The Worship of Mammon: The Fetishism of Capital in the Theological Thoughts of Creflo Dollar and Michael Novak, Part II

This is part II (and the final part) in my series on my critique of “Prosperity Theology.” Part I focused on the Rev. Creflo Dollar, who represents the micro aspects of prosperity theology. For this part, and my wrap-up, I will focus on neo-conservative Catholic theologian and classical economic proponent of the free market, Michael Novak. Who represents the macro aspects of prosperity theology.

Like Dollar, Novak subscribes to a Prosperity Theology, yet a different branch of Prosperity Theology. Instead of focusing too much on the accumulation of commodities through money and being a cheerleader, Novak uses his theology as a jumping off point for the justification of the system of capitalism and to justify laissez-fair free market capitalistic policies.

In Capital, Vol. III Marx states, “We have already shown in connection with the most simple categories of the capitalist mode of production and commodity production in general” the mystifying character of money and commodities and the fetishes that arise out of them. “In the capitalist mode of production, however, where capital is the dominant category and forms specific relation of production, this bewitched and distorted world develops much further.”(1) With an ever deepening capitalist system commodity and money relationships widen their scope to include means of production as well the working classes of society. “As money becomes capital,” Hinkelammert says, “it becomes obvious how commodity relationships in their very workings are in a position to decide not merely how much of what material goods shall be produced but even whether producers will live or not.”(2) Now everyone is affected by commodities and money through the accumulation of capital (surplus value). Those who work for corporations and manufacturers no longer control their own lives. Their livelihood is now based on the conditions of where they work and are determined by the way commodities interact with each other in the free market. Depending how commodities such as oil and high grade steel battle with each other, etc., this will affect the worker at her or his job. If one is an employee for American Airlines and the prices of oil skyrocket one will loose her or his job due to increased costs at American Airlines (for fueling the airliners) and if another is working at an Exxon-Mobil oil rig than that one will be able to keep her or his job, and maybe even make a little more money. Both of those workers jobs depend on how capital is built up and how commodities battle and interact with each other. “Unfitted by nature to make anything independently, the manufacturing worker develops his productive activity only as an appendage” of the corporation. “As the chosen people bore in their features the sign that they were the property of Jehovah,” says Marx, “so the division of labour brands the manufacturing worker the property of capital.”(3) Now, due to circumstances beyond a workers control, he or she must give their allegiances to the corporation and must submit to the interaction of commodities and capital. Miller states that the First Commandment not only applies to “other gods” but also “to multiple claims on your obedience.”(4) But this wouldn’t be the fault of the worker, the worker must work in order to live, if the worker chooses not to submit to commodities he or she will die. The fault doesn’t lie at the feet of the worker and the exploited but rather at the feet of the capitalist and those who justify capitalist oppression, such as Michael Novak. The prophet Jeremiah states that:

Like fowlers they set a trap; they catch human beings. Like a cage full of birds, their houses are full of treachery; therefore they have become rich, they have grown fat and sleek. They know no limits in deeds of wickedness; they do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the right of the needy. (Italics mine, Jer. 5:25-29, NRSV)

For Novak the corporation is “the best secular analogue to the church.”(5) “Viewed in the long run of history, the business corporation is a fascinating institution. It is a social institution” and “[i]ts legal existence is transgenerational.” and it “is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the success of democracy” because the Founding Fathers “saw quite clearly that democracy would be safer if built upon the commercial and industrial classes.” Novak also writes that “[i]ts members come to it voluntarily. They do not give it all the commitment and all the energies of life.”(6) Finally, “the business corporation is, in its essence, a moral institution of a distinctive type” which imposes its “moral obligations that are inherent in its own ends, structure, and modes of operation.”(7) Hinkelammert argues that in order for capital and corporations “to live, the worker must be kept alive. Capital gets its life from the worker and therefore has to keep the worker alive in order to stay alive itself.”(8) Yet it seems that corporations (guided by capital), that is, capital, only care about the bare necessities in order for their worker to live. “In manufacture,” Marx says, “the social productive power of the collective worker, hence of capital, is enriched through the impoverishment of the worker in individual productive power.”(9) Corporations are vehicles meant to build up capital and it needs workers to consume to build up that capital. They are not seemingly guided by the welfare of human beings or of its workers but instead guided by one single force, to accumulate capital, to build wealth. This capital fetish, the wanting (needing) to build up capital is something that the prophet Amos criticizes when he chides the leaders and the rich of Yis’srael by stating:

Hear this, you that trample the needy and bring ruin to the poor of the land saying: “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great...buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.” Yhwh has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. (Italics mine, Amos 8:4-7, NRSV)

Novak’s capital fetish blinds him to the fact of this reality. In fact, it blinds him so much that he actually equates the corporation for the Body of Christ, the church, by stating it is “the best secular analogue to the church.” Instead of pledging his allegiance to God he is pledging his allegiance to an entity who’s sole purpose is to build up capital (money), which leads to a further intensification of idolatry by further delving into the commodity and money fetish and by putting one’s faith in money and by imbuing money and commodities with divine like qualities; this then leads to the ultimate heresy in claiming that a corporation is in essence a church, the Body of Christ. Which for those accepting those principles, makes sense, since they project divine characteristics onto commodities and money.

Novak also states that a corporations members come to it voluntarily. Yet Novak does not expound who its members are. Are the members the boardroom members, the janitors, cubicle workers, shareholders, sweatshop workers? Also, the idea of choice within a capitalists system,(10) as we have seen above, depends on one’s position in that system. But even if one is an owner of capital in the system he or she does not direct how capital should be used since it is commodities, made by human beings, that seem to direct the flow of capital (as we have seen above). Marx states that for the owner of capital one only hears:

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!...If, in the eyes of classical economics, the proletarian is merely a machine for the production of surplus-value [the building of capital], the capitalist too is merely a machine for the transformation of this surplus value into surplus capital.(11)

We can also see how instead of being a beacon for freedom, as Novak states the corporation is, we now see that many Americans (and Europeans) are working longer hours for lesser pay (since inflation is rising faster than wages).(12) Novak’s main theological flaw is putting his trust in an institution of capitalism which its only goal is the consumption of human life in order to accumulate capital, the Anti-Christ, as Marx states. This then puts Novak on the opposite side of the theological divide between those whom fight for God and His people and on the side of those whom fight against God and for capital (all be it both sides claim to fight for God).

