The Enchantments of Mammon

Modern Theology 21:3 July 2005
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
THE ENCHANTMENTS OF
MAMMON: NOTES TOWARD A
THEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF
CAPITALISM
EUGENE McCARRAHER
When I say a bottle of Coca Cola . . . , I mean it as an outward and visible

sign of something inward and spiritual, I mean it as if each Coca Cola
bottle contained a djinn, and as if that djinn was our great American civ-
ilization ready to spring out of each bottle and cover the whole global
universe with its great wide wings. That is what I mean.
Hector Dexter, an American telling his English hosts of his desire
to put a Coke bottle on every English table, in Nancy Mitford’s The
Blessing (1951)
Once upon a time (so one tale of modernity goes), the earth was an
enchanted place.1 Rocks, trees, rivers, and rain pulsed with invisible but
potent beings—specimens of what anthropologists have called mana, the
basic force of the universe—as did the affairs of tribes and empires. Beholden
to the whimsy or providential design of a pantheon of spirits and deities,
the world of enchantment could be magically or prayerfully entreated. But
with Protestantism, science, bureaucracy, and capitalism, the company of
enchantment was evicted from the earth, and its dispossession defines
modernity. As the natural and human sciences dispelled the world of
mystery, the prose of reason hushed the poetry of enchantment, and the rem-
nants fled to the shadowlands of superstition, ignorance, and fantasy.2
Capitalism plays a major role in this venerable but contestable tale, encap-
sulated in Max Weber’s phrase “the disenchantment of the world”. In the
Eugene McCarraher
Department of Humanities, 304 St. Augustine Center, Villanova University, Villanova, PA 19085-
1699, USA
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350
Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
430 Eugene McCarraher
course of unshackling production and exchange from moral and religious

restrictions, capitalism anathematized the bestowal of sacral meaning on
social relations and material objects. Once charged with the power to link
us with mana or to bind together communities, things lost their souls as
entrepreneurs transformed them into commodified wares. Avarice and cal-
culation mandated indifference if not aversion to an enchanted order larger
than human desires. Providential design became the laws of supply,
demand, and comparative advantage. And if enchanted forces were respect-
fully supplicated, disenchanted forces could be profitably mastered, without
humility or gratitude, through the incessant refinement of technological
prowess. As the economist Robert Heilbroner has summarized the conven-
tional wisdom, capitalism “is not sacred but secular” and “would be impos-
sible in a sacralized world to which men would relate with awe and
veneration”.3
While this tale of disenchantment deserves the greatest respect (if only
for its longevity), many have discerned a sacral order in the mechanisms of
capitalism. As Thomas Carlyle wrote in Past and Present (1843), capitalism
bore “the Gospel of Mammonism”, the good news of a deity whose money,
through its “miraculous facilities”, rendered its devotees “spell-bound” in a
“horrid enchantment”. While this could be dismissed as the rhetorical flour-
ish of banal and facile moralism, Carlyle’s language may have captured
something real about the nature of capitalist economics.4 Although capital-
ism was and remains a political economy—an evolving structure of property
relations, productive forces, and state formations—Carlyle suggested that
it was also a moral economy and a “sacralized world”, a mutable structure
of symbols and ontological assumptions fraught with desire for a selfhood
redeemed, a common good, even communion with divinity. Far from being
an unambiguous agent of disenchanted secularity, capitalism might be best
understood as a perverse regime of the sacred, an order of things bearing
powerful and unmistakable traces of enchantment.
If this is so, then secular forms of history and criticism must defer to those
cast in religious and theological terms. We may discover that the most pen-
etrating forms of historical scholarship and cultural criticism may reside, not
in secular narratives of enlightenment, disenchantment, and liberation, but
in Christian theological accounts of divine presence, sin, and redemption.
Although they have furnished invaluable tools, the Weberian, Marxist, and
psychoanalytical traditions also point to unresolved and irreducibly reli-
gious concerns which can be obscured no longer. Christian theology can
clarify and resolve these concerns. If we refuse the reduction of the “sacred”
to the “secular” on which the tales of disenchantment rest; if we reformulate
these conventional secular tales in terms of creation and sacrament; and if
we recall with Augustine that sin is the perversion and not the opposite
of good—then a more incisive history and critique of capitalism becomes
possible.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005
The Enchantments of Mammon 431
Such a history and critique would invoke what theologians have dubbed
“the sacramental imagination”, a sensibility in which, as Richard McBrien
has written, “the visible, the tangible, the finite, [and] the historical” become
“actual or potential carriers of the divine presence”. Especially in Catholic
theology, the material world mediates divinity by its very nature as a divine
creation. This sacramental imagination is properly cultivated ecclesially
through liturgical practices and imagery. Through what Vincent Miller labels
a “sacramental operation”, liturgies—especially the Eucharist—link “the
mundane material of a sacramental sign and the theological realities it sig-
nifies.” As templates for human relationship, sacramental liturgies, in Rowan
Williams’ view, bear social and economic implications. “The objects of the
world, seen in the perspective of the eucharist . . . cannot properly be tools
of power.” As a sign of “the possibility of communion, covenanted trust, and
the recognition of shared need and shared hope”, the Eucharist, Williams
continues, “hints at the paradox that material things carry their fullest
meaning for human minds and bodies—the meaning of God’s grace and of
the common life thus formed—when they are the medium of gift, not instru-
ments of control or objects for accumulation”. It would seem to follow that
the sacramental sensibility can be formed—as well as deformed or mal-
formed—by practices outside the ecclesia. As Miller and Terrence Tilley have
suggested, the consumer culture of contemporary capitalism is just such a
parody of sacramentality. “Commodities are transubstantiated into sacra-
ments . . . in a world empty of the presence of God”, Tilley contends, be-
coming what Williams calls “instruments of control” and “objects of
accumulation”.5 While I would argue that much theological cultural criti-
cism in this vein has ignored the realm of production—and especially the
workplace origins of consumerism—its insight into the perversely sacramen-
tal character of capitalism is indisputable and indispensable.
Two important consequences follow from placing sacramentality at the
center of social theory, historical writing, and political economy. First, what
Weber and other modern intellectuals have understood by “enchantment”
can be clarified in theological terms. Affirmed by, say, the Maori of New
Guinea when they speak of the hau of gifts, or studied and consigned to
superstition by modern academics, enchantment is the perverse appropriation
and practice of sacrament. Second, sacramentality allows Christian intellectu-
als to advance a rival, more capacious, and more genuinely historical form
of materialism. Such a “historical materialism” would rest on what John
Milbank describes as “Augustine’s vision of the ontological primacy of per-
fection”—that is, on the conviction that creation is peaceful, abundant, and
sacramental. Because Christians believe that God is a God of love and power,
and that God’s creation partakes of these qualities, they trust in God and the
real goodness of the world. Thus, the Christian virtue of charity is not an
idealistic moralism but the clearest and profoundest realism about the archi-
tecture of the world. Literally true to life, it arises from “the assumption of
plenitude, our confidence in God’s power”. Christians assert that we always

