I also believe human life is a sacred gift from our Creator. I worry about
a culture that devalues life, and believe as your President I have an important obligation to foster and encourage
respect for life in America and throughout the world.
--George W. Bush
The Unborn at War
- In early 2002, George Bush issued a press release proclaiming January 22 as National Sanctity of Human Life
Day. In the speech he delivered for the occasion, Bush reminded the public that the American nation was founded on
certain inalienable rights, chief among them being the right to life. The speech is remarkable in that it
assiduously duplicates the phrasing of popular pro-life rhetoric: the visionaries who signed the Declaration of
Independence had recognized that all were endowed with a fundamental dignity by virtue of their mere biological
existence. This fundamental and inalienable right to life, Bush insists, should be extended to the most innocent and
defenseless amongst us--including the unborn: "Unborn children should be welcomed in life and protected in law."
What is even more remarkable about the speech is its smooth transition from right to life to neoconservative just
war rhetoric. Immediately after his invocation of the unborn, Bush recalls the events of September 11, which he
interprets as acts of violence against life itself. These events, he claims, have engaged the
American people in a
war of indefinite duration, a war "to preserve and protect life itself," and hence the founding values of the
nation. In an interesting confusion of tenses, the unborn emerge from Bush's speech as the innocent victims of a
prospective act of terrorism while the historical legacy of the nation's founding fathers is catapulted into the
potential life of its future generations. Bush's plea for life is both a requiem and a call to arms: formulated in a
nostalgic future tense, it calls upon the American people to protect the future life of the
unborn in the face of
our "uncertain times," while preemptively mourning their loss.[1]
- In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it is easy to forget that the most explosive test
confronting Bush in the early months of his presidency was not terrorism but the issue of whether or not to provide
federal funds for research on embryonic stem cells. The issue had been on the agenda since 1998 when scientists
funded by the private company Geron announced the creation of the first immortalized cell lines using cells from a
frozen embryo and an aborted fetus. Bush, who had campaigned on an uncompromising pro-life agenda, put off making a
decision for as long as possible. In July 2001 he made a visit to the Pope, who reiterated the Catholic Church's
opposition to any experimentation using human embryos (The White House, "Fact Sheet). On
August 11, 2001, however, Bush declared that he would allow federal
funding on research using the 60 or so embryonic stem cell lines that were already available (the actual number of
viable cell lines turned out to be less than this). In making this concession to stem cell research, he claimed, the
U.S. government was not condoning the destruction of the unborn. "Life and death decisions"
had already been made by scientists, Bush argued. By intervening after the fact, the state was
ensuring that life would nevertheless be
promoted: in this case, not the life of the potential person but the utopia of perpetually
renewed life promised by stem cell research.
- In the months leading up to his decision, Bush had attempted to soften the blow for the religious right by
extending universal health coverage to the unborn, who thereby became the first and only demographic in the U.S. to
benefit from guaranteed and unconditional health care, at least until the moment of birth (Borger). However it
translates in terms of actual health care practice, the gesture was momentous in that it formally acknowledged the
unborn foetus as the abstract and universal subject of human rights--something the pro-life movement had been trying
to do for decades.
- In the meantime and in stark contrast to the U.S. government's official moral stance on
the field of stem cell research, U.S. legislation provides for the most liberal of
interpretations of patent law, allowing the patenting of unmodified embryonic stem cell lines.
For this reason, the most immediate effect of Bush's decision to limit the number of stem cell
lines approved for research was to ensure an enormous captive market for the handful of
companies holding patents on viable stem cell lines. One company in particular is poised to
profit from George Bush's post life and death decision. The aptly named Geron, a start-up
biotech company specializing in regenerative medicine, also happens to hold exclusive licensing
rights to all the most medically important stem cell lines currently available. Uncomfortably
positioned between the neo-liberal interests of the biomedical sector and of the moral
absolutism of the religious
right, Bush seems to have pulled off a political tour de force: while proclaiming his belief in the
"fundamental value and sanctity of human life," he was also able to "promote vital medical
research" and, less ostentatiously, to protect the still largely speculative value of the
emerging U.S. biotech sector.
- In his press release announcing the new National Sanctity of Life Day, George Bush
expressed his faith in the future of life. But what kind of future does George Bush believe in?
And what tense is he speaking in? Bush's pro-life rhetoric oscillates between two very
different visions of life's biomedical and political future: one that would equate "life
itself" with the future of the nation, bringing the unborn under the absolute protection of
the state, and the other that less conspicuously abandons biomedical research
to the uncertain and speculative future of financial capital investment. On the one hand, life
appears as an inalienable gift, one that must be protected at all costs from the laws of the
market, while on the other hand, the patented embryonic stem cell line seems to function like
an endlessly renewable gift--a self-regenerative life which is also a self-valorizing capital.
- What appears to be at stake, behind the scenes of George Bush's speech, is the determination of the value of life. How
is the promise of biological life to be evaluated? Is its value relative or absolute? Perhaps what is most seriously at issue
is the temporal evaluation of life, life's relation to futurity (predetermined or speculative).
How will this value, whatever it
consists of, be realized? Given that the contemporary life sciences are tending to uncover a "proto-life" defined by its
indifference to the limits of organic form, within what limits will its actualization
nevertheless be constrained? Bush's decision on stem cells provides two solutions to the
problem of apprasing the value of life whose apparently conflicting valuations
function together quite nicely in practice. According to media reports, Bush stacked his ethics
committees with
a half and half mix of pro-life supporters, determined to protect the sanctity of life, and
representatives of the private
biomedical sector, just as fervently opposed to any kind of federal regulation of stem cell research. Somehow the two
positions managed to coexist in the person of George W. Bush.
- In keeping with the general tone of his public declarations, George Bush's speeches on the unborn weave together a
subtle mix of three tendencies in American political life--neoconservatism, neoliberal economics, and pro-life or culture of
life politics. These three tendencies have coexisted in various states of tension and alliance since the mid-seventies. But
they've been getting closer. Neo-liberals such as George Gilder have started to openly affirm their evangelical faith.
Neoconservatives such as William Kristol have aligned themselves with the evangelical right in its defense of the right to
life and its opposition to stem cell research. Both have more recently championed the cause of creationism in American schools.
Michael Novak, the free-market neoconservative, has always quite happily embodied the tension between a capitalism of
endless growth and an unshakeable faith in the absolute limits of life. In the meantime, evangelicals who were once content to
fight over domestic moral and racial politics have embraced an increasingly militant and interventionist line on U.S.
imperialism, seeing U.S. victory in the Middle East as the necessary prelude to the end times
and the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Under George W. Bush and indeed in the person of George W. Bush, these tendencies have become increasingly difficult to
distinguish.