This trust in the corporation for Novak is only possible because of his trust in the capitalist free market which he views as the best vehicle for the common good of humanity. “I believe in sin,” stated Novak in a Washington Post column in March of 1976, “I am for capitalism, modified and made intelligent...It allows human beings to do pretty much what they will...Capitalism is a system built on belief in human selfishness; given checks and balances, it is near always a smashing, scandalous success.”(13) What Novak is doing here is framing his argument for capitalism in a theological way which will “protect” him from the criticism of fellow Christians (mainly liberation theologians) by relying on old Mediaeval beliefs on the concept of sin. Yet through out much of the Tanakh (the Hebrew bible, known as the Old Testament to most) and the New Testament we see many of the prophets, evangelists, and Jesus, framing the concept of sin in economical terms of those exploiting the masses (Ex. 3:7-10; Neh. 5:1-5; Ps. 10:1-3; Is. 10:1-3b; Sir. 34:18-22; Matt. 6:19-21; Lk. 1:46-55; Jam. 5:1-6, etc.). To uplift the masses Novak sees the capitalist system, the free market, as the perfect means to do this. Speaking of the time period of Adam Smith Novak states, “If you face a world of 800 million people, most of them poor...and you can produce new wealth, then you must produce new wealth. If you can do it, you must, give the widespread poverty in the world.”(14) One shouldn’t focus on the poor whom are poor due to the free market’s constant obsession with amassing more capital since that is the “[w]rong question. I mean, supposing somebody figured out the causes of poverty. So now that you know how to make poverty who wants it? I mean it is absolutely the wrong question. It is just an insane question.”(15) Novak seems to be blinded by his fetish for capital to see the contradictory terms in his statement in a world where the pursuit for capital inevitably leaves many people in poverty due to the aftereffects of pursuing capital in the free market. This is where we can clearly see Novak’s apostasy in relation to his belief in God. To question the free market is to question the divine will of God (even though Novak has admitted that the free market is “capitalistic hell”(16) ). Novak sees the commodities and money (capital) built up in the capitalist system as divine objects of God, which is the same mistake that Dollar makes, and because of this, Novak sees the free market as being set up by God for common good purposes despite the fact that Novak states it is an imperfect system.(17) Using terms from Hinkelammert, Novak, instead of having a faith in the Christian God of the Bible, has:

faith in money, which is the Holy Spirit immanent in the commodity world...faith in the preestablished order of the relationships of production—faith that they will continue eternally...[and] faith that the agents of production are, and will continue to be personifications of capital.(18)

With this Novak has fallen into sin, which is what the author of 1st Tim. talks about when he states that “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.” (1 Tim. 6:9-10, NRSV). Not only is Novak wrong in the theological realm but his thinking in the secular realm is also off. Here, we see a circular justification for the oppression and grinding poverty of millions of people around the world due to free market and neoliberal policies. Since there are poor people in this world society must “produce more wealth” and because of the building up of capital this will adversely affect the poor, thus causing them to slip further into poverty,(19) which in turn, according to Novak, will require us to make more capital.

Novak always goes back to Adam Smith in his analysis of free market capitalism. He always states that free markets are the best system because they lead to democracy and free societies.(20) Yet his outlook either ignores (on purpose) or fails to realize that while “economies become more and more modernized, the direct association between production and use gets increasingly obscured for exchange.”(21) In early 19th and late 18th century America’s economies were more local and means of production more spread out which lead to a more “democratic” market since there was yet any national and transnational corporations and large businesses. If you were in a town you got your meat from a butcher who knew you, clothes from a tailor who knew you, and grain from a merchant who more than likely knew you. Yet when the distance between service and profit increased, and commodity and monetary relations became less personalized and more impersonal, the market became more and more “obsessed” with the accumulation of capital and less for the benefits of human beings.(22) We can see with the advancement of capitalism through neoliberal globalization the effects it has on those of the lower classes; such as an increase of suicides in India by local farmers(23) due to an increase in large scale industry farming. “For thousands of years, land in” areas such as India and Guatemala were “used for subsistence farming. As capitalism expands into the third world, however, land is seen as too commercially viable to remain outside the cycle of exchange.”(24) Capital has now reached a point where it is now consuming land in order to continue its massive growth, and with that growth it is consuming those who used to farm the land. Now these farmers have become “dependent on the money economy” instead of themselves for subsistence.(25) Novak, instead of condemning this action based on his faith actually applauds these policies and he justifies them religiously. The prophet Isaiah states, “It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor? Says the Lord God of hosts” (Is. 3:14b-15, NRSV). And yet Novak seems to be ignoring this piece of scripture, and others, for the benefit of the capitalist. If Marx says that “[j]ust as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand”(26) than we can also state the reverse for Novak: Just as in capitalist production human beings are enslaved by products of their own hands, they project this slavery onto a religious world, in which they are dominated by products emanating from their own brains. This gets to the heart of the matter of Novak’s true heresy and mistake. Novak’s religious thought is controlled by his capital fetish, in order to justify the accumulation of capital he twists the texts of the Bible to satisfy his own fetish instead of looking critically at the world around him and himself, to see if he is staying true to his professed Christian God. Also, criticizing Novak’s belief that the free market creates a common good, Thomas R. Rourke points out that how is the common good being meet when “Nike corporation...paid an average female worker in Indonesia approximately $.82 per day in 1991" and charged consumers more than 100 times that much for the shoe produced and “paid Michael Jordan $20,000,000.” Which was a figure higher than all of the workers who produced shoes in Indonesia combined.(27) This oversight by Novak can only be explained by his being guided by the capital fetish instead of being guided by the Holy Spirit (a being he believes in and professes to be guided by).

Ultimately people such as Novak, who justify free market systems by using the Bible, and Dollar, who justify wealth building by using the Bible and who states God shows his blessings through money, are blinded by their fetishes for capital, money, and commodities. It’s these fetishes which guide their theological perspectives, instead of the Bible guiding their theological perspectives. Because of this, no matter how much they justify their views, they will always be lead down the wrong path by their fetishes, and that path will lead them to idolatry by worshiping commodities, money, and the capitalist system. Instead of God being their concrete reality (which they proclaim God is), their concrete “reality” will be what they see (yet they will see it in a perverted sense), and what they see is commodities and money, which is one thing the Bible is very clear on and one thread of the Bible that connects the New Testament and the Tanakh. That thread is the condemnation of money and commodities which distract people from God, and since they are distracted from God they are ultimately distracted from each other and the common good of their fellow human beings.

