Since the 1980s, academics and activists attempting to explain why American evangelicals have supported politicians with controversial environmental track records—from James Watt to James Inhofe—have framed such believers as apocalyptic fatalists content to pillage Creation until Jesus raptures them to safety and destroys the Earth. Today evangelicals maintain higher levels of climate skepticism and lower levels of support for environmental legislation than other religious groups—seemingly confirming the “End Times Apathy Hypothesis.” However, the history of such Rapture-believing, premillennial evangelicals reveals surprisingly sensitive attitudes toward science, nature, and the environmental crisis that stand in stark contrast to popular depictions. Far from promoting anti-science and anti-environmental attitudes, premillennialism has historically encouraged a this-worldly interest in empirical science as believers saw the natural world as a source of revelation and sought to discern the “signs of the times.” It has also offered a flexible theological framework capable of assimilating the most dire findings by environmental scientists and meeting them with hope. Prophecy popularizers such as Billy Graham and Hal Lindsay wrote books which sold in the millions and carried with them the latest findings and predictions by environmental scientists—making them, in effect, some of the most effective science communicators of the twentieth century. Where environmental skepticism has entered evangelicalism, it has been through postmillennial Christian Reconstructionism—a movement deeply opposed to premillennialism—and its promotion of economic cornucopianism, Young Earth Creationism, Christian America historical revisionism, and organizations like the Cornwall Alliance. To make evangelicals into anti-environmentalists, these Reconstructionists first had to unmake them as premillennialists. This interdisciplinary dissertation demonstrates how history and theology can explain evangelicals’ shifting attitudes toward environmentalism. From their early concerns over nuclear testing through their participation in the first Earth Day and up to the eve of the millennium, premillennialism drove evangelicals to take seriously the growing concerns for Creation’s condition and their present attitudes of skepticism and antagonism represent a divergence from this hitherto untold story of apocalyptic environmentalism.

Peyote is a subject which renders the mechanisms, forces, and assemblages of colonialism clear. It is in the very inability of the colonial world to categorize, locate, understand and react to peyote that reveals so much about how colonialism operates. A primary goal of this project is to demonstrate that through understanding peyote, and its role in both colonial and contemporary history, one may come to better understand or recognize racial hierarchies and colonial forces which have not gone away with time. The first chapter is primarily a discussion of the Ghost Dance, I lay out some of the difficulties that indigenous appeals to religious freedom face both in terms of political power, but also conceptual, cultural, and academic thinking. In chapter two I move more specifically to the topic of peyote, tracing peyote’s history from precolonial times to the present. Chapters three and four deal with peyote as part of the borderlands and part of the War on Drugs respectively. I argue that understanding peyote can benefit a broader decolonial project within scholarship. The richness of the intersections between peyote and myriad other subjects is vastly understudied in academia and continued decolonial scholarship on the topic could have immense potential in bringing new insights into view. I draw heavily on scholars such as Edward Said and Aimé Césaire, but I have also been strongly influenced by other scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Frantz Fanon, and Gloria Anzaldúa. In keeping with the decolonial mission, it is important to recognize that much of what I am presenting in this work is necessarily new or radical to the indigenous communities who are close to the topics at hand. While I present my own novel insights and discoveries, I also intend for this project to be a call for greater attention and study to be brought to the subject of peyote.