Card-Carrying Christians

Debt and the Making of Free Market Spirituality in Colombia

Rebecca C. Bartel

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520977068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the waning years of Latin America's longest and bloodiest civil war, the rise of an unlikely duo is transforming Colombia: Christianity and access to credit. In her exciting new book, Rebecca C. Bartel details how surging evangelical conversions and widespread access to credit cards, microfinance programs, and mortgages are changing how millions of Colombians envision a more prosperous future. Yet programs of financialization propel new modes of violence. As prosperity becomes conflated with peace, and debt with devotion, survival only becomes possible through credit and its accompanying forms of indebtedness. A new future is on the horizon, but it will come at a price.

1 Credit

It is not simply to show power . . . that a man throws copper into the sea . . . in so doing he is also sacrificing to the gods and the spirits.

—Marcel Mauss

We must believe in capitalism, in the ways that [some] early Protestants were asked to believe in predestination.

—Arjun Appadurai

Fernanda swiped her credit card. She then took a deep breath and closed her eyes, praying silently amid the thousands of swaying bodies and arms around her. The usher tore off the receipt and handed it to her to initial. She emerged from prayer with pen ready. The usher leaned in, “May God reward you a hundredfold.” Fernanda replied in agreement, “Merry Christmas.” She turned and smiled at me, then stood and moved to the aisle so she could dance freely to the rhythms of the offertory music, her face turned upward, arms raised high. It was Christmas in Colombia, we were at the Misión Carismática Internacional (MCI) in the middle of Bogotá, and Fernanda had just given God a “gift” of 2 million pesos (approximately $1,000 USD). With compound interest accruing immediately on her debt, Fernanda acted on the belief that God would reward her. “You’ve gone into debt to give to God?” I asked her. Fernanda laughed, “Of course. Hasn’t everybody?”

Figure 6. Small-group worship at the Misión Carismática Internacional. Photo by the author.

CREDIT AND BELIEVING: CREDERE

This chapter details the debt upon which the prosperity gospel rests in Colombia. Throughout my time in Colombia, I found that Christmas time was when the overlap of debt and religious fervor became the most legible. Such blatant and enthusiastic resignation to indebtedness spurred the question: What does religious practice reveal about the gift in financial capitalism? Specifically, this chapter demonstrates that the relationship between financial capitalism and Christianity are particularly interrelated through the social relations bound up in the gift. Financial capitalism modifies the gift, from a gift based on social debt to a gift based on financial debt. The profound impact of this modification is a new social relation, a relation between the debtor and the immaterial spirits of finance. Credit card companies, banks, and other financial service providers are the guarantors that mediate gift relations in financial capitalism. The focus of this chapter illustrates the centrality of belief to the program of financialization.

Fernanda’s gift to God, animates this new relation of exchange in a particularly salient way. Fernanda’s gift is “different and deferred” as Pierre Bourdieu suggested of the gift relation, but it is based on a new kind of economy of exchange that requires a believing economy.¹ While belief can be understood as being a characteristic in relations of exchange before finance capitalism, the ways in which I understand believing in relations of financial exchange is different. I understand believing as a social relation, as a practice of social mobility and, as Michel de Certeau states, “the subject’s investment in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true.”² The proposition of believing in the context of Colombia’s rapid financialization is tied to credit insofar as credit, and specifically credit cards, facilitate exchanges impossible without them. The gift relation is one relation of exchange that is most affected by the distinct form of relationality that propositional belief in credit provides. Finance capitalism changes the gift relation in two important ways.