“They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.”
-Isaiah 65:21-22

Notes

1. Quoted in Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 27.
2. Ibid., 28.
3. Marx, Capital, 482.
4. Miller, The God You Have, 21.
5. McCarraher, “The Enchantments of Mammon,” 460, n. 42.
6. Michael Novak, Three in One, 233.
7. Ibid., 241.
8. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 30.
9. Marx, Capital, 483.
10. For more on choice and the setting up of the capitalist system and how people merely are only making choices based on what the free market dictates to them see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002).
11. Marx, Capital, 742.
12. On wages and working hours see Jeffrey E. Hill, et. al., “Finding an Extra Day a Week: The
Positive Influence of Perceived Job Flexibility on Work and Family Life Balance,” Family
Relations 50, no. 1 (Jan. 2001): 49-54; Lynne Lamberg, “Impact of Long Working Hours
Explored,” Journal of the American Medical Association 292, no. 1 (July 2004): 25-26; Jeremy Reynolds, “When Too Much Is Not Enough: Actual and Preferred Work Hours in the United States and Abroad,” Sociological Forum 19, no. 1 (March 2004): 89-120; Amy S. Wharton and Mary Blair-Loy, “Long Work Hours and Family Life: A Cross-National Study of Employees’ Concerns,” Journal of Family Issues 27, no. 3 (March 2006) 415-436.
13. Novak, Three in One, 4.
14. Ibid., 57.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 4.
17. Ibid., 56.
18. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 44.
19. For more on the adverse effects of neoliberal policies on the lower classes around the world see Edmund Amann and Werner Baer, “Neoliberalism and its Consequences in Brazil,” Journal of Latin American Studies 34, no. 4 (Nov. 2002): 945-959; Werner Baer and William Maloney,
“Neoliberalism and Income Distribution in Latin America,” World Development 25, no. 3 (March 1997): 311-327; Rubiana Chamarbagwala, “Economic Liberalization and Wage Inequality in India,” World Development 34, no. 12 (Dec. 2006): 1997-2015; and Warwick E. Murray, “Neoliberal Globalisation, ‘Exotic’ Agro-exports, and Local Chance in the Pacific Islands: A Study of the Fijian Kava Sector,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21, no. 3 (Nov. 2000): 355-373.
20. On the fallacy of capitalism leading to democracy in the 21st century see Bruce Bueno de
Mesquita and George Downs, “Development and Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 84, no. 5 (Sept/Oct2005): 77-86.
21. Thomas R. Rourke, “Michael Novak and Yves R. Simon on the Common Good and
Capitalism,” Review of Politics, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 249.
22. Rourke, “Michael Novak and Yves R. Simon,” 249.
23. Somini Sengupta, “On India’s Despairing Farms, a Plague of Suicide,” New York Times, 19
Sept., 2006, A1.
24. Rourke, “Michael Novak and Yves R. Simon,” 249.
25. Ibid., 250.
26. Marx, Capital, 772.
27. Rourke, “Michael Novak and Yves R. Simon,” 250.

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The Worship of Mammon: The Fetishism of Capital in the Theological Thoughts of Creflo Dollar and Michael Novak, Part I

It has been a while since my last post that I fully authored myself. This essay is Part I of a two part series on my critique of "Prosperity Theology" which is a branch of Christian thought that states that God showers His blessings on people through money and that those who believe in the Bible and Jesus Christ (as well as tithing to a church) will also recieve finnancial blessings and have all their problems in life answered. Part I on this series will focus on the Rev. Creflo Dollar (his real name believe it or not) while Part II will focus on neo-conservative Catholic theologian and classical economic propent of the free market, Michael Novak.

“As a stake is driven firmly into a fissure between stones, so sin is wedged in between selling and buying.”

-Sirach 27:2(1)

Over the years the concept of “Prosperity Theology,” in where God shows his blessings to His people by showering them with riches, has obviously attracted many followers, and seems to be gaining more momentum by the day. The poster child of this movement, in all of his excessive and over the top glory, is the Rev. Creflo Dollar of Creflo Dollar Ministries and who is the reverend of the World Changers International World Dome church in southwest Atlanta. Dollar preaches all over the United States about how God wants to shower all of his faithful with money (of course, Dollar is quick to point out that he also means spiritual wealth) and one of his biggest selling points is the fact that he flaunts his own wealth to prove God is blessing him. He unabashedly shows his congregants, and anyone else for that matter, “his custom-tailored suits and alligator shoes, his Rolls-Royces, his private airplanes” and has no problems demanding from his congregation 10% of their income for tithes, and if they decide to give less they might as well not even bother and instead, “Go buy a Happy Meal.”(2) The concept of Prosperity Theology arose out of the capitalist system and indeed is the religious byproduct of the capitalist system. Without the unrestrained capitalist system and its forms of perversion there would more than likely be no Prosperity Theology to be preached upon. Prosperity Theology, as preached by Creflo Dollar, is the religious justification of capitalism and of capitalism’s systems. While Creflo Dollar speaks on a more simplistic level, stating that people who follow the Bible and follow God will soon become rich, or at least financially comfortable, neo-conservative Catholic Theologian Michael Novak takes a more nuanced approached to capitalism and the building of capital (wealth). Novak’s belief is that because everyone is affected by original sin and is in nature sinful and imperfect, the capitalist system is the most logical choice for human kind, in fact, he sees the capitalist system as practically ordained by God.(3) For Novak, the capitalist market system is the best vehicle for making sure that the common good of humanity is meet. Novak’s fetishistic trust in the “free” market I argue is just as flawed as Dollar’s fetishistic trust in God’s love through the form of money and that both are inherently wrong in their interpretation of the Bible on their views of money and capitalism. To show how their relationship between the Bible and the free market is inherently incorrect I will be using liberation theologian Franz J. Hinkelammert’s theological critique of capitalism and his use of Marx’s theory of fetishism in order to critique the microeconomic fallacies of Dollar and the macroeconomic fallacies of Novak and how their trust and Biblical justification in the free market and the capitalist system undermines their Biblical message.

In order to understand the theological perversities of Dollar’s preachings on money and the luxurious commodities people can acquire with money we must first look at Marx’s theory of the fetish which first comes to us in the form of the commodity fetish since the commodity fetish is “[t]he basis of the whole analysis of [Marx’s theory of] fetishism.”(4) Hinkelammert describes the capitalistic world as “a world that is bewitched” and that the analysis of the commodity fetish is a way to unveil this world of enchanted commodities.(5) Marx states, quite rightly, that wealth in societies that have a “capitalist mode of production...appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities.’”(6) In order to begin his investigation of “political economy” Marx begins his investigation with this mass of commodities.(7) Marx states that “[a] commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”(8) Its these subtleties and niceties that end up taking “‘metaphysical’ and ‘theological’ guises” because capitalist industry obscures and hides the fact that commodities are created by human labor.(9) This is do to the fact of capitalist production which separates the manufacturing process through the division of labor; which happens quite naturally under capitalism and nearly all forms of trade and commerce. Because people don’t see commodities for what they are, that is, products of human labor (all though they do “sense” what they are to a point, as Marx states(10) ), instead they ascribe to them human like traits. Commodities appear to come from nowhere and materialize themselves onto the market scene and act on their own. It is the commodity that is talked about, not the producers of the commodity, by market analysts. Hinkelammert states, “Commodities now set up social relationships among themselves. For example, artificial nitrate battles natural nitrate [on the market] and defeats it. Oil fights with coal, and wood with plastic. Coffee dances on world markets while iron and steel get married.” The producer of the commodity becomes controlled and dominated by the commodity itself, not the other way around. Depending on the fluctuations of the stock market during a day steel, silicone, and plastics will either become more valuable or less, and thus creating cheaper commodities or more expensive commodities, which in turn affects workers who will either keep their jobs or lose them depending on costs and expenditures. In essence, the workers life depends on the commodity. Today, there is much talk of oil prices and their continued rise in the marketplace, there seems to be little control over the price of oil by human beings, instead it is controlled by the supply and demand of it, which are not concrete sciences but rather philosophical and economical guesses based on either rational or irrational human behavior and the process of production.(11) For Hinkelammert “[t]he decision to continue to produce commodities is always at the same time the decision to accept being determined by the sum of commodities.” He goes on to say that “[c]ommodities begin to move although no one wanted or intended them to do so, and even though any movement on their part comes from some movement of human beings. The effects are completely beyond all human intention” and control.(12) This whole effect of commodities on the lives of human beings are “products of the human brain” which make commodities (commodities that Dollar tells his congregation to seek and which he seeks himself) “appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations” with human beings on the market system and their everyday lives. Marx calls “this...fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and therefore inseparable from the production of commodities” the “fetishism of the world of commodities.”(13)

