Cultivating ’Black Gold’

Could God be present in decomposed organic matter? How are projects of making compost influencing Christians’ view and relationship to webs of biological life? Looking at a present-day project of religious education aimed at cultivating regenerative Christian farmers in South Africa, I examine conservative Evangelical-Charismatic Christians’ compostmaking practices. By addressing a Christian pedagogics of mimicking the biotic order revealed in nature, I outline key aims of establishing sensory immersion with compost-making as a core educational tool for (re)ordering how Christians cultivate nature and human-nature relations. Situated in the post-apartheid context of South Africa, the case points to a compost politics centered on immanence where ordering connected to a biblical past enables Christians to engage in a project of transcending social contestations over land use in post-apartheid South Africa.