Melinda Cooper

Global Biopolitics Research Group
Institute of Health
University of East Anglia
M.Cooper@uea.ac.uk

 

I also believe human life is a sacred gift from our Creator. I worry about a culture that devalues life, and believe as your President I have an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world.

 

–George W. Bush

 

The Unborn at War

 

In early 2002, George Bush issued a press release proclaiming January 22 as National Sanctity of Human Life Day. In the speech he delivered for the occasion, Bush reminded the public that the American nation was founded on certain inalienable rights, chief among them being the right to life. The speech is remarkable in that it assiduously duplicates the phrasing of popular pro-life rhetoric: the visionaries who signed the Declaration of Independence had recognized that all were endowed with a fundamental dignity by virtue of their mere biological existence. This fundamental and inalienable right to life, Bush insists, should be extended to the most innocent and defenseless amongst us–including the unborn: “Unborn children should be welcomed in life and protected in law.” What is even more remarkable about the speech is its smooth transition from right to life to neoconservative just war rhetoric. Immediately after his invocation of the unborn, Bush recalls the events of September 11, which he interprets as acts of violence against life itself. These events, he claims, have engaged the American people in a war of indefinite duration, a war “to preserve and protect life itself,” and hence the founding values of the nation. In an interesting confusion of tenses, the unborn emerge from Bush’s speech as the innocent victims of a prospective act of terrorism while the historical legacy of the nation’s founding fathers is catapulted into the potential life of its future generations. Bush’s plea for life is both a requiem and a call to arms: formulated in a nostalgic future tense, it calls upon the American people to protect the future life of the unborn in the face of our “uncertain times,” while preemptively mourning their loss.¹

 

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it is easy to forget that the most explosive test confronting Bush in the early months of his presidency was not terrorism but the issue of whether or not to provide federal funds for research on embryonic stem cells. The issue had been on the agenda since 1998 when scientists funded by the private company Geron announced the creation of the first immortalized cell lines using cells from a frozen embryo and an aborted fetus. Bush, who had campaigned on an uncompromising pro-life agenda, put off making a decision for as long as possible. In July 2001 he made a visit to the Pope, who reiterated the Catholic Church’s opposition to any experimentation using human embryos (The White House, “Fact Sheet). On August 11, 2001, however, Bush declared that he would allow federal funding on research using the 60 or so embryonic stem cell lines that were already available (the actual number of viable cell lines turned out to be less than this). In making this concession to stem cell research, he claimed, the U.S. government was not condoning the destruction of the unborn. “Life and death decisions” had already been made by scientists, Bush argued. By intervening after the fact, the state was ensuring that life would nevertheless be promoted: in this case, not the life of the potential person but the utopia of perpetually renewed life promised by stem cell research.

 

In the months leading up to his decision, Bush had attempted to soften the blow for the religious right by extending universal health coverage to the unborn, who thereby became the first and only demographic in the U.S. to benefit from guaranteed and unconditional health care, at least until the moment of birth (Borger). However it translates in terms of actual health care practice, the gesture was momentous in that it formally acknowledged the unborn foetus as the abstract and universal subject of human rights–something the pro-life movement had been trying to do for decades.

 

In the meantime and in stark contrast to the U.S. government’s official moral stance on the field of stem cell research, U.S. legislation provides for the most liberal of interpretations of patent law, allowing the patenting of unmodified embryonic stem cell lines. For this reason, the most immediate effect of Bush’s decision to limit the number of stem cell lines approved for research was to ensure an enormous captive market for the handful of companies holding patents on viable stem cell lines. One company in particular is poised to profit from George Bush’s post life and death decision. The aptly named Geron, a start-up biotech company specializing in regenerative medicine, also happens to hold exclusive licensing rights to all the most medically important stem cell lines currently available. Uncomfortably positioned between the neo-liberal interests of the biomedical sector and of the moral absolutism of the religious right, Bush seems to have pulled off a political tour de force: while proclaiming his belief in the “fundamental value and sanctity of human life,” he was also able to “promote vital medical research” and, less ostentatiously, to protect the still largely speculative value of the emerging U.S. biotech sector.

 

In his press release announcing the new National Sanctity of Life Day, George Bush expressed his faith in the future of life. But what kind of future does George Bush believe in? And what tense is he speaking in? Bush’s pro-life rhetoric oscillates between two very different visions of life’s biomedical and political future: one that would equate “life itself” with the future of the nation, bringing the unborn under the absolute protection of the state, and the other that less conspicuously abandons biomedical research to the uncertain and speculative future of financial capital investment. On the one hand, life appears as an inalienable gift, one that must be protected at all costs from the laws of the market, while on the other hand, the patented embryonic stem cell line seems to function like an endlessly renewable gift–a self-regenerative life which is also a self-valorizing capital.

 

What appears to be at stake, behind the scenes of George Bush’s speech, is the determination of the value of life. How is the promise of biological life to be evaluated? Is its value relative or absolute? Perhaps what is most seriously at issue is the temporal evaluation of life, life’s relation to futurity (predetermined or speculative). How will this value, whatever it consists of, be realized? Given that the contemporary life sciences are tending to uncover a “proto-life” defined by its indifference to the limits of organic form, within what limits will its actualization nevertheless be constrained? Bush’s decision on stem cells provides two solutions to the problem of apprasing the value of life whose apparently conflicting valuations function together quite nicely in practice. According to media reports, Bush stacked his ethics committees with a half and half mix of pro-life supporters, determined to protect the sanctity of life, and representatives of the private biomedical sector, just as fervently opposed to any kind of federal regulation of stem cell research. Somehow the two positions managed to coexist in the person of George W. Bush.

 

In keeping with the general tone of his public declarations, George Bush’s speeches on the unborn weave together a subtle mix of three tendencies in American political life–neoconservatism, neoliberal economics, and pro-life or culture of life politics. These three tendencies have coexisted in various states of tension and alliance since the mid-seventies. But they’ve been getting closer. Neo-liberals such as George Gilder have started to openly affirm their evangelical faith. Neoconservatives such as William Kristol have aligned themselves with the evangelical right in its defense of the right to life and its opposition to stem cell research. Both have more recently championed the cause of creationism in American schools. Michael Novak, the free-market neoconservative, has always quite happily embodied the tension between a capitalism of endless growth and an unshakeable faith in the absolute limits of life. In the meantime, evangelicals who were once content to fight over domestic moral and racial politics have embraced an increasingly militant and interventionist line on U.S. imperialism, seeing U.S. victory in the Middle East as the necessary prelude to the end times and the second coming of Jesus Christ. Under George W. Bush and indeed in the person of George W. Bush, these tendencies have become increasingly difficult to distinguish.

