According to the editor of the Routledge Handbook of Economic Theology, Stefan Schwarzkopft, the emerging field of “economic theology” is “the study of the forms of interaction between theological imaginaries… and economic thought and economic-managerial practices.” Research in the field, he continues, “identifies explicit and implicit theologies inherent in economic concepts, institutions and practices as well as the role of economic terminology within theological thought” (p. 1, 4, emphasis added). Antonio Eduardo Alonso, Lucia Hulsether, and I wrote contributions that fall under this definition as we attend to theological imaginaries embedded in a world shaped by capitalism. But as I read these three books side by side, a third word comes to mind that has the surprising benefit of adding a rhyme to Schwarzkopft’s very useful definition of the task of economic theology. I’m thinking that next to explicit and implicit traces, our works may speak to complicit ties biding theological imaginaries and economic thought.
I believe that Commodified Communion, Capitalist Humanitarianism, and Trading Futures intersect at one crucial question, namely, the problem of the commodity. Though speaking from distinct disciplines, we are all concerned about this apparently trivial thing that on close inspection “[abounds] with metaphysical subtitles and theological niceties” (Marx, 1992, p. 163). I’m tempted to claim that the thread that links our three books is precisely something akin to a witnessing to the theological niceties that abound in the commodity form. Alonso accompanies the processes that lead to the commodification of the eucharist while making the case that our encounters with the sacred are never outside the enchanted world of the commodity. For him, God finds way of cracking open the falsifications of the commodity. Hulsether demonstrates how “capitalist humanitarianism” seeks to “reformulate the commodity as an instrument of emancipation” while keeping the system itself intact. My own contribution, in turn, interrogates recent developments in financialized capitalism to witness to the making of futures as a commodity that one can trade in financial markets. The society of commodity producers that Marx described continues to expand its mystifying in a world that commodifies all things, including the eucharist, the activism of indigenous communities, and the future.
Capitalist Humanitarianism opens with this provocative question: “What if my commodity attachments could express solidarity with exploited and oppressed people?” (Hulsether, 2023, p. 2). Hulsether shows how many micro-financing initiatives in Central America couch their work in the name of solidarity with the poor while claiming to their investors and consumers in North America that the “‘ethical’ provenance” of their commodities grants them free pass into a region of moral innocence (Hulsether, p. 30). Hulsether insightfully claims that in the humanitarian model of capitalism, the commodity hides in plain sight the conditions of exploitation and expropriation under the guise of emancipated consumption. The mystery of the commodity is thought to be solved when consumers in the affluent world have access to fairtrade commodities, but the obscurantist logic of capitalism is expanded as the consumer now joins hands with the venture and the humanitarian capitalist, both confident that they are producing and buying commodities “at their value.” Moneybags, the now humanitarian capitalist, must be really lucky, Marx would say (Marx, p. 270). He has found a commodity that affords him a profit while also making him an upstanding, innocent, and moral investor standing in solidarity with the “least of this.” All of this is afforded by the commodity. If Marx’s famous analysis stages a theatrical coming to life of the commodity, Hulsether’s book demonstrates that the commodity also affords some a free pass into innocence.
In Alonso’s book, commodities are encountered in the holy sites of daily devotion. They are in altarcitos, where his abuela accumulated a whole range of objects that formed a domestic shrine that simply could not exist outside market forces and its intense drive to produce and circulate commodities. Alonso recognizes that the more typical response to mass consumption in Christian circles is one of resistance, which he describes as having the problem of trying too hard to distance and secure the holy from the everyday, as if this distinction could be easily done. Rather, Alonso is interested in the way that Christian faith is “articulated” not apart from these commodities, but precisely through them, “even in their commodified state” (Alonso, 2021, p. 16). For Alonso, a “consumer culture” is the one where nearly all forms of exchange, including cultural and religious forms, are “marked by the processes of commodification” (Alonso, p. 72). This process of commodification is constant but, for Alonso, never complete. For him, the commodity always fails to deliver on its promises, which is what grants him the ability to identify divine agency in a “commodified world.” The commodity is not only a sign of “delusions” but also a sign of a missing thing and the “truths of its fallen hopes and dreams” (Alonso, p. 77).