live beyond our means, because there is no other way to live. (Here, they
must contest both modern economics—capitalist or Marxist—which narrates
the agonistic production of abundance, and a Bataillean “general economy”
which celebrates plenty in nihilistic violence.) Creation is not just abundant,
but sacramental as well. Affirming Augustine’s claim that “the invisible real-
ities of God are apprehended through the material things of his creation”,
Graham Ward articulates a “doctrine of divine participation in creation”
whereby “the corporeal and the incorporeal do not comprise a dualism”.
When read theologically, Ward asserts, the visible, material realm “manifests
the watermark of its creator”.6 It would follow that a proper theological cri-
tique of Marxist metaphysics would not be that it is “too materialist” but
rather that it is not materialist enough—that is, that it does not provide an ade-
quate account of matter itself, of its sacramental and revelatory character. So
if Marxist “demystification” of capitalism purports to uncover the material
roots of ideology, a theological “demystification” would expose the per-
versely sacramental and ecclesial roots of injustice.
I realize that the implications of this argument extend far beyond what I
can address here, and so I must clarify and delimit the scope of this essay.
This article arose out of theoretical considerations that developed in the
course of a book-length project in which I am currently engaged, a cultural
history of corporate business in the United States tentatively entitled The
Enchantments of Mammon: Corporate Capitalism and the American Moral Imagi-
nation. This project represents the convergence of two sets of intellectual con-
cerns. On the one hand, the history of corporate cultural authority remains
a largely unexplored subject among historians of American culture. In the
course of studying business culture, I have been struck by the ubiquity of
religious language and imagery. Of course, the pervasiveness of religious
discourse in corporate culture could be largely explained—for many, more
or less “explained away”—as the residue of American evangelical Protes-
tantism. But the theological reading sparked by research on my first book
had prepared me to challenge and resist this sort of facile reductionism.
Inspired initially by Paul Tillich’s search for a “theology of culture” in the
crucible of Weimar modernism—a theology that would, in his words, “point
to the spiritual meaning of the real by using its given forms”—I now affirm
Graham Ward’s assertion that Christian cultural study entails “reading the
signs of the times through the grammar of Christian faith”.7 The religious
significance of corporate capitalism now seems far more than residual, and
far more disturbing.
Moreover, as I read more widely and deeply in contemporary theology, I
became increasingly convinced that Christian intellectuals must use theol-
ogy, not as some invertebrate “spirit” that “informs” their work, but as the
discursive architecture in which they formulate problems and incorporate
insights from other traditions. While Christian historians have been espe-
cially contentious about the secularism of their discipline, the upshot so far
has been little more than fire-breathing modesty in requesting a “seat at the
table” of the post-Protestant academy, or in pontification about the “deeper
meaning” of historical events. Like Marxists or feminists, Christians must
enlarge their ambitions to embrace the content and discursive protocols of
historical writing. One of the most long-lived and long-toothed of those pro-
tocols is the tale of “disenchantment”; and I hope to show that we possess
the theological resources to challenge and discredit this narrative. If, as John
Milbank has written, Christianity has been “constituted, historically, by a
particular theoretical perspective upon history” which, rooted ecclesiologi-
cally, “ ‘reads’ all history as most fundamentally anticipation, or sinful
refusal of, salvation”, then theology affords a way to discern and narrate “the
‘religiosity’ of capitalism”.8 This essay represents an extended reflection on
how to envision that religiosity.
Writing the cultural history of capitalism provides an occasion for such an
enterprise, affording an opportunity to write a new tale of accumulation and
its discontents. In this tale, capitalism becomes a new form of sacrament, a
repression, displacement, and renaming of the sacred, a mobilization of
desires for redemption and transfiguration. The cash nexus and the fetishism
of commodities pervert the performance of sacrament. The “scarcity of
resources” and the “laws of the market” conceal the charity of providence.
Economic thought and management theory impersonate creed and doxol-
ogy. The corporation parodies the ecclesia, and the trinkets of the market ape
the delights of the heavenly city. The enchantments of capitalism pervert our
longing for a sacramental way of being in the world. A fat, greasy, hoarding
slob in ancient Babylonian lore, Mammon appears, in capitalist modernity,
in a counterfeit angelic raiment.
“Religiously Unmusical”: The Weberian Tale of Disenchantment

