My initial theological reflection on late capitalist consumer culture emerged out of my work as a liturgical musician in diverse Catholic communities throughout the United States. Shaped by the twentieth century Liturgical Movement, both my pastoral ministry and my scholarly work has been animated by the Movement’s emphasis on the vital link between liturgy and justice. One of the hallmarks of much of the scholarship that grew out of the Movement is a conviction that liturgical practice—and especially the Eucharist—has the capacity to shape or inspire ethical action in the world, supporting Christian resistance to a range of forces in Western culture, including materialism, nationalism, consumerism, and more. In recent years, a growing number of theologians working in the fields of ethics, political theology, and practical theology have similarly invoked liturgical practice as a response to everything from racism to mass incarceration. The Eucharist, under such a logic, embodies countercultural alternatives to the world as it is.
When I began writing Commodified Communion—a book about the relationship between consumer culture and Eucharist—I largely took for granted the premise that the Eucharist had the capacity to in some sense resist the distorting qualities of late capitalism. But ever deepening reflection on my own lived experience, the insinuation of late capitalism into every sphere of contemporary life, and the messy materiality of the Eucharist itself began to surface the limits of such claims. I increasingly began to see them as theologically-inflected empirical claims unverified by anything like empirical evidence. This growing awareness of the limits of what the Eucharist can accomplish in an immanent frame under the pervasive pressures of late capitalism alongside a theological conviction about the eschatological nature of the Eucharist led me to rethink cultural resistance as a viable frame for conceiving of the relationship between the Eucharist and Christian ethical action in a consumer culture. And so I argue in the book that reducing the work of theology to resistance and centering Christian hope in a Eucharist that might better support that resistance undermines our ability to talk about the activity of God within a consumer culture, binds grace to human activity, and instrumentalizes the Eucharist into ethics.
Where I attempt to show how late capitalism inescapably shapes Christian practice at its deepest levels, Filipe Maia’s Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism offers provocative insight into the ways that financialized capitalism has colonized even our ability to hope. Our sense of time and our perception of the future, he argues, is determined by the hegemony of capitalism that is always constructing the future in its own image and likeness. The colonization of the future advanced by financial discourse, he writes, “creates material conditions in which our senses—our meaning-making energies and our directions—are diminished and exploited for the sake of the profit.”[1] Bound to a hope that imagines nothing else beyond the continuance of the structures of the world as they are, Maia shows how our anxieties about the future under financialized capitalism have expanded to the level of ultimate concern.
Lucia Hulsether’s Capitalist Humanitarianism takes up related questions with even greater force. Where many critiques of capitalism tend to center exclusively on the political Right, Hulsether centers the role of the Left in the rise of the neoliberal order. She unveils the ways that capitalist critiques from the Left—especially capitalist humanitarian projects rooted in performances of self-critique and self-reform—have used the tools of financial capitalism and corporate philanthropy as vehicles for projects of liberation in ways that end up reifying that which they purport to resist. Interrogating everything from the creation of the global fair trade movement to the rise of microfinance as an antipoverty tool, she shows how capitalist humanitarianism invites participation in structures that might give us some momentary relief from the system even as it privatizes public welfare and turns free market capitalism into an imagined solidarity with the very people that capitalist economies systematically oppress. Capitalist humanitarianism, she shows, is a particularly insidious example of neoliberalism’s relentless ability to absorb critique and adapt itself for the growth of racial capitalism and settler dispossession.
Maia and Hulsether lay bare the magnitude of neoliberal capitalist destruction and the limits of the kind of immanent prescriptions for its healing from within the system toward which I gesture in Commodified Communion. In a terrain in which financialized capitalism has distorted even our ability to hope, one in which replacing our daily big-box coffee routine with a cup of fair trade brew grants the illusion that consumption in a capitalist economy can repair the same harms it enacts, how could quotidian practices—liturgical or otherwise—claim to substantively resist such a power without denying the ways they too are embedded in the world and captive to its deepest logics whether we see it or not, whether we like it or not? Even homemade, organic eucharistic bread made with fair trade flour and kneaded in commitment to the life of the poor is not exempt from the kind of death-dealing economic structures that make such bread possible. While we may long for it to be otherwise, we are always both in and of the world.
