Death is the inevitable consequence of an economic system that has shaped our conviction that profits are more valuable than human life. — Rebecca Bartel

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Every time I read a story about the border, or migration, or a hot-take about how we need to balance the needs of “the economy” with the needs of living, breathing, humans, I think of Rebecca Bartel’s book, Card-Carrying Christians: Debt and the Making of Free Market Spirituality in Colombia (University of California Press, 2021). Bartel draws us into the lives of a group of women staking their futures on debt and hope. The study — located in a mega-church, a multilevel marketing company, and a microloan venture — gives us an invaluable picture of what it’s like to have one’s sense of self defined by debt. By delving into the connections between Christian morality and the morality of finance capitalism, we not only come to understand religion and finance better, we also see more clearly how their power is connected. Card-Carrying Christians is innovative, deeply humane, and deserves to be read and taught widely.

Kali Handelman: I want to use the book’s title to set up our conversation and my first question. Most basically, it’s a two-part question: 1) Who are “card-carrying Christians? And 2) What are “free market spiritualities”? I’m hoping that, on our way to those definitions, you can also start to open up for our readers the ways you complicate and push back on assumed divisions between the categories of religion and economy. In the book you write about “finding the religious in the economic and the economic in the religious.” So, to bring that all together: what are the linked religious and economic ideas driving card-carrying Christians and free market spiritualities and why is it important to see the relationship (or lack of division) between them?

Rebecca Bartel: Let me begin with a vignette to answer those questions. At a mega-church the size of a small shopping mall, in the middle of cosmopolitan Bogotá, thousands of Christians flow through oversized glass doors every Sunday. At each of the church’s seven services, wireless credit card machines float about the faithful during scheduled offerings. Often with the lights dimmed, the worship band provides an emotive cadence to fervent praying, and at times weeping, with darkly clad ushers carrying credit card machines throughout the convention hall. They look like floating lights. As faithful tithers hail the ushers to their seat, the credit card machines illuminate the faces of the faithful as they enter their PIN and sign their receipts, with the usher always asking, “how many payments?” Electronic tithing often employs payment plans of up to 48 months with interest rates as high as 30%. These ushers ultimately add: “May God reward you one hundred-fold.”

This tiny gesture is the seemingly inevitable outgrowth of two interrelated developments. The first is that Colombia is now nearly 30% evangelical Christian, with new forms of Protestantism quickly changing the religious landscape of this longtime Roman Catholic country. At the center of this shift is something known as “Prosperity Christianity.” This is a set of beliefs that conflate God’s blessing and economic success. The second development is that Colombia is now all about credit. The most notable evidence is the rapid upsurge in credit card spending, which averages now approximately $2.5 million USD every hour. The net result is an ethnographic observation: debt is now central to Prosperity Christianity. Or as one Christian interlocutor told me, “Debt is a sign of faith.”

What drew me to studying Christianity and capitalism was a series of experiences like the one I just described, and the seemingly obvious entanglements between economic and religious forces. Yet, in the scholarly literature, time and again, religion and economics were held apart as independently operating spheres of human action – as though the profanity of the economic realm somehow tainted the sacred, or that the irrational sacred should not influence the supposedly “secular” economic realm. What I saw in the lived, everyday experiences of Colombian Christians was an intense muddling of these so-called discrete realms of practice. The religious and the economic were mutually influential in people’s lives.

In Colombia, Christianity is intimately entangled with economic and political webs of power. Throughout the book I explore how Christians understand themselves, their economic lives, and how their faith informs their financial practices. But also, importantly, how finance itself requires a certain kind of faith; a belief in the markets, in credit, and in debt. In that vein, the term “Card Carrying Christians” arises from the fact that the Christians I engaged with for this book both defined themselves as “authentic” Christians, but also use credit cards to put into work financialized practices of piety.

Central to the entanglements of these two concepts you ask about — religion and economics — are the practices that individual believers in Colombia put to work in their lived experience of late capitalism in the midst of ongoing civil war. The backdrop to my study is the five-decades long armed conflict that has generated over 200,000 deaths, millions of internal refugees, hundreds of thousands of disappeared bodies, and two generations of Colombians who have known their country in the shadow of war. I don’t focus on the war, in part because many excellent books have written specifically on the machinations of armed conflict in Colombia,[1] but also because I wanted to foreground the lives that continue in all their vibrancy, struggle, beauty, and, of course, debt.