 

Brought up as a mainstream Methodist, Bush was born again as an evangelical Christian around the age of forty (Kaplan 68-71; Phillips, American Dynasty 229-44). In the process, he moved from a religion based on personal self-transformation and discipline to one that espouses a decidedly more expansive, even world-transforming philosophy. More than one of Bush’s close associates have commented that he saw his investiture as President of the United States as a sign of divine election, one that linked his personal revival to that of America–and ultimately to that of the world. Luminaries of the evangelical right such as Pat Robertson could only agree with him. After all, it was largely thanks to the (white) evangelical right that he won the 2000 elections (Kaplan 3). And in return, the Bush administration allowed them an unprecedented influence in almost all areas of government policy (Kaplan 2-7).

 

Bush’s economic philosophy, too, reflects a dramatic transformation in Protestant views on wealth and sin. The ethic of late Protestantism is much more investment than work-oriented, much more amenable to the temptations of financial capital than to the disciplines of labor, and evangelical Christians have found a welcome ally in the writings of various free-market and supply-side economists. In his biography of the Bush family clan, Kevin Phillips has argued convincingly that George W. Bush is also essentially a supply-sider: despite appearances, his economic outlook is more informed by his experience in investment banking and finance than by the nuts and bolts of the oil industry (American Dynasty 113-48).

 

Bush’s conversion to the neoconservative cause was perhaps more contingent on the events of September 11 than is commonly recognized. In their careful study of the Bush team’s defense policy before late 2001, the political theorists Halper and Clarke point out that the early Bush was notably reluctant to engage in any nation building (America Alone 112-56). But the reasons for his alliance with the neocons, when it did happen, were certainly not lacking–since the mid-seventies, the neoconservatives had strategically aligned themselves with the prophets of supply-side economics, and during the nineties, their attentions turned to the populist appeal of the right to life movement (America Alone 42, 196-200). In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, they were able to present George W. Bush with a ready-made blueprint for war, one that would satisfy both the millenarian longings of the Christian right and the evangelistic tendencies of free-market capitalism.

 

How have these imperialist, economic and moral philosophies been able to work so tightly together under the presidency of George W. Bush and why have they converged so obsessively around the “culture” of promissory or unborn life? In order to address these questions, I first look at Georg Simmel’s work on the relationship between economics and faith. I then turn to a discussion of the links between Protestantism and capitalism, and more pertinently, between the history of American evangelical revivals and the specific cultures of American liberalism and life. U.S.-based evangelical Protestantism, I suggest, has developed a doctrine of debt, faith and life that differs in fundamental respects both from the Roman Catholic tradition and from mainline Reformationist Protestantism. These differences help explain the impulses informing the “culture of life” movement today. It is equally important, however, to look at the ways in which the evangelical movement has itself mutated over the last three decades, reorienting its traditional concerns with life, debt and faith around the focal point of sexual politics. The neo-evangelical movement, I argue, combines the revolutionary, future-oriented impulse of earlier American revivals with a new found sexual fundamentalism.² It is this contrary impulse that informs George W. Bush’s culture of life politics and is reflected perhaps most forcefully in his ambivalent stance on stem cell research. It is also characteristic of the ambivalent tendencies of capitalism today, in which a speculative reinvention of life comes together with a violent desire to re-impose the fundamentals, if only in the figure of a future or unborn life.

 

Economics and Faith

 

Increasingly, it would seem, it is becoming difficult to confront the most violent manifestations of contemporary economic imperialism without at the same time thinking through their religious, salvationist dimensions. Yet there is too little in the contemporary economic literature on the relationship between the two.³

 

One notable early exception is Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, a work that combines anthropological, historical and economic perspectives on the emergence of modern capitalism in ways that might still prove fruitful. Simmel notes that all economic relations, to the extent that they require trust in the future, involve a certain element of faith. Yet it is only in a money economy, he argues, that this faith goes beyond a simple inductive knowledge about the future and takes on a “quasi-religious” flavor (179). A money economy, after all, is one in which the object to be exchanged (money) is itself born of faith: all money is created out of debt and is therefore of a promissory or fiduciary nature, even before it is exchanged. Simmel draws attention to the two-sidedness of this faith: money on the one hand embodies a promise (to the creditor) and a threat of violence (to the debtor); it brings together obligation and trust. And in the case of market economies, this two-sided faith relation is extended to all members of a community. A capitalist economy, Simmel asserts, is one in which the whole life of a community is indebted to the debt form. But having established its “quasi-religious” nature, how does Simmel define the particular religious form of capitalism? What kind of faith does capitalism require? And what are its specific forms of violence? In his historical account of capitalism, Simmel makes it clear that the emerging market economies of the early modern period fundamentally differ from and disrupt the established forms of sovereign medieval power with their close ties to the Catholic Church and their foundations in landed wealth. A basic premise of his argument is that the philosophy of money needs to be distinguished from the various political theologies of sovereign power. What then is the difference between the philosophy of early modern Christian faith, which we have largely inherited from the Middle Ages, and the “quasi-religious” faith of capitalism?

 

It should be noted in the first place that the philosophy of Roman Catholicism, as exemplified in the work of someone like Thomas Aquinas, is at one and the same time a political and an economic theology, inasmuch as the authority of the Medieval Church extended to both domains. What unites these spheres, in the work of Aquinas, is a common understanding of foundation, origin and time (the transcendent or the eternal). This idea of foundation is most clearly enunciated in the doctrine of the Gift, which brings together the questions of theological, political and economic constitution. In Aquinas’s work, the Holy Spirit is the Gift of Life that reunites the finite and the infinite incarnations of the Holy Trinity (Basic Writings, 359-62). As such, the Gift is also the originary act through which God creates life, so that from the point of view of His creatures, life is a series of debt installments, a constant quest to repay the wages of sin. Implicit in his theology is the notion that the Gift (which is also a debt) is underwritten by an original presence, the eternal unity of finite and infinite, in which all debt is cancelled. In this way, Christianity promises the ultimate redemption of the debt of life, a final reunion of the finite and the infinite, even if it is unattainable in this world. It instructs the faithful to believe in a final limit to the wages of sin.

