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The Unborn Born Again: Neo-Imperialism, the Evangelical Right, and the Culture of Life
*Melinda Cooper *
/ University of East Anglia/
M.Cooper@uea.ac.uk
(c) 2006 Melinda Cooper.
All rights reserved.
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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
1. 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
<#foot1>]
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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).
9. 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).
10. 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.
11. 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 <#foot2>] 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
12. 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 <#foot3>]
13. 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?
14. 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.
15. 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 <#foot4>] 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.
16. 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.
17. 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
18. 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.
19. 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 <#foot5>] 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.
20. 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 <#foot6>]
21. 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.
22. 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
23. 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.
24. 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.
25. 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 <#foot7>]
26. 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.
27. 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).
28. 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!
29. 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 <#foot8>] 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.
30. 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 <#foot9>]
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
31. 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 <#foot10>] 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.
32. 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 <#foot11>] 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.
33. 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.
34. 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
35. 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 <#foot12>]
36. 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 <#foot13>] 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.
37. 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 <#foot14>] 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).
38. 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 <#foot15>] 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.
39. 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.
40. 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 <#foot16>] 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
<#foot17>] 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.
41. 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 <#foot18>]
42. 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 <#ref1>. 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 <#ref2>. 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 <#ref3>. 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 <#ref4>. For an overview of Aquinas's economic philosophy, see
the articles collected in Blaug, St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).
5 <#ref5>. 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 <#ref6>. 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 /re/formative--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 <#ref7>. 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 <#ref8>. 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 <#ref9>. 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 <#ref10>. 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 <#ref11>. For a more detailed discussion on the sources of
evangelical economics, see Lienesch 94-138.
12 <#ref12>. 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 <#ref13>. 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 <#ref14>. On the links between the right to life movement and
white supremacist groups, see Mason's astonishing essay "Minority
Unborn."
15 <#ref15>. 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 <#ref16>. On the convergence of the neoconservatives and the
Religious Right, see Diamond 178-202 and Halper and Clarke 196-200.
17 <#ref17>. On the increasingly global reach of right-wing
evangelical opinion, see Kaplan 219-43.
20 <#ref20>. 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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