- Brought up as a mainstream Methodist, Bush was born again as an evangelical
Christian around the age of forty (Kaplan 68-71; Phillips, American Dynasty 229-44). In the process,
he moved
from a religion based on personal self-transformation and discipline to one that espouses a decidedly more expansive, even
world-transforming philosophy. More than one of Bush's close associates have commented that he saw his investiture as President
of the United States as a sign of divine election, one that linked his personal revival to that of America--and ultimately to
that of the world. Luminaries of the evangelical right such as Pat Robertson could only agree
with him. After all, it was
largely thanks to the (white) evangelical right that he won the 2000 elections (Kaplan 3). And in return, the Bush
administration allowed them an unprecedented influence in almost all areas of government policy (Kaplan 2-7).
- Bush's economic philosophy, too, reflects a dramatic transformation in Protestant views on wealth and sin. The ethic of
late Protestantism is much more investment than work-oriented, much more amenable to the temptations of financial capital than
to the disciplines of labor, and evangelical Christians have found a welcome ally in the
writings of various free-market and
supply-side economists. In his biography of the Bush family clan, Kevin Phillips has
argued convincingly that George W. Bush is also essentially a supply-sider: despite
appearances, his economic outlook is more informed by his
experience in investment banking and finance than by the nuts and bolts of the oil industry
(American Dynasty 113-48).
- Bush's conversion to the neoconservative cause was perhaps more contingent on the events of
September 11 than is commonly recognized. In their careful study of the Bush team's defense
policy before late 2001, the
political theorists Halper and Clarke point out that the early Bush was notably reluctant to engage in any nation
building (America Alone 112-56). But the reasons for his alliance with the
neocons, when it did happen, were certainly not
lacking--since the mid-seventies, the neoconservatives had strategically aligned themselves with the prophets of supply-side
economics, and during the nineties, their attentions turned to the populist appeal of the right to life movement (America
Alone 42, 196-200). In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, they were able to present George W. Bush with a
ready-made blueprint for war, one that would satisfy both the millenarian longings of the
Christian right and the evangelistic tendencies of free-market capitalism.
- How have these imperialist, economic and moral philosophies been able to work so tightly
together under the presidency of George W. Bush and why have they converged so obsessively
around the "culture" of promissory or unborn life? In order to address these questions, I first
look at Georg Simmel's work on the relationship between economics and faith. I then turn to a
discussion of the links between Protestantism and capitalism, and more pertinently, between the
history of American evangelical revivals and the specific cultures of American liberalism and
life. U.S.-based evangelical Protestantism, I suggest, has developed a doctrine of
debt, faith and life that differs in fundamental respects both from the Roman Catholic
tradition and from mainline Reformationist Protestantism. These differences help explain the
impulses informing the "culture of life" movement today. It is equally important, however, to
look at the ways in which the evangelical movement has itself mutated over the last three
decades, reorienting its traditional concerns with life, debt and faith around the focal point
of sexual politics. The neo-evangelical movement, I argue, combines the revolutionary,
future-oriented impulse of earlier American revivals with a new found sexual fundamentalism.[2] It is this contrary impulse that informs George W. Bush's
culture of life politics and is reflected perhaps most forcefully in his ambivalent stance on
stem cell research. It is also characteristic of the ambivalent tendencies of capitalism today,
in which a speculative reinvention of life comes together with a violent desire to re-impose
the fundamentals, if only in the figure of a future or unborn life.
Economics and Faith
- Increasingly, it would seem, it is becoming difficult to confront the most violent manifestations of contemporary
economic imperialism without at the same time thinking through their religious, salvationist dimensions. Yet
there is too little in the contemporary economic literature on the
relationship between the two.[3]
- One notable early exception is Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money, a work
that combines anthropological,
historical and economic perspectives on the emergence of modern capitalism in ways that might still prove fruitful. Simmel
notes that all economic relations, to the extent that they require trust in the
future, involve a certain element of
faith. Yet it is only in a money economy, he argues, that this faith goes beyond a simple inductive knowledge about the future
and takes on a "quasi-religious" flavor (179). A money economy, after all, is one in which the object to be exchanged (money)
is itself born of faith: all money is created out of debt and is therefore of a promissory or fiduciary nature, even before it
is exchanged. Simmel draws attention to the two-sidedness of this faith: money on the one hand embodies a promise (to the
creditor) and a threat of violence (to the debtor); it brings together obligation and trust. And in the case of market
economies, this two-sided faith relation is extended to all members of a community. A
capitalist economy, Simmel asserts, is one in
which the whole life of a community is indebted to the debt form. But having established its "quasi-religious" nature, how does
Simmel define the particular religious form of capitalism? What kind of faith does capitalism require? And what are its specific forms of violence? In his historical account of capitalism, Simmel
makes it clear that the emerging market economies of the early modern period fundamentally
differ from and disrupt the
established forms of sovereign medieval power with their close ties to the Catholic Church and their foundations in landed
wealth. A basic premise of his argument is that the philosophy of money needs to be distinguished from the various political
theologies of sovereign power. What then is the difference between the philosophy of early modern Christian faith, which we
have largely inherited from the Middle Ages, and the "quasi-religious" faith of capitalism?
- It should be noted in the first place that the philosophy of Roman Catholicism, as
exemplified in the work of someone like Thomas Aquinas, is at one and the same time a political and
an economic theology, inasmuch as the authority of the Medieval Church extended to both domains.
What unites these spheres, in the work of Aquinas, is a common understanding of foundation, origin
and time (the transcendent or the eternal). This idea of foundation is most clearly enunciated in
the doctrine of the Gift, which brings together the questions of theological, political and economic
constitution. In Aquinas's work, the Holy Spirit is the Gift of Life that reunites the finite and
the infinite incarnations of the Holy Trinity (Basic Writings, 359-62). As such, the
Gift is also the originary act through which God creates life, so that from the point of view of His
creatures, life is a series of debt installments, a constant quest to repay the wages of sin.
Implicit in his theology is the notion that the Gift (which is also a debt) is underwritten by an
original presence, the eternal unity of finite and infinite, in which all debt is cancelled. In this
way, Christianity promises the ultimate redemption of the debt of life, a final reunion of the
finite and the infinite, even if it is unattainable in this world. It instructs the faithful to
believe in a final limit to the wages of sin.
