Uncool Passion: Conviction and the Spirit of Deregulation

Illustration: Peter Oumanski

These days, the sacred declares itself in ever more profane places. “Jesus is the answer,” proclaimed a crude, hand-painted sign beside the highway to Sun City, northwest of Johannesburg, where I recently traveled with a few colleagues. “But what was the question?” we quipped in unison. Clearly we were missing the point. The sign's confident assertion was not merely meant to banish doubt; it was meant to preempt any question in the first place by furnishing the universal answer.

Certainly, the message on the rock gestures toward a particular form of belief and a rational subject capable of declaring it. It is a form of conviction, anthropologist Thomas Blom Hansen suggests (1), that implies, “the capacity to make decisions, and the capacity to be convinced." And, importantly, to act decisively in the service of abstract cause or principle. This link between active conviction and belief, Blom Hansen argues, is evident across a range of different kinds of commitment in the current world. And there is evidence to support him: the vernacular term for a person of conviction among Setswana speakers in South Africa, for instance, is badumedi, “one who voices agreement.” To “believe” is to consciously concur that Jesus is in fact the answer, reflecting the view of the 19th Century Protestant mission that genuine faith could only take root in deliberating, reflective, speaking subjects. Passive, tacit, or taken-for-granted assumptions about the sacred were treated as unreflective superstition. Converts had to choose faith, and to continuously reiterate the sincerity of their conviction both in words and in deeds.

But there is also another idiom of piety – one with perhaps an even older legacy – that asserts itself ever more forcibly in our times. It is one that seems to overwhelm the rational subject through the sheer force of its ineffability: like the manifestation of the Virgin Mary, in April 2005, on the wall of an underpass on one of the Chicago's busiest thoroughfares (2). Soon hundreds of people gathered, wreathing the image with flowers and votive candles. For such a demure figure, she drew forth a surprisingly passionate public response. Nocturnal skeptics, seemingly enraged by her arresting power, scrawled a counter assertion -- “Big Lie” – across her sepia visage (3), and the city fathers then ordered the whole expanse to be doused in plain brown paint. Yet, lo and behold, a day later, the divine features appeared again, their uncanny outlines etched clearly on the bluff surround – an assertion of a wondrous presence that for many was a truth beyond argument.

Autonomous apparitions of this sort are hardly unprecedented, especially in Catholic contexts, but such humdrum miracles and effusive declarations of popular piety have become increasingly pervasive features of mainstream public culture, even in predominantly Protestant contexts. In 2004, a toasted sandwich bearing the face of the Virgin fetched $28,000 on e-bay. Soon after, a pro-life passion play, centered on hapless coma patient Terry Schiavo, took control of the American mass media, refashioning her as a middle-aged fetus threatened by liberal abortionists and others willing to flout the letter of divine law.

What the battle over Schiavo and the clash of images on the underpass both make evident is an ever more strident struggle between argument and revelation, i.e. between contrasting modes of conviction. Both of these forms have always coexisted (albeit uneasily) as inherent features of modern modes of thought. The cool passion of the deliberative, Kantian self, or of the Weberian rational ascetic has been understood, after all, as a sublimation of more primitive affect, just as modern ideas of rational action are widely perceived as emerging from the suppression of emotional excess. The dialectic at work here is ongoing and never fully resolvable – hence the enduring challenge of snatching virtue from temptation, or the hope that righteous fervour can counter the excesses of reason. But for the most part, modernity has understood itself as being about the predominance of the rational over the affective, about a model of personhood and conviction in which cool passion prevailed -- even if a longing for the white heat of miracles remained its suppressed underside.

There seems to be evidence, however, that in recent decades the unquestioned dominance of this rationalist ideology has been disturbed; that appeal to the role of a more unsettling kind of fervor is detectable in many spheres of life. The $28,000 sacred sandwich is a case in point: despite (and often, alongside) an ever-stronger, world-wide commitment to market rationalization, a new religious realism, whether in Pentecostal or Latin shape, is pervading mundane American life. Efforts to propel Creationism onto school syllabi in the South in the guise of intelligent design have been accompanied by the issuing of fatwahs by born-again pastors against foreign heads of state. And it is not merely fundamentalist Protestants who call the question. In Europe, a vibrant, "radical orthodox" and anti-modernist strain has been identified in current Anglo-Catholicism, replacing an older, cooler deism in terms of which, if God was not dead, he had certainly left his human creatures pretty much to their own providential devices.