In order to better understand and illustrate the commodity (and money and capital) fetish Marx stated that, “we must take flight into the misty realm of religion.”(14) Because of their alienation from the products they make, human beings invest into commodities their own hopes and dreams, fears and longings. They don’t see a Nike shoe as a product made of rubber, phylon, and polyurethane which is wholly overpriced compared to its production value and labor expenses, they instead see a product which they must buy in order to obtain a certain “status” amongst their peers or to make themselves feel better about who they are. In this way they “enchant...commodities with hopes of gratification and justice”(15) that these commodities obviously can’t fulfill them with. This is the fundamental flaw of Creflo Dollar’s preaching and theology. He tells his congregation that God showers blessings onto His people through the forms of money and commodities. Dollar states he is blessed by God because of his wealth in commodities. “I own two Rolls-Royces and didn’t pay a dime for them,”( they were given to him through donors), “Why? Because while I’m pursuing the Lord those cars are pursuing me.”(16) Because Dollar has yet to demystify the commodities around him he sees commodities as blessings and as signs that he is doing the right thing. One could take the opposite view of his mind set that instead of gifts from God they were the gifts of a very generous congregation (his own) and a very generous group of his own workers through their own money. This is the commodity fetishism in a nutshell. Instead of using religion as an analogy Dollar actually really does see the commodities as having suprasensual qualities and having been enchanted with divine properties. And this is what leads Dollar away from the true God(17) and towards false gods, the gods of commodities. Max Weber wrote that despite being defeated by the proclamation of the Christian religion by being declared the official religion of the Roman Empire and the Christianization of the European world and of the Americas, the old polytheistic gods were resurrected in the form of capitalism and of commodities. Eugene McCarraher states, “Observing how ‘many old gods ascend from their graves’ to become the laws of nature of the market, [Weber] called upon his fellow modern intellectuals that ‘we live as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons’ [author’s italics] ‘only we...live in a different sense.’”(18)

Yet the big selling point for Dollar isn’t the commodities per se, but the item that gets people those “luxurious” commodities: money. Dollar tells his congregants and viewers that they must “‘speak debt-canceling Scriptures’ every day, in order to help make God’s promise real” in order for them to get more money(19) to buy the commodities they want and need and in order to live a comfortable(and possibly a lavish) life. Which brings us to the next stage of Marx’s theory of fetishism, and another fundamental (and idolatress) flaw, the money fetish. Hinkelammert sums up Marx’s views on money by stating, “Money is a commodity. But it is not a commodity like the rest; it is the commodity that stands out above all the rest.”(20) Money is not meant to be consumed like other commodities such as sneakers that you wear and get old or cars you drive that must be scrapped after their “life span” exceeds its limit. Instead money is the common denominator between all commodities, with this “the process of [the] commodity [fetish] intensifies.”(21) For Marx, it is at this stage of the money fetish, an intensification of the commodity fetish, that money is “endowed with the attributes of a conscious subject,”(22) as Hinkelammert puts it. With commodities there was no hierarchy with one commodity representing an equivalent for another, but with money there is now a hierarchy, money is the “king”in the polytheistic commodity world. Marx states that through the actions of capitalists and consumers, money “ has been set apart to be the universal equivalent”(23) in where one commodity is brought “into an opposing relation with some other commodity.”(24) So now the human being, which is brought under the power of commodities of their own making, having their lives ruled by commodities, are now ruled by a universal equivalent to commodities that can transcend individual commodities and represent all commodities (i.e., $10 can buy a CD, a few snow cones, a movie ticket, etc.). This causes Marx to label money as the “Mark of the Beast” by quoting the Latin text of the Book of Revelations in the New Testament(25) which states: “These are united in yielding their power and authority to the beast...so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.” (Rev. 17:13, 13:17, NRSV). Analyzing Marx’s use of this Christian image Hinkelammert goes on to say that “[t]he other reference to Christianity in the text links the commodity world, and specifically money, with the apocalyptic tradition of the beast, the Antichrist—that is, the antihuman.”(26) In Grundrisse (written a decade before Capital Volume I) Marx wrote that when money was first minted it was stored in the temples of antiquity, with this Marx took the analogy that money was “the god among commodities” and “the real community” of capitalist society.(27)

Patrick D. Miller puts it this way, “In the case of Jesus’ radical instruction...there seems to be no tension, only the assumption that property and wealth are another god, an alternative master in whom one is always at risk of putting one’s trust and finding a place of ultimate refuge.”(28) Dollar puts not only himself, but his congregants, at risk when he preaches about the gods of wealth and projects divine qualities onto money and onto commodities. We see that when he speaks of not only spiritual but “financial increase.” All one has to do is tithe to the church,(29) read their Bible, and be good Christians and they will become prosperous and rich. With this thinking being indoctrinated into oneself regularly one could not be held at fault for thinking that those whom are poor are not blessed by God while those who are rich are blessed by God. Quickly one begins to mix up the polytheistic world of commodities and the Anti-Christ of money with the realities of the true God. Money are blessings which give one precious commodities. Precious commodities are received because one is blessed by God. Money is now one’s god, the false god. In fact, Dollar and his ministry are seemingly mixing up the world of the fetish with God everyday. Kelefa Sanneh stated in a piece in the New Yorker that during his stay at the World Changers campus things started:

to get mixed up: the shareholders are the customers are the employees, and the corporate commitment to excellence comes to seem indistinguishable from the religious commitment to righteousness. It is a vision in which everyone will go on becoming more righteous and more excellent and more prosperous, forever and ever.(30)