- If we turn then to Aquinas's work on jurisprudence, which includes a consideration of
price and exchange, it becomes
apparent that his economic philosophy shares precisely the same mathematics of debt.[4] His
premise here is that any institutionalized political form such as the state must be underwritten by a stable referent or use
value, an ultimate guarantor of the value of value, in order to maintain a proper sense of
justice. In this way, Aquinas's
economic philosophy is founded on the possibility of debt redemption. All exchange values must be measurable against a "just
price," in the same way that each human life is redeemable against an original Gift.
- Historical work on the economic philosophy of the Middle Ages has emphasized just how
closely such ideas reflect the actual position of the early Christian Church (see for example
Gilchrist). The wealth of the medieval Church was based in landed property rather than in trade.
For this reason, the Church
was not opposed to a certain level of state regulation of exchange and to price control, as long
as these worked to maintain the "just price" of Church property, while it virulently
opposed certain forms of trading profit, particularly usury. Usury, after all, is a
credit/debt relation that wagers on the instability of price. It aims to create money out of a
perpetually renewed debt, and it does this without recourse to a fundamental reserve or
guarantor of value. It has no faith in the measurability of value and no interest in the final
redemption of debt.
- It is here that Simmel locates the fundamental difference between the early economic theory of the Christian Church and
the particular faith-form of modern capitalism. The capitalist economy, he argues, is a form
of abstraction that dispenses
with all absolute foundation, all possibility of final measure, all substantial value. "The fact that the values money is
supposed to measure, and the mutual relations that it is supposed to express, are purely psychological makes such stability of
measurement as exists in the case of space or weight impossible" (Simmel 190). Simmel doesn't
want to deny the historical existence of all kinds of institutions designed to uphold the measurability of exchange value
(his Philosophy of Money is in part a detailed history of such institutions, from
precious metals to the
Central Bank to the labor theory of value). Without such institutions and their lawful forms of violence, no creditor would be
able to demand repayment. Yet he insists that such institutions, considered singly, are both mutable and not foundational to
the creative logic of capitalism. Modern capitalism, in other words, is a social form in which the law no longer figures as a
source of creation, but rather as an institution charged with the power of sustaining the faith a posteriori,
through the threat of violence. In stark contrast to the economic theology of the Medieval Church, capitalism is a mode of
abstraction that generalizes the logic of usury and constantly revolutionizes any institutional limits to its
self-reproduction. What then is its particular mode of faith?
Born-Again Nation: American Evangelicalism and the Culture of Life
- This is the question that preoccupies Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic. In Calvinism, Weber
identifies the first religion to celebrate the life of business and the disciplines of labor, not merely as means to an end but
as the very manifestation of faith in the Protestant God. In contrast to the Roman Catholic
tradition, with its repudiation of earthly
pursuits, Protestantism brings "God within the world" and espouses an immersive, transformative relation to God's creation,
rather than a contemplative one (Weber 75). And in late seventeenth-century variations on
Protestantism, argues Weber, there is
an even more extreme change in attitudes towards wealth creation--here usury, the creation of money from promise
and debt, is accepted as a legitimate way of expressing one's faith. This move away from a Calvinist doctrine of
predestination, suggests Weber, is reflected in the rise of later, less "aristocratic" forms of Protestant faith
such as Methodism, in which the doctrine of regeneration or the new birth, as espoused by John Wesley,
becomes central (89-90). The Methodist philosophy of conversion through rebirth develops in England but will flourish in
America--and it is here that Weber closes his analysis.
- Weber's perspective on the European Protestant Reformation needs to be supplemented by an account of
the specific inventiveness of American Protestantism--particularly in its understanding of
life, faith, and wealth.[5] Historian Mark Noll notes that the most
successful currents in American
Protestantism were self-consciously evangelical: they practiced a radically democratized form
of worship, with
a focus on the personal experience of conversion and rebirth (5). In the process, the American
take on Methodism freed sanctification from the necessity of institutional mediation to an
extent that could hardly have been imagined by Wesley himself. For the American evangelicals, being born-again was an
experience of autonomous, although involuntary, self-regeneration--the Holy Spirit being wholly
implicated in the self and vice
versa, just as the self was implicated in the world.
- Moreover, the American evangelical experience was reflected in an enthusiasm for
wealth-creation far surpassing its counterparts in the European tradition. Here, suggests Noll, the
anti-authoritarianism of the American evangelicals expresses itself as an aversion to foundational
value, a belief in the powers of money that separates promise from all institutional guarantee and
regulating authority, figuring the market itself as a process of radical self-organization and
alchemy (174). In this way the doctrine of the new birth merges imperceptibly with a theology of the
free market, one that situates the locus of wealth creation in the pure debt-form--the regeneration
of money from money and life from life, without final redemption. This is a culture of
life-as-surplus that is wholly alien to the Catholic doctrine of the gift and its attendant
political theologies of sovereign power. Pushed to its extreme conclusions, evangelicalism seems to
suggest that the instantaneous conversion of the self--which is held to render an ecstatic surplus
of emotion--is the emotive equivalent of a financial transmutation of values, the delirious process
through which capital seeks to recreate itself as surplus.[6]
- The doctrine of regeneration imparts a highly idiosyncratic vitalism to the evangelical
understanding of nationhood. Again as detailed by Noll, the extraordinary rise of Protestant
evangelical faith between the Revolution and the Civil War was decisive in fusing together the
discourses of republicanism and of religious experience, so that in an important sense the
language of American foundation and independence became inseparable from that of evangelical
conversion (173-74). It is therefore not only in the minds of latter-day fundamentalists that
the founding of America came to be figured as an act of God-given grace: such analogies were
already sufficiently self-evident in late nineteenth century America that Abraham Lincoln was
able to refer to Americans as God's almost chosen people, calling for a new birth of
the American nation itself.
- What is the relationship between these earlier forms of American evangelicalism and the right to life movement of the
1970s? What has become of the experience of rebirth today? And what are its connections
to evangelical views on capitalism?
In order to respond to these questions, we need to look at the ways in which U.S. capitalism itself has mutated over the last
three decades, redefining its relationship to the countries of the rest of the world, both creditors and debtors. In what
follows, I argue that U.S. imperialism today is founded on the precarious basis of a perpetually renewed debt--and thus
seems to take the evangelical doctrine of wealth-creation to its extreme conclusions. It is this extreme form of economic faith
that is also celebrated in neo-liberal theories of wealth creation.
