The Christian Right and American History

By Jeff Sharlet

This was an article that was originally published in Harper's. This version can be found on the website The Revealer which is "a daily review of religion and the press." The article is about how the Christian right views, and uses, history.

Jeff Sharlet is a contributing editor of Harper's as well as the editor for the web log The Revealer.

We keep trying to explain away American fundamentalism. Those of us not engaged personally or emotionally in the biggest political and cultural movement of our times—those on the sidelines of history—keep trying to come up with theories with which to discredit the evident allure of this punishing yet oddly comforting idea of a deity, this strange god. His invisible hand is everywhere, say His citizen-theologians, caressing and fixing every outcome: Little League games, job searches, test scores, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the success or failure of terrorist attacks (also known as “signs”), victory or defeat in battle, at the ballot box, in bed. Those unable to feel His soothing touch at moments such as these snort at the notion of a god with the patience or the prurience to monitor every tick and twitch of desire, a supreme being able to make a lion and a lamb cuddle but unable to abide two men kissing. A divine love that speaks through hurricanes. Who would worship such a god? His followers must be dupes, or saps, or fools, their faith illiterate, insane, or misinformed, their strength fleeting, hollow, an aberration. A burp in American history. An unpleasant odor that will pass.

We don’t like to consider the possibility that they are not newcomers to power but returnees, that the revivals that have been sweeping America with generational regularity since its inception are not flare-ups but the natural temperature of the nation. We can’t conceive of the possibility that the dupes, the saps, the fools—the believers—have been with us from the very beginning, that their story about what America once was and should be seems to some great portion of the population more compelling, more just, and more beautiful than the perfunctory processes of secular democracy. Thus we are at a loss to account for this recurring American mood.

Is “fundamentalism” too limited a word for a belief system of such scope and intimacy? Lately, some scholars prefer “maximalism,” a term meant to convey the movement’s ambition to conform every aspect of society to God. In contemporary America—from the Cold War to the Iraq War, the period of the current incarnation’s ascendancy—that means a culture born again in the image of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior who hates the carnage he must cause, a man-god ordinary men will follow. These are days of the sword, literally; affluent members of the movement gift one another with real blades crafted to medieval standards, a fad inspired by a bestselling book called Wild at Heart. As jargon, then, “maximalism” isn’t bad, an unintended tribute to Maximus, the fighting hero of Gladiator, which is a film celebrated in Christian manhood guides as almost supplemental scripture. But I think “fundamentalism”—coined in 1920 as self-designation by those ready to do “battle royal for the fundamentals,” hushed up now as too crude for today’s chevaliers—still strikes closest to the movement’s desire for a story that never changes, a story to redeem all that seems random, a rock upon which history can rise.

If the term “fundamentalism” endures, the classic means of explaining it away—class envy, sexual anxiety—do not. We cannot, like H. L. Mencken, writing from the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, dismiss the Christian right as a carnival of backward buffoons jealous of modernity’s privileges. We cannot, like the Washington Post, in 1993, explain away the movement as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” We cannot, like the writer Theodor Adorno, a refugee from Nazi Germany who sat squinting in the white light of L.A., unhappily scribbling notes about angry radio preachers, attribute radical religion—nascent fascism?—to Freudian yearning for a father figure.

The old theories have failed. The new Christ, fifty years ago no more than a corollary to American power, twenty-five years ago at its vanguard, is now at the very center. His followers are not anxiously awaiting his return at the Rapture; he’s here right now. They’re not envious of the middle class; they are the middle class. They’re not looking for a hero to lead them; they’re building biblical households, every man endowed with “headship” over his own family. They don’t silence sex; they promise sacred sex to those who couple properly—orgasms more intense for young Christians who wait than those experienced by secular lovers.

Intensity! That’s what one finds within the ranks of the American believers. “This thing is real!” declare our nation’s pastors. It’s all coming together: the sacred and the profane, God’s time and straight time, what theologians and graduates of the new fundamentalist prep schools might call “kairos” and “chronos,” the mystical and the mundane. American fundamentalism—not a political party, not a denomination, not a uniform ideology, but a manifold movement—is moving in every direction all at once, claiming the earth for God’s kingdom, “in the world but not of it” and yet just loving it to death anyway.

The Christian nation of which the movement dreams, a government of those chosen by God but democratically elected by a people who freely accept His will as their own, is a far country. The nation they seek does not, at the moment, exist; perhaps it could in the future. More important to fundamentalism is the belief that it did exist in the American past, not in the history we learn in public school and from PBS and in newsmagazine cover stories on the Founders but in another story, one more biblical, one more mythic and more true. Secularism hides this story, killed the Christian nation, and tried to dispose of the body. Fundamentalism wants to resurrect it, and doing so requires revision: fundamentalists, looking backward, see a different history, remade in the image of the seductive but strict logic of a prime mover that sets things in motion. The cause behind every effect, says fundamentalist science, is God. Even the inexorable facts of math are subject to His decree, as explained in homeschooling texts such as Mathematics: Is God Silent? Two plus two is four because God says so. If He chose, it could just as easily be five.

* * *

It would be cliché to quote Orwell here were it not for the fact that fundamentalist intellectuals do so with even greater frequency than those of the left. At a rally to expose the “myth” of church/state separation I attended this spring, Orwell was quoted at me four times, most emphatically by William J. Federer, an encyclopedic compiler of quotations whose America’s God and Country—a collection of apparently theocentric bons mots distilled from the Founders and other great men “for use in speeches, papers, [and] debates”—has sold half a million copies. “Those who control the past,” Federer said, quoting Orwell’s 1984>, “control the future.” History, the practical theology of the movement, reveals destiny.

Federer, a tall, lean, oaken-voiced man, loved talking about history as revelation, nodding along gently to his own lectures. He wore a gray suit, a red tie marred by a stain, and an American flag pin in his lapel. He looked like a congressman, which was what he’d wanted to be: he was a two-time G.O.P. candidate for former House minority leader Dick Gephardt’s St. Louis seat. He lost both times, but the movement considers him a winner—in 2000, he faced Gephardt in one of the nation’s most expensive congressional races, forcing him to spend down his war chest. Federer considered this a providential outcome.