Insofar as neoliberal political economies have sustained an economy of violence in Colombia, and in large part, prolonged the war as a source of profit, I found that beliefs in the possibility of peace and prosperity are often aligned with belief in the dominant economic form—financialized capitalism. For example, in one church service, the pastor preached, “God is rich! God is SO rich! And God wants to change Colombia. Colombia will be saved, Colombia will be a first-world nation, Colombia will be a rich nation.” This exhortation was followed by a call to make financial pacts with God. Many of the faithful present made those pacts on credit cards.

Financialized capitalism is currently the dominant form of capitalism, operating via credit-based forms of accumulation, rather than through material production. Debt is a source of profit. Credit card companies, banks, financial service providers, and other speculative economic forces gamble on future possibilities, and all invest in debt. Financial inclusion and financial education programs are becoming the focus for mainline educational institutions. In fact, one of the largest national banks in Colombia has taken over writing curriculum for an entire school district, with a focus on financial education. Opening a bank account is touted as a sign of modernization and moral responsibility. Financialization has become the animating force in the processes of capital accumulation, especially through the credit industry. The global shift towards deeper financialization is rooted in the neoliberal programs of deregulation and privatization of the 1980s and 1990s. Betting on futures and speculating on the profitability of debt is, of course, what led to the 2008 financial crash. Connecting these macro-economic shifts to the everyday financial practices of Colombian Prosperity Christians reveals an intimate link between belief and finance; the financial system requires belief. This is a central theme of the book: financialized capitalism requires enchanted systems of belief in order to function as it does, organizing not only our economic reality, but also our social and political worlds.

“Free Market Spiritualities,” then, are the social forms of late capitalism: aspirational, believing practices, and, fundamentally, going into debt whether by choice or by force.

KH: I’d like to pull on the thread about the link between credit and belief and ask about the relationship between debt and faith. When you engage with conversations — nationally and transnationally — about debt, do you see a religious logic at play? When we talk about Colombia, but also, say, about Haiti or student loans or microloans to women in the Global South? What kind of Christian morality is underwriting those conversations? (A side-note, I love your use of the term “underwriting” in the book. It does so much to subtly but powerfully activate the ways our vocabularies are saturated with financial, actuarial, logics!)

RB: Let’s begin with the notion of “debt-worthiness” or “credit-worthiness.” There is something innately predatory about these logics of indebtedness, given that there is an attached morality, and human “worth” tied to credit histories and economic practices that determine if a person is worthy of receiving a loan. As David Graeber carefully and thoroughly lays out in his history of debt, and Michel Feher has explained in his treatise on speculative capitalism and the “political ascendency of credit-worthiness,” credit and debt are two sides of the same coin. The valuation modes of global finance render certain individuals worthy and others not, and this is dictated by moral fictions of financial worth. In other words, your credit rating reflects some inner trait of your value as a person. In part this is in line with Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. But if we track Weber’s analysis into the 21^st century, we encounter indebtedness as a practice of survival (i.e., going into credit card debt for groceries, qualifying for microcredit programs in order to sustain a small business, becoming saddled with insurmountable student debt in order to finish a university degree) and the double-edged sword of finance; prosperity requires debt yet prosperity is blocked by debt. This informs a kind of “cruel optimism,” following Lauren Berlant, that requires faith in a system designed to profit off the losses and desperation of lower classes.

I trace the imbrications of debt and faith to the roots of the concepts of credit and belief, both from the Latin word, credere. In the Western Christian tradition, credit and belief are related at a conceptual level. Weber makes the point of describing the “Spirit of Capitalism” as a specifically Christian endeavor, citing Benjamin Franklin’s admonitions about credit: “Remember, that credit is money. If a man lets his money lie in my hands after it is due, he gives me interest, or so much as I can make of it during that time. This amounts to a considerable sum where a man has good and large credit, and makes good use of it.” And again: “The most trifling actions that affect a man’s credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or eight at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at a billiard table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when you should be at work, he sends for his money the next day; demands it, before he can receive it, in a lump. It shows, besides, that you are mindful of what you owe; it makes you appear a careful as well as an honest man, and that still increases your credit.” This is, of course, what we’ve come to refer to as the Protestant Ethic. The dominant, pervasive code that tells us that productivity, profit, and salvation are ineluctably connected.

