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Card-Carrying Christians
Debt and the Making of Free Market Spirituality in Colombia
Rebecca C. Bartel
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Card-Carrying Christians
Debt and the Making of Free Market Spirituality in Colombia
Rebecca C. Bartel
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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.
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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.
âMarcel Mauss
We must believe in capitalism, in the ways that [some] early Protestants were asked to believe in predestination.
âArjun 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, âMay God reward you a hundredfold.â Fernanda replied in agreement, âMerry Christmas.â 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 MisiĂłn CarismĂĄtica Internacional (MCI) in the middle of BogotĂĄ, and Fernanda had just given God a âgiftâ 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. âYouâve gone into debt to give to God?â I asked her. Fernanda laughed, âOf course. Hasnât everybody?â
Figure 6. Small-group worship at the MisiĂłn CarismĂĄtica 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.
Fernandaâs gift to God, animates this new relation of exchange in a particularly salient way. Fernandaâs gift is âdifferent and deferredâ 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, âthe subjectâs investment in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true.â2 The proposition of believing in the context of Colombiaâs 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 âthrowing copper into the seaâ functions also as an act of sacrifice to the gods because, in the act of gifting, the object gifted retained the hauâthat 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, âThe fetishism that is found in the economics of precapitalist societies arises from the sense of organic unity between persons and their products.â4 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 Maussâs analysis, that sacrifice âis a gift that compels the deity to make a return,â Fernandaâs gift of credit money was an immaterial offering that did expect return (as all âgiftsâ do).5 What is different is that giving money to God, or the gods, that comes from oneâs own physical moneyâpound of gold or coinâor 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. âMoney,â as Marx declared in reference to credit moneys, what he names âfetish capital,â âis now pregnant.â6 It is this incredible contradiction that prompts Taussig to ask, âHow could such a mutually reinforcing combination of rationality and fantasy so systemically coexist?â 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 âinterested and obligatoryâ reciprocity, rather than a simple equation of âvoluntary presentation.â7 As Mary Douglas in her foreword to the 1990 translation of Maussâs essay states, âThere are no free gifts.â8 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 HaĂŻda and Tlingit, is a case in point. Douglas explains, âThe cycling gift system is society.â9 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 âinterest,â as it is imposed on a financialized credit card expense, and these should not be confused (more on this below). Most importantly, Maussâs 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. âUntil he has given in return, the receiver is obliged, to show his gratitude towards his benefactor, or, at least, to have regard for him.â11 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 âto abolish the interval is also to abolish strategy.â12 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: âA 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 âdeferredâ that believing is separated from seeing.â13 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 Certeauâs analysis of believing illuminates relations of exchange, and the crediting system, anew: âThe object of exchange is itself altered by the distance between moments, since the dueâor expectedâis 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 âcreditingâ of the creditor or the âbelieverâ and, more explicitly, towards credit, where Marx sees âthe judgment that political economy bears on the morality of man.â â14 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 âsystem of beliefâ and belief underwrites the practices that make up the everyday operations of Colombiaâs 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 âbelief.â 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 âreligionâ and âeconomyâ through querying the distinction between âbeliefâ and âpractice.â The beginning point for this inquiry is based in an etymological curiosity found in the Latin verb credereâthe root of both belief and creditâand 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 Bellâs 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., âThose people believe such and such, those other people believe some other such and suchâ), or a term collapsible with either âcultureâ or âreligion.â My ethnographic research pushes the âquestion of beliefâ 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 creditâand, critically, debt.
Belief is a slippery category that has fascinated and frustrated the scholar of religion since Durkheim claimed that âreligion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is, things that are set apart and forbidden.â19 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 âAlthough it is ignored in all formal senses, the field makes nearly constant reference to the idea of belief in nearly every publication.â20 Overlooked in the field of religious studies, the âproblem of beliefâ 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 âroutine reliance on [belief]âs nebulous status passing back and forth raw datum and theoretical tool.â25
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 âbeliefsâ ...