Debt Imperialism: The U.S. Since 1971
- In his study of the changing faces of U.S. imperialism, revised and rewritten over three decades, the economist Michael
Hudson has argued that the nature of U.S. imperial power underwent a dramatic change in the early 1970s, when Nixon abandoned
the gold-dollar standard of the Bretton Woods era (Super Imperialism). Hudson was originally hired under
the Nixon administration to report on the costs of the Vietnam War and its connection to the U.S.'s budget deficit. In 1972,
and at the behest of various federal administrations, he published a full-length study on the question. His conclusions were
damning: by demonetizing gold, the U.S. had initiated a form of super-imperialism that
effectively left it off the
hook in terms of debt repayment. Instead of taking this as an admonition, however, the U.S. administration received it as an
unintended recipe for success, one that should henceforth be maintained at all costs. Hudson's
book reportedly sold well in
Washington, although his work was strongly challenged.
- Hudson's argument is complex, and at odds with the mainstream of left-wing commentaries, which tend to see America's
spiraling debt as the harbinger of its imminent decline. He identifies the early 1970s as a turning point.
Before 1971, the U.S. was a creditor to other nations. In the period following
World War II, the dollar
was convertible against gold and thus remained indexed to a conventional unit of measurement. While the gold standard remained
in force, the political and economic limits of the American nation were inherently circumscribed. It was the gold standard that
prevented the U.S. from running up excessive balance-of-payment deficits, since foreign nations could always cash in
surplus-dollars for gold. As a nation, the U.S. was underwritten by an at least nominal foundation.
- When gold was demonetized, however, the U.S. abandoned even this conventional guarantor of exchange value. As foreign
governments could no longer cash in their surplus-dollars for gold, it was now possible for the U.S. government to run up
enormous balance-of-payment deficits without being held to account. Indeed, it became feasible for the U.S., as a net
importer, to create debt without limit and to sustain its power through this very process. Hudson contends that such a
strategy inaugurates a fundamentally new kind of imperialism--a super-imperialism that is precisely dependent on the endless
issuing of a debt for which there is no hope of final redemption. Hudson explains the details of this process as
follows: all the dollars that end up in European, Asian, and Eastern central banks as a result
of the U.S.'s massive importing
now have no place to go but to the U.S. Treasury. With the gold option ruled out, foreign
nations now have no other "choice" but to use their surplus dollars to buy U.S. Treasury
obligations (and to a lesser extent corporate stocks and bonds). What this
effectively amounts to is a forced loan, since in the process, they lend their surplus dollars back to the
U.S. Treasury, thereby financing U.S. government debt. This forced loan, Hudson points out, is a losing proposition, as the
falling dollar progressively erodes the value of U.S. Treasury IOUs (Hudson ix). And it is a "loan" without foreseeable return:
U.S. debt cannot and will not be repaid, but will be rolled over indefinitely, at least as long
as the present balance of
international power remains in place (xv-xvi). The momentum attained by these dynamics is now such, according to Hudson, that
U.S. debt creation effectively functions as the source of world capitalism, the godhead of a cult without redemption. Trends
that were initiated in 1972 have now become blatant, particularly under George W. Bush: the
U.S. Treasury has run up an
international debt of over $60 billion, a deficit that finances not only its trade but also its federal budget deficit.
Moreover, he argues, the cycle of U.S. debt creation has now become so integral to the workings of world trade that the
consequences of any upheaval might well appear apocalyptic, even to countries outside the
U.S.[7]
- Hudson's work can help us understand the character of U.S. nationhood and imperialism today,
and explain how we define a nation that seeks to recreate itself and world power relations out of a
fount of perpetual debt. In terms of traditional theories of economic and political nationhood,
Hudson's analysis seems to lead to the unsettling conclusion that the American state is rigorously
devoid of foundation, since the possibility of its continued self-reproduction has come to coincide
with the temporality of perpetual debt. As a nation, the U.S. no longer rests on any minimal reserve
or substance but, in tandem with the turnover of debt, exists in a time warp where the future morphs
into the past and the past into the future without ever touching down in the present. In economic
terms then, the American nation has become purely promissory or fiduciary--America demands faith and
promises redemption but refuses to be held to final account. Its growing debt is already renewed
just as it comes close to redemption, already born again before it can come to term. America is the
unborn born again.
- And yet the importance of Hudson's work is to show that there is nothing ethereal about the imperialism of U.S. debt
creation. Indeed it is through the very movement by which it renounces all economic
foundation--Hudson claims--that the U.S. is
able to reassert itself as the most belligerent of political forces and the most protectionist of trading partners. The
position of the U.S. at the very vortex of debt imperialism has meant that it has been able to function as a profligate,
protectionist state, spending enormous amounts on the military, domestic trade subsidies, and
R&D, while many other countries have had to subject themselves to the rigors of IMF-imposed
budget restraint (xii). In other words, while the U.S.,
acting through the IMF and World Bank, imposes draconian measures of debt redemption on
countries indebted to the IMF and the World Bank, it alone "acts uniquely without financial
constraint," turning debt into the very source of its power (xii).
- How has the U.S. ensured that the surplus dollars held by its foreign trading partners would be effectively reinvested
in U.S. government securities? According to Hudson, essentially through the use--real or threatened--of institutional violence.
The U.S. exercises unilateral veto power within such purportedly multilateral institutions as the IMF and World Bank (Susan
George and Fabrizio Sabelli have analyzed the successive internal reforms of these institutions as so many
attempts to establish an orthodox doctrine of the faith in the arena of world economic policy). But the
economic prescriptions of the World Bank and IMF have also, necessarily, been backed up by the threat of military retaliation.
U.S. diplomats, notes Hudson, have long made it perfectly clear that any return to gold or attempt to buy up U.S. companies
would be considered as an act of war (Super Imperialism ix). The irony here is that the U.S.'s exorbitant military
expenditure has been financed through the very debt-imperialism it is designed to enforce!
- All this suggests the need for a nuanced interpretation of the nature of U.S.
nationalism in the contemporary
era, one that takes into account both the deterritorializing and reterritorializing trends of debt imperialism. For it implies
that the very loss of foundation is precisely what enables the U.S. to endlessly refound itself, in the most violent and
material of ways. In the era of debt imperialism, nationalism can only be a re-foundation of that which is without
foundation--a return of the future, within appropriate limits.[8] The endless
revolution (rolling over) of debt and the endless restoration of nationhood are inseparably entwined. The one enables the
other. And the one perpetuates the other, so that revolution becomes a project of perpetual restoration and restoration a
project of perpetual revolution. It is only when the double nature of this movement is grasped that we can understand the
simultaneously revolutionary and restorative nature of contemporary capitalism in general: its evangelism and its
fundamentalism.