While different in scope, discipline, and intent, each of these books is marked deeply by whether, when, and how to summon hope in the ruins of late capitalism. Driven by his liberationist conviction that theology is fundamentally a critical reflection on hope, Maia insists that to foreclose hope is to hand over even the eschaton to a late capitalist logic. But his hope is not one born of a naïve optimism that everything will be alright if we just worked harder; it is a melancholic hope, a hope that is “fragile, mournful, and tentative,”[2] but also stubborn, persistent, and constantly in motion. And so Maia articulates an eschatological hope grounded in a future that exceeds what financialized capitalism is able to contain and control, inviting attention to the liberating force that exists in the pause of a “fugitive future” that is not–yet. Hulsether actively resists performances of hope and optimism, instead performing a strategically critical negativity. But her politics of pessimism is hardly a political nihilism that cedes everything to corporations. It is instead a way of refusing to deny the extent of the violence in which we are living. And it is a rejection of the pervasive pressure to articulate hopeful neoliberal slogans toward which capitalist humanitarian projects drive. To the degree that there are some flickers of hope for Hulsether, they are found in discerning what it means to live together in the ruins knowing there is no way out. In Commodified Communion, the eucharistic hope I attempt to unfold is one that resists confining the activity of God to human activity or an imagined ethical purity that might be possible this side of redemption. The hope expressed in the Eucharist, I argue, is not found in gnostic flight from the materiality of the world nor in the purity of the gifts we offer, but in an eschatological hope untethered to human striving that comes in and in spite of our best and worst efforts at resistance. Taken together, these books testify to the fact that any hope dependent upon human ability to convincingly resist capitalism is no hope at all.
“You are not a real child of the Christian Left if you do not lampoon the older cohort of change makers,” writes Hulsether in one of her provocative, personal interludes.[3] To differing degrees, each of these books critiques an older cohort of change makers—people from whom we have learned, people we have loved, people who, like ourselves, long for a world other than it is. Despite the deep differences that mark these projects and the people who wrote them, I am struck by how they are each wrought by a shared generational experience of profound losses—global and local, communal and personal—in implicit and explicit ways. Those losses shape a growing dissatisfaction with the confident answers and assured alternatives we have so far been given from our respective fields in the face of the sheer magnitude of capitalism’s grasp. That dissatisfaction coupled with an awareness of capitalism’s ability to commodify even our deepest dissent and most sincere hopes for the future are part of what I think drives a shared refusal to offer anything like concrete prescriptions for reform.
Whatever alternatives might be possible, such alternatives will not be born of imaginary histories of past movements for reform that global economic systems have so clearly absorbed; by a belief that capitalism can redeem the losses that continue to accumulate in its wake; or that practices ancient or new celebrated all through the rise of such structures can somehow counter the same world in which they are celebrated. Nor will such alternatives be found in curated versions of our ancestors, our communities, our scholarship, or ourselves exempt from the kinds of critiques we want to launch. To dwell in the truth of the present is to resist drives toward closure that quick turns to imagined countercultures offer us, whether inside or outside the church. To critique such alternatives and to resist articulating new ones is not to nihilistically celebrate the futility of resistance. It is necessarily to linger in loss, acknowledging that there is much that cannot be repaired. It is to begin with a new set of questions about what it means to live in amidst and not apart from the ruins of late capitalism and to awaken attentiveness to what new forms of life are not-yet.
[1] Filipe Maia, Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 7.
[2] Maia, Trading Futures, 143.
[3] Lucia Hulsether, Capitalist Humanitarianism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023), 164.