As the “Religious Right” became a tangible influence on politics in the early 21st Century, from the Moral Majority to the Christian Coalition to President Bush's regular meetings with conservative evangelical leaders, government itself has resorted ever more overtly to the language of divine imperative. In the U.S., the growth of evangelical prison programs has sought to displace the logic of secular rehabilitation with that of religious redemption. Theologico-politics, a concern of crusading 17th century rationalists like Spinoza (1670), is once again a lively reality. Returned, too, is early 19th Christian Political Economy (4), making cheerful fellowship with the spirit of neoliberal capitalism: mass-merchandised hamburgers now come wrapped in biblical homilies and Starbucks coffee has been graced with quotations from best-selling Christian author Rick Warren.

But why is all of this happening at this particular juncture? And what do we make of the strange echoes of this rediscovery of the power of emotional fervor in more literal – some would say, “fundamentalist” – calls to reunite God and government all over the world?

This impetus has special salience in an age of widespread deregulation. At a time when, under the sway of neoliberal policies, many states have relinquished significant responsibility for schooling, health, and welfare – in short, for the social reproduction of their citizens – religious organizations have willingly reclaimed this role; a role they never fully lost, in some places, to the institutions of the welfare state. The retreat of government and the recent expansion of faith-based social services have opened new spheres for religious organizations, erasing the separation of powers that underlay the ideals, if not always the practices, of most twentieth-century liberal democracies. These days, the life of the spirit extends ever more tangibly beyond the space of the sanctuary and the time of worship, a fact made graphically evident in the large megachurches that flourish luxuriantly on the new frontiers of the post-industrial economy in the American West. Here Pentecostals deliberately blur received distinctions to encompass diverse reaches of secular life – business, schooling, day care, athletic facilities, counseling, and gourmet dining. The pastor of one such religious super center is quite up-front about hitching God’s business to the ordinary wants of the world: “If Oprah and Dr. Phil are doing it, why shouldn’t we...We want the church to look like a mall. We want you to come in and say, ‘Dude, where’s the cinema?’” (5). Commitment here means opting for Christianity as lifestyle: reborn faiths aspire to become theocracies (in the manner of Max Weber), offering employment and business opportunities, education, athletic facilities, ritual and therapeutic care. Some observers claim that in certain areas these churches basically function as “surrogate governments" (6).

Megachurches of this sort are not limited to the US; evangelical Pentecostalism is held to attract almost 20 million new members a year worldwide, having emerged as the major competitor of a Catholicism that is itself becoming markedly more charismatic (7). The prominent New Life Church, founded in Colorado Springs by the now infamous "Pastor Ted" Haggard, has direct mission offshoots in several parts of Africa, for example, including in the North West province of South Africa, where it ministers to those seeking new life after apartheid. While few congregations in Africa match the elaboration of the theocracies of the US, expansive, multiplex installations are common in many parts of the continent. They offer everything from security services and mail delivery to schooling and AIDS outreach, their robust institutional growth contrasting sharply with the erosion of other civic organizations under conditions of liberalization and state contraction. Said a South African pastor: "It might sound heretical, but we strive above all to make our services exciting, affecting. Our competition, after all, is the video.”

Many Pentecostal initiatives, as I have stressed, seek to reclaim the profane world as a space of the miraculous (i.e. to see the happenings of everyday life as a consequence of the direct engagement of an instrumental Spirit). The now fallen Ted Haggard, known for preaching not with a Bible, but with a PalmPilot in hand (8) titled his best-selling book Dog Training, Fly Fishing, & Sharing Christ in the 21st Century. Alas, he was subsequently found sharing the gospel with a gay sex-worker of precisely the sort he was famous for denouncing; hence his spectacular fall from grace. But as Haggard's case suggests, emissaries of revitalized faith seem ever more intent on taking possession of what were formerly (relatively) separate domains of politics, the law, the market, popular culture, the secular media. They aim to appropriate their modus operandi as implements of God’s design, their signs as indices one ineffable truth.

Sacralizing Markets

Within Europe and beyond, Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam have all engaged, in their own ways, with the spirit of capitalism. And this interplay is constantly evolving: The Roman Catholic Church recently provided a neat example: at the present time, some North American and European churches send Mass intentions, requests for prayers to remember the dead, to clergy in Kerala, India by email, where they are performed by priests at about one-third of the cost in the West. This divine outsourcing was condemned by a spokesman of the British union, Amicus: “It shows that no aspect of life in the West is sacred,” he chided (9). But the truth is perhaps the reverse: these days, the most urbane activities can be recuperated in the service of the divine. Hence the Starbucks preachers (10), the Christian banks, Islamic finance, Godly HMO’s, and pyramid schemes. Hence, also, enterprises like the Lord’s Gym (11), a US fitness franchise that promises to build body and soul in a “safe,” “properly “Christian atmosphere’ ) (12). Its logo is a pumped-up Jesus, doing push-ups beneath the weight of a huge cross, under the message, “His Pain Your Gain” This is 19th Century muscular Christianity, refashioned for the consumerist entertainment age, a trend equally evident in the thrashing Christian metal concerts or blockbuster Hollywood action films that wed the logic of the violent video-game to the Passion of Christ In an era of increasingly deregulated faith, no instrument is too profane to act as a vehicle of salvation – as was evident in a recent Larry King Live discussion with a group of ardent female evangelists who claimed to work the streets of a Colorado town, “flirting for Jesus.” The aim is to turn you on – to the Passion of the Savior (13).