Federer and I were riding together in a white school bus full of Christians from around the country to pray at the site on which the Danbury, Connecticut, First Baptist Church once stood. It was in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists that Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase “wall of separation,” three words upon which the battle over whether the United States is to be a Christian nation or a cosmopolitan one turns. Federer, leaning over the back of his seat as several pastors bent their ears toward his story, wanted me to understand that what Jefferson—notorious deist and author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—had really meant to promote was a “one-way wall,” designed to protect the church from the state, not the other way around. Jefferson, Federer told me, was a believer; like all the Founders, he knew that there could be no government without God. Why hadn’t I been taught this? Because I was a victim of godless public schools.

“‘Those who control the present,’” Federer continued his quotation of 1984, “‘control the past.’” He paused and stared at me to make sure I understood the equation. “Orson Welles wrote that,” he said.

* * *

The first pillar of American fundamentalism is Jesus Christ; the second is history; and in the fundamentalist mind the two are converging. Fundamentalism considers itself a faith of basic truths unaltered (if not always acknowledged) since their transmission from Heaven, first through the Bible and second through what they see as American scripture, divinely inspired, devoutly intended—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the often overlooked Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which declared “religion” necessary to “good government” and thus to be encouraged through schools. Well into the nineteenth century, most American schoolchildren learned their ABCs from The New-England Primer, which begins with “In Adam’s Fall/We sinned all”—and continues on to “Spiritual Milk for American Babes, Drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments.” In 1836, McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers began to displace the Primer, selling some 122 million copies of lessons such as “The Bible the Best of Classics” and “Religion the only Basis of Society” during the following century.

It wasn’t until the 1930s, the most irreligious decade in American history, that public education veered away from biblical indoctrination so thoroughly that within a few decades most Americans wrongly believed that the nationalism of manifest destiny—itself thinly veiled Calvinism—rather than open piety was the American educational tradition. The movement now sees that to reclaim America for God, it must first reclaim that tradition for Him, and so it is producing a flood of educational texts with which to wash away the stains of secular history.

Such chronicles are written primarily for the homeschoolers and the fundamentalist academies that together account for at least 2 million of the nation’s children, an expanding population that buys more than half a billion dollars of educational materials annually. “Who, knowing the facts of our history,” asks the epigraph to the 2000 edition of The American Republic for Christian Schools, a junior-high textbook, “can doubt that the United States of America has been a thought in the mind of God from all eternity?” So that I would know the facts, I undertook my own course of homeschooling. In addition to The American Republic, I read the two-volume teacher’s edition of United States History for Christian Schools, appropriate for eleventh graders, as well as Economics for Christian Schools, and I walked the streets of Brooklyn listening to an eighteen-tape lecture series on America up to 1865 created for Christian college students by Rousas John Rushdoony, the late theologian who helped launch Christian homeschooling and revived the idea of reading American history through a providential lens. [1]I was down by the waterfront, pausing to scribble a note on Alexis de Tocqueville—Rushdoony argues that de Tocqueville was really a fundamentalist Christian disguised as a Frenchman—when a white-and-blue police van rolled up behind me and squawked its siren. There were four officers inside.

“What are you writing?” the driver asked. The other three leaned toward the window.

“Notes,” I said, tapping my headphones.

“Okay. Whatcha listening to?”

I said I didn’t think I had to tell him.

“This is a high-security area,” he said. On the other side of a barbed-wire fence, he said, was a Coast Guard storage facility for deadly chemicals. “Somebody blow that up and boom, bye-bye Brooklyn.” Note-taking in the vicinity might be a problem. “So, I gotta ask again, whatcha listening to?”

How to explain—to the cop who had just clued me in on the ripest terrorist target in Brooklyn—that I was listening to a Christian jihadi lecture on how democracy as practiced in America was defiance of God’s intentions, how God gave to the United States the “irresistible blessings” of biblical capitalism unknown to Europe, and how we have vandalized this with vulgar regulations, how God loves the righteous who fight in His name?

Like this: “American history.”

“Providence” would have been a better word...

Continue reading "Through a Glass, Darkly.”

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Mesopotamia Burning, Part III

It has been awhile since I did my last post in this series. That mainly had to do with work and school getting in the way. For an introduction to the series see Part I and for a history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East and the Iran-Iraq War see Part II. Part III covers the history of the start of the first Gulf War right up to the election of George W. Bush.

After the Iran-Iraq war, both countries were exhausted. Specifically, Iraq owed Gulf states, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, massive amounts of money given to the country as loans, in order to fight against the Shia Muslim state of Iran.(1) On top of loans Iraq also suffered economically from the many years of war with Iran. In 1975 Iraq had 3% of its labor force in the armed forces. But, during the late 1970s and early 1980s Iraq shifted, under Hussein, from a mostly civilian economy to a mostly military economy. By 1988, when the major fighting had ended, 21% of the Iraqi labor force was in the armed forces. Also, military spending in Iraq had risen from $1 billion in 1970 (19% of GDP) to $12.1 billion in 1980 (nearly 23% of GDP) and during the period of 1981-1988 Iraq had spent 40% of its GDP, $111 billion, in military endeavors. Military spending was also outpacing Iraq’s production of oil, during the period of 1981-1988 while Iraq was spending $111 billion on the military, it only raised $72 billion in oil revenues. By the time the war had ended Iraq had an economy that was a mere shadow of its former self during the pre-war years. In 1980 the government generated $26 billion, by the near end of the war in 1988 Iraq was only generating $11 billion. To make matters worse Iraq suffered a 9% decline in its GDP in as little as two years, from 1988-1989.(2) According to Abbas Alnasrawi the decline in the Iraqi economy “constituted a severe blow to the government and forced it to adopt an austerity program of spending. But to reduce government spending in a period of sever economic crisis had the effect of worsening the crisis.”(3) Iraq was caught in between a rock and a hard place and had almost no place to go, especially since there was no hope that any of the governments in the Gulf region would ease up on their demands for repayment of loans.

Hussein began looking towards Kuwait, a country that Iraq owed millions of dollars in loan repayments to, as the solution to Iraq’s economic woes. Iraq was extremely vulnerable, a situation that benefited the U.S., and needed to boost its economy. Yet the economy had been fully militarized years before by Hussein and only continued military action could boost the economy. Kuwait also had strategic oil wells that Iraq could further use to bolster its economy. Hussein decided to invade Kuwait in July of 1990 and started amassing troops by the Kuwaiti boarder, but before he took action Hussein meet with U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie.