First, giving on credit mobilizes a third party in the gift relation. In precapitalist societies, like the ones that Marcel Mauss addressed in his assessment of the social and political crisis of capitalist society in terms of social relations, two actors operated in the field of exchange: the giver and the receiver. As Mauss states, quoted in the epigraph of this chapter, gifting, or “throwing copper into the sea” functions also as an act of sacrifice to the gods because, in the act of gifting, the object gifted retained the hau—that is, a part of a person remained as part of the object (or person in the case of women as wives) that was gifted.³ As Michael Taussig explains, “The fetishism that is found in the economics of precapitalist societies arises from the sense of organic unity between persons and their products.”⁴ The process of reification between produced commodity and laborer is the first distinction that the gift exchange in capitalism represents. The credit card company facilitates the exchange of gifts, reifying the relation between commodity and laborer twice over. The gift on credit, if it is a material commodity, is bought with the credit money that profits not only the capitalist merchant, but also the bank and the credit card company.

The second difference is that the use of credit in order to gift money, credit money, introduces an immateriality to the gift that Mauss did not consider, and further extrapolates the idea of Bourdieu that the gift in return must be different and differed. Perhaps resembling more closely the Vedic principle that inspired Mauss’s analysis, that sacrifice “is a gift that compels the deity to make a return,” Fernanda’s gift of credit money was an immaterial offering that did expect return (as all “gifts” do).⁵ What is different is that giving money to God, or the gods, that comes from one’s own physical money—pound of gold or coin—or on a debit card is already a reification of the contradictory money form. However, credit money is fictitious capital; it exists only as a promise yet is understood as a materiality. “Money,” as Marx declared in reference to credit moneys, what he names “fetish capital,” “is now pregnant.”⁶ It is this incredible contradiction that prompts Taussig to ask, “How could such a mutually reinforcing combination of rationality and fantasy so systemically coexist?” Holding this contradiction in tension is where the productive power of believing enters this now diffuse social relation, between giver, receiver, facilitator, merchant, and processor.

The gift relation that Marcel Mauss explained as foundational to precapitalist systems of exchange was based on “interested and obligatory” reciprocity, rather than a simple equation of “voluntary presentation.”⁷ As Mary Douglas in her foreword to the 1990 translation of Mauss’s essay states, “There are no free gifts.”⁸ The point of revealing the gift relation in precapitalist societies, for Mauss, was to recognize the total social fact of reciprocal giving. The example of the potlatch in West Coast First Nations communities, the Haïda and Tlingit, is a case in point. Douglas explains, “The cycling gift system is society.”⁹ Tied up in the gift relation is the pursuit of honor. A failure to return the gift, and oftentimes in excess of the original gift, is to lose the competition for honor. This, however, is different from “interest,” as it is imposed on a financialized credit card expense, and these should not be confused (more on this below). Most importantly, Mauss’s essay on the gift is a commentary on politics and economics, issues that Mauss understood to be in disarray, even crisis, in his context of Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, on a steady path of industrializing capitalism. More specifically, Mauss wrote against the utilitarianism of English liberalism.¹⁰ The Gift is an essay about human solidarity.

Pierre Bourdieu further theorizes the gift within a paradigmatic form, or rather, social strategic form, in which gift giving becomes a strategy. “Until he has given in return, the receiver is obliged, to show his gratitude towards his benefactor, or, at least, to have regard for him.”¹¹ The gift must be different because, according to Bourdieu, to return the equivalent gift would be to annul the gift relation. The gift must also be deferred because “to abolish the interval is also to abolish strategy.”¹² Referring back to Michel de Certeau, the need for deferral in the return of the thing given is as much about the gift as it is about believing: “A plurality and a historicity are knotted into the act that posits, by the same gesture, a different partner and a deferred restitution. This temporal practice of difference endows delay with all its social pertinency. It is by this ‘deferred’ that believing is separated from seeing.”¹³ The gift is imbued with power and hierarchical social structures reflective of the capital, both symbolic and financial, that circulates in society.