The First Commandment states, “I am Yhwh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt...you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make yourself an idol...You shall not bow down to them or worship them...” (Ex. 20:2-5, NRSV). For the world of the people of Yis’rael (Israel), to worship other gods did not just mean to worship a bunch of divine beings up in the sky or on a mountain, but to put ones trust in certain gods because they gave people certain things, or commodities. If one put trust in other gods they did so to receive money, property, commodities, etc. One of those gods, in the ancient Near East, was Ba’al, a Canaanite god who’s name in Aramaic was Mammon (which has also been translated as “Wealth”). The word Mammon has been seen by some etymologists as coming from the word ’āmana which means “that in which one trusts.”(31) This etymological root can help us better understand Jesus’ parable on serving two masters better, and put into context Dollar’s (such an apt name if I do say so myself) heresy. “‘No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Wealth.” Jesus then goes on to condemn the religious establishment “who were lovers of money” by saying, “‘You are those who justify yourself in the sight of others; but God knows your hearts, for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God.’” (Luke 16:13-15, NRSV) This quote from Jesus, the man Dollar states he serves and speaks to on a regular basis, gets to the heart of the matter. Dollar misguidedly preaches a heretical message to his people based on his fetishistic view of commodities and money. Because his vision is so simplistic and narrow minded, instead of preaching about the true God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which Christians state is their true god, he preaches a fetishistic gospel based on the perversities of the capitalist system. One no longer puts her or his trust in God but now one puts her or his trust in money, from which one has access to multiple gods, the gods of the commodities (money in the Hindu sense can almost be seen like a perversion of the god Ganesh, whom gives many Hindus access to the gods they want to pray too).

Norman O. Brown’s 1959 book Life Against Death “is perhaps the most searching psychoanalytical critique of capitalism ever written,” states McCarraher.(32) With capitalism, Brown writes, the “power over this world has passed from God to God’s ape, the Devil.” With money Brown sees “the essence of the secular, and therefore of the demonic.” Writing on Brown McCarraher states, “The ‘money complex,’” which Dollar falls under and what Marx “considered the animating spirit of commodity fetishism—is, in Brown’s words, ‘the heir to and substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things.’ Capitalism, we might add, was a new form of enchantment.”(33) As I have stated above for commodities, Dollar appears to be putting divine characteristics of enchainment into money, he’s trying to find God in commodities and money instead of trying to find God in the presence of human beings, which is a subject that Gustavo Gutiérrez talks at length about.(34) He’s putting money above all else, even commodities. This is Dollar’s downfall and his largest weakness. While he may be preaching a theology that many want to hear (especially the rich) he is preaching a false theology that only can exist under the pretenses of the commodity and money fetish. Yet these fetishes wouldn’t be as intense unless it had to do with the capitalistic market economy. Pablo Richard and Raul Vidales write that:

With the advance of the capitalist system money is transformed into capital...In the transformation of money into capital it becomes obvious that commodity relationships in their very operation have the power of decision not only over the proportions of material goods to be produced but even over the life or death of the producer.(35)

With this we now enter the capital fetish and into the thoughts of the neo-conservative Catholic theologian, and neo-classical proponent of capitalism, Michael Novak, whom also uses religion and the Bible to justify capitalism and the building of capital (wealth). Which we will go over in Part II of this blog series.

Notes

1. All quotes from the Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant Bible are taken from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translation. The Bible in use is Michael D. Coogan ed., The New Oxford Annotated Bible Third Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
2. Kelefa Sanneh, “Pray and Grow Rich.” New Yorker 80, no. 30 (Oct. 11, 2004): 48-57,
http://0-web.ebscohost.com.opac.sfsu.edu/ehost/detail?vid=5&hid=6&sid=ccbc98f3-5524-4684-9d
58-475fec862823%40SRCSM2 (accessed Oct. 5, 2006).
3. Michael Novak, Three in One: Essays on Democratic Capitalism, 1976-2000 (Lanham, Md:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001), 4.
4. Franz J. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death: A Theological Critique of
Capitalism, trans. by Phillip Berryman (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1986), 5.
5. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 5.
6. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Pelican Books, 1976. Reprint, New York: Penguin Classics, 1990), 125.
7. Mike Wayne, “Fetishism and Ideology: A Reply to Dimoulis and Milios,” Historical
Materialism 13, no. 3 (2005): 201.
8. Marx, Capital,163.
9. Eugene McCarraher, “The Enchantments of Mammon: Notes Toward a Theological History of
Capitalism,” Modern Theology 21, no. 3 (July 2005): 437.
10. The commodity, for Marx, “is a sensuous [thing] which...at the same time [is] suprasensible or social...the impression made by a thing on the optic nerve is perceived not as a subjective excitation of that nerve but as the objective form of a thing outside the eye. In the act of seeing...is a physical relation between physical things...As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within nature of the commodity and the material [dinglich] relations arising out of this.” (Marx, Capital, 163)
11. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 6.
12. Ibid., 7.
13. Marx, Capital, 165.
14. Ibid.
15. McCarraher, “The Enchantments of Mammon,” 438.
16. Quoted in Sanneh, “Pray and Grow Rich.”
17. By “true” God I don’t mean to state that the Christian God is the only true God and all other
gods are false gods and that all other religions are demonic, false, and evil, etc. By “true God” I
mean the true God in the sense that Dollar sees, or thinks he sees, it. The god of the Christian
religion, which Dollar holds to be his god. I will argue that Dollar no longer worships the god he
sees as true but now worships a plethora of false gods in the forms of commodities and the ultimate false god, the anti-Christ, in the form of money, which is the unifier of commodities on the free market.
18. McCarraher, “The Enchantments of Mammon,” 435.
19. Sanneh, “Pray and Grow Rich.”
20. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 16.
21. Pablo Richard and Raul Vidales, “Introduction,” ibid., xvii.
22. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 19.
23. Marx, Capital, 181.
24. Ibid., 180.
25. The text he quotes is: “Illi unum consilium habent et virutem et potestatem suam bestiae
tradunt...Et ne quis possit emere aut vendere, nisi qui habet charactereum aut nomen bestiae,
aut numerum nominis eius.” (Marx, Capital, 181).
26. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death, 19.
27. McCarraher, “The Enchantments of Mammon,” 437.
28. Patrick D. Miller, The God You Have: Politics, Religion, and the First Commandment
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 31.
29. Members must tithe 10% of what they make and in order to become a member they have to meet numerous requirements, among which is to give the church their social security number (Sanneh, “Pray and Grow Rich).
30. Sanneh, “Pray and Grow Rich.”
31. Miller, The God You Have, 25.
32. McCarraher, “The Enchantments of Mammon,” 442.
33. Ibid., 443.
34. See Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: 15th Anniversary Edition, trans. by Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1988), 106-120, specifically 106-107.
35. Pablo Richard and Raul Vidales, “Introduction,” The Ideological Weapons of Death, xviii.

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The Enchantments of Mammon: Metaphysical Subtleties and Theological Niceties, Towards a Theological History of Capitalism

By Eugene McCarraher

This is a section from an essay by Eugene McCarraher. The essay, McCarraher, Eugene. “The Enchantments of Mammon: Notes Toward a Theological History of Capitalism.” Modern Theology 21, no. 3 (July 2005): 429-461, was one I read while researching for my thesis paper for my Religious Studies Minor at San Francisco State University for my Religious Studies 696 Directed Readings class. It was very intriguing and I’ve decided to take some of the best aspects of this essay, particularly the section titled “'Metaphysical Subtleties and Theological Niceties'”: Commodity Fetishism and the Marxist Tale of Disenchantment.” I plan to post my finished essay on this blog once I finish it, which will be in about two to three weeks.