Being worthy of credit is tied to specifically Western Christian ideas of morality, as credit scores determine our human worth. Slovenliness is anti-capitalist and, importantly, anti-Christian in Weber’s account. We have known that Christianity and capitalism are intimately related for a long time already. In my book, I extend and complicate these ideas by arguing that indebtedness has become a form of faithful practice in a new era of capitalism that is different from the industrial capitalism of Weber’s time. One of my principle interlocutors expressed to me that her debt was a sign of her faith. As the Christian micro-credit organization that I researched told their clients, paying back debts on time is a Christian virtue, and also a virtue that will guarantee future credits. The micro-credit organization requires clients to participate in life skills workshops that, they say, will allow individuals to act within their context and achieve the transformation of themselves, their families, their community, and their society. Such transformation efforts, of the self, family, community, and society, reveal the depths to which financialization reaches a cellular, all-encompasing degree of power. The Christian ideas that order these social and political realities sustain concepts of worth and value, creating economies of moral exchange wherein fiscal value is interchangeable with human value.

KH: Related to what you just said there about how finance renders some lives worthy and others unworthy, your book gives us a really useful new concept to think with: “necrofinance.” In adapting Achille Mbembe’s term, necropolitics (describing systems of power that operate by determining that some lives are disposable), you focus on how capitalism succeeds by marking some lives worthy of survival and thriving, and others as disposable. That is, as you say, “Necrofinance is imbued with the right to kill, if necessary, for financial gain.” Could you give us a sense of what that looks like on the ground in Colombia in the neighborhoods and communities whose stories you tell? 

RB: Necrofinance is the violent underside of late financial capitalism, and there are few parts of the world where the maneuverings of finance and violence are more clearly implicated than in Colombia. When fiscal value becomes interchangeable, or more accurately, prioritized above human value, the result is violence. To make this claim, I turn to Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics.” Necropolitics for Mbembe is a form of sovereignty that determines who can live and who should die. Mbembe suggests that politics in late modernity, especially in the post-colony, are a form of necropolitics that operate as a “work of death.” I suggest that finance in late capitalism operates according to the same logic: finance capitalism necessitates the work of death. This is necrofinance. Necrofinance arises out of late capitalist economic structures that generate systemic socio-economic precarity to the point of generating violence in order to generate profit.

The war that has raged for more than five decades in Colombia has been ordered by diverse regimes of violence. The political economy of violence has been a prominent driver of ongoing conflict in Colombia. Territory and land ownership are central factors in the prolongation of the violence. The land is fertile and rich in natural resources. Through colonial holdover and generations of violent dispossession, land ownership is extremely uneven, with a small percentage of the population owning the large majority of the land. Credits are required by small land owners in order to compete with the monopolies of agricultural production, the narco-industry, and the resource extraction industry that is accompanied by militarized security. The debts that are incurred by the most precarious classes in Colombia often become unpayable, while forced displacements from rural areas for economic interests of the agro-industry become necessary to maintain shareholder dividends. Much of the violence that takes place in rural Colombia is driven by economic interests in land and land speculation, but also by the struggle for control over strategic routes for trafficking drugs, weapons, and licit products like oil, gold, and gas. We know that upwards of 80% of forced displacements throughout Colombia take place in regions of the country that are the richest in natural resources and agro-industrial interest. These forced displacements have resulted in over 5 million internally displaced persons in Colombia, the largest in the hemisphere. This is a humanitarian crisis that has been created, in large part, by financial interests that have taken priority over the value of the lives of millions of human beings. This is one example of necrofinance. There are countless more, because, as I illustrate throughout the book, necrofinance is the constant companion of financial capitalism. Death is the inevitable consequence of an economic system that has shaped our conviction that profits are more valuable than human life.