 

If we turn then to Aquinas’s work on jurisprudence, which includes a consideration of price and exchange, it becomes apparent that his economic philosophy shares precisely the same mathematics of debt.⁴ His premise here is that any institutionalized political form such as the state must be underwritten by a stable referent or use value, an ultimate guarantor of the value of value, in order to maintain a proper sense of justice. In this way, Aquinas’s economic philosophy is founded on the possibility of debt redemption. All exchange values must be measurable against a “just price,” in the same way that each human life is redeemable against an original Gift.

 

Historical work on the economic philosophy of the Middle Ages has emphasized just how closely such ideas reflect the actual position of the early Christian Church (see for example Gilchrist). The wealth of the medieval Church was based in landed property rather than in trade. For this reason, the Church was not opposed to a certain level of state regulation of exchange and to price control, as long as these worked to maintain the “just price” of Church property, while it virulently opposed certain forms of trading profit, particularly usury. Usury, after all, is a credit/debt relation that wagers on the instability of price. It aims to create money out of a perpetually renewed debt, and it does this without recourse to a fundamental reserve or guarantor of value. It has no faith in the measurability of value and no interest in the final redemption of debt.

 

It is here that Simmel locates the fundamental difference between the early economic theory of the Christian Church and the particular faith-form of modern capitalism. The capitalist economy, he argues, is a form of abstraction that dispenses with all absolute foundation, all possibility of final measure, all substantial value. “The fact that the values money is supposed to measure, and the mutual relations that it is supposed to express, are purely psychological makes such stability of measurement as exists in the case of space or weight impossible” (Simmel 190). Simmel doesn’t want to deny the historical existence of all kinds of institutions designed to uphold the measurability of exchange value (his Philosophy of Money is in part a detailed history of such institutions, from precious metals to the Central Bank to the labor theory of value). Without such institutions and their lawful forms of violence, no creditor would be able to demand repayment. Yet he insists that such institutions, considered singly, are both mutable and not foundational to the creative logic of capitalism. Modern capitalism, in other words, is a social form in which the law no longer figures as a source of creation, but rather as an institution charged with the power of sustaining the faith a posteriori, through the threat of violence. In stark contrast to the economic theology of the Medieval Church, capitalism is a mode of abstraction that generalizes the logic of usury and constantly revolutionizes any institutional limits to its self-reproduction. What then is its particular mode of faith?

 

Born-Again Nation: American Evangelicalism and the Culture of Life

 

This is the question that preoccupies Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic. In Calvinism, Weber identifies the first religion to celebrate the life of business and the disciplines of labor, not merely as means to an end but as the very manifestation of faith in the Protestant God. In contrast to the Roman Catholic tradition, with its repudiation of earthly pursuits, Protestantism brings “God within the world” and espouses an immersive, transformative relation to God’s creation, rather than a contemplative one (Weber 75). And in late seventeenth-century variations on Protestantism, argues Weber, there is an even more extreme change in attitudes towards wealth creation–here usury, the creation of money from promise and debt, is accepted as a legitimate way of expressing one’s faith. This move away from a Calvinist doctrine of predestination, suggests Weber, is reflected in the rise of later, less “aristocratic” forms of Protestant faith such as Methodism, in which the doctrine of regeneration or the new birth, as espoused by John Wesley, becomes central (89-90). The Methodist philosophy of conversion through rebirth develops in England but will flourish in America–and it is here that Weber closes his analysis.

 

Weber’s perspective on the European Protestant Reformation needs to be supplemented by an account of the specific inventiveness of American Protestantism–particularly in its understanding of life, faith, and wealth.⁵ Historian Mark Noll notes that the most successful currents in American Protestantism were self-consciously evangelical: they practiced a radically democratized form of worship, with a focus on the personal experience of conversion and rebirth (5). In the process, the American take on Methodism freed sanctification from the necessity of institutional mediation to an extent that could hardly have been imagined by Wesley himself. For the American evangelicals, being born-again was an experience of autonomous, although involuntary, self-regeneration–the Holy Spirit being wholly implicated in the self and vice versa, just as the self was implicated in the world.

 

Moreover, the American evangelical experience was reflected in an enthusiasm for wealth-creation far surpassing its counterparts in the European tradition. Here, suggests Noll, the anti-authoritarianism of the American evangelicals expresses itself as an aversion to foundational value, a belief in the powers of money that separates promise from all institutional guarantee and regulating authority, figuring the market itself as a process of radical self-organization and alchemy (174). In this way the doctrine of the new birth merges imperceptibly with a theology of the free market, one that situates the locus of wealth creation in the pure debt-form–the regeneration of money from money and life from life, without final redemption. This is a culture of life-as-surplus that is wholly alien to the Catholic doctrine of the gift and its attendant political theologies of sovereign power. Pushed to its extreme conclusions, evangelicalism seems to suggest that the instantaneous conversion of the self–which is held to render an ecstatic surplus of emotion–is the emotive equivalent of a financial transmutation of values, the delirious process through which capital seeks to recreate itself as surplus.⁶

 

The doctrine of regeneration imparts a highly idiosyncratic vitalism to the evangelical understanding of nationhood. Again as detailed by Noll, the extraordinary rise of Protestant evangelical faith between the Revolution and the Civil War was decisive in fusing together the discourses of republicanism and of religious experience, so that in an important sense the language of American foundation and independence became inseparable from that of evangelical conversion (173-74). It is therefore not only in the minds of latter-day fundamentalists that the founding of America came to be figured as an act of God-given grace: such analogies were already sufficiently self-evident in late nineteenth century America that Abraham Lincoln was able to refer to Americans as God’s almost chosen people, calling for a new birth of the American nation itself.

 

What is the relationship between these earlier forms of American evangelicalism and the right to life movement of the 1970s? What has become of the experience of rebirth today? And what are its connections to evangelical views on capitalism? In order to respond to these questions, we need to look at the ways in which U.S. capitalism itself has mutated over the last three decades, redefining its relationship to the countries of the rest of the world, both creditors and debtors. In what follows, I argue that U.S. imperialism today is founded on the precarious basis of a perpetually renewed debt–and thus seems to take the evangelical doctrine of wealth-creation to its extreme conclusions. It is this extreme form of economic faith that is also celebrated in neo-liberal theories of wealth creation.