- U.S. imperialism, in other words, needs to be understood as the extreme, "cultish" form of
capital, one that not only sustains itself in a precarious state of perpetually renewed and
rolled-over nationhood but which also, of necessity, seeks to engulf the whole world in its cycle of
debt creation.[9] The economic doctrine corresponding to U.S. debt
imperialism can be found in several varieties of neo-liberalism, in particular the supply-side
theories of the Reagan era. Its theological expression can be found in neo-evangelicalism, the
various revived and militant forms of Christian evangelical faith that sprang up in the early
seventies. Supply-side economists and neo-evangelicals share a common obsession with debt and
creationism. For supply-side theorists such as George Gilder, economics requires an understanding of
the operations of faith, and for the right-wing evangelicals who cite him, the creation of life and
the creation of money are inseparable as questions of biblical interpretation.
Neoliberalism: The Economics of Faith
- It is surely not incidental that one of the most influential popularizers of
neo-liberal economic ideas, the journalist George Gilder, also happens to be a
committed evangelical and creationist whose work argues for the essentially
religious nature of economic phenomena.[10]
Gilder's classic work, Wealth and Poverty, is
as much a meditation on faith as a celebration of U.S. debt imperialism and
debt-funded growth. Drawing on anthropological work on the relationship between
promise, belief, and debt, Gilder sets out to explain the particular faith-form
required by contemporary U.S. power. The new capitalism, he asserts, implies a
theology of the gift--"the source of the gifts of capitalism is the supply side of
the economy"--but one which differs in fundamental respects from Roman Catholic
philosophies of debt and redemption (Wealth and Poverty 28). Here
there are no fundamental values, no just price or Word against which the
fluctuations of faith can be measured and found wanting. Nor is there any final
redemption to look forward to. What distinguishes the gift cycle of the new
capitalism, claims Gilder, is its aversion to beginnings and ends (23). In the
beginning was not the Word, God the Father, or even the gold standard, but rather
the promise, a promise that comes to us from an unknowable future, like Jesus
before the resurrection. And in the end is not redemption but rather the imperative
to renew the promise, through the perpetual rolling over of U.S. government debt.
The promise may well be entirely uncertain, but this doesn't mean that it won't be
realized at all. On the contrary, Gilder insists that it will be realized, over and
over again, in the form of a perpetually renascent surplus of life. The return on
debt may be unpredictable, but it will return nevertheless (25)--as long as we
maintain the faith:
Capitalist production entails faith--in one's neighbors, in one's society, and in the compensatory logic of the
cosmos. Search and you shall find, give and you will be given unto, supply creates its own
demand. (24)
Importantly, what Gilder is proposing here is not merely an economic doctrine but a
whole philosophy of life and rebirth. What neo-liberalism promises, he insists, is
not merely the regeneration of capital but the regeneration of life on earth--out
of the promissory futures of U.S. debt imperialism. It is this belief that informs
Gilder's strident anti-environmentalism (and that of many of his evangelical and
neo-liberal siblings). In a world animated by debt imperialism, there can be no
final exhaustion of the earth's resources, no ecological limits to growth that
won't at some point--just in time--be renewed and reinvigorated by the perpetual
renascence of the debt-form itself (259-69). His is a doctrine of the faith that
not only promises to renew the uncertain future but also to reinfuse matter itself
with a surplus of life, over and over again. The irony of this position lies in its
proximity to the technological promise of regenerative medicine. The burgeoning
U.S. stem cell market is one instance in which the logic of speculative
accumulation--the production of promise from promise--comes together with the
particular generativity of the immortalized embryonic stem cell line, an
experimental life-form that also promises to regenerate its own potential for
surplus, without end. What Marx referred to as the "automatic fetish" of financial
capital here attempts to engender itself as a body in permanent embryogenesis.
- In this way, Gilder's theology of capital sustains a belief in the
world-regenerative, revitalizing powers of U.S. debt imperialism and its
technological futures. It also offers one of the most comprehensive expositions of
the neo-evangelical faith today. And it is no coincidence that his work is
frequently cited in the voluminous evangelical literature on financial management,
investment, and debt, where the creation of life and the creation of money are
treated as analogous questions of theological doctrine.[11] This is a faith that, in the first instance, separates the
creation of money from all institutional foundations or standards of measurement; a
religion that conceives of life as a perpetual renascence of the future, unfettered
by origin.
- This, however, doesn't mean that the question of foundations is overcome. On
the contrary, Gilder's neo-liberal philosophy is exemplary precisely because it
brings together the utopian, promissory impulse of speculative capital with the
imperative to re-impose the value of value, even in the face of the most evanescent
of futures. The problematic can be summarized as follows: How will the endless
promise of the debt be realized, distributed, consumed? How are we to restore the
foundations of that which is without foundation? How will the gift of capital,
which emanates from the U.S., be forced to repatriate within the confines of
America the nation? After all, it could just as easily not return, go roaming
around the world and reinvest somewhere else--or not at all. Gilder's theology of
capitalism is haunted by the possibility that the promissory future of the debt
will not be reinvested within the proper limits of the American nation; that the
promise that is America will not be realized, reborn, rolled over. More
generally perhaps, he expresses the fear that faith, in the long run, may fail to
reinvest in the property form at all--the fear of revolution without restoration, a
gift without obligation. The law of value needs to be reasserted; actual limits
need to be re-imposed on the realization of the future.
- For Gilder, these limits are of three mutually reinforcing kinds. The first
is summed up in the brute law of property: there is no economic growth without
inequality, scarcity, and poverty. There is no debt imperialism without debt
servitude. The second is of a political kind: U.S.-based economic enterprise must
be shored up by a "strong nation," a nation, that is, that has emptied itself as
far as possible of all social obligations towards its members, while investing
heavily in law and order. Implied in these two conditions are certain limits on
the biological reproduction of the American nation: America must continue to
reproduce itself as white, within the proper restrictions of the heterosexual
family. In this way, Gilder's assertion of the law of property is strictly
inseparable from his white nationalism and his avowed "moral conservatism." The
refoundation of value is the nation, which is the property form,
which in turn is realized in the most conservative of moral institutions--the
straight, white, reproductive family. It is this amalgam of political, economic,
and moral law that gets summed up in the notion of a "right to life" of the unborn.