It is important to point out that these deepening connections and blurring boundaries between religion and commerce run far deeper than evangelists crudely coopting the crass and sexualized idioms of consumer capitalism for marketing purposes. Radically liberalized business is ever more overtly identified with religious motives in many places., either through efforts to imbue commerce with religious meaning, or more subtly, through reimagining the market as redemptive force. Former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, in a widely circulated YouTube video, told members of her Wasilla Assembly of God that “God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built. So pray for that.” This was the perspective of 19th century modernizing imperialists like David Livingstone, who saw commerce, Christianity and civilization as conditions of each others’ possibility. Now this ethos has been revitalized in the doctrines of the Neo-Pentecostal Churches, which encourage the faithful to aspire for salvation in terms of a prosperity gospel of consumer desire. Here the old language of patient labor is eclipsed by invocation of the market as deus ex machina. Political theorist William Connolly (14) describes it as striving to “bind capitalist creativity to the creativity of God himself.” Certainly, the leaders of such groups frequently hail their members as full-blooded, desiring beings in a formula that tends to resolve an older Protestant ambivalence about this-worldly gratification by endorsing wholesome consumption and righteous (i.e. monogamous) passion. But notable, too, is the frequency with which the Faustian embrace of appetite comes apart in its own holy excess. All too often does the miraculous commerce fleece its flock, as in the Pentecostal penchant to spawn explosive pyramid schemes and other get-rich-quick disappointments (15). In this we see intensified cycles of repentance and rebirth transmogrified into cycles of boom and bust.

A resurgent and expanding religiosity does not necessarily imply increased religious observance across the planet. In fact recent US surveys suggest that, despite heightened evangelical activity, the numbers of those who profess no faith at all are also on the rise (16). But the blurring of secular boundaries occasioned by affective, entrepreneurial faith can be seen in the injection of an affective morality into once rationalized spheres of state and society, often without any overt religiosity.

Feeling the Heat: The rising temperature of public passion

From the US to Uganda, Britain to Bosnia, civic life has been pervaded by a rhetoric of ethical impulsion, an embrace of faith-based initiatives. Governments resort ever more readily to the language of virtue and sentiment rather than social engineering; they are ever more ready to proclaim wars against evil, to announce campaigns of moral regeneration and foster models of ethical citizenship. Scholars and statesmen alike seek to ground a discourse of collective action in appeals to rectitude and sentiments of empathy – edging aside the language of social determination, solidarity, and state-centered rationality.

Much attention has been paid to the most overtly fundamentalist strains which present moral politics in the idiom of religious or civilizational conflict (e.g. Bush versus Bin Laden). But much more widely pervasive than the language of crusade is the hyper-individualistic language of early liberalism, the ethos of the Scottish enlightenment that preceded the triumph of sociological thought in the manner of Comte, Durkheim or Keynes: the obsessive interest in civil society, of a market tempered less by social reason or state mediation than by voluntaristic, interpersonal empathy; of “community” as an aggregate or commonweal born not of collective understanding or norms as irreducible social facts, but from a myriad individual transactions and contracts. If Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments was born of his fear of the prospect of markets without affect, our reborn liberal age evinces a similar urge to unite capitalism with some deeper ethical purpose (think of recent movements that espouse enlightened voluntaristic enterprise, e.g. Corporate Social Responsibility, micro-financing, green markets, etc.).

This trend is not merely confined to the United States or evangelical Africa. Even the secular bastion of Western Europe, some observers claim, has seen the rise of an assertively ethical discourse of citizenship and a notable expansion of quasi-religious idioms of “service” in public life—a “Catholicization” of Europe. One result has been the blurring of once clear divides between secular and sacred, public and private, as policies of “ethical citizenship” seek to create communities of mutual care through public-private sector partnerships (17); it is worth noting that one key personification of ethical liberalism in Europe, Tony Blair, converted to Catholicism as soon as he left public office). While Europe contrasts in many ways with the expanding “neo-Pentecostalism” that is taking on the role of care and social reproduction in many other parts of the planet, the doctrine of ethical citizenship expresses a similar “anti-modernist” strain, a discomfort with secular notions of society, politics and morally-neutral public life, a desire to erase the line between the metaphysical and the mundane. At the same time, theological critics of modernity (whether philosophical or more prosaic) are increasingly strident in asserting the limits of humanism: be it the conceits of liberal democracy or Darwinism, Leninism or laïcite, historicism or relativism – all such forms of secularism are viewed as cold, repressive ideologies in many places.