We must conjure first the ambivalent spirit of Weber, whose rueful formula-
tion of “the disenchantment of the world” is one of the precious heirlooms
of intellectual modernity. For Weber, the enchanted universe was inhabited
by fairies, angels, demons, spirits, and gods—“mysterious incalculable
forces” who animated or controlled the material world, composing what we
might call an ontology of enchantment. Unlike modernity, the enchanted
world fused ontology and ethics—“is” was united with “ought”—and so
“the most ultimate and sublime values” formed part of the world’s very
metaphysical composition. This union underlay the political and economic
lives of enchanted communities; embedded in the ontology of enchantment,
the production and exchange of material goods were believed to partake of
these forces, and so they could never be left to the play of “free” or “imper-
sonal” markets. As the historian Karl Polanyi put it in The Great Transforma-
tion (1944)—still an indispensable point of departure for any historical
account of capitalism—“man’s economy, as a rule” was considered by pre-

modern peoples to be indissoluble from “custom and law, magic and
religion”.9
Weber’s account of disenchantment—which has to be pieced together from
his vast corpus—spanned several centuries. In line with German liberal
Protestantism, Weber cast the Hebrews as the earliest righteous disen-
chanters who belittled cultic practice, vilified empty ritual, and elevated the
ethical, “secular” pursuit of social justice. Though dismissive of pagan
enchantment, medieval Catholics compromised with its enduring charms in
a cultic ensemble of sacraments and relics. But Calvinist Protestantism reac-
celerated the process, which culminated in modern science, bureaucracy, and
capitalism.10
Focusing on science, this story has become a staple of Western cultural
history—from Keith Thomas’ chronicle of “the decline of magic” to Carolyn
Merchant’s eco-feminist lament over “the death of nature”—but Weber had
insisted that capitalism, not science, had been the primary culprit in disen-
chantment. Since money was “the most abstract and impersonal element that
exists in human life”, it displaced mana and dissolved the enchanted bond
linking ontology and “ultimate values”. By demolishing this enchanted
ontology, capitalist markets rendered the exchange of goods “ever less
accessible . . . to any imaginable relationship with a religious ethic of broth-
erliness”. Enchanted assumptions of abundance, fluidity, and generosity—
articulated, in the Jewish and Christian traditions, by the opening verses of
Genesis—gave way to the disenchanted verities of scarcity and competition.
Shamans, magicians, and priests yielded to businessmen, bureaucrats, and
technicians. Life in modernity’s iron cage embodied Thomas Hobbes’ infer-
nal vision: “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth
only in death”. As Weber wrote in his bleak conclusion to The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), the disenchanted world labored under
“specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart” who presumed to have
“attained a level of civilization never before achieved”.11
Theology played a crucial role in Weber’s tale of capitalist disenchant-
ment. He shrewdly anticipated and rejected the “foolish and doctrinaire”
idea of a causal link between Protestantism and capitalism. Rather, the con-
nection inhered both in the “elective affinity” of Protestant theology and
capitalist enterprise and in the “psychological sanctions” for accumulation
afforded by religious doctrine. The “elective affinity” of Protestantism and
capitalism originated in the repudiation of Catholic sacramentalism. In
Weber’s view, the marrow of Protestant (and especially Calvinist) divinity
was its mistrust of “magical and sacramental forces”. Lacking the assurance
of salvation provided by sacramental rituals, the Calvinist allayed the
inevitable anxiety through “intense worldly activity” in a “calling”. So the
“spirit of capitalism” was not, Weber argued, just another term for greed; it