 

Debt Imperialism: The U.S. Since 1971

 

In his study of the changing faces of U.S. imperialism, revised and rewritten over three decades, the economist Michael Hudson has argued that the nature of U.S. imperial power underwent a dramatic change in the early 1970s, when Nixon abandoned the gold-dollar standard of the Bretton Woods era (Super Imperialism). Hudson was originally hired under the Nixon administration to report on the costs of the Vietnam War and its connection to the U.S.’s budget deficit. In 1972, and at the behest of various federal administrations, he published a full-length study on the question. His conclusions were damning: by demonetizing gold, the U.S. had initiated a form of super-imperialism that effectively left it off the hook in terms of debt repayment. Instead of taking this as an admonition, however, the U.S. administration received it as an unintended recipe for success, one that should henceforth be maintained at all costs. Hudson’s book reportedly sold well in Washington, although his work was strongly challenged.

 

Hudson’s argument is complex, and at odds with the mainstream of left-wing commentaries, which tend to see America’s spiraling debt as the harbinger of its imminent decline. He identifies the early 1970s as a turning point. Before 1971, the U.S. was a creditor to other nations. In the period following World War II, the dollar was convertible against gold and thus remained indexed to a conventional unit of measurement. While the gold standard remained in force, the political and economic limits of the American nation were inherently circumscribed. It was the gold standard that prevented the U.S. from running up excessive balance-of-payment deficits, since foreign nations could always cash in surplus-dollars for gold. As a nation, the U.S. was underwritten by an at least nominal foundation.

 

When gold was demonetized, however, the U.S. abandoned even this conventional guarantor of exchange value. As foreign governments could no longer cash in their surplus-dollars for gold, it was now possible for the U.S. government to run up enormous balance-of-payment deficits without being held to account. Indeed, it became feasible for the U.S., as a net importer, to create debt without limit and to sustain its power through this very process. Hudson contends that such a strategy inaugurates a fundamentally new kind of imperialism–a super-imperialism that is precisely dependent on the endless issuing of a debt for which there is no hope of final redemption. Hudson explains the details of this process as follows: all the dollars that end up in European, Asian, and Eastern central banks as a result of the U.S.’s massive importing now have no place to go but to the U.S. Treasury. With the gold option ruled out, foreign nations now have no other “choice” but to use their surplus dollars to buy U.S. Treasury obligations (and to a lesser extent corporate stocks and bonds). What this effectively amounts to is a forced loan, since in the process, they lend their surplus dollars back to the U.S. Treasury, thereby financing U.S. government debt. This forced loan, Hudson points out, is a losing proposition, as the falling dollar progressively erodes the value of U.S. Treasury IOUs (Hudson ix). And it is a “loan” without foreseeable return: U.S. debt cannot and will not be repaid, but will be rolled over indefinitely, at least as long as the present balance of international power remains in place (xv-xvi). The momentum attained by these dynamics is now such, according to Hudson, that U.S. debt creation effectively functions as the source of world capitalism, the godhead of a cult without redemption. Trends that were initiated in 1972 have now become blatant, particularly under George W. Bush: the U.S. Treasury has run up an international debt of over $60 billion, a deficit that finances not only its trade but also its federal budget deficit. Moreover, he argues, the cycle of U.S. debt creation has now become so integral to the workings of world trade that the consequences of any upheaval might well appear apocalyptic, even to countries outside the U.S.⁷

 

Hudson’s work can help us understand the character of U.S. nationhood and imperialism today, and explain how we define a nation that seeks to recreate itself and world power relations out of a fount of perpetual debt. In terms of traditional theories of economic and political nationhood, Hudson’s analysis seems to lead to the unsettling conclusion that the American state is rigorously devoid of foundation, since the possibility of its continued self-reproduction has come to coincide with the temporality of perpetual debt. As a nation, the U.S. no longer rests on any minimal reserve or substance but, in tandem with the turnover of debt, exists in a time warp where the future morphs into the past and the past into the future without ever touching down in the present. In economic terms then, the American nation has become purely promissory or fiduciary–America demands faith and promises redemption but refuses to be held to final account. Its growing debt is already renewed just as it comes close to redemption, already born again before it can come to term. America is the unborn born again.

 

And yet the importance of Hudson’s work is to show that there is nothing ethereal about the imperialism of U.S. debt creation. Indeed it is through the very movement by which it renounces all economic foundation–Hudson claims–that the U.S. is able to reassert itself as the most belligerent of political forces and the most protectionist of trading partners. The position of the U.S. at the very vortex of debt imperialism has meant that it has been able to function as a profligate, protectionist state, spending enormous amounts on the military, domestic trade subsidies, and R&D, while many other countries have had to subject themselves to the rigors of IMF-imposed budget restraint (xii). In other words, while the U.S., acting through the IMF and World Bank, imposes draconian measures of debt redemption on countries indebted to the IMF and the World Bank, it alone “acts uniquely without financial constraint,” turning debt into the very source of its power (xii).

 

How has the U.S. ensured that the surplus dollars held by its foreign trading partners would be effectively reinvested in U.S. government securities? According to Hudson, essentially through the use–real or threatened–of institutional violence. The U.S. exercises unilateral veto power within such purportedly multilateral institutions as the IMF and World Bank (Susan George and Fabrizio Sabelli have analyzed the successive internal reforms of these institutions as so many attempts to establish an orthodox doctrine of the faith in the arena of world economic policy). But the economic prescriptions of the World Bank and IMF have also, necessarily, been backed up by the threat of military retaliation. U.S. diplomats, notes Hudson, have long made it perfectly clear that any return to gold or attempt to buy up U.S. companies would be considered as an act of war (Super Imperialism ix). The irony here is that the U.S.’s exorbitant military expenditure has been financed through the very debt-imperialism it is designed to enforce!

 

All this suggests the need for a nuanced interpretation of the nature of U.S. nationalism in the contemporary era, one that takes into account both the deterritorializing and reterritorializing trends of debt imperialism. For it implies that the very loss of foundation is precisely what enables the U.S. to endlessly refound itself, in the most violent and material of ways. In the era of debt imperialism, nationalism can only be a re-foundation of that which is without foundation–a return of the future, within appropriate limits.⁸ The endless revolution (rolling over) of debt and the endless restoration of nationhood are inseparably entwined. The one enables the other. And the one perpetuates the other, so that revolution becomes a project of perpetual restoration and restoration a project of perpetual revolution. It is only when the double nature of this movement is grasped that we can understand the simultaneously revolutionary and restorative nature of contemporary capitalism in general: its evangelism and its fundamentalism.

