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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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