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

Christians assert that we always live beyond our means, because there is no other way to live. (Here, they must contest both modern economics—capitalist or Marxist—which narrates the agonistic production of abundance, and a Bataillean “general economy” which celebrates plenty in nihilistic violence.) Creation is not just abundant, but sacramental as well. Affirming Augustine’s claim that “the invisible realities of God are apprehended through the material things of his creation”, Graham Ward articulates a “doctrine of divine participation in creation” whereby “the corporeal and the incorporeal do not comprise a dualism”. When read theologically, Ward asserts, the visible, material realm “manifests the watermark of its creator”. It would follow that a proper theological critique of Marxist metaphysics would not be that it is “too materialist” but rather that it is not materialist enough—that is, that it does not provide an adequate account of matter itself, of its sacramental and revelatory character. So if Marxist “demystification” of capitalism purports to uncover the material roots of ideology, a theological “demystification” would expose the perversely sacramental and ecclesial roots of injustice.
...
Writing the cultural history of capitalism provides an occasion for such an enterprise, affording an opportunity to write a new tale of accumulation and its discontents. In this tale, capitalism becomes a new form of sacrament, a repression, displacement, and renaming of the sacred, a mobilization of desires for redemption and transfiguration. The cash nexus and the fetishism of commodities pervert the performance of sacrament. The “scarcity of resources” and the “laws of the market” conceal the charity of providence. Economic thought and management theory impersonate creed and doxology. The corporation parodies the ecclesia, and the trinkets of the market ape the delights of the heavenly city. The enchantments of capitalism pervert our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world. A fat, greasy, hoarding slob in ancient Babylonian lore, Mammon appears, in capitalist modernity, in a counterfeit angelic raiment.
(pp. 432-433)
...
Yet the sociologist who claimed that he was “religiously unmusical” heard faint notes of enchantment in capitalist culture. Despite the wounds inflicted by disenchantment, the old deities had not simply hobbled off to die. Observing how “many old gods ascend from their graves” to become the laws of nature or the market, he called upon his fellow modern intellectuals to realize that “we live as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons” (my italics)—“only we”, he concluded cryptically, “live in a different sense”. Some of Weber’s scholarly descendants locate that “different sense” in the self of modern consumer culture. The sociologist Colin Campbell, for instance, traces the descent of consumer consciousness from what he calls “the Other Protestant Ethic”, a concentration on ecstatic inner experience which marked both evangelical and liberal Protestant religious traditions. When separated from the Protestant churches, this Other Protestant Ethic morphed into a “romantic ethic” which, by affirming the primacy of emotion and sensibility, served as the “secular” prelude to consumer consciousness. Consumerism is the contemplative mysticism of commodity culture. The perpetually unsatisfied desire of consumerism is, in this view, the psychological residue of enchantment. If we look at the matter theologically, however, could we say that consumerism is the contemplative mysticism of commodity culture?
(p. 435)
...
The possibility that capitalist “rationality” bears vestiges of enchantment receives unlikely but auspicious support from none other than the Marxist tradition. As the Communist Manifesto makes very and proudly clear, Marx considered capitalism the most arduous and liberating of modernity’s disillusioning forces. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” The bourgeoisie “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor . . . in the icy water of egotistical calculation”—an image suggesting that capital is consecrated in a murderous baptismal rite of accumulation. Yet while Marx was more exhilarated than Weber by the death of God, he could not, in the end, affirm the secularity of capitalism or reject religion as a source of insight into the capitalist mode of production. If the capitalist is indeed “a sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up with his spells”, then Marx might turn out to be the bearer of an oddly sacramental critique of commodity civilization.

Marx framed his analysis of capitalism in religious terms throughout his career, suggesting that his use of religious language was far more than irony or sarcasm. In the “1844 manuscripts”, Marx reflected on “the divine power of money, its perverse capacity for moral and metaphysical transfiguration. Through its power to conjure an abstract equivalence among distinct and incomparable things, money remade the world in its own empty image and likeness, effecting “the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries”, procuring love for the unpleasant, education for the dull, travel for the indolent or parochial. “Thou visible God!” as he quoted Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Noting later, in the Grundrisse (1857), his massive preliminary study of capitalism, that money was first minted and stored in the temples of antiquity, Marx concluded that it was both “the god among commodities” and “the real community” of capitalist society—a new ontology of enchantment, perhaps? Indeed, Marx considered money “the immanent spirit of commodities”, a restless specter that lingered with material goods only for a while, awaiting release and re-investment in the circuit of accumulation. But Marx quickly defused the possibility of any theological criticism by interpreting both religion and money as epiphenomenal distortions, the effects of a more basic “social” existence misshapen by scarcity, injustice, and alienation. The “fetishistic” character of both religion and money would, Marx thought, be exposed—disenchanted—by historical development and revolutionary practice.

Yet later, in Capital, in one of the most renowned and difficult passages in his work—“the fetishism of commodities, and the secret thereof”—Marx underlined the formal similarities between commodity exchange and religious practice in such a way as to undermine his secular critique of capitalism. The commodity, he wrote, is “a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”. These subtleties and niceties take “metaphysical” and “theological” guises, in his view, because modern industry obscures or eclipses the fact that commodities are made by human beings. Since, under conditions of large-scale production and exchange, we see no traces of labor in the things we buy, commodities seem to appear from nowhere, acquire agency, even interact with each other. Thus “the mutual relations of producers” assume the appearance of a “social relation between the products”, both of which are mediated by money. (Note how Marx, against the drift of much high-minded palaver about “consumerism”, locates the roots of commodity fetishism in the relations of production. Talking about consumerism has become a way of not talking about capitalism.) But because, under conditions of alienation, people invest material products with their deepest hopes and fears, they endow—enchant—commodities with hopes of gratification and justice that can really be fulfilled only by a revolutionary transformation of society. So far, so secular; yet Marx then declared that to resolve the enigma of fetishism we must take “recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world”. Just as “God” stands for the unrealized, projected, and distorted powers of humanity, so, too, do the fetishized products of alienated labor. And just as an enlightened humanity will see a piece of bread instead of a Eucharistic host—a sacramental analogy Marx used earlier in Capital—so a classless world of unestranged producers, recognizing their own creations in the wealth of industrial production, will see the full flourishing of their talents and capacities.