In the meeting Glaspie reportedly told Hussein. “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” Hussein saw this as American backing, or at least American indifference, to his intended invasion of Kuwait.(4) The army presence, and Hussein’s threats against the Gulf states (he said the Gulf states were tools of the Western powers and that there was an intentional campaign to “impoverish Iraq’s people” by lowering oil prices), seemed to work since OPEC raised the price of oil from $18 per barrel to $21 per barrel. Yet, despite that, in August of 1990 Hussein ordered his army to invade Kuwait.(5) Justifying the invasion to the Iraqi people the deputy prime minister for the economy stated that “Iraq will be able to pay its debt in less than five years” and that “the new Iraq would have a much higher oil production quota” and “that its income from oil would rise to $38 billion; and that it would be able to vastly increase spending on development projects and imports.”(6)

In the same month that Iraq invaded, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 661, which demanded an immediate withdrawal from Kuwait. With that President George H. W. Bush started rallying nations from around the region and Europe as he began sending U.S. troops to the Gulf to prepare for an invasion. In September Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Hussein would have a “stranglehold” over the U.S., and the world, if he was able to take control of Kuwait’s and Saudi Arabia’s oil wells.(7) In November of 1990 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 678, authorizing force to ouster Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Before the U.S. lead invasion of Kuwait a “last-minute proposal was made by the French” that Iraq would pull its troops out if the U.S. agreed to propose an international conference on peace on the Middle Eastern region. The U.S. and Britain rejected this proposal with “U.S. officials saying that a peaceful Iraqi withdrawal was ‘nightmare scenario.’”(8)

The coalition forces made quick work in their fight against the Iraqi military once the air campaign began in January of 1991. “During forty-three days of war, the United States flew 109,876 sorties and dropped 84,200 tons of bombs. Average monthly tonnage of ordnance used nearly equaled that of the Second World War” and 93% “of munitions used by the allies consisted of unguided ‘dumb’ bombs, dropped primarily by Vietnam-era B-52 bombers.”(9) By February 26 Hussein ordered his troops to abandon their positions in Kuwait and return to Iraq. Instead of pursuing the Iraqi army all the way to Baghdad and overthrowing Hussein, President Bush held back.

Then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell, reluctant from the beginning to commit U.S. forces to the Gulf, said. “I took the president through the situation on the ground. I pointed out that within the next 24 hours, I would be bringing a recommendation with respect of the cessation of hostilities. The president then said, ‘Well, if that’s the case, we’re within the window. Why not end it now?’”

This was considered by many of the neoconservatives, or neo-Reaganites (as they called themselves), a huge miscalculation and that overthrowing Hussein should be the primary objective of the United States in order for the U.S. to exert its power and influence over the Gulf Region.(10)

While the victory over Iraq was an important victory for the U.S., especially during the post-Vietnam era, the fall of the Soviet Union was even more important, and changed the political landscape forever. On December 25, 1991, Secretary-General Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachyov resigned and handed over all power to the president of Russia, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin. Wit the fall of the Soviet Union many where saying that the world had entered a new era and the threat of nuclear annihilation was no longer a factor. Also, with the end of the Cold War, said many political analysts, was the end of neoconservative policy. Yet, instead of disappearing, the neoconservative doctrine further intensified by “contending that the moment had come to create an American-dominated world order.”(11) In order for the neoconservative movement’s ideology to gain traction they needed a document that spelled out their beliefs and what they would need to do in order for America to gain complete hegemonic power. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz, was just the man to create such a document.

During the early part of 1992 Wolfowitz created a 46 page document that had been circulating in the defense department called the “Defense Planning Guidance” which was to define America’s role in a post-Cold War world.(12) The plan called for the United States to position itself in the world by using economic, diplomatic, and military means in order to remain the worlds only superpower and “to discourage [other countries] from challenging [U.S.] leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.”(13) The document also said that the U.S. should “talk loudly and carry a big stick” as well as using unilateral action when necessary.(14) While there were some within the Pentagon that agreed with the documents views many found the document abhorrent, as a result the document was leaked to the New York Times in March of 1992. In the Times article it was stated that the document’s “concept of benevolent domination by one power, the Pentagon document articulates the clearest rejection to date of collective internationalism, the strategy that emerged from World War II.”(15) The publishing of the article caused a public outcry and an undue strain on President Bush during a time when he was running for reelection. Because of this Bush ordered Cheney to personally rewrite the draft to make it more suitable to the public, as well as to many within the Pentagon who did not agree with its radical departure from traditional foreign policy goals. Because of this, the document was left on the backburner and kept in Pentagon vaults to collect dust, that is, until another president arose who agreed with the document’s policy goals.

It was obvious, however, from the start, that the newly elected President William Jefferson Clinton, was not the president to resurrect the Defense Planning Guidance. With the defeat of Bush many of the neoconservatives that had been working in Washington since Ronald Reagan (and some since President Gerald Ford, Jr.) took up jobs in public life. Then Senior Director of Soviet and Eastern European Affairs, Condoleezza Rice (who had left in 1991) returned to Stanford University to teach and to also work at the Hoover Institution. After making contacts she quickly became a board member of the oil company Chevron, and even had an oil tanker named after her, the Condoleezza Rice. Paul Wolfowitz also went back to the academic life and was appointed dean to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Cheney, after making a speech that seemed like he would never return to politics, became the president and CEO of the Haliburton Company, a top military contractor and oil services company that had many ties with the Pentagon.(16)

Clinton brought a more realist, or realpolitik, and pragmatical foreign policy to the table (as did former President George H. W. Bush), much to the dismay of the neoconservatives. Instead of focusing on regions around the world and targeting countries that would increase American hegemony and cement America as the world’s only superpower, such as Iraq and North Korea, Clinton instead focused on Somalia, Hattie, and the Balkans. In reaction to this (and for planning for the future), according to Gary Dorrien, “They tightened their hold over leading conservative think tanks,” such as the American Enterprise Institute, “and magazines, strengthened their alliances with Cheney and Rumsfled,” who had been the Secretary of Defense under Ford and had been involved in private business and other ventures since (he also introduced Cheney to Washington life), “founded The Weekly Standard magazine, and got a huge boost from the rise of the Fox network.”(17) In 1997 William Kristol, a prominent neoconservative outside of government, founded the Project for the New American Century, which called for the United States to step up its role and to make moves to further cement itself as the world’s dominant superpower and to spread American values across the globe, as well as to act militarily against other countries that challenged America’s supremacy. The following year the Project for the New American Century wrote an open letter to Clinton urging him to overthrow Hussein.