The unborn, after all, is the future American nation in its promissory form, the
creative power of debt recontained within a redemptive politics of familial life.
And as the new right has made clear, its reproduction is the particular form of
debt servitude required of the nation's women:
It is in the nuclear family that the most crucial process
of defiance and faith is centered. . . . Here emerge the most indispensable acts of capital
formation: the psychology of giving, saving and sacrifice, on behalf of an unknown future, embodied
in a specific child--a balky bundle of possibilities that will yield its social reward even further
into time than the most foresighted business plan. (Gilder, Men and Marriage 198-99)
It is no accident then that the counter-active tendencies of neo-liberal conservatism come to a head
on the question of embryonic life and its scientific regeneration. The stem cell line embodies the
most radical materialization of the evangelical faith and its promise of an endlessly renewable
surplus of life. At the same time, however, it threatens to undermine the very precepts of normative
reproduction and therefore needs to be recaptured within the social and legislative limits of the
potential person--and its right to life.
The Unborn Born Again
- The movement that we now recognize as born-again evangelical Christianity underwent an extraordinary reawakening in the
early seventies. In its revived form, the evangelical movement took up the Protestant ethic of self-transformation--impelling
its believers to be born-again, in a kind of personal reenactment of Jesus's death, burial, and
resurrection--and turned it
into something quite different in scope. What distinguished this movement both from main-line
Protestantism and from earlier
evangelical revivals was its intense focus on the arena of sexual politics and family values. Faced with a rising tide of new
left political demands, from feminism to gay rights, the evangelical movement of the 1970s gave voice to a new-found
nostalgia--one that obsessed over the perceived decline of the heterosexual, male-headed, reproductive white family. The
concerns of the right to life movement have ranged from the introduction of domestic violence laws to equal opportunities, and
most recently, gay marriage. But if there was one issue that focalized the energies of the early movement it was the Roe vs.
Wade decision of 1973. As one editorial of the late
seventies pointed out, Roe vs. Wade was the "moment life began, conception--'quickening,'
viability, birth: choose your own
metaphor--for the right to life movement" ("The Unborn and the Born Again" 5). The born-again evangelical right was
reborn as a mission to save the unborn.[12]
- We now so commonly associate the evangelical right with a "pro-life" politics that it is difficult to
recognize the
novelty of this revival. The evangelical obsession with the question of abortion was, however,
unprecedented in the history of
Protestant evangelicalism--so much so that the early neo-evangelicals borrowed their pro-life rhetoric from orthodox
Catholicism, if only to later rechannel it through distinctly mass-mediated, populist and
decentralized forms of protest (see Harding 189-91). In the process, the evangelical right brought a new element into its own traditions of
millenarianism and born-againism. For evangelicals awaiting the millennium, the unborn came to be identified with the last man
and the last generation--indeed the end of the human race. At the same time, it was this last--and future--generation that most
urgently required the experience of conversion or rebirth. The evangelical tradition had long identified the unsaved soul with
Jesus before the resurrection, but now both were being likened to the unborn child in
utero. In the born-again how-to
tracts of the seventies, Jesus had become the unborn son of God, while we were all--prior
to salvation--the fetal
inheritors of the Lord.[13] In this context of tortuous
temporal amalgamations, it was no
surprise that the question--can the unborn be born again?--emerged as a matter worthy of serious doctrinal debate.
- From the first, evangelicals understood the pro-life movement to be a project of national restoration. The United
States was founded on religious principles--indeed on the principle of the right to life--according to the new evangelical
right. Roe v. Wade--a decision that after all was most likely to affect young
white women--was decried as an
act of war that threatened to undermine the future reproduction of the (white) American nation, its possibility of a redemptive
afterlife.[14] It was also the last and fatal blow in the
protracted process of
secularization and pluralism that had led to the decline of America's founding ideals. Roe
v. Wade had emptied the gift of
life of all foundation--the future existence of America had been effectively undermined, offered up in a precarious, promissory
form, a promise that might never be redeemed. Ontologically, it seemed, America was suspended in the strange place that is also
reserved for the frozen embryo (hence, an obsessive focus not simply on the unborn but more particularly on the frozen or
in vitro unborn).
- At the same time, and characteristically for the evangelical right, these concerns about the sexual and racial
reproduction of the American nation come together with a sense of malaise in the face of
America's growing state of
indebtedness. As Pat Robertson remarks: "Any nation that gives control of its money creation and regulation to any authority
outside itself has effectively turned over control of its own future to that body" (The New World
Order 118). Here,
the idea that the reproducers of the unborn nation might be at risk of defaulting feeds into the fear that the U.S.'s economic
future might be similarly imperiled, suspended as it were on the verge of a promise without collateral. Thus, along with its
enthusiastic support for U.S. debt-imperialism, the evangelical right also gives voice to the suspicion that the
economic
reproduction of the U.S. is becoming dangerously precarious, promissory, contingent, a matter of faith--in urgent need of
propping up.[15] The nightmare of someone like Pat
Robertson is that the promissory future
of U.S. debt may not be restored within the territorial limits of America itself, that the future may fail to materialize
within the proper limits of self-present nationhood. And because he understands
that the nation lies at the nexus
of sexual and economic reproduction, he calls for a politics of restoration on both fronts.
- Delirious as it may seem, the religious right at least recognizes that from the point of view of traditional state
financing, the postmodern American nation is literally poised on the verge of birth--unborn--its future contingent on the
realization of a debt that has not yet and may never come to maturity. Their fear is that its potential may be realized in the
form of excess, escaping appropriation. And in anticipation of this threat, they call for a proper rebirthing of the unborn,
the resurrection of a new man and a new nation, from out of the future. But what would it mean to re-found the future? In what
sense is it possible to re-birth the unborn? It is in the form of this temporal ellipsis that the right to life movement
articulates its politics of nationhood: what needs to be restored is of course the foundational moment of America, the act
through which the Founding Fathers inaugurated the nation, but this moment is itself constitutive of the right to life of the
unborn, contingent, in other words, on the return of the not-yet. The pro-life movement has invented an extraordinary number of
ritualistic methods for memorializing this contingent future: from online memorials to the unborn to court cases undertaken on
behalf of the future victims of genocidal abortion. Herein lies the novelty of (neo)-fundamentalism, of fundamentalism for the
neo-liberal era: in the face of a politics that operates in the speculative mode, fundamentalism becomes the struggle to
re-impose the property form in and over the uncertain future. This property form, as the right to life movement makes clear, is
inextricably economic and sexual, productive and reproductive. It is, in the last instance, a claim over the bodies of women.