So while Marx the revolutionary pamphleteer heralds the rationalization of economic life as a powerful force for disenchantment, Marx the student of political economy sees commodity fetishism as a reservoir of enchantment...
...
Other Marxists have taken the analysis of commodity fetishism to an even higher theological level, explicitly linking the concept of reification to sacramentality and eschatology. Thanks to the universalization of the commodity form under late capitalism, reification—along with commodity fetishism, its specifically capitalist form—must, Fredric Jameson asserts, “come into their own [as] the dominant instruments of analysis and struggle”. As the process whereby the products of labor acquire a “phantom subjectivity”, in Georg Lukacs’ words, an abstract quality that disguises their human origin, reification is for Marxists both a necessary condition and the condition from which revolution will emancipate us. Possessing this dialectical character, art, religion, and commodities offer tantalizing glimpses of a utopian, unreified existence, a future heralded in a Marxism which prefigures “a lucid enchantment of the world”—to use Perry Anderson’s startling and cryptic
phrase.

Rejecting a “secular reason” which participates in a “reified logic of the here and now” and thereby inhibits genuine openness to the unknown, Bewes attempts to chart the analogy, even the homology, between commodity fetishism and sacramental practice. Five pages into Reification (2002)—whose cover features an old nun tending what appears to be a loom of some high-tech sort—Bewes asserts that the Incarnation is a “metaphor or even a synonym for reification: when Christ becomes man—‘historically’ or symbolically in the sacraments of the Holy Communion—the divine is translated into worldly terms”. In the Christian terms of Incarnation and Eucharist, “the moment of reification is pregnant with the moment of liberation from reification”; bread and wine become “physical tokens” of emancipation from the reified world. (Drawing on Flannery O’Connor’s conviction of the “intimacy of creation”, Bewes even suggests that what has been called transubstantiation be renamed intersubstantiation, a word which, in his view, better conveys the quality of a sacrament to reveal the always inherent intermixture of sacred and mundane.) Bewes can then restate, in continuity with classical Marxism, that the end of religion and the end of reification are the same moment. “The disappearance of religion is identical to the realization of its truth, to the manifestation of its objects of devotion, to the erasure of the semiotic disjunction between faith and parousia, an event which religion itself could not survive.”
...
Every atrium, dress shop, and voluptuous advertisement bore the longing for divinity. Department stores, Benjamin wrote, were “temples consecrated” to “the religious intoxication of cities”, the redemptive fantasies of communion and abundance perverted and mobilized by urban commercial culture. If, in Marxist terms, the dispelling of commodity fetishism is a disenchantment, for Benjamin the exposure of the fetish was a prelude to re-enchantment, a discovery of some vaguely utopian and perhaps divine promise inherent in material life.
(pp. 436-341)

“[C]ommodities seem to appear from nowhere, acquire agency, even interact with each other.” The Rev. Dollar’s (a “Prosperity” theologian who I am critiquing in my paper and who has a mega-church in Atlanta, GA) mistake is that he tells people God show’s his mercies and blessings on those through money and commodities. This is a mistake because Dollar does not seem to know where the commodity is from. Of money, Marx writes“the divine power of money, its perverse capacity for moral and metaphysical transfiguration. Through its power to conjure an abstract equivalence among distinct and incomparable things, money remade the world in its own empty image and likeness, effecting the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries.” Dollar worships the god of money, Mammon, without even knowing it, he turns his “flock” away from the true God (the “true God” in what they believe, that is, the Christian God, they are turning away from a God they profess to believe in) and towards the mystical and man-made elements of money, money and commodities which are endowed with the characteristics of a god, the worship of money and commodities is the worship of a false god. One understanding of the 1st commandment is that in ancient Israel gods were considered everywhere, there was a god for commerce, money, and materials, thus the 1st commandment was as much a critique of commodity fetishism and the worship of money and commodities as it was a critique of not worshiping Yhwh (cf. Miller, Patrick D. The God You Have: Politics and the First Commandment. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004., This is a great little book on further study for the 1st commandment and its present day abuses in American society).

...in Life Against Death, [Normon O.] Brown produced what is perhaps the most searching psychoanalytical critique of capitalism ever written, connecting the psychoanalysis of money to an exploration of religious concerns. Noting how the standard psychoanalytic appraisal of money was “anchored in the domain of the secular”, Brown concluded, after a survey of historical and anthropological literature, that money actually derived its power from “the magical, mystical, religious . . . the domain of the sacred”. Besides, he continued, the “flat antinomy” of sacred and secular was misleading in any case. “Secularization”, he asserted, “is only a metamorphosis of the sacred”—an observation made in the course of criticizing the “illusion that modern money is secular”. The secular, Brown contended, is “the negation of the sacred”—negation, that is, in Freud’s and Hegel’s terms, in which the act of negation is in fact an affirmation of its opposite. If the secular is indeed this affirmative negation of the sacred, then “the psychological realities of money”, Brown asserted, were “best grasped in terms of theology”. In Brown’s reading, neither capitalism nor secularism had disenchanted the world. In a chapter entitled “Filthy Lucre” that examined the scatological fixations of Martin Luther, Brown affirmed the reformer’s insight that, with capitalism, “power over this world has passed from God to God’s ape, the Devil”. Like Luther, Brown saw in money “the essence of the secular, and therefore of the demonic”. The “money complex”—what Marx, recall, had considered the animating spirit of commodity fetishism—is, in Brown’s words, “the heir to and substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things”. Capitalism, we might add, was a new form of enchantment.
(pp. 442-443)
...
If capitalism works like a religion, then we can study and critique it as a religion, a form of enchantment, an ensemble of rituals, symbols, moral codes, and iconography. Yet it is on precisely this score that radical orthodoxy needs revision in order to realize its enormous promise as a reservoir of critical power. Because Milbank and his comrades define modern secularity as the creation of a space of untrammeled human will-to-power, they obscure or even miss the full significance of their own discernment of religious residue in capitalist theory and practice. Milbank, for instance, emphasizes the persistence of providential notions in classical conceptions of the market (the “invisible hand”) and notes the transvaluation of Christian virtue into the skinflint and specious probities of sobriety, punctuality, and self-restraint. D. Stephen Long—whose Divine Economy (2000) is a remarkable fusion of historical theology and intellectual history—rightly asserts that Adam Smith “articulated a metaphysical-moral vision for capitalist economics”, and examines how contemporary Christian intellectuals such as Michael Novak and Max Stackhouse have tried to align the verities of economics with those of theology. But neither Long nor Milbank appears to consider the perdurance of this perverse sacrality a reason to abandon or revise what Jeffrey Stout has called “the secularist theory of secularization” that structures their accounts of capitalism and political economy.
(p. 449)

The author goes on to state in footnote 42 about Michael Novak, a conservative theologian who writes on economy whom I’m also critiquing in my thesis paper:

Michael Novak’s theological economics, it must be noted, is the most forthright and outrageous of all these efforts. The corporation, he writes, is “the best secular analogue to the church”, indeed a “Suffering Servant” representing “a much despised incarnation of God’s presence in the world”.
(p. 460, n. 42)

...Even more provocatively, Cavanaugh argues that the modern nation-state is a “simulacrum, a false copy, of the Body of Christ” with “an alternative soteriology to that of the Church”. “It is not enough”, he contends in a highly suggestive but undeveloped passage, “to see what is called ‘secularization’ as the progressive stripping away of the sacred from some profane remainder”. Modern nationalism is “the substitution of one mythos of salvation for another”—“extra respublicam nulla salus”, as he wittily encapsulates it—and this nationalist mythos has succeeded “because it mimics its predecessor”. In other words, there is a sacrality inherent in secularity, and the state is, in short, a perverse form of religio. But if, as Cavanaugh notes, “the power of the state grew in concert with the rise of capitalism”, might not the history of the latter be a similar story of mythic mimicry and substitution? Might not capitalism appropriate “the capital of what it denies” and reinvest it in the liturgy of accumulation?