In the letter the group stated, “The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action…In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein.”(18) Obviously the neoconservatives were still interested in Iraq and still saw Iraq as a key player in furthering U.S. political power in the Middle East. While weapons of mass destruction may have been a legitimate worry for some within the group, the most important thing was the removal of Hussein because Iraq could be used as a tool to further U.S. dominance in the region, WMDs were a secondary issue (in fact, they seemed to be more of an excuse to invade than a legitimate concern for most). Those who signed the letter to Clinton were Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol, Richard Armitage, and John Bolton, among others.

Yet Clinton was still unreceptive to their calls. While he did sign a bill calling for the overthrow of Hussein latter on in his presidency and while he did initiate Operation Desert Fox, he did not take the type of action that the neoconservatives wanted. For that, they would need to look forward to another president.




Notes
1. Research Unit for Political Economy. “Behind the War On Iraq.” Monthly Review 55, no. 1 (May 2003): 33.
2. Alnasrawi, Abbas. “Oil, Sanctions, Debt and the Future.” Arab Studies Quarterly 23, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 5-6.
3. Alnasrawi, 6.
4. Research Unit for Political Economy, 36; Mearsheimer, John J. and Stephen M. Walt. “An Unnecessary War.” Foreign Policy no. 134 (Jan/Feb 2003): 54.
5. Alnasrawi, 6.
6. Ibid., 6-7.
7. Klare, Michael. “The New Geopolitics.” Monthly Review 55, no. 3 (July 2003): 55.
8. Research Unit for Political Economy, 37.
9. Ibid.
10. Frontline. The War Behind Closed Doors. Prod. and dir. Michael Kirk, 60 minutes. Originally aired on PBS Feb. 20, 2003.
11. Dorrien, Gary. “Consolidating the Empire: Neoconservatism and the Politics of American Dominion.” Political Theology 6, no. 4 (Oct. 2005): 413-414.
12. Tyler, Patrick E. “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls For Insuring No Rivals Develop.” New York Times, 8 March 1992, 1.
13. Tyler, 1.
14. “Excerpts From 1992 Draft ‘Defense Planning Guidance.’ Frontline. The War Behind Closed Doors. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/wolf.html (accessed Jan. 29 2007); “Chronology: The Evolution Of The Bush Doctrine.” Frontline. The War Behind Closed Doors. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/cron.html (accessed Jan. 29, 2007).
15. Tyler, 1.
16. Mann, James. Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 225, 227, 229.
17. Dorrien, 415.
18. “Chronology: The Evolution Of The Bush Doctrine.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/cron.html (accessed Jan. 29, 2007).

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Marxism and the Failed Critique of Religion

By Alexander Saxton

This was an article that appeared in the MR Zine which is done by the Monthly Review Foundation who also put out the socialist magazine, the Monthly Review. It talks about religion and how Marx and Engels viewed it, their ideas, shortcomings and explanations of religion. I myself find Marx’s critique of religion (especially orthodox Marxists) very lacking because its not nuanced enough and often views religion in a simplistic light (but obviously in a different simplicity than say BJP Hindu nationalists or evangelical Republican Christians) when in reality religion and the history of religion is wholly complicated with deep patterns of nuance and thought running beneath nearly every religious belief system. But I don’t necessarily reject his critique of established religion which is often used by the ruling elite to justify certain policies, of course, I don’t think that every ruling elite uses religion cynically to justify their policies since some (if not most) actually believe what they are preaching.

Alexander Saxton is emeritus professor of history at the University of California Los Angeles and is the author of The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. He just came out with another book Religion and the Human Prospect. This essay is an excerpt and adaptation from Chapter 11 “Marxism and the Failed Critique of Religion” in his newest book.

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.

The Break from Hegelian Idealism

Marx and Engels tell us their break from Hegelian idealism -- and presumably from religion as well -- was inspired by Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity (1841). Feuerbach had proposed a materialist account of religion, to the effect that humans in primeval times imagined gods in their own image, then projected and worshipped those same gods; as they came to realize the gods were reflections of themselves, they would gradually recognize the divine essence of their humanity. Marx and Engels adopted a similarly "materialist" (but no less ambiguous) formulation. Was this real or metaphorical? Or somewhere in between? The Prometheus of Marx's doctoral thesis appears profoundly Feuerbachian, as does the fuzziness of the boundary drawn there between human and divine. Well versed though he was in Greek mythology -- knowing that Prometheus, born of gods and titans, had to be a god -- Marx nonetheless assigned him human status: "noblest of saints and martyrs in the calendar of philosophy." Whence came this divine aspiration attributed to the human species? Was it inherent in the cosmos? Had Feuerbach simply substituted a Spinozean pantheism for Christianity's orthodox theism? And did Marx and Engels concur? They soon distanced themselves from Feuerbach, yet they would not hesitate to impose on proletarians the god-like tasks of Prometheus.

Despite these ambivalences of concept and explanation, Marx and Engels remained nonbelievers and foes of institutionalized religion. This heritage from the Left Enlightenment they powerfully transmitted to their followers thus helping to ensure that through the next century and a half Marxist parties would serve as prime targets for religion's multitudinous defenders. At the same time -- more than any other nineteenth-century tendency of radical anti-capitalism -- Marxism remained open to labor unionism and working-class politics. Marxist activists proved influential leaders in both these enterprises. It may not be irrelevant, therefore, to ask how successful they were in pursuing the party line on religion and whether it proved an asset or hindrance in organizing workers, nor to inquire why Marx and Engels themselves had chosen to make criticism of religion the "premise" for their project in revolutionary political economy. Such questions may seem more pertinent to our own times than to those in which Marx and Engels actually lived. Any investigation of their stance toward religion must begin by noting that their careers fell within the opening century of the Age of Secularism. Nonbelief, for the first time in more than fifteen hundred years was becoming intellectually -- even to some extent socially -- tolerable.