 

U.S. imperialism, in other words, needs to be understood as the extreme, “cultish” form of capital, one that not only sustains itself in a precarious state of perpetually renewed and rolled-over nationhood but which also, of necessity, seeks to engulf the whole world in its cycle of debt creation.⁹ The economic doctrine corresponding to U.S. debt imperialism can be found in several varieties of neo-liberalism, in particular the supply-side theories of the Reagan era. Its theological expression can be found in neo-evangelicalism, the various revived and militant forms of Christian evangelical faith that sprang up in the early seventies. Supply-side economists and neo-evangelicals share a common obsession with debt and creationism. For supply-side theorists such as George Gilder, economics requires an understanding of the operations of faith, and for the right-wing evangelicals who cite him, the creation of life and the creation of money are inseparable as questions of biblical interpretation.

 

Neoliberalism: The Economics of Faith

 

It is surely not incidental that one of the most influential popularizers of neo-liberal economic ideas, the journalist George Gilder, also happens to be a committed evangelical and creationist whose work argues for the essentially religious nature of economic phenomena.¹⁰ Gilder’s classic work, Wealth and Poverty, is as much a meditation on faith as a celebration of U.S. debt imperialism and debt-funded growth. Drawing on anthropological work on the relationship between promise, belief, and debt, Gilder sets out to explain the particular faith-form required by contemporary U.S. power. The new capitalism, he asserts, implies a theology of the gift–“the source of the gifts of capitalism is the supply side of the economy”–but one which differs in fundamental respects from Roman Catholic philosophies of debt and redemption (Wealth and Poverty 28). Here there are no fundamental values, no just price or Word against which the fluctuations of faith can be measured and found wanting. Nor is there any final redemption to look forward to. What distinguishes the gift cycle of the new capitalism, claims Gilder, is its aversion to beginnings and ends (23). In the beginning was not the Word, God the Father, or even the gold standard, but rather the promise, a promise that comes to us from an unknowable future, like Jesus before the resurrection. And in the end is not redemption but rather the imperative to renew the promise, through the perpetual rolling over of U.S. government debt. The promise may well be entirely uncertain, but this doesn’t mean that it won’t be realized at all. On the contrary, Gilder insists that it will be realized, over and over again, in the form of a perpetually renascent surplus of life. The return on debt may be unpredictable, but it will return nevertheless (25)–as long as we maintain the faith:

 

Capitalist production entails faith–in one’s neighbors, in one’s society, and in the compensatory logic of the cosmos. Search and you shall find, give and you will be given unto, supply creates its own demand. (24)

 

Importantly, what Gilder is proposing here is not merely an economic doctrine but a whole philosophy of life and rebirth. What neo-liberalism promises, he insists, is not merely the regeneration of capital but the regeneration of life on earth–out of the promissory futures of U.S. debt imperialism. It is this belief that informs Gilder’s strident anti-environmentalism (and that of many of his evangelical and neo-liberal siblings). In a world animated by debt imperialism, there can be no final exhaustion of the earth’s resources, no ecological limits to growth that won’t at some point–just in time–be renewed and reinvigorated by the perpetual renascence of the debt-form itself (259-69). His is a doctrine of the faith that not only promises to renew the uncertain future but also to reinfuse matter itself with a surplus of life, over and over again. The irony of this position lies in its proximity to the technological promise of regenerative medicine. The burgeoning U.S. stem cell market is one instance in which the logic of speculative accumulation–the production of promise from promise–comes together with the particular generativity of the immortalized embryonic stem cell line, an experimental life-form that also promises to regenerate its own potential for surplus, without end. What Marx referred to as the “automatic fetish” of financial capital here attempts to engender itself as a body in permanent embryogenesis.

 

In this way, Gilder’s theology of capital sustains a belief in the world-regenerative, revitalizing powers of U.S. debt imperialism and its technological futures. It also offers one of the most comprehensive expositions of the neo-evangelical faith today. And it is no coincidence that his work is frequently cited in the voluminous evangelical literature on financial management, investment, and debt, where the creation of life and the creation of money are treated as analogous questions of theological doctrine.¹¹ This is a faith that, in the first instance, separates the creation of money from all institutional foundations or standards of measurement; a religion that conceives of life as a perpetual renascence of the future, unfettered by origin.

 

This, however, doesn’t mean that the question of foundations is overcome. On the contrary, Gilder’s neo-liberal philosophy is exemplary precisely because it brings together the utopian, promissory impulse of speculative capital with the imperative to re-impose the value of value, even in the face of the most evanescent of futures. The problematic can be summarized as follows: How will the endless promise of the debt be realized, distributed, consumed? How are we to restore the foundations of that which is without foundation? How will the gift of capital, which emanates from the U.S., be forced to repatriate within the confines of America the nation? After all, it could just as easily not return, go roaming around the world and reinvest somewhere else–or not at all. Gilder’s theology of capitalism is haunted by the possibility that the promissory future of the debt will not be reinvested within the proper limits of the American nation; that the promise that is America will not be realized, reborn, rolled over. More generally perhaps, he expresses the fear that faith, in the long run, may fail to reinvest in the property form at all–the fear of revolution without restoration, a gift without obligation. The law of value needs to be reasserted; actual limits need to be re-imposed on the realization of the future.