is the rationalized accumulation of wealth, undertaken, Calvinists convinced

themselves, for the sake of God’s glory and majesty. In the process, Calvin-
ist capitalists achieved a “sanctification of worldly activity” once reserved
for monastic contemplation, and cultivated a “worldly asceticism” which,
once loosened from its theological moorings, became the classic trinity of
bourgeois virtues: diligence, thrift, and self-restraint. Thus, the nexus of
Protestantism and capitalism lay in a “disenchantment of the world” which,
by denying matter any sacramental character, unleashed upon it—and upon
human beings—the capitalist’s energies of mastery and acquisition.12 For
Weber, the triumph of capitalism dispelled enchantment, mandated imper-
sonality, and nullified the prospect of a loving commerce.
Weber took little inspiration, and certainly no comfort, from this mourn-
ful and hopeless narrative. For all his German mandarin contempt for pecu-
niary passions, and for all his humanist magnanimity, Weber saw not the
slightest opening in the iron cage of this disenchanted world. Perhaps, he
mused, “new prophets” would arise heralding a “great rebirth of old ideas
and ideals”. But he thought more likely a drearier prospect of “mechanized
petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance”—the
world, that is, of his soulless, heartless, technically proficient barbarians. As
intellectual history, one could see this as Friedrich Nietzsche in sociological
drag (or perhaps, if one is more upbeat, Francis Fukyama), in which the
Protestant Ethic reaches its apogee—or nadir—in the consumerized Last
Man at the liberal-capitalist End of History.13
Yet the sociologist who claimed that he was “religiously unmusical” heard
faint notes of enchantment in capitalist culture. Despite the wounds inflicted
by disenchantment, the old deities had not simply hobbled off to die.
Observing how “many old gods ascend from their graves” to become the
laws of nature or the market, he called upon his fellow modern intellectuals
to realize that “we live as did the ancients when their world was not yet dis-
enchanted of its gods and demons” (my italics)—“only we”, he concluded
cryptically, “live in a different sense”. Some of Weber’s scholarly descen-
dants locate that “different sense” in the self of modern consumer culture.
The sociologist Colin Campbell, for instance, traces the descent of consumer
consciousness from what he calls “the Other Protestant Ethic”, a concentra-
tion on ecstatic inner experience which marked both evangelical and liberal
Protestant religious traditions. When separated from the Protestant
churches, this Other Protestant Ethic morphed into a “romantic ethic” which,
by affirming the primacy of emotion and sensibility, served as the “secular”
prelude to consumer consciousness. Consumerism is the contemplative mys-
ticism of commodity culture.14 The perpetually unsatisfied desire of con-
sumerism is, in this view, the psychological residue of enchantment. If we
look at the matter theologically, however, could we say that consumerism is
the contemplative mysticism of commodity culture?

We could begin to answer this question—and many others—by consider-

ing the way in which Weber and his successors frame their tale of disen-
chantment. They begin by opposing the “religious” to the “social”, the
“irrational” to the “rational”, and the “sacred” to the “secular”. These oppo-
sitions are, of course, standard pieces of modern intellectual furniture, but
recent work in theology and philosophy suggests that they are also far more
fragile and fraudulent than they appear. Theologians such as Milbank, for
example, seek to dismantle the conceptual polarities that structure Weber’s
tale of “disenchantment”. “Weberian sociology betrays and subverts
history”, Milbank asserts, by assuming a priori the very secularity—or “dis-
enchantment”—that Weber seeks not so much to explain as to justify. Con-
tending that cultic practice, besides being sacramental, was also affirmed by
the prophets, Milbank argues that charisma and routine (as well as prophecy
and priesthood) are best understood as elements “within a single religious
tradition”. Moreover, rejecting the now-standard formulation of “religion”
and “social forces”, Milbank maintains that religion cannot be reduced to
“social forces” because it is itself already a particular form of sociality. “One
is not measuring ‘social’ as against ‘religious’ influences”, Milbank writes,
“but rather . . . contingently historical modes of social organization.”15
At the same time, following the lead of Alasdair MacIntyre, Milbank con-
tends that if “rationality” has no meaning apart from different historical tra-
ditions and communities in which it is inescapably embedded, then the
“rationality” or “secularity” of capitalism cannot be rigorously distinguished
from the irrationality or enchantment of pre-modern peoples. (Weber
arguably senses something similar when he recognized that accumulation
“rationally pursued”—and recorded in the double-entry ledgers that gave
birth to modern accounting—was a “particular concrete form of rational
thought.” Despite his salutary impatience with moralism, Weber saw some-
thing profoundly irrational in human terms about avarice “rationally
pursued”.) If, in Milbank’s words, “these [conceptual] boundaries are not
ahistorical absolutes”,16 then the lines between the “enchanted” and the “dis-
enchanted” are not as distinct and inviolable as Weberian sociology regards
them.
“Metaphysical Subtleties and Theological Niceties”: Commodity Fetishism and