Except here the name of the dead father is replaced by the image of the unborn child as sign and guarantor of women's essential
indebtedness.
- Under Reagan, the rhetoric of the pro-life movement, with its rewriting of the Declaration of Independence as a right to
life tract, entered into the mainstream of American political discourse, so that a hard-line conservative such as Lewis A.
Lehrman could declare that the moral and political restoration of America would depend on the Republican Party welcoming the
unborn "in life and law" ("The Right to Life"). Reagan himself, however, failed to live up to the expectations of
his moral electorate, and it was not until George W. Bush came to power that the pro-life movement acceded to anything like a
real presence within the decision-making processes of government. When it did so, it was after making a detour via the
neoconservative right. In the course of the nineties, a period when both moralist and militant extremes of conservative
thinking were on the back burner, a second generation of neoconservatives began to make overtures
to the religious right,
inviting pro-life representatives to work at their think-tanks while they themselves began to
issue public declarations
linking the political and strategic future of the American nation to its upholding the "founding" principle of the right to
life.[16] Since then, pro-lifers and neoconservatives have
joined forces in mounting a more
general assault on all kinds of embryo research, particularly in the area of stem-cell
science. It was no surprise when the neoconservative Catholic thinker Michael Novak
announced that Bush's compromise stem-cell decision of 2001 threatened the unborn potential of
America, and by extension the future salvation of the rest of the world:
this nation began its embryonic existence by declaring that it held
to a fundamental truth about a right to life endowed in us by our Creator. The whole world depends on us
upholding that principle. (Novak, "The Principle's the Thing")
But the 1990s had also seen more mainline, previously "secular" neocons such as William
Kristol launching
himself into the arena of right to life politics, in a series of impassioned stay of execution pleas on
behalf of the unborn. For Kristol, the connection between a muscular, neo-imperialist foreign policy and a
pro-life position is clear--what is at stake in both cases is the restoration of an
emasculated America, the rebirth of its unborn nationhood:
We will work to build a consensus in favor of legal protection for the unborn, even as we work to build an America more
hospitable to children and more protective of families. In doing so, our country can achieve a commitment to justice and a new
birth of freedom. (Kristol and Weigel 57)
It is probably too early to assess the long-term consequences of these developments, but at the very least it might be ventured
that the alliance between the neoconservative and Christian Right has brought a new and alarmingly literal legitimacy to the
war-mongering, millenarian and crusading rhetoric of the right to life movement. After all,
pro-life representatives now occupy key advisory positions at every level of U.S.
government.[17] The most obvious effect of this presence
so far
has been in the arena of foreign aid, where U.S. federal funds are now indexed to stringent anti-abortion, anti-prostitution,
anti-contraception, and pro-abstinence guidelines. A less visible though surely no less
significant phenomenon is the
massive presence of evangelical missionaries in Bush's military operations in the Middle East.
- On a rhetorical level too, George Bush has consistently drawn together the language of the Christian Right--with its
evocations of a war on the unborn, its monuments and memorials to the unborn--with the newly legitimized, neoconservative
defense of just war. Is this the harbinger of a new kind of war doctrine, one that returns to
the doctrine of just war theory,
while declaring justice to be without end? And one that speaks in the name of life, like humanitarian warfare, while
substituting the rights of the unborn for those of the born? Certainly, this has been the subtext of George W. Bush's official
declarations on the "culture of life" in America.[18]
- As a counter to these slippages, it is important to remember that the most immediate precedent to the terrorist attacks
of September 11 can be found in the string of bombings and murders committed by home-grown right to life groups and white
supremacist sympathizers over the last few decades. These attacks have attracted
nothing like the full-spectrum military response occasioned by September 11. On the contrary, one of the ironies of Bush's war
on terror is that it is being used as a pretext for bringing the culture of life to the rest of the world. In this way, even as
it emanates from the precarious center of debt imperialism, Bush's politics of life collaborates with the many other
neofundamentalist movements of the neoliberal era.
Global Biopolitics Research Group
Institute of Health
University of East Anglia
M.Cooper@uea.ac.uk
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Notes
1. I am here thinking of the temporal ellipsis about
which Brian Massumi writes in
"Requiem for our Prospective Dead (Toward a Participatory Critique of Capitalist Power),"
40-64. The motif of war was present
in right to life rhetoric from the beginning. See for example Marx.
2. I here follow Nancy T. Ammerman's account of the American evangelical movement
and its 20th century fundamentalist mutations (1-63). I am
particularly concerned with the evangelical revival that occurred in the mid-seventies and has come to be associated with
"born againism" and pro-life politics. The evangelical movement is generally understood to be an offshoot of mainline
Protestantism. Other commentators have pointed out that both the Protestant and Catholic Churches sprouted right-wing,
evangelizing and free-market wings around the same time. See for example Kintz 218, 226, and
230. This convergence is evident in George W. Bush's frequent recourse to the advice of the Vatican.
Because of this convergence, I cite the work of the Catholic free-market neoconservative Michael Novak, who has had a
considerable influence over (and arguably been influenced by) evangelical thinking.
3. There is a recent and growing literature on the
role of emotions in
finance; see in particular Pixley. Two interesting recent works on
the
relationship between faith, credibility, credit/debt relations, and the question of political
constitution are
Aglietta and Orléan's edited La Monnaie Souveraine, and Aglietta and
Orléan, La Monnaie: Entre
Violence et Confiance. Following Aglietta and Orléan, I don't make any essential distinction between the gift
and the debt, assuming that what constitutes a gift for one person will probably be experienced as a debt by another. Where
I do draw a distinction is between different kinds and temporalities of the gift/debt relationship. In other words, the
pertinent question here is whether or not the gift/debt is redeemable.
4. For an overview of Aquinas's economic philosophy,
see the articles collected in Blaug, St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).
5. What interests me here is the importance of
born-againism or regeneration within
American evangelicalism in general. I make no attempt to provide an overview of the various denominational splits
within American Protestant evangelicalism, although this would certainly be relevant for
an historical understanding of the
Republican-Southern Baptist alliance today. For a detailed insight into this history, see Phillips.