Commodified Communion stretches our perception of the “theological niceties” in the commodity form. Alonso describes, for example, the historical process of how the production of communion bread was commodified and monopolized by a single company at the key historical moment when the Roman Catholic Church was reforming in its liturgy in response to Vatican II. To put it in Hulsether’s terms, it is almost as if the reformist impetus of the post-conciliar church was immediately subsumed by the liturgical arm of capitalist humanitarianism. Alonso writes: “In ways that outran the best intentions of liturgical and sacramental reformers, calls for greater reception and new ways of expressing the material significance of the Eucharist… created an unlikely market that benefited few and decimated many more. What was once the privileged work of the hands of women religious is now a product mostly mass-produced in a factory, bought and sold in the open market, made with the flour of one the biggest names in agribusiness, and subject to forces of market demand for more and better options and prices, all before arriving on the Eucharistic altar to be transformed into the Body of Christ.” (Alonso, p. 113). Clearly, not even the transubstantiation is safe from this social process.
In a world of revolutionary shampoos (an expression that I shamelessly borrow from David Harvey’s lectures on Marx’s Capital) and where “disruption” is the buzz word for venture capitalists, Alonso is wisely cautious about the transformative power of the Eucharist. More importantly, he warns those who rely on antagonizing the purity of the church against the deformations of “culture.” Alonso is prescient in saying that this search for purity has already been commodified by capitalism: “In a culture in which everything worth doing, buying, or praying promises a revolution…, any desire to articulate a Eucharistic vision against the wider culture… reveals an implicit and inescapable assent to the orthodoxy of a market logic: Even Eucharistic countercultures can and have been commodified” (Alonso, p. 121).
Complicity is the operative word here. Hulsether concludes Capitalist Humanitarianism with a response against claims that critique must be accompanied by the laying out of alternatives. Hulsether finds that these accusations are a trap, not because there are indeed no alternatives to capitalism, but because the offering of an alternative glosses over the immensity of our shared calamity. “Our efforts to live otherwise remain absolutely necessary… but have never been and will never be sufficient” (Hulsether, p. 185). She even couches the statement on the memory of her confirmation class in Reformed theology, where human depravity does not entail quietism, but a more somber and humble realization of our inability to disentangle ourselves from injustice. I think there is a direct parallel between Hulsether’s insistence on naming our complicity with structures of oppression and Alonso’s critique to addressing capitalism and resistance to it as an exclusively moral issue. Alonso is sharp in his observation: “Undialectical moralizing is a temptation in every kind of theological reflection” (Alonso, p. 8). The presumption at stake here, which Alonso rightly qualifies as a temptation, is the thought that one is outside the fold of complicity, that one has an alibi that habilitates a safe and sound space for theologizing. Hulsether theorizes this as a “politics anchored in pessimism,” an expression that makes a quick but decisive appearance at the closing pages of the book. This affords that one makes “impossible and mundane demands, and then it demands more” (Hulsether, p. 187).
I’m intrigued by the capaciousness of this politics, even as in my work I prefer the vocabulary of hope—which must be distinguished from optimism—as a theologically-inflected idiom that forever suspends the presumed constancy of the world as it is. The vocabulary of hope and of the plight for the future, fraught with problems and profoundly ambiguous, remains for me a form of demanding the impossible, of a politics of refusal with regards to any prescribed realism, which I understand—with Rubem Alves—as the perennial tactic for the preservation of the status quo. Readers of these three books may find that we may differ on our reliance on the deployment of the language of hope, which is prominent in my and Alonso’s books, whereas Hulsether’s appeal to the politics anchored in pessimism gestures in different directions. In my view, our complicity in systems of oppression makes the task of thinking economic theology all the more urgent. And my insistence on the language of hope, to cite Marx one last time, does not signify that tomorrow “a miracle will occur” but rather a mode of reading the “signs of the times” and noticing that, even within the “ruling classes,” the “foreboding is emerging that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and constantly engaged in a process of change” (Marx, p. 93).