the Marxist Tale of Disenchantment
The possibility that capitalist “rationality” bears vestiges of enchantment
receives unlikely but auspicious support from none other than the Marxist
tradition. As the Communist Manifesto makes very and proudly clear, Marx
considered capitalism the most arduous and liberating of modernity’s disil-
lusioning forces. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”
The bourgeoisie “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor
. . . in the icy water of egotistical calculation”—an image suggesting that
capital is consecrated in a murderous baptismal rite of accumulation. Yet

while Marx was more exhilarated than Weber by the death of God, he could
not, in the end, affirm the secularity of capitalism or reject religion as a source
of insight into the capitalist mode of production. If the capitalist is indeed
“a sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world
whom he has called up with his spells”,17 then Marx might turn out to be
the bearer of an oddly sacramental critique of commodity civilization.
Marx framed his analysis of capitalism in religious terms throughout his
career, suggesting that his use of religious language was far more than irony
or sarcasm. In the “1844 manuscripts”, Marx reflected on “the divine power
of money, its perverse capacity for moral and metaphysical transfiguration.
Through its power to conjure an abstract equivalence among distinct and
incomparable things, money remade the world in its own empty image and
likeness, effecting “the transformation of all human and natural properties
into their contraries”, procuring love for the unpleasant, education for the
dull, travel for the indolent or parochial. “Thou visible God!” as he quoted
Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Noting later, in the Grundrisse (1857), his
massive preliminary study of capitalism, that money was first minted and
stored in the temples of antiquity, Marx concluded that it was both “the god
among commodities” and “the real community” of capitalist society—a new
ontology of enchantment, perhaps? Indeed, Marx considered money “the
immanent spirit of commodities”, a restless specter that lingered with mate-
rial goods only for a while, awaiting release and re-investment in the circuit
of accumulation. But Marx quickly defused the possibility of any theologi-
cal criticism by interpreting both religion and money as epiphenomenal dis-
tortions, the effects of a more basic “social” existence misshapen by scarcity,
injustice, and alienation. The “fetishistic” character of both religion and
money would, Marx thought, be exposed—disenchanted—by historical
development and revolutionary practice.18
Yet later, in Capital, in one of the most renowned and difficult passages in
his work—“the fetishism of commodities, and the secret thereof”—Marx
underlined the formal similarities between commodity exchange and reli-
gious practice in such a way as to undermine his secular critique of capital-
ism. The commodity, he wrote, is “a very queer thing, abounding in
metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”. These subtleties and
niceties take “metaphysical” and “theological” guises, in his view, because
modern industry obscures or eclipses the fact that commodities are made
by human beings. Since, under conditions of large-scale production and
exchange, we see no traces of labor in the things we buy, commodities seem
to appear from nowhere, acquire agency, even interact with each other. Thus
“the mutual relations of producers” assume the appearance of a “social rela-
tion between the products”, both of which are mediated by money. (Note
how Marx, against the drift of much high-minded palaver about “con-
sumerism”, locates the roots of commodity fetishism in the relations of pro-
duction. Talking about consumerism has become a way of not talking about
capitalism.) But because, under conditions of alienation, people invest mate-
rial products with their deepest hopes and fears, they endow—enchant—
commodities with hopes of gratification and justice that can really be
fulfilled only by a revolutionary transformation of society. So far, so secular;
yet Marx then declared that to resolve the enigma of fetishism we must take
“recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world”. Just as
“God” stands for the unrealized, projected, and distorted powers of human-
ity, so, too, do the fetishized products of alienated labor. And just as an
enlightened humanity will see a piece of bread instead of a Eucharistic
host—a sacramental analogy Marx used earlier in Capital—so a classless
world of unestranged producers, recognizing their own creations in the
wealth of industrial production, will see the full flourishing of their talents
and capacities.19
So while Marx the revolutionary pamphleteer heralds the rationalization
of economic life as a powerful force for disenchantment, Marx the student
of political economy sees commodity fetishism as a reservoir of enchant-
ment. As Slavoj Zizek explains this paradox, the “everyday spontaneous ide-
ology” of bourgeois society is disenchanted: people use money, for instance,
and “know very well that there is nothing magical about it”. However, Zizek
continues, in their social conduct, “in what they are doing, they are acting as
if money, in its material reality, is the immediate embodiment of wealth”.
Thus, they are “fetishists in practice, not in theory”. Zizek resolves this
tension, and connects disenchantment and fetishism, by reconsidering the
nature of belief. Pointing to ritual practices of prayer and liturgy, Zizek sug-
gests that the modern interiorization of belief is an ideological ruse that
deflects attention from social relations. “It is belief which is radically exte-
rior”, Zizek insists, and it is “embodied in the practical, effective procedure
of people”. Thus, commodity fetishism permits all “superstitions and meta-
physical mystifications”—as well as the exploitative relations of capitalism—
to be repressed, displaced, and projected onto “ ‘the social relations between
things’ ”.20
Zizek’s gesture toward ritual underscores the Marxist tradition’s reliance
on the lexicon of magic and religion. “How easy it is”, Henri Lefebvre
exclaimed in his Critique of Everyday Life (1959), “to pass from the social
mystery to the theological one!” To pay for the round-trip passage, several
contemporary Marxist intellectuals are borrowing more heavily than ever
before from the treasury of Christian theology. Sometimes, as with Julian
Stallabrass, these debts are grudging conceded but nonetheless indisputable.
Though he complains (rightly, I think) that the comparison of shopping malls
to cathedrals has become “a cliché of the theory of consumption”, his account
of commodity fetishism is remarkably sacramental, so much so that Stal-
labrass himself seems overtaken by the analogy. Rehearsing Marx’s discus-
sion in Capital, Stallabrass tells us that the appearance of the commodity is
“a miracle, the materialization of an ideal in which all marks of its making