Orthodox religionists, Protestant or Catholic, still controlled most major institutions such as city and state governments and universities throughout western Europe, yet they faced increasingly articulate resistance from educated opponents among the upper classes. Thus, for example, when John Stuart Mill in England declared that the "whole of the prevalent metaphysics of the present century" constitutes a "tissue of suborned evidence in favor of religion," he was saying approximately what Marx and Engels were saying, and targeting the same German idealist metaphysics they were rebelling against. While for Mill the main enemy was Kant, it was of course Hegel for Marx and Engels. Different though the systems of these philosophers were, it would not be inaccurate to describe both as idealist constructions designed to protect religion. To protect it against what? Against the oncoming Era of Secularism: against the rise of skeptical rationalism; against cumulative disillusionments attached to the memory of religious wars that had raged across Europe for almost two hundred years; against the encroachments of empirical science into orthodox belief. Marx and Engels in all these controversial areas stood on solid ground to the extent that their peers in class status and education were likely to remain tolerant toward criticisms of religion that many of them already shared. Yet obviously no such immunity would attach to radical criticisms of class hierarchy.

From Feuerbach to the Manifesto

The Hegelian dialectic in a broad sense had idealized the cosmos as an ongoing spiritual process. More narrowly, that portion of it that paralleled human history could be analogized to Christian doctrine. God's decision to create a world populated by creatures (including humans) established the antithesis. Conflict stemmed from the willed act of human creatures to use their God-given liberty for rebellion against the creator. Resolution, after many turns of the dialectic, must await the advent of Christ, begotten out of mortal flesh by divine spirit, and thus providing the synthesis within which the opposites -- mortal and divine, creator and created -- will at last be rejoined. According to the famous legend, Marx had arrived at his class interpretation of human history by an intellectual tour de force, that is, by translating Hegel's idealist dialectic into a materialist one. Thus, instead of pushing the narrative through a sequence of metaphysical abstractions, the dialectic would now be made to convey human class struggles in the language of historical realism.

A full-dress presentation of the materialist dialectic occurs in the Communist Manifesto (1848). There are some baffling conceptual problems about this transformation, of which I will mention (at this point) only one. If history comprises a series of struggles in which exploited (therefore antithetical) classes overpower one another to establish each in turn its own dominance, there would seem no possible escape from this repetition unless a class formation occurred that somehow had the power (or lack of power!) to break out of the circle. Recalling the original model -- that is, the Hegelian dialectic that symbolically enacted the Christian story -- it is obvious the crucial role belonged to Christ, who by his sacrificial death terminates the long chain of contradictions between creator and created. Yet when the idealist dialectic is turned upside down and all the actors become "real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces," what sort of class formation could be expected to play a comparable role? "The idea --fundamental for Marx from then on," writes the Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, "that the proletariat was a class which could not liberate itself without thereby liberating society as a whole, first appears as 'a philosophical deduction rather than a product of observation.' . . . [Thus] 'the proletariat makes its first appearance in Marx's writings as the social force needed to realize the aims of German philosophy.'" Needed, that is, to materialize the idealized figure of Prometheus.

Did Hobsbawm say deduction? He did. Marx and Engels always insisted on their socialist theory as scientific, rather than Christian or utopian. Science, however (at least as understood in the nineteenth century), rests not on deduction from alleged universals, but inductions from empirical observation. Engels, in The Condition of the English Working Class (1845), had provided an empirical and shattering portrayal of the beginnings of capitalist manufacturing. His work undoubtedly contributed to the predictive accuracy of Capital, on which the two authors later collaborated, yet hardly offers much evidence for the Promethean (or Christ-like) role assigned to proletarians in The Communist Manifesto. "A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps," Engels wrote, describing a typical industrial slum. "The race that lives in these ruinous cottages . . . must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity. . . . The neglect to which the great mass of workingmen's children are condemned . . . brings the enfeeblement of the whole race. . . . Liquor is almost their only source of pleasure . . . . As inevitably as a great number of working men fall prey to drink, just so inevitably does it manifest its ruinous influence upon the body and mind of its victims."

How could a "race" so reduced in vital energy and self-esteem find courage to break free from religious superstition and raise the banner of revolt? Engels, no less an enthusiast than Marx, did his best to discover empirical answers to this question. "Faulty education," he speculated, "saves [the new proletarian] from religious prepossessions, he . . . knows nothing of the fanaticism that holds the bourgeoisie bound. . . ." For Engels, raised in a hardshell Protestant milieu, any estrangement from religion, even if arrived at by default, was a positive factor; and he found hope also in the first flickerings of class consciousness. "The English workingman who can scarcely read and still less write, nevertheless knows very well where his own interest and that of the nation lies." "They begin to perceive that, though feeble as individuals, they form a power united. . . . The consciousness of oppression awakens . . . the workers attain social and political importance." Entries such as these remain few in number, cautious and tentative in tone, whereas the overwhelming thrust of Engel's book is on despair and degradation -- disease, malnutrition, wretchedness of the workers, suffering and death of their women and children. Yet only three years later, when these same proletarians reappear in the Communist Manifesto, they have taken a new lease on life. A key passage describing their "condition" -- and announcing their historic mission -- runs as follows:

Modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him [the proletarian] of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. . . . All previous historical movements were movements of minorities . . . The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority. . . . The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

What a contrast! The industrial worker, reborn, transcends not only bourgeois nationalism, but bourgeois law, morality, religion as well, and not by default but as a result of purposeful thought. Deconstructing the mysteries of ideology, the proletarian energizes "the immense majority" of humankind (there is no empirical evidence whatever in Engels' book to support this assertion) whose fate now rests on the integrity of working-class consciousness. Here is a transformation comparable to the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and we need to understand they share some of the same ingredients. Marxist theory's worldwide impact would be inconceivable without the Promethean hero, who becomes a teacher, first of other segments of the working class, then of the human species at large.

Dialectics of the Welfare State

Two mistakes of Marx and Engels in the 1840s were their anticipation of immediate revolution and their belief that proletarians must necessarily reject religion. On both points, Engels had pushed beyond what his observations of English working-class life could sustain, and Marx went along with this. Together, they developed a historical argument building upward from peasant revolts in the seventeenth century, through the great revolutions of the eighteenth and Chartism in the nineteenth, all anchored within real (empirical) history, but then leaping to an imagined future insurrection led by England's proletarians that would engulf the nations of the world. Revolution, Engels wrote in 1845, soon "must break out . . . in comparison with which the French Revolution . . . will prove to have been child's play." They supported the revolutions of 1848 (Engels in military action in the Rhineland), but viewed these as bourgeois and constitutionalist -- merely preliminary to the proletarian insurrection they were predicting. Many years later, blaming himself for their failed prophecy, Engels ascribed it to "youthful ardor." I am concerned here with Marxism itself, not with apportioning credits and demerits between its founders. I suppose Marx to have been no less youthfully ardent than Engels; they were barely two years apart in age; both were gripped by Promethean visions that perhaps led them to transcend -- or at least go beyond -- what the empirical evidence warranted.

