Fuel for the Soul

For the people I was seated with at breakfast, oil work provided narratives and metaphors through which they navigated a Christian story. But the way they describe the materiality of oil and the work of its extraction speaks to a broader experience, one related to a non-material infrastructure of values, narratives, and virtues. Both the messaging of the Oilfield Christian Fellowship and other groups in Calgary offer a narrative in which to live a good life you have to find a way to navigate or manage the energy that oil work produces. Calgary’s municipal economic development campaign suggests this centrality of fuel in its use of the slogan, “Be Part of the Energy.” While this campaign is not motivated by the Christian framework of the Oilfield Christian Fellowship, its narrative proposes a higher power that moves through oil and the energy produced by it to create meaning and possibility in people’s lives.

Later that afternoon at the Global Petroleum Show, and throughout my fieldwork in Calgary, I spoke to people for whom being in relation to oil through work is an important part of how they craft themselves and imagine their futures. This bible God’s Word for the Oil Patch: Fuel for the Soul points to a shared condition in Calgary’s oil culture: To have the kind of soul that lives a good life you need to manage oil and its energy. The important implication here is that souls are things that need fuel, be it “God’s word” or oil itself. Oil work, in this context, becomes soul work.