have been effaced”. So far, so classically historical materialist. But then we
learn that commodities “aspire to a condition of transfiguration” in which
they are “vehicles for a higher harmony which runs the world, the object,
and the consumer”. Its “impoverished body”, Stallabrass concludes, carries
“a valorizing spirit”. The sacramental, and particularly eucharistic, quality
of commodities seems unmistakable, but Stallabrass balks at the precipice of
an outright theological description, recalling (with almost palpable relief)
that the commodity is “sanctified by social distinction”—secularly
conceived.21
Other Marxists have taken the analysis of commodity fetishism to an even
higher theological level, explicitly linking the concept of reification to sacra-
mentality and eschatology. Thanks to the universalization of the commod-
ity form under late capitalism, reification—along with commodity fetishism,
its specifically capitalist form—must, Fredric Jameson asserts, “come into
their own [as] the dominant instruments of analysis and struggle”. As the
process whereby the products of labor acquire a “phantom subjectivity”, in
Georg Lukacs’ words, an abstract quality that disguises their human origin,
reification is for Marxists both a necessary condition and the condition from
which revolution will emancipate us. Possessing this dialectical character,
art, religion, and commodities offer tantalizing glimpses of a utopian, unrei-
fied existence, a future heralded in a Marxism which prefigures “a lucid
enchantment of the world”—to use Perry Anderson’s startling and cryptic
phrase.22
While the editor of New Left Review can hardly disavow the Marxist nar-
rative of disenchantment, some of the comrades, such as Timothy Bewes,
have argued that the ontological and historical dimensions of reification
indicate “a methodological continuity rather than a break between Marxism
and [Christianity]”. Rejecting a “secular reason” which participates in a
“reified logic of the here and now” and thereby inhibits genuine openness
to the unknown, Bewes attempts to chart the analogy, even the homology,
between commodity fetishism and sacramental practice. Five pages into
Reification (2002)—whose cover features an old nun tending what appears to
be a loom of some high-tech sort—Bewes asserts that the Incarnation is a
“metaphor or even a synonym for reification: when Christ becomes man—
‘historically’ or symbolically in the sacraments of the Holy Communion—
the divine is translated into worldly terms”. In the Christian terms of
Incarnation and Eucharist, “the moment of reification is pregnant with the
moment of liberation from reification”; bread and wine become “physical
tokens” of emancipation from the reified world. (Drawing on Flannery
O’Connor’s conviction of the “intimacy of creation”, Bewes even suggests
that what has been called transubstantiation be renamed intersubstantiation,
a word which, in his view, better conveys the quality of a sacrament to reveal
the always inherent intermixture of sacred and mundane.) Bewes can then
restate, in continuity with classical Marxism, that the end of religion and the
end of reification are the same moment. “The disappearance of religion is
identical to the realization of its truth, to the manifestation of its objects of
devotion, to the erasure of the semiotic disjunction between faith and parou-
sia, an event which religion itself could not survive.”23
And yet, at the last moment, even Bewes backs away from the theologi-
cal precipice. He points out, correctly enough, that the analogy between com-
modity fetishism and religious belief is imperfect, since the former is a
“thoroughly secular” formulation of reification which “presupposes nothing
beyond the earthly sphere”. But where one might have expected a reformu-
lation of commodity fetishism from a critic of reified reason, we receive what
amounts to yet another “revitalized” Marxism. Dismissing any desire for a
“reconciliation of Marxism with Christianity” as a “concessionary political
formation”—a refreshing repudiation of “liberation theology”—Bewes
asserts “the identity of Marxism and religious thought”, an identity grasped
from the standpoint of Marxism. Though Christian redemption is, in Bewes’
view, “structurally analogous to the Marxist promise of revolution”, it makes
this promise in “a metaphysical form that is categorically removed from the
worldly activity of politics”.24 Thus, Bewes forcloses the prospect that a
reconstruction of commodity fetishism points to the ontological and politi-
cal possibilities of sacrament.
One Marxist hovering like an angel over all this theologizing is Walter
Benjamin, whose work has inspired many cultural historians over the last
two decades. “My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related
to ink. It is satured with it”, he interjected in his “Arcades Project” some-
time in the 1930s. “A theologian stranded in a secular age”, to borrow a term
from his friend Gershom Sholem, Benjamin ambled through the streets and
studied the arcades of the modern capitalist metropolis, attempting to dis-
close a divine presence that was latent in the world. Indeed, Benjamin’s
career could be characterized as a modern search for sacramental possibil-
ity. In One-Way Street (1928), a motley collection of aphorisms and vignettes,
Benjamin abounded in perceptions of lucid or barely concealed enchant-
ment from antiquity to the present. Ancient peoples, he wrote, realized that
“they alone shall possess the earth who live from the forces of the cosmos”
and that they “can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally.”
Moderns, however, obsessed with money, mastery, and autonomy, con-
signed this enchanted, sacramental state to “the poetic rapture of starry
nights”—an exile, that is, to the recesses of the romantic, consumerist self.
But the technological and organizational genius of the capitalist nation-
state—modernity’s “unprecedented commingling with the cosmic
powers”—was, to Benjamin, a surreptitious form of enchantment whose
very “disenchanted” guise made it especially heedless and deadly. To Ben-
jamin, bank notes hinted at the veiled sacrality of capitalism. “Innocent
cupids frolicking about numbers, goddesses holding tablets of law, stalwart
heroes sheathing their swords before monetary units”—all “ornamenting