Moreover, they were hampered by misperceptions inherent in their class background, especially with respect to religion. Secularism, as I noted earlier, had, by the early nineteenth century, become tolerable in educated middle-class circles. But this was not the case for lower-class cultures. Engels acknowledged that most of what he knew about religion in the mill towns came from reports of Anglican or Unitarian investigative committees. Anglicans were Conservative, Unitarians Liberal, each had their own agendas to push. Both would be suspicious of Methodist chapels and hostile to radical sectaries such as those described by E. P. Thompson, or, for an earlier period, Christopher Hill. The mills were already recruiting Irish immigrants, some doubtless brought their Catholic faith, which to Anglicans as well as Unitarians would seem worse than none at all. I suspect that Engels, with respect to religion, missed a good deal of what was going on around him in Manchester and Birmingham. So, for a variety of reasons, Marx and Engels were mistaken both in their prediction of revolution and their belief that industrial workers would reject religion. The latter especially seemed crucial to them during the 1840s because they believed loss of religion necessary to that total alienation from bourgeois values that they expected would launch the proletarians into revolutionary orbit.

Nonoccurrence of the revolution determined the political landscape within which Marxism and religious faith pursued their complex relationships through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the political economy of that landscape has already been thoroughly mapped, I will simply note several of its main features and set them aside for reference. Industrial capitalism burgeoned in western Europe and North America. So also did the industrial working class. Because industrialists required some degree of willing cooperation from their work force, a symbiotic relationship which we now call welfare-state capitalism developed between the two. The keynote of welfare states was industrial growth. The bigger the pie the larger its individual slices. Growth made possible the maintenance -- sometimes even improvement -- of working-class living standards without requiring changes in the hierarchical structure of society. Thus it mitigated class conflict and provided a buffer against revolution. Welfare states faced outward. Both sets of partners (capital and labor) strove to upgrade the enterprise at the expense of other nations, including similarly structured welfare states. We know by hindsight that world war would be the eventual outcome, but such grim scenarios were not yet readily visible during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Labor radicalism, inside each welfare state, shorn of revolution, produced a cadre of radical workers together with a pseudo-middle class of trade union officials and social democratic politicians who served their constituents as spokesmen and mediators. Continuing across successive life spans, these circumstances generated a class consciousness that was unique to the labor force of industrial capitalism. The more diligently each worker strove to keep self, family (and party comrades) alive, the more invincible became those institutions they hoped eventually to abolish. One might describe this as the "dialectic of the welfare state."

Outwardly functioning as partnerships, welfare states worked inwardly as controlled arenas of class conflict. Although the conflict was basically that of labor against capital, both sets of contestants (labor especially) remained internally divided. A Weberian image of this apparatus would look like a seesaw with the socialist workers on one end and religious workers at the other. The capitalist-controlled government in the middle gives occasional nudges this way or that for fine tuning. We are now deep into the Era of Secularism, which as we know, penetrated working classes less than other levels of society. Details differ from nation to nation and time to time, but the seesaw image remains approximately accurate, I think, for welfare states throughout the Western world. The social relationships it portrays entail several important corollaries. Based in working-class communities more religious than the society at large, Marxist activists often found themselves targeted for teaching disbelief and corrupting Christian morals. Already known as members of a movement that denied religion, they would be hampered in defending themselves. Their logical counter-strategy would involve appeals to class solidarity combined with accusations that the Church -- whatever branch happened to be dominant in that particular community -- had betrayed its working-class constituency by supporting the capitalist employers. Such indictments, containing enough empirical reality to make them persuasive, nonetheless introduced subtle shifts in the original Marxist stance on religion -- shifts, that is, from critiques of religion itself to forms of anticlericalism that often seemed more concerned with purifying the church than criticizing religion.

The Problem of Liberation Theology

Marx and Engels both portrayed early Christianity as driven by the desperation of enslaved and exploited populations in the Roman empire; Engels represented the Hussites and Anabaptists as religiously inspired rebels fighting to liberate peasants from feudalism. Why might not religion then inspire working-class rebels against industrial capitalism? The fact is it has done so -- a dramatic (and recent) example being that of liberation theology in Latin America. While it is true that most such movements were crushed by their respective ruling classes and dominant clergies, these outcomes could be explained by pointing out that wherever religion became institutionalized, it generated privileged clerical hierarchies that merged into the existing ruling class. Marx and Engels usually (but not always) characterized religion as reactionary because it was prone to being captured by ruling-class ideologies. Ideology they treated invidiously, as obscurantism intended to conceal class exploitation. They sometimes spoke of religion and ideology as identical or of the one (religion) as contained within the other. They even suggested that religion had been invented for ideological purposes.

All this made for an empirically based and politically powerful explanatory system, yet contained two big difficulties. The first was the absence of any satisfactory way of accounting for instances (acknowledged by Marx and Engels both), when religion actually functioned as a liberating rather than repressive force. The second difficulty is more complicated, but takes us to the heart of the matter. Ideological explanations necessarily locate religion's starting point late in human culture since they begin by attaching, or equating, religion to ideology. Ideology, however -- understood as a rationalization, and camouflage, for class and gender exploitation -- could hardly have originated before the division of labor. But that left dangling the question of whether religion itself existed prior to class society. If so, it could not be explained as an ideological construct, and its existence would precede, perhaps even run separately from, the dialectic of class struggle that for Marxist theory provides the motive force of social development. "The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms," Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, ". . . whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other." Was religion, then, moving on a track separate from the rest of human history? But that would not be an attractive alternative for nonbelievers, because it came perilously close to concurring with an idealist notion of religion.

Given the gift of hindsight, it is not difficult to specify what they needed at this juncture. They needed a secular (materialist) account of the origin of religion separate from the origin of ideology. This would allow religion to function (later on) as the keystone of ruling-class ideology, yet not preclude explaining its liberationist phases by reference to particular historical circumstances (such as colonial regimes, for example, or the importation of slaves, or "guest" workers). At the same time, and perhaps more important, it would situate religion in the earliest stages of human development, before division of labor and the advent of class society.

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Ohio Wesleyan University

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)

The Lakota Ghost Dance: Ritualized Rebellion Against Colonial Rule

This is an essay I just completed this semester for my Dance 430, Dance History class at San Francisco State University.