 

For Gilder, these limits are of three mutually reinforcing kinds. The first is summed up in the brute law of property: there is no economic growth without inequality, scarcity, and poverty. There is no debt imperialism without debt servitude. The second is of a political kind: U.S.-based economic enterprise must be shored up by a “strong nation,” a nation, that is, that has emptied itself as far as possible of all social obligations towards its members, while investing heavily in law and order. Implied in these two conditions are certain limits on the biological reproduction of the American nation: America must continue to reproduce itself as white, within the proper restrictions of the heterosexual family. In this way, Gilder’s assertion of the law of property is strictly inseparable from his white nationalism and his avowed “moral conservatism.” The refoundation of value is the nation, which is the property form, which in turn is realized in the most conservative of moral institutions–the straight, white, reproductive family. It is this amalgam of political, economic, and moral law that gets summed up in the notion of a “right to life” of the unborn. The unborn, after all, is the future American nation in its promissory form, the creative power of debt recontained within a redemptive politics of familial life. And as the new right has made clear, its reproduction is the particular form of debt servitude required of the nation’s women:

 

It is in the nuclear family that the most crucial process of defiance and faith is centered. . . . Here emerge the most indispensable acts of capital formation: the psychology of giving, saving and sacrifice, on behalf of an unknown future, embodied in a specific child–a balky bundle of possibilities that will yield its social reward even further into time than the most foresighted business plan. (Gilder, Men and Marriage 198-99)

 

It is no accident then that the counter-active tendencies of neo-liberal conservatism come to a head on the question of embryonic life and its scientific regeneration. The stem cell line embodies the most radical materialization of the evangelical faith and its promise of an endlessly renewable surplus of life. At the same time, however, it threatens to undermine the very precepts of normative reproduction and therefore needs to be recaptured within the social and legislative limits of the potential person–and its right to life.

 

The Unborn Born Again

 

The movement that we now recognize as born-again evangelical Christianity underwent an extraordinary reawakening in the early seventies. In its revived form, the evangelical movement took up the Protestant ethic of self-transformation–impelling its believers to be born-again, in a kind of personal reenactment of Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection–and turned it into something quite different in scope. What distinguished this movement both from main-line Protestantism and from earlier evangelical revivals was its intense focus on the arena of sexual politics and family values. Faced with a rising tide of new left political demands, from feminism to gay rights, the evangelical movement of the 1970s gave voice to a new-found nostalgia–one that obsessed over the perceived decline of the heterosexual, male-headed, reproductive white family. The concerns of the right to life movement have ranged from the introduction of domestic violence laws to equal opportunities, and most recently, gay marriage. But if there was one issue that focalized the energies of the early movement it was the Roe vs. Wade decision of 1973. As one editorial of the late seventies pointed out, Roe vs. Wade was the “moment life began, conception–‘quickening,’ viability, birth: choose your own metaphor–for the right to life movement” (“The Unborn and the Born Again” 5). The born-again evangelical right was reborn as a mission to save the unborn.¹²

 

We now so commonly associate the evangelical right with a “pro-life” politics that it is difficult to recognize the novelty of this revival. The evangelical obsession with the question of abortion was, however, unprecedented in the history of Protestant evangelicalism–so much so that the early neo-evangelicals borrowed their pro-life rhetoric from orthodox Catholicism, if only to later rechannel it through distinctly mass-mediated, populist and decentralized forms of protest (see Harding 189-91). In the process, the evangelical right brought a new element into its own traditions of millenarianism and born-againism. For evangelicals awaiting the millennium, the unborn came to be identified with the last man and the last generation–indeed the end of the human race. At the same time, it was this last–and future–generation that most urgently required the experience of conversion or rebirth. The evangelical tradition had long identified the unsaved soul with Jesus before the resurrection, but now both were being likened to the unborn child in utero. In the born-again how-to tracts of the seventies, Jesus had become the unborn son of God, while we were all–prior to salvation–the fetal inheritors of the Lord.¹³ In this context of tortuous temporal amalgamations, it was no surprise that the question–can the unborn be born again?–emerged as a matter worthy of serious doctrinal debate.

 

From the first, evangelicals understood the pro-life movement to be a project of national restoration. The United States was founded on religious principles–indeed on the principle of the right to life–according to the new evangelical right. Roe v. Wade–a decision that after all was most likely to affect young white women–was decried as an act of war that threatened to undermine the future reproduction of the (white) American nation, its possibility of a redemptive afterlife.¹⁴ It was also the last and fatal blow in the protracted process of secularization and pluralism that had led to the decline of America’s founding ideals. Roe v. Wade had emptied the gift of life of all foundation–the future existence of America had been effectively undermined, offered up in a precarious, promissory form, a promise that might never be redeemed. Ontologically, it seemed, America was suspended in the strange place that is also reserved for the frozen embryo (hence, an obsessive focus not simply on the unborn but more particularly on the frozen or in vitro unborn).

 

At the same time, and characteristically for the evangelical right, these concerns about the sexual and racial reproduction of the American nation come together with a sense of malaise in the face of America’s growing state of indebtedness. As Pat Robertson remarks: “Any nation that gives control of its money creation and regulation to any authority outside itself has effectively turned over control of its own future to that body” (The New World Order 118). Here, the idea that the reproducers of the unborn nation might be at risk of defaulting feeds into the fear that the U.S.’s economic future might be similarly imperiled, suspended as it were on the verge of a promise without collateral. Thus, along with its enthusiastic support for U.S. debt-imperialism, the evangelical right also gives voice to the suspicion that the economic reproduction of the U.S. is becoming dangerously precarious, promissory, contingent, a matter of faith–in urgent need of propping up.¹⁵ The nightmare of someone like Pat Robertson is that the promissory future of U.S. debt may not be restored within the territorial limits of America itself, that the future may fail to materialize within the proper limits of self-present nationhood. And because he understands that the nation lies at the nexus of sexual and economic reproduction, he calls for a politics of restoration on both fronts.

 

Delirious as it may seem, the religious right at least recognizes that from the point of view of traditional state financing, the postmodern American nation is literally poised on the verge of birth–unborn–its future contingent on the realization of a debt that has not yet and may never come to maturity. Their fear is that its potential may be realized in the form of excess, escaping appropriation. And in anticipation of this threat, they call for a proper rebirthing of the unborn, the resurrection of a new man and a new nation, from out of the future. But what would it mean to re-found the future? In what sense is it possible to re-birth the unborn? It is in the form of this temporal ellipsis that the right to life movement articulates its politics of nationhood: what needs to be restored is of course the foundational moment of America, the act through which the Founding Fathers inaugurated the nation, but this moment is itself constitutive of the right to life of the unborn, contingent, in other words, on the return of the not-yet. The pro-life movement has invented an extraordinary number of ritualistic methods for memorializing this contingent future: from online memorials to the unborn to court cases undertaken on behalf of the future victims of genocidal abortion. Herein lies the novelty of (neo)-fundamentalism, of fundamentalism for the neo-liberal era: in the face of a politics that operates in the speculative mode, fundamentalism becomes the struggle to re-impose the property form in and over the uncertain future. This property form, as the right to life movement makes clear, is inextricably economic and sexual, productive and reproductive. It is, in the last instance, a claim over the bodies of women. Except here the name of the dead father is replaced by the image of the unborn child as sign and guarantor of women’s essential indebtedness.