6. There is thus an important distinction to be drawn
between the Catholic
philosophy of life (which presumes sovereign power) and the Protestant, evangelical culture of life, where life is in the
first instance understood as a form of self-regenerative debt. In the Protestant tradition, sovereign power is not so much
formative as reformative--it is the attempt to re-found that which is without foundation. One important corollary
of my argument is that Agamben's philosophy of bare life is wholly unsuited to a critical engagement with the contemporary
phenomenon of culture of life politics. Indeed, to the extent that he reinstates the sovereign model of power--if only in
inverted form--as constitutive of power itself, his philosophical gesture comes very close to that of the right-to-life
movement. Bare life, in other words, is the suspended inversion of the vita beata and finds its most popular iconic
figure in the unborn foetus. Agamben's philosophy of biopolitics is not so much a negative theology as a theology in
suspended animation.
7. For a complementary reading of U.S. debt and its
role in the financialization of
world capital markets, see Brenner 59-61 and 206-08. See also Naylor for a fascinating account of the links
between neoliberalism, debt
servitude, and neo-evangelical movements in South America and elsewhere. It should be noted here that not
all contemporary
evangelical philosophies of debt are necessarily imperialist. Liberation theology is one instance of a faith that works
against Third World debt.
8. The neoconservative movement is quite lucid about
the speculative,
future-oriented thrust of its return to fundamentals. It is here that one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism,
Irving Kristol, identifies its distinguishing feature: "What is 'neo' ('new') about this conservatism," he proffers, "is
that it is resolutely free of nostalgia. It, too, claims the future--and it is this claim, more than anything else, that
drives its critics on the Left into something approaching a frenzy of denunciation" (xii).
9. Here I'm thinking of Walter Benjamin's analysis
of the cult in "Capitalism as
Religion." In this piece, Benjamin asserts that the specificity of capitalism as a mode of worship lies in its tendency to
dispense with any specific dogma or theology other than the perpetuation of faith (288). The religion of capital,
he argues, comes into its own when God himself is included in the logic of the promise and can no longer function as its
transcendent reference point or guarantor. In its ultimate cultic form, the capitalist relation tends to become a promise that sustains its own promise, a threat that sustains its own violence. The gifts it dispenses emanate from a
promissory future and forego all anchorage in the past. In this sense, it institutes a relation of guilt from which there is
no relief or atonement.
10. There is debate about the
intellectual sources of neoliberalism. In his recent history of the concept, Harvey
discerns a complex fusion of monetarism, rational expectations, public choice
theory, and the "less respectable but by no means uninfluential 'supply-side' ideas
of Arthur Laffer" (54). Like many others, he points to the crucial role played by
the journalist and investment analyst George Gilder in popularizing neoliberal and
supply-side economic ideas. However, I here follow Paul Krugman's more detailed
analysis of supply-side theory to argue that the supply-siders actually offered a
radical critique of neoclassically inspired models of equilibrium economics such as
monetarism. It was on the question of debt and budget deficits that at least some
supply-siders took issue with the more traditional conservative economists. On
these points, see Krugman 82-103 and 151-69. The supply-side gospel has come to be
associated with Reagonomics--and it was under Reagan that U.S. federal debt first
began to outpace GDP in relative terms (Krugman 152). But by far the most extreme
experiment in deficit free-fall has been carried out under the administration of
George W. Bush (Phillips 119-28; Press). Others have analyzed the
religious dimension of neoliberalism by looking at Chicago-school monetarism (see
for example Nelson and Taylor). I tend to think that monetarism is an easy target
and that supply-side ideas, particularly as espoused by George Gilder, had much
more influence on actual economic policy and popular cultures of neoliberalism. In
this sense too, I tend to see complexity-influenced approaches to economics not as
a counter to neoliberalism (as Taylor does) but as its ultimate expression. Gilder,
for example, is a committed complexity theorist. For Gilder's thoughts on U.S.
debt, see Wealth and Poverty, 230; for his views on budget deficits
under Bush, see "Market Economics and the Conservative Movement."
11. For a more detailed discussion on the sources
of evangelical economics, see Lienesch 94-138.
12. On the history of Roe v. Wade and the
Christian Right, see Petchesky. On the specific links between the right to life movement and the born-again
movement see Harding, 183-209.
How can we situate this most recent revival of evangelicalism within the longer tradition of American Protestantism? It
might be argued that the born-again movement of the seventies brings together the abiding concerns of the various
evangelical strains of American Protestantism--republicanism, anti-authoritarianism and personal
rebirth--with the
reactionary tendencies of Baptist fundamentalism. What is now known as the fundamentalist wing of evangelical Christianity
emerged in the early part of the twentieth century as an internal reaction against progressive forces within
the Protestant
Church. "Fundamentalism," writes Ammerman, "differs from traditionalism or orthodoxy or even a
mere revivalist
movement. It differs in that it is a movement in conscious, organized opposition to the disruption of those traditions and
orthodoxies" (14). After losing battles to prohibit the teaching of evolution in schools, fundamentalists retreated into relative political obscurity even as a new generation of
non-separatist evangelists such as Billy Graham were increasingly willing to engage in public life. It was only in
the seventies that this rift was repaired, as evangelicals started obsessing about the moral decline of America and fundamentalists once again came out of hiding to do battle for their faith. No doubt this reunion accounts for the
coexistence of apparently contradictory tendencies within the contemporary born-again
movement: future-oriented,
transformative, but reactive nevertheless. On the differences between fundamentalist and
non-fundamentalist Protestantism, see Ammerman, 1-63.
13. Again, Harding presents a compelling account of
this
identification in the work of fundamentalist Baptist Jerry Falwell. But it recurs in the
literature of the period. For an insight into the born-again ethos of this era, see Graham.
14. On the links between the right to life movement
and white supremacist groups, see Mason's astonishing essay "Minority Unborn."
15. There is thus a fundamental ambivalence within
the economic writings of the
evangelicals, who on the one hand celebrate U.S. debt-creationism and on the other obsess over the need to cancel all debt,
restore strict tariff and exchange controls, and reinstate the gold standard. On this point,
see Lienesch, 104-07.
Interestingly, the same ambivalence can be found amongst supply-side economists, some of whom advocate a return to the gold
standard.
16. On the convergence of the neoconservatives and
the Religious Right, see Diamond 178-202 and Halper and Clarke 196-200.
17. On the increasingly global reach of right-wing
evangelical opinion, see Kaplan 219-43.
18. In his book Holy Terrors, Bruce Lincoln explores the ways in which
George W. Bush's speeches make implicit reference to the language of the Religious Right, often borrowing their syntax and
phraseology from popular evangelical tracts.
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---. "Market Economics and the Conservative Movement." Address. Philadelphia Society
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