...A theological critique of “disenchantment” could then avoid the tiresome and flat-footed opposition of secular and sacred, and enable us to suggest that while moderns claim to disenchant and de-sacramentalize matter, they “fetishize” goods by shifting faith in divine power to the transformative properties of commodities. Likewise, the love of accumulation is a corrupted love of God, a private and spoiled Eucharistic banquet. And as the site of poesis deformed into productivity, the corporation is a grotesque of liturgical labor.

Guided by some of the ideas I have sketched, I have become convinced that American cultural history abounds with evidence that enchantment or sacramentality has persisted throughout the evolution of capitalism. Even before the advent of corporate capitalism in the late nineteenth-century, American economic culture had featured an ongoing tension between a Cartesian-Calvinist worldview that disenchanted material life and a more fluid, enchanted sensibility that bore Campbell’s “other Protestant ethic”...
(p. 450)
...
...Over the course of the twentieth-century, an array of writers in the reform, academic, and corporate intelligentsia—from Progressives to advertising moguls, from pragmatist philosophers at Harvard to business journalists at Fortune—attributed moral and sacral significance to the capitalist corporation and its commodity culture. Josiah Royce, for instance, considered the corporation a prefigurement of the “Beloved Community” he augured as the modern solution to The Problem of Christianity (1913). In War and Insurance (1914), Royce marveled at the corporation’s fusion of mortal material assets with an identity, legally conferred but nonetheless forceful, which constituted an immortal selfhood, an “essentially intangible soul”. Herbert Croly, one of the founders of the New Republic, identified Progressive Democracy (1914) with the “holy city”, built with the hands of corporate workers. Modern sanctity, he believed, depended on the “fund of virtue” or “spiritual heritage” invested by a modern clerisy of “learned or holy men”—especially the “democratic administrators” and “scientific managers” who possessed the discursive capital of social science.

Corporate intellectuals closer to the daily activities of business shared these enchanted and expansive hopes. Eager to counter charges that corporate business was a soulless and avaricious leviathan, members of the business community increasingly argued that corporate labor, when properly managed, bore a religious import. J. George Frederick, managing editor of Printer’s Ink (then the advertising industry’s leading trade magazine) called upon corporate leaders to spread “the ideality of the human spirit” throughout “our vast mechanism of production”. Bruce Barton, perhaps the most famous (or infamous) advertising man of the twentieth-century, came even closer to articulating an ecclesial, liturgical conception of the corporation. In his best-selling The Man Nobody Knows (1925), Barton (son of a Congregationalist minister) asserted that Jesus “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world”. Easily derided as a mite of kitsch, Barton’s remark should be noted for its implicit identification of the church with the corporation. Moreover, Barton explicitly anointed corporate work in language which, if placed in a very different political and discursive context, would have merited the applause of Weil or Gill. “All work is worship; all useful service prayer”, are the words with which he concluded his book. “Whoever works wholeheartedly at any worthy calling is a co-worker with the Almighty in the great enterprise which He has initiated.” Yet if Barton the liberal Protestant still retained some sense that the church and the corporation were indeed distinct communities, other corporate ideologues presaged a form of corporate cultural hegemony less tightly bound to Christian religiosity. Declaring in Business the Civilizer (1928) that Americans were already living in a “business millennium”, the advertising executive Earnest Elmo Calkins argued that corporate business was both the most auspicious modern venue for romantic adventure—“our Field of the Cloth of Gold”, he rhapsodized, where men could earn “the glory [once] given to the crusader, the solider, the courtier, the explorer, the martyr”—and the site of moral and sacral authority. “That eternal job of administering this planet must be turned over to the business man”, Calkins wrote. “The work that religion and government have failed in must be done by business.”
(pp. 452-453)
...
...As any student of contemporary business culture knows, and as any casual observer of ubiquitous advertising can see, our corporate-manufactured symbolic universe is bathed in the luminosity of the sublime. In this respect (as in many others) they resemble and arguably merge with figures in what has come to be called “New Age” religious culture. Indeed, writers as diverse as Slavoj Zizek and Paul Heelas have noted the harmonic convergence of New Age “spirituality” with the accumulative and cultural dynamics of global capitalism, a fusion that releases an abundance of spiritual treasure for investment in corporate hegemony. As Naomi Klein observed in No Logo (1999), “the corporate world has always had a deep New Age streak”, with branding as the most advanced form of “corporate transcendence”. (Might brands be best considered in Durkheimian fashion as the latest version of totems, objects that bear the spirit of a clan?)
(p. 454)
...
While the silicon chip plays a eucharistic role in Gilder’s cyber-theology, the greatest irony of Gilder’s digitalized enchantment lies in its ultimately gnostic repudiation of matter itself. Wealth becomes curiously immaterial in Gilder’s world, wherein the “metaphysical capital of ideas” constitutes “the true substance of economic growth”. Gilder’s incessant references to “mind”,
“idea”, and “consciousness” disclose the growing immateriality of life in late capitalism, a development celebrated by none other than Michael Novak when he announces that in democratic capitalism “materialism” is “more and more left behind”. The investment of hope in money and commodities—in the sacraments and graces of capitalism—fuels a gnostic rage to accumulate and to disembody in pursuit of what Marx rightly called “the immanent spirit of commodities”.
...
While I doubt that the “distributism” of G. K. Chesterton possesses much in the way of useful analysis or practical politics, his “meditation in Broadway”, penned in the wake of his visit to the United States shortly after World War I, still speaks to our ambivalent delight in the enchanted capitalist paradise...

Yet because he embraced and refused to despise this beguiling mortal splendor, Chesterton ended his meditation with “a rather dark sympathy with those many-coloured solar systems turning so dizzily, far up in the divine vacuum of the night”. Just as Chesterton knew that the ads in the
skies were the tokens of a counterfeit paradise, we must see, in the history of capitalism, a celestial aspiration, and in the hunger for riches, a sacramental longing. Even in the fretful dreamlands of late capitalism, the world remains, as Gerard Manley Hopkins knew, charged with the grandeur of God, even as “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil”. Any renewal of political hope must rest in the sacraments of the triune God, in what Hopkins, the poet of sacrament, called “the dearest freshness deep down things”.
(p. 455-456)