the façade of hell.”25
In the face of fascism, Benjamin relied increasingly on theology to fathom
the dream world of capitalism in the shops, exhibitions, and panoramas—
“sites of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish”, as he put it in the Arcades.26
Benjamin’s incessant references to “dream”, “sleep”, and “awakening” sig-
naled his pursuit of the enchanted community lost in the Fall of powerlust.
Indeed, Benjamin’s maddeningly disheveled epigrams are notes toward a
dialectic of enchantment, dispatches from a pilgrim toward a sacramental
way of being in the world. Benjamin realized that the cultural power of cap-
italism resided in its enlistment of the sacramental imagination. Utopia—for
the younger Benjamin, the state of transparent enchantment encountered
and lost in paradise—“left its traces in a thousand configurations of life, from
enduring edifices to passing fashions”. Every atrium, dress shop, and volup-
tuous advertisement bore the longing for divinity. Department stores, Ben-
jamin wrote, were “temples consecrated” to “the religious intoxication of
cities”, the redemptive fantasies of communion and abundance perverted
and mobilized by urban commercial culture.27 If, in Marxist terms, the dis-
pelling of commodity fetishism is a disenchantment, for Benjamin the expo-
sure of the fetish was a prelude to re-enchantment, a discovery of some
vaguely utopian and perhaps divine promise inherent in material life.
“Joy, Beauty, and Enrichment”: “Sacred Sociology”, the Life Against Lucre, and
the Beatific Vision of Psychoanalysis
Still, Benjamin remained more suggestive than substantive—stranded, as
Scholem might have put it, in a secular age—and so we must turn elsewhere
for more explicit insights into the sacramental nature of economic life. We
might, for instance, turn to the short-lived but long-fertile “College of Soci-
ology” founded by outré French leftists in the 1930s. Comprised of Georges
Bataille, Roger Caillois, and other young Marxists disaffected from both Stal-
inism and social democracy, the College outlined a “sacred sociology” based
in part on a full-scale reconstruction of economic thought—a “Copernican
transformation” as Bataille put it later in The Accursed Share (1967). Starting
from Emile Durkheim’s sociology of religion as the pre-modern form of
social solidarity, the College contrasted the “sacred” realm of community—
festival, gift-exchange, and other forms of useless, even “wasteful” expen-
diture offered up to the gods—to the “profane” realm of instrumental work
and production, a world structured by “economy, accumulation, and mod-
eration”, as Caillois defined it. Bataille in particular defined religion as the
attempt to restore “intimacy” with the cosmos—enchanted union—through
ritualized acts of despoliation and sacrifice. According to the principles of
what he called “general economy”, the world is a place of superabundant
energy and proliferation, replenished by the “ceaseless prodigality” of the
sun which—like the Christian God—“dispenses energy—wealth—without