 

Under Reagan, the rhetoric of the pro-life movement, with its rewriting of the Declaration of Independence as a right to life tract, entered into the mainstream of American political discourse, so that a hard-line conservative such as Lewis A. Lehrman could declare that the moral and political restoration of America would depend on the Republican Party welcoming the unborn “in life and law” (“The Right to Life”). Reagan himself, however, failed to live up to the expectations of his moral electorate, and it was not until George W. Bush came to power that the pro-life movement acceded to anything like a real presence within the decision-making processes of government. When it did so, it was after making a detour via the neoconservative right. In the course of the nineties, a period when both moralist and militant extremes of conservative thinking were on the back burner, a second generation of neoconservatives began to make overtures to the religious right, inviting pro-life representatives to work at their think-tanks while they themselves began to issue public declarations linking the political and strategic future of the American nation to its upholding the “founding” principle of the right to life.¹⁶ Since then, pro-lifers and neoconservatives have joined forces in mounting a more general assault on all kinds of embryo research, particularly in the area of stem-cell science. It was no surprise when the neoconservative Catholic thinker Michael Novak announced that Bush’s compromise stem-cell decision of 2001 threatened the unborn potential of America, and by extension the future salvation of the rest of the world:

 

this nation began its embryonic existence by declaring that it held to a fundamental truth about a right to life endowed in us by our Creator. The whole world depends on us upholding that principle. (Novak, “The Principle’s the Thing”)

 

But the 1990s had also seen more mainline, previously “secular” neocons such as William Kristol launching himself into the arena of right to life politics, in a series of impassioned stay of execution pleas on behalf of the unborn. For Kristol, the connection between a muscular, neo-imperialist foreign policy and a pro-life position is clear–what is at stake in both cases is the restoration of an emasculated America, the rebirth of its unborn nationhood:

 

We will work to build a consensus in favor of legal protection for the unborn, even as we work to build an America more hospitable to children and more protective of families. In doing so, our country can achieve a commitment to justice and a new birth of freedom. (Kristol and Weigel 57)

 

It is probably too early to assess the long-term consequences of these developments, but at the very least it might be ventured that the alliance between the neoconservative and Christian Right has brought a new and alarmingly literal legitimacy to the war-mongering, millenarian and crusading rhetoric of the right to life movement. After all, pro-life representatives now occupy key advisory positions at every level of U.S. government.¹⁷ The most obvious effect of this presence so far has been in the arena of foreign aid, where U.S. federal funds are now indexed to stringent anti-abortion, anti-prostitution, anti-contraception, and pro-abstinence guidelines. A less visible though surely no less significant phenomenon is the massive presence of evangelical missionaries in Bush’s military operations in the Middle East.

 

On a rhetorical level too, George Bush has consistently drawn together the language of the Christian Right–with its evocations of a war on the unborn, its monuments and memorials to the unborn–with the newly legitimized, neoconservative defense of just war. Is this the harbinger of a new kind of war doctrine, one that returns to the doctrine of just war theory, while declaring justice to be without end? And one that speaks in the name of life, like humanitarian warfare, while substituting the rights of the unborn for those of the born? Certainly, this has been the subtext of George W. Bush’s official declarations on the “culture of life” in America.¹⁸

 

As a counter to these slippages, it is important to remember that the most immediate precedent to the terrorist attacks of September 11 can be found in the string of bombings and murders committed by home-grown right to life groups and white supremacist sympathizers over the last few decades. These attacks have attracted nothing like the full-spectrum military response occasioned by September 11. On the contrary, one of the ironies of Bush’s war on terror is that it is being used as a pretext for bringing the culture of life to the rest of the world. In this way, even as it emanates from the precarious center of debt imperialism, Bush’s politics of life collaborates with the many other neofundamentalist movements of the neoliberal era.

 

 

Notes

 

1. I am here thinking of the temporal ellipsis about which Brian Massumi writes in “Requiem for our Prospective Dead (Toward a Participatory Critique of Capitalist Power),” 40-64. The motif of war was present in right to life rhetoric from the beginning. See for example Marx.

 

2. I here follow Nancy T. Ammerman’s account of the American evangelical movement and its 20th century fundamentalist mutations (1-63). I am particularly concerned with the evangelical revival that occurred in the mid-seventies and has come to be associated with “born againism” and pro-life politics. The evangelical movement is generally understood to be an offshoot of mainline Protestantism. Other commentators have pointed out that both the Protestant and Catholic Churches sprouted right-wing, evangelizing and free-market wings around the same time. See for example Kintz 218, 226, and 230. This convergence is evident in George W. Bush’s frequent recourse to the advice of the Vatican. Because of this convergence, I cite the work of the Catholic free-market neoconservative Michael Novak, who has had a considerable influence over (and arguably been influenced by) evangelical thinking.

 

3. There is a recent and growing literature on the role of emotions in finance; see in particular Pixley. Two interesting recent works on the relationship between faith, credibility, credit/debt relations, and the question of political constitution are Aglietta and Orléan’s edited La Monnaie Souveraine, and Aglietta and Orléan, La Monnaie: Entre Violence et Confiance. Following Aglietta and Orléan, I don’t make any essential distinction between the gift and the debt, assuming that what constitutes a gift for one person will probably be experienced as a debt by another. Where I do draw a distinction is between different kinds and temporalities of the gift/debt relationship. In other words, the pertinent question here is whether or not the gift/debt is redeemable.

 

4. For an overview of Aquinas’s economic philosophy, see the articles collected in Blaug, St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).

 

5. What interests me here is the importance of born-againism or regeneration within American evangelicalism in general. I make no attempt to provide an overview of the various denominational splits within American Protestant evangelicalism, although this would certainly be relevant for an historical understanding of the Republican-Southern Baptist alliance today. For a detailed insight into this history, see Phillips.