The Neo-Pentecostal churches that are presently expanding at the expense of mainstream Christian denominations in many parts of the African continent also operate with a strikingly different economy of affect from that that characterized modernist mission orthodoxy: not only do they encourage outbursts of enthusiasm as testimony to a radical invasion by the spirit; they express distrust of modes of piety and public action that lack animating fervor. In this, they resonate with more urbane romantic sentiment in these places and beyond: an increasingly palpable sense that secular liberalism “lacks authenticity because it lacks passion" (18).

Many observers in the US and UK have noted the current “obsession” with the performance of sincerity or transparency in public life: the demand that political figures show integrity and empathy (“feel your pain”). What David Runciman terms the mass-mediated “politics of self-revelation,” seems now more important in public culture than issue-based argument, more palatable than the challenging compromises and in-situ judgments required by democracy-in-action. As both ideology and politics have increasingly been devalued as mere interested calculation, affect becomes evidence of a forthright relation between heart and deed; the truth or fakery of expressions of feeling become more significant than debate about content or policy.

This quality is evident, too, in the enactment of religious commitments. In South African churches, for example, there has been a marked move to turn up the expressive heat (most striking in the more charismatic faiths, but relayed across a broad spectrum beyond). It is a move to publicly perform the kind of conviction that seminal sociologist Max Weber (19) termed “hysterical;” i.e. to enact faith than seems to overwhelm reason, strategy, and personal interest to flood the self with divine cumpulsion. “Even the Lord Jesus Christ needed the Holy Spirit to live on earth,” says a recent Sunday handout from the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (20) in central Cape Town, the “Spirit – like a driver – drives you to his Kingdom” (It is not a mere coincidence that the same denomination that conjures the image of a driving spirit should also see fit to adorn the alters of its churches with BMW advertisements).

Conclusions – Uncool and otherwise

What, then, does make sense of the exuberant growth of “new Christianity” in these times? Of its continuities with, and breaks from, the past? Writers like Talal Asad (21) have argued that the process of defining and maintaining the space of the secular has been essential to the project of modern nationalism as a mode of governance. But how might we explain the widespread popular impetus, in the early 21st Century world, to redefine the place of religion in the modern civic order? How exactly have nation-states been implicated in this process, and can one make sense of these processes by focusing on state-centred logics alone? In fact, there is much to suggest that the character of contemporary faith is integral to the advent of a new stage in the life of capital – less an historical rupture with the past than a reorganization of its core components, involving an intensification of some of the signature features of industrial modernity, and an eclipse of others. And this, in turn, has been inseparable from transformations of the institutional scaffolding of liberal democracies, and the cultural terms through these structures are popularly apprehended and inhabited. These shifts vary in their local manifestations, and so too, does the thrust of the religious revitalization I have been describing here. Some scholars have argued, for example, that the challenge to secular hegemony has been less evident in Western Europe than elsewhere – although there is recent evidence to suggest that this, too, might be changing. Indeed, there are grounds for identifying some very widespread trends in religious life across the world that call for explanation. How might this reformed social landscape speak back – with latter-day insight—to classic accounts of religion and modernity, like Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism?

Max Weber famously argued that the Protestant Ethic had sanctified the calculating, maximizing ethos of early industrial society and nurtured cultural and subjective orientations that ensured that it flourished. Are we not just witnessing a later chapter in the same long story -- “born-again,” as it were, in the elective affinity between evangelicalism and 21st century consumer capitalism?

Yes, and no. The historical relationship of Protestantism to capitalism continues to be far more subtle and contradictory than Weber suggested. Furthermore, many of the features of contemporary entrepreneurial Protestantism – at least, in this avid Pentecostal form – are new. Weber stressed the inherent Calvinist suspicion of emotion and spontaneous feeling, the distrust of what he termed the “medieval” type of religion that strove for enjoyment of salvation in this world. He famously highlighted the “strict and temperate discipline” that “protected the rational personality of the [Puritan] from his passions,” and argued that it was precisely this stern, disciplined disposition which nursed a fledging capitalism. Yet, as I have suggested, Weber's vision of the modern Protestant subject is at odds with the emotional logic underlying much born-again belief, which takes untempered affect as a sign of the power of true faith, and that harnesses the pursuit of worldly desire to the advent of God’s kingdom in the here and now. This revitalization entails a reformation of key modernist demarcations between the sacred an the profane, private and the pubic, the church and the wider secular world.