KH: Finally, as we think about finance, life, and death, you describe the book as “an ethnography of aspiration” and demonstrate how central aspiration is to Christian faith and practices (of all denominations). Crucially, you explain that, “the connection between aspiration, breathing, and becoming lies in the metaphorical possibilities of resurrection and the new life that being born again promises.” I’m hoping that you can talk us through the significance of aspiration as a core concept in your book, so that we can then follow it through to your very powerful conclusion, where you write about how necrofinance is racialized and how it kills, centering the last words of Eric Garner and George Floyd: I can’t breathe. Reading these pages now, in 2021, I couldn’t help but think, too, of the millions of people who have died from COVID-19 — a respiratory disease. As you say in the book, financial capitalism and racial capitalism “take our breath away.” How do we think about the linked religious and economic logics of aspiration in this moment? And about how those logics are racialized and gendered? 

RB: Capitalism and Christianity traffic in hope. Yet hope, esperanza, can suggest passivity, as the Spanish root of “esperanza” is “esperar,” which means “to wait.” As one Colombian economist said, when asked where he finds hope in the midst of these political economies of violence, “We do not hope/esperar. We are not waiting, passively, for the war to end, for society to change. We have faith. We know and act with the knowledge that the war must end, that society will change.” This economist believed that Colombia could become a different country, with a new economy and new politics. Narratives of rebirth, thick with Christian imagery and symbolism, sustain a collective aspiration towards a new society, a peaceable society, and a new time. Yet, insofar as this aspiration is tied to an economic system that requires sacrifice, aspiration becomes increasingly illusive. I call my study an ethnography of aspiration because aspiring towards a new future was a social fact that presented in all of my research sites, in so many of my interactions, and was a central organizing social form that drove narratives of survival and gumption. Yet, as you mention, in my conclusion I call attention to the need for greater scholarly attention to the racialized forces of late capitalism and the racial capitalism that drives indebtedness and necrofinance.

The COVID-19 Pandemic has forced us, or should force us, to reckon with the racist and colonial violence that hold up our economic structures, especially as our economic structures are imbricated with our healthcare systems, and as the economy has so clearly been prioritized above the value of human life. In hoping for the pandemic to end, for bodies to heal, for breath to be returned to ventilated lungs, for racial reckoning, aspirational urges get caught in our throats. We are all experiencing the pressure of the pandemic, and the economic squeeze on livelihoods as the pressure to keep businesses open grinds against an already taxed healthcare system. But the pressures and challenges to aspirational visions of the future are not felt equally across society. When Los Angeles was running out of oxygen, in January of this year, Latinx patients were dying at triple the rate of white patients. There were not enough ventilators to assist the Latinx majority of COVID patients in LA County. COVID takes the breath of the most vulnerable. Millions still can’t breathe. The crushing proverbial knee of a white supremacist legal structure is sustained by racist social and economic forces that deprive BIPOC bodies of breath; aspiro.

Racial capitalism has contributed to the construction of race itself and the positioning of whiteness as not only a fabricated ethnicity, but more importantly a social and economic class. In order to dismantle white supremacy, as a transnational and transhistorial project, racial capitalism must also be dismantled. An ethnography of aspiration traces the ways that moral imaginaries for the future are entangled with structural realities of the present, and the different ways that historical injustices literally take breath away. Economic justice is intimately and inseparably connected to racial justice. To further understand how race and capital are related, following the groundbreaking work of Cedric J. Robinson, Nancy Leong, Rita Segato, and others, I hope my book encourages scholars to recognize and explore the religious worlds that uphold and, yes, underwrite these imbrications.

 

Kali Handelman is an academic editor based in London. She is also the Manager of Program Development and London Regional Director at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a Contributing Editor at the Revealer.

Rebecca C. Bartel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Associate Director for the Center for Latin American Studies at San Diego State University.

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[1] Martha Nubía Bello, Basta Ya! Colombia, Memorias de Guerra y Dignidad, (Bogotá, Colombia: Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2013); Aldo Cívico, The Para-State: An Ethnography of Colombia’s Death Squads (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016); Alexander L. Fattal, Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Michael Taussig, Law in a lawless land: Diary of a “limpieza” in Colombia (New York, NY: New Press, 2003); Nubia Yaneth Ruiz Ruiz, Mercedes Castillo de Herrera, and Karen Forero Niño, Geopolítica Del Despojo: Minería y Violencia En Colombia (Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2018); Nazih Richani, Systems of Violence: the political economy of war and peace in Colombia (2nd ed.) (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013).