 

6. There is thus an important distinction to be drawn between the Catholic philosophy of life (which presumes sovereign power) and the Protestant, evangelical culture of life, where life is in the first instance understood as a form of self-regenerative debt. In the Protestant tradition, sovereign power is not so much formative as reformative–it is the attempt to re-found that which is without foundation. One important corollary of my argument is that Agamben’s philosophy of bare life is wholly unsuited to a critical engagement with the contemporary phenomenon of culture of life politics. Indeed, to the extent that he reinstates the sovereign model of power–if only in inverted form–as constitutive of power itself, his philosophical gesture comes very close to that of the right-to-life movement. Bare life, in other words, is the suspended inversion of the vita beata and finds its most popular iconic figure in the unborn foetus. Agamben’s philosophy of biopolitics is not so much a negative theology as a theology in suspended animation.

 

7. For a complementary reading of U.S. debt and its role in the financialization of world capital markets, see Brenner 59-61 and 206-08. See also Naylor for a fascinating account of the links between neoliberalism, debt servitude, and neo-evangelical movements in South America and elsewhere. It should be noted here that not all contemporary evangelical philosophies of debt are necessarily imperialist. Liberation theology is one instance of a faith that works against Third World debt.

 

8. The neoconservative movement is quite lucid about the speculative, future-oriented thrust of its return to fundamentals. It is here that one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, identifies its distinguishing feature: “What is ‘neo’ (‘new’) about this conservatism,” he proffers, “is that it is resolutely free of nostalgia. It, too, claims the future–and it is this claim, more than anything else, that drives its critics on the Left into something approaching a frenzy of denunciation” (xii).

 

9. Here I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the cult in “Capitalism as Religion.” In this piece, Benjamin asserts that the specificity of capitalism as a mode of worship lies in its tendency to dispense with any specific dogma or theology other than the perpetuation of faith (288). The religion of capital, he argues, comes into its own when God himself is included in the logic of the promise and can no longer function as its transcendent reference point or guarantor. In its ultimate cultic form, the capitalist relation tends to become a promise that sustains its own promise, a threat that sustains its own violence. The gifts it dispenses emanate from a promissory future and forego all anchorage in the past. In this sense, it institutes a relation of guilt from which there is no relief or atonement.

 

10. There is debate about the intellectual sources of neoliberalism. In his recent history of the concept, Harvey discerns a complex fusion of monetarism, rational expectations, public choice theory, and the “less respectable but by no means uninfluential ‘supply-side’ ideas of Arthur Laffer” (54). Like many others, he points to the crucial role played by the journalist and investment analyst George Gilder in popularizing neoliberal and supply-side economic ideas. However, I here follow Paul Krugman’s more detailed analysis of supply-side theory to argue that the supply-siders actually offered a radical critique of neoclassically inspired models of equilibrium economics such as monetarism. It was on the question of debt and budget deficits that at least some supply-siders took issue with the more traditional conservative economists. On these points, see Krugman 82-103 and 151-69. The supply-side gospel has come to be associated with Reagonomics–and it was under Reagan that U.S. federal debt first began to outpace GDP in relative terms (Krugman 152). But by far the most extreme experiment in deficit free-fall has been carried out under the administration of George W. Bush (Phillips 119-28; Press).

 

Others have analyzed the religious dimension of neoliberalism by looking at Chicago-school monetarism (see for example Nelson and Taylor). I tend to think that monetarism is an easy target and that supply-side ideas, particularly as espoused by George Gilder, had much more influence on actual economic policy and popular cultures of neoliberalism. In this sense too, I tend to see complexity-influenced approaches to economics not as a counter to neoliberalism (as Taylor does) but as its ultimate expression. Gilder, for example, is a committed complexity theorist. For Gilder’s thoughts on U.S. debt, see Wealth and Poverty, 230; for his views on budget deficits under Bush, see “Market Economics and the Conservative Movement.”

 

11. For a more detailed discussion on the sources of evangelical economics, see Lienesch 94-138.

 

12. On the history of Roe v. Wade and the Christian Right, see Petchesky. On the specific links between the right to life movement and the born-again movement see Harding, 183-209.

 

How can we situate this most recent revival of evangelicalism within the longer tradition of American Protestantism? It might be argued that the born-again movement of the seventies brings together the abiding concerns of the various evangelical strains of American Protestantism–republicanism, anti-authoritarianism and personal rebirth–with the reactionary tendencies of Baptist fundamentalism. What is now known as the fundamentalist wing of evangelical Christianity emerged in the early part of the twentieth century as an internal reaction against progressive forces within the Protestant Church. “Fundamentalism,” writes Ammerman, “differs from traditionalism or orthodoxy or even a mere revivalist movement. It differs in that it is a movement in conscious, organized opposition to the disruption of those traditions and orthodoxies” (14). After losing battles to prohibit the teaching of evolution in schools, fundamentalists retreated into relative political obscurity even as a new generation of non-separatist evangelists such as Billy Graham were increasingly willing to engage in public life. It was only in the seventies that this rift was repaired, as evangelicals started obsessing about the moral decline of America and fundamentalists once again came out of hiding to do battle for their faith. No doubt this reunion accounts for the coexistence of apparently contradictory tendencies within the contemporary born-again movement: future-oriented, transformative, but reactive nevertheless. On the differences between fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist Protestantism, see Ammerman, 1-63.

 

13. Again, Harding presents a compelling account of this identification in the work of fundamentalist Baptist Jerry Falwell. But it recurs in the literature of the period. For an insight into the born-again ethos of this era, see Graham.

 

14. On the links between the right to life movement and white supremacist groups, see Mason’s astonishing essay “Minority Unborn.”

 

15. There is thus a fundamental ambivalence within the economic writings of the evangelicals, who on the one hand celebrate U.S. debt-creationism and on the other obsess over the need to cancel all debt, restore strict tariff and exchange controls, and reinstate the gold standard. On this point, see Lienesch, 104-07. Interestingly, the same ambivalence can be found amongst supply-side economists, some of whom advocate a return to the gold standard.

 

16. On the convergence of the neoconservatives and the Religious Right, see Diamond 178-202 and Halper and Clarke 196-200.

 

17. On the increasingly global reach of right-wing evangelical opinion, see Kaplan 219-43.

 

18. In his book Holy Terrors, Bruce Lincoln explores the ways in which George W. Bush’s speeches make implicit reference to the language of the Religious Right, often borrowing their syntax and phraseology from popular evangelical tracts.

 

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