Image from Walden3d

I’yehe’! my children — Uhi’yeye’heye’!
I’yehe’! my children — Uhi’yeye’heye’!
I’yehe’! we have rendered them desolate — Eye’ăe’yuhe’yu!
I’yehe’! we have rendered them desolate — Eye’ăe’yuhe’yu!
The whites are crazy — Ahe’yuhe’yu!(1)

—

It was mid-day and Wovoka, the son of Tävibo, lies sick on his bed in his wickiup. Wovoka is considered a great weather man by his people (whom are apart of the Paiute tribe in Mason Valley, in western Nevada), just like his father, who had also been a prophet. As he is laying ill in his bed from a fever the sun is becoming darkened due to a solar eclipse. All over his tribal camp people became distressed and began shooting their guns at the object which was blocking the sun. As the sun darkened Wovoka slipped more and more from consciousness until, all of a sudden, he found himself being taken up into heaven where he spoke with God, who commanded him to preach a gospel of peace, to live justly in the world, and to bring a new dance to his people. The year was 1889 and the day was January 1st (this day would latter be called by the Paiute people “the day the sun died”(2)), this was the day that the Ghost Dance was born and the day that Wovoka stated that he became God’s prophet to the Native American peoples. Soon Native Americans (and whites) from all over the United States began to come to Mason Valley to hear Wovoka speak,(3) word also got out to the Dakotas, the tribal lands of the Lakota, and the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Reservation decided to send an elder, Good Thunder, as well as four or five others, to see this Wovoka themselves and to here his message. After being satisfied and returning to their reservation the Lakota decided to send more delegates, this time from three agencies instead of just Pine Ridge, back to western Nevada, among them was Good Thunder, Short Bull, Kicking Bear, and others.(4)

The simple message of Wovoka intrigued the Lakota (as it had others) especially because of their present day situation which was very much looking bleak (to say the least). The medicine man Short Bull, during a trip between Valentine in Nebraska and the Rosebud Reservation (east of the Pine Ridge Reservation), heard the words of Wovoka through the reading of a letter that Wovoka had wrote:

I, Jack Wilson [Wovoka’s white name], love you all...When you get home you must make a dance to continue for five days...You must all dance in the same way...Do not tell the white people about this. Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud. The dead are all alive again. I do not know when they will be here; maybe this fall or in the spring...Do not refuse to work for the whites, and do not make any trouble with them until you leave them.(5)

Soon, Short Bull would became one of the Lakota leaders of the new religion preached by Wovoka.(6)

The Ghost Dance religion’s underlying principles (with beliefs varying from tribe to tribe) was that one day every single Native American, living and dead, would become reunited with a regenerated earth and would live a life without disease, death, and sorrow.(7) Short Bull and Kicking Bear emerged as charismatic leaders of the new religion for the Lakota and spoke prophecies, based on the prophecies of Wovoka, that by the spring of 1891 the Native American messiah would come down and destroy the white man and bring the buffalo back to the earth. Dominic J. Capeci, Jr. and Jack C. Knight state that, “This would happen, it was believed, because whites had proven themselves a faithless race causing God to turn his wrath against them.” Due to the coming apocalypse (hastened by large dances, that would go on for days, as commanded by Wovoka) the Lakota decided to remove all of the trappings of white culture that had been thrust upon them by the white colonial powers (the government and the settlers), to be civil (even towards whites) and practice a life of good will (which Wovoka commanded), and to perform the dances, which would demonstrate their faith in their own inviolability.(8)

The dance in question was called “dance in a circle” by the Paiute, the Kiowa called it the “dance with clasped hands,” and the Lakota called it the “spirit dance.”(9) For the Lakota (and others) the Ghost Dance was danced in a circle by either small or very large groups of people for days. Ethnologist Warren K. Moorehead, who visited the Pine Ridge Reservation during the peak of the Ghost Dance “fever,” described one encounter with the dance:

The largest camp of dancers was located upon Wounded Knee Creek under the charge of Chiefs No Water, Short Bull and Little Wound...A pole or sapling some thirty-five feet in height was erected...built near the dance ground were several...sweat houses, separate structures being provided for women...A priest...called aloud to those who wished to participate...several hundred men and women crowed up and, grasping hands, formed a circle fully two hundred feet in diameter...the priests began a prayer to the Great Spirit...”Great Wakan Tanka: We are ready to begin the dance as you have commanded us...we beg that you give us back our old hinting grounds, and our game...transport such of the dancers...to the Spirit Land far away and let them see their dead relatives...the priests began a doleful chang, which is taken up by the assembled multitude and loudly sung over and over again. The circle moves toward the left. For the first half hour the motion is short step...After the space of half an hour...“Weep for your sins” commands the high priest. They moan and cry, rolling upon the ground, apparently in great agony. Some of the more desperate ones crowd up to the sapling...Others cut their arms...The scene is most impressive. Surely the [Lakota] are serious in their grief...A new song is struck up...the dancing becomes fast and furious. The men and women leap backward and forward. They seem possessed of the spirit of demons...the priests are extremely active. They run from one excited dancer to another, gently compelling them to lie prone upon the earth...The scene of a Ghost Dance at night makes a vivid impression upon the mind. The music in its strange wild key rings in the ears for days, while one can never forget the reeling figures, the earnest, expressive faces.(10)

Why had the Ghost Dance caught on in such as big way? In November of 1890 around 40% of the Lakota at Pine Ridge Reservation and 30% at the Rosebud Reservation had taken up the religion of the Ghost Dance.(11) The answer lies in the colonial policies of the United States government and the history of repression that had fallen upon the Lakota in the decades culminating before the Ghost Dance revival. Essentially what the Ghost Dance was, was a “ritualized resistance as a means of repelling colonial rule” taken up by the Lakota to protest and fight back against the U. S. government and the white settlers who were legally (by U. S. standards), and illegally (even by U. S. standards), encroaching on their reservation lands.(12)