Although credit is not a gift from MasterCard, per se, the exchange of payment operates according to the logic of different and deferred payment through interest. It is the injection of time into the equation that brings the gift at Christmas in Colombia back to questions of believing and commerce in the form of credit. Here, Michel de Certeau’s analysis of believing illuminates relations of exchange, and the crediting system, anew: “The object of exchange is itself altered by the distance between moments, since the due—or expected—is not the same as the given, but an equivalent: the analogy between the offered and the received would be the work of time on their identity. The sequence of the gift and restitution thus temporarily articulates an economy of exchange. . . . It will develop on the side of credence, or ‘crediting’ of the creditor or the ‘believer’ and, more explicitly, towards credit, where Marx sees ‘the judgment that political economy bears on the morality of man.’ ”¹⁴ Credit differentiates and defers the gift, but return on the gift is based in new systems of belief that are tied up in ongoing interest payments and extended return over time. Giving a gift on credit introduces a new dimension to the gift relation. Credit underwrites the gift in financial capitalism, because long after the gift is given, the lingering remnant of debt weighs on the devout soul and profits the bank and credit card company. Fernanda made a covenant with God in her Christmas gift, but importantly, she also made a covenant with the gods of finance: the credit card company and her bank. This new system of gift relations, I argue, rests upon the practices of believing that financial capitalism requires. And at no other time do believing and credit collide as legibly as during Christmas.

BELIEF AND BELIEVING

The financial system is (at least in part) a “system of belief” and belief underwrites the practices that make up the everyday operations of Colombia’s emerging credit system.¹⁵ It is in this sense that Arjun Appadurai, as the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter cites, suggested that capitalism requires a certain degree of belief.¹⁶ One objective of this chapter is to engage in the ongoing debate among scholars of religion that has revolved around the usefulness (or uselessness) of the concept “belief.” To do so, I consider both believing and credit as relations of exchange and as social practices central to finance capitalism. This exploration into believing and credit leads me to problematize the oft-assumed divide between the categories of “religion” and “economy” through querying the distinction between “belief” and “practice.” The beginning point for this inquiry is based in an etymological curiosity found in the Latin verb credere—the root of both belief and credit—and the work that credere does on the gift.

This chapter develops a distinction between credere, or believing, on the one hand, and belief or a belief system on the other. In order to support this claim, and to illuminate its significance, I lean on Catherine Bell’s exploratory work on belief and believing.¹⁷ Bell invites the scholar of religion to take a step away from considering belief as a closed system, a fallback anthropological method of differentiation (i.e., “Those people believe such and such, those other people believe some other such and such”), or a term collapsible with either “culture” or “religion.” My ethnographic research pushes the “question of belief” toward a question of believing. This question develops a deeper consideration of religious worlds embedded in credit-based social and economic relations. Through employing categories of economic exchange, assumptions about believing and capitalist economy are unveiled. At the same time, thinking with believing and credit in complex relation offers an important analogical insight into the functioning of finance capital, its temporality, and the contradictions inherent therein. To do so, I focus on believing in relation to the gift in order to illuminate the shifts in emerging forms of financial social forms.¹⁸ Doing so reveals a temporal contradiction deeply embedded in finance capitalism: short-term profiteering rubs against tempos and time frames of long-term accumulation strategies and interrupts production. The intrinsic instability of such a temporal contradiction reveals a conceptual opening that is held together by believing and credit—and, critically, debt.

Belief is a slippery category that has fascinated and frustrated the scholar of religion since Durkheim claimed that “religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is, things that are set apart and forbidden.”¹⁹ Yet, as Catherine Bell aptly pointed out, while religious practices have been a focus for the study of religion, belief has not been the subject of significant scholarly attention in the field. This is ironic, she notes, because “Although it is ignored in all formal senses, the field makes nearly constant reference to the idea of belief in nearly every publication.”²⁰ Overlooked in the field of religious studies, the “problem of belief” has nevertheless been addressed in various other disciplines, such as anthropology,²¹ philosophy,²² cognitive theory,²³ and of course extensively in theological studies.²⁴ Bell assigns blame for the oversight in religious studies to the “routine reliance on [belief]’s nebulous status passing back and forth raw datum and theoretical tool.”²⁵

This tacking back and forth has maintained a tendency toward sidestepping belief as a category of inquiry in itself. Assumed, yet without theoretical foundation, is that the study of religion preserves the distinction between internal “beliefs” ...