When nine Ghanaian banks collapsed during the country's 2017–2019 financial crisis, a Charismatic Pentecostal pastor was at the center of public accusations as the board chairman of one of the failed banks. His role put a spotlight on the growing influence of Charismatic Pentecostal institutions and elites in Ghana's financial market. Shifting the perspective between diverse actors who reckoned with the bank's collapse, from ordinary Christians to artist-activists, this article explores how Ghanaians evaluated the culpability of the pastor and in so doing problematized who Christian elites involved in banking and business are accountable to: God, their congregants, or the public at large? We argue that global financial liberalization has generated new types of financial elites, Pentecostal pastors among them, who become subject to new lines of accountability. Holding someone accountable comes with stakes expressed through vernacular registers that demonstrate how financial markets are engulfed in broader social relations and regimes of ethical evaluation.

In texts, films, paintings and speeches, New Deal policymakers and allied intellectuals deployed biblical language and images to evoke contrition for environmental “sins.” The sins of the fathers, namely the exploitative land use on the part of settlers and agro-capitalists, were now being visited on the Depression generation in the catastrophes not only of wind-born soil erosion (as in the Dust Bowl) but also the more extensive threat of gullying and water-born erosion. New Deal uses of the Bible, we argue, were not an instrumental conceit designed to manipulate hearts and minds. Rather, New Deal environmental thought, even at its seemingly most technocratic, was profoundly embedded within Christian imaginaries of sin and redemption. Scientific and religious modes of authority merged with the offices of state. As such, the soil Jeremiad is one illustration of both the need for and potential benefit of thickening “inter-field” religious and environmental methodologies—a potential we explore in this essay. In historicizing the soil Jeremiad, we also offer an example of how we might better understand the importance of religion for the history of the environmental movement beyond stories from activists’ biographies and move toward a religious-environmental history of the public sphere itself.