In 1868, leaders of the Lakota agreed to sign the Ft. Laramie Treaty which forfeited most of their hunting grounds in exchange to never be disturbed in by any outsider while they live on the “Great Sioux Reservation.” Yet this treaty had taken away hunting, as well as sacred, grounds that originally had been theirs according to the original reservation treaty of 1858 (which gave them their entire western half of South Dakota). Yet once gold was found in the sacred Black Hills the U. S. government moved quickly to take it away from them. Again, their lands were encroached upon and the Lakota were forced to sign a treaty breaking up the “Great Sioux Reservation” into six smaller reservations divided into three distinct land masses, all separate from each other (classic divide and conquer), further humiliating the Lakota and subjugating them to further colonial rule.(13) Instead of living like they had, as hunter-gatherings with the freedom to move about the land, they were forced, like prisoners of war, to stay in one area which further lead them to take up crop growing (in an area unsuitable to grow crops), cattle ranging, and as well as receiving ration handouts from the government.(14) In 1887 the Dawes Act also allowed the purchase of Lakota lands. Senator Henry L. Dawes, from Massachusetts, argued in 1890 for the cutting of further rations to the Lakota, this despite food shortages resulting in the near extinction of the buffalo by white settlers (which lead to massive starvation in the winter of 1889). Dawes stated that “the best way to treat the Indian was to starve him into self-support. ‘Root, hog, or die...Next year you are only to have so much, and you must supplement it by the labor of your own hands.’”(15)

The Ghost Dance was born out of this misery, the Lakota, a once proud warrior society that roamed free on the Great Plains, were now reduced to obeying the whim of the U. S. government and the white settlers; they also faced starvation and loss of land (one of the greatest blows of this was the loss of the sacred Black Hills). The Ghost Dance was a repudiation of everything the white man and the U. S. government stood for and was the basis for the resistance to the colonial powers. The hope of the Ghost Dance for the Lakota was that the white man would be destroyed and that the buffalo (and the hunting grounds) would return to the earth for the Lakota and other Native Americans to enjoy. In response to the ever looming and encroaching presence of white culture, participants in Ghost Dance circles (in the Lakota reservations) were forbidden to bring anything associated with white culture into the dance, only traditional Lakota clothing and artifacts were allowed (this despite the fact that Wovoka would wear white man’s clothing). Capeci and Knight state that “[t]he antiwhite bias of the Ghost Dance was important. The reservation spectacle of once-proud [Lakota] warriors humbling themselves before officials by wearing store-bought” white clothing was seared into the minds of the Lakota and “the act of shedding these cloths” was a “liberating gesture. For some, western dress also foretold the violent end to be suffered by the white race, as the Messiah would” use western dress to distinguish between who to kill and who to allow to survive.(16)

While violence and rebellion against the white settlers and the government was not preached in the Ghost Dance (all though it had been used before by the Lakota, as the Battle of Little Big Horn has shown us) the Lakota were willing to use force to protect their dances from reservation police, government agents and military, as well as white settlers. Violent resistance to protect their sacred traditions had been uncommon during reservation period (in fact, some of their traditions had been banned by the government).(17) Yet for the Ghost Dance, the Lakota were willing to die, and indeed, go to war. Although the Lakota were still tempered by the fact of past defeats and constantly having their land being encroached by white settlers.

Despite the promise for renewal, and re-energizing the Lakota in their fight against their oppressors, the Ghost Dance ended in tragedy at the Massacre of Wounded Knee where over 150 men, women, and children were killed (fleeing) by the Seventh Calvary. Not even this non-violent (though potentially violent in certain aspects) religion was allowed by the colonial masters. Where the Lakota saw hope in the Ghost Dance whites saw a threat. The actions at Wounded Knee, states Scott L. Pratt, were seen by whites and the government as “a necessary, even humanitarian, response because it brought a quick end to a ‘craze’ that was good for neither whites nor” Native Americans.(18)

Due to the "theological eclecticism" of the Lakota and the fact that the Lakota were a traditional warrior society their “interpretation of the Ghost Dance was more militant than Wovoka’s teachings.”(19) The Lakota believed that their ritualized rebellion against the government and white settlers would evolved into a military victory and restore the Lakota and other Natives back to their original state in a new world. It gave the Lakota a source of pride and revitalized their spirits as a nation as well as meeting the needs of the Lakota warriors, who had been feeling the sting of defeat by the white man for years. The Lakota “adapted traditional rituals to redress the wrongs done to them. In this way they waged war long before any bullets had been fired or lives lost.”(20) The Lakota wouldn’t have a revolt this large (ritualized or armed) until February of 1973, when around 200 members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) took over Wounded Knee by force and declared it the “Independent Oglala Sioux Nation” and told the government they would not leave until they had addressed the grievances of tribal leaders, an investigation into the treatment of Native Americans in America, and a review of all treaties signed by the government.

—
The whole world is coming,
A nation is coming, a nation is coming,
The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe.
The father says so, the father says so.
Over the whole earth they are coming.
The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming,
The Crow has brought the message to the tribe,
The father says so, the father says so.(22)
—

Endnotes

1. James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1965), 221. This is a Ghost Dance song of the Arapaho tribe, Mooney (who wrote this in 1892-1893) states that, “In this song the father tells his children of the desolation, in consequence of their folly and injustice, that would come upon the whites when they will be left alone upon the old world, while the Indians will be taken up to the new earth to live in happiness forever.” (Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion, 222).
2. William S. E. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 2.
3. Alice Beck Kehoe, The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization (Fort Worth, Chicago,
San Francisco, Philadelphia: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1989), 5, 35.
4. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 6, 9-10.
5. Ibid., 9.
6. Ibid., 8.
7. Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion, 19.
8. Dominic J. Capeci, Jr. and Jack C. Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism: The North American
Ghost Dance and East African Maji-Maji Rebellions,” Historian 52, no. 4 (Aug. 1990): 584-602,
Academic Search Premier, http://0-web.ebscohost.com.
9. Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, 8.
10. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 36-39.
11. Capeci and Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism.”
12. Ibid.
13. Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, 15-16; Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 11.
14. Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, 16.
15. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 18.
16. Capeci and Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism.”
17. Ibid.
18. Pratt, Scott L. “Wounded Knee and the Prospect of Pluralism.” Journal of Speculative
Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2005): 154.
Endnotes
19. Capeci and Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism.”
20. Ibid.
21. Encyclopedia Britannica (2006), “Wounded Knee,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online,
http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-9077525 (accessed November 16, 2006).
22. Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion, 307. This is a Ghost Dance song of the Lakota. Mooney sums up the aspect of this song quite nicely by stating, “This fine song summarizes the whole hope of the Ghost dance—the return of the buffalo and the departed dead, the message being brought to the people by the sacred birds, the Eagle and the Crow. The eagle known as wañ’bali is the war eagle, from which feathers are procured for war bonnets.” (Mooney, ibid., 307).