The spirit of Revelation—or at least, of decidedly uncool passion—is among us once more, ministering to a reality that seems at odds with the tenets of secular reason. Yet this spirit also shows surprising affinity with the hyper-rational ethos of deregulated, neoliberal capitalism: its urge to substitute the logic of the market for that of “society” or government; its eagerness to take the “waiting out of wanting;” its impetus to replace a disciplined, long-term accumulation of virtue with more “boom-and-bust” cycles of sin and rebirth. Those of us partial to an older understanding of the workings of economy and society are challenged – in conditions like this -- to think of anew of ways in which the idea of ‘the sociological imagination’ can be defended.

¹ Hansen, Thomas Blom Cool Passion: The Political Theology of Modern Conviction. 2007 Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press

² “Virgin Mary’ on US motorway wall,” BBC News: World Edition, 21 April, 2005

³ “‘Vision of the Virgin’ vandalised,” BBC News: World Edition, 7 May, 2005 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4524057.stm).

⁴ Norman, Edward R. 1976 Church and Society in England 1770-1970: A Historical Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

⁵ Mahler, Jonathan 2005 “The Soul of the New Exburb,” The New York Times Magazine, March 27, 2005:30-57.

⁶ ibid.

⁷ Nixon, J. Peter 2003 “Not Dead Yet,” America: The National Catholic Weekly, Vol. 188(5), February 17, 2003 (http://www.americamagazine.org/BookReview.cfm?textID=2794&articletypeid=...), accessed 5 February, 2008.

⁸ Sharlet, Jeff 2005 “Inside America’s most powerful megachurch,” Harpers, May: 41-54.

⁹ Short on Priests, U.S. Catholics Outsource Prayers to Indian Clergy,” Saritha Rai, June 13, 2004, NYTimes.com (https://webmail.uchicago.edu/horde/imp/message.php?Horde=fe3019d7f77d60499f03398c) 6/15/04

¹⁰ “How Breweth Java With Jesus,” Damien Cave, The New York Times, October 23, 2005, Week in Review, p.4.

¹¹ Lord’s Gym website (http://www.lordsgym.org/page/page/4282989.htm), accessed 20 May, 2007.

¹² Schippert, Claudia 2003 “Sporting Heroic Bodies in a Christian War,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 5 (http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/art4-heroicbodies.html). and Comaroff, Jean 2006 “The Force that is Faith,” WISER Review 2:6-7.

¹³ See also evangelical discussions of sexuality-as-godliness such as The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love, a best seller first published in 1976 by Tim and Beverly LaHaye; cf. Linda Kintz, 1997, Between Jesus and the Market: the Emotions that Matter in Right Wing America. William (see next footnote) has gone so far as to speak of the “Christian-family-eroticism” formula in the contemporary US.

¹⁴ Connoly, William n.d. “The Contingency of Capitalism,” paper presented in a series sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory University of Chicago, October, 2006.

¹⁵ Comaroff, Jean and John 1999 "Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony," American Ethnologist. 26(3): 279-301.

¹⁶ “Survey Indicates More Americans “Without Faith,” American Athiest, November 22, 2001 (http://www.athiests.org/flas.line/athiest4.htm) 10/9/05.

¹⁷ Muehlebach, Andrea 2007 The Moral Neo-Liberal: Welfare State and Ethical Citizenship in Contemporary Italy, Doctoral dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago.

¹⁸ "Behind the Masks,” David Runciman, Guardian, 17 May, 2008, Review, p.4.

¹⁹ Weber, Max 2001 The Potestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Transl. By Talcott Parsons. London and New York: Routledge.

²⁰ This church, a branch of the prolific and much discussed Igreja Uni¬versal do Reino de Deus Brazil, has flourished in Southern Africa in the past couple of decades (Comaroff and Comaroff 200 “Second Comings: Neoprotestant Ethics and Millennial Capitalism in South Africa, and Elsewhere.” In P. Gifford [ed.], with D. Archard, T.A. Hart, N. Rapport, 2000 Years: Faith Culture and Identity in the Common Era. London:Routledge. & Kramer, Eric 1999 Possessing Faith: Commodification, Religious Subjectivity, and Community in a Brazilian Neo-Pentecostal Church. Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago).

²¹ Asad, Talal 2003 Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press.

Jean Comaroff is a professor anthropology at the University of Chicago and the University of Cape Town.