any return”. Thus, abundance, not scarcity, was the real foundation for eco-
nomics. From potlatch to pyramids, this religious expenditure on festivals
and public works limited the accumulation of capital and the exaltation of
“productivity”. Under both capitalism and Marxism, however, profanity—
disenchantment—triumphed over the sacred, since both upheld limitless
production as the ideal human activity.28
To secular commentators, Bataille’s “general economy” and theory of reli-
gion does possess Copernican significance, enabling us to move, in Jean Bau-
drillard’s words, “beyond political economy” to the “metaphysical principle
of economy”, even to its “mythic” quality. And indeed, in making abundance
and festive expenditure rather than scarcity and productivity into the basic
principles of economics, Bataille and the College of Sociology underscored
the irreducibly religious foundations of economic practice. But if general
economy and religion remain bounded by solar radiation and death, then
has Bataille really transcended the dismal science of classical economics? As
Milbank and Catherine Pickstock have contended, Bataille’s “sacred sociol-
ogy” remains a sacrality of immanence which conceals a complicity with the
tyranny of production and the hegemony of death. For one thing, Bataille,
Milbank writes, simply assumes the profanity or disenchantment of produc-
tion, and thus represents no real advance over Marx or Weber. If we under-
stand production to exhibit “the benefit of participation” in divine creativity,
then there is no real contrast between production and expenditure. “If what
is held must be lost, it is also the case that this losing is an increased self-
expression, allowed to us by the transcendent.” Thus, only a sacramental
view of material life as disclosure of divinity allows us to postulate abun-
dance and sacralize production. Bataille’s refusal of this possibility forces
him, as Pickstock sees, both to celebrate death as the only effective avenue of
opposition to profanity—dead men make no money—and, barring a return
to tribal economies, to submit to the very realm of production whose accu-
mulative imperatives he claims to reject.29
Bataille’s dazzling albeit necrophilic attempt to sacralize economics had a
parallel in Norman O. Brown’s account of the psychopathology of money in
Life Against Death (1959). Far more than an oracle of the 1960s countercul-
ture, Brown was one of the most penetrating and theologically literate critics
in the psychoanalytical tradition. Beginning with Freud’s earliest remarks on
“character and anal erotism”, psychoanalysis has long associated money
with excrement, understanding economic pursuits, and especially pecuniary
conduct, as “anal” activities that sublimate or project unconscious concerns
regarding power and control. But in Life Against Death, Brown produced
what is perhaps the most searching psychoanalytical critique of capitalism
ever written, connecting the psychoanalysis of money to an exploration of
religious concerns. Noting how the standard psychoanalytic appraisal of
money was “anchored in the domain of the secular”, Brown concluded, after
a survey of historical and anthropological literature, that money actually

derived its power from “the magical, mystical, religious . . . the domain of
the sacred”. Besides, he continued, the “flat antinomy” of sacred and secular
was misleading in any case. “Secularization”, he asserted, “is only a meta-
morphosis of the sacred”—an observation made in the course of criticizing
the “illusion that modern money is secular”. The secular, Brown contended,
is “the negation of the sacred”—negation, that is, in Freud’s and Hegel’s
terms, in which the act of negation is in fact an affirmation of its opposite.
If the secular is indeed this affirmative negation of the sacred, then “the psy-
chological realities of money”, Brown asserted, were “best grasped in terms
of theology”. In Brown’s reading, neither capitalism nor secularism had dis-
enchanted the world. In a chapter entitled “Filthy Lucre” that examined the
scatological fixations of Martin Luther, Brown affirmed the reformer’s
insight that, with capitalism, “power over this world has passed from God
to God’s ape, the Devil”. Like Luther, Brown saw in money “the essence of
the secular, and therefore of the demonic”. The “money complex”—what
Marx, recall, had considered the animating spirit of commodity fetishism—
is, in Brown’s words, “the heir to and substitute for the religious complex,
an attempt to find God in things”.30 Capitalism, we might add, was a new
form of enchantment.
Brown’s remarks cannot be dismissed as theological embellishment, I
think, because his notion of “finding God in things”—as close a formulation
of enchantment or sacrament as one is likely to find in psychoanalytical dis-
course—resonates with ideas in the object-relations theory associated with
Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott. Often appropriated as the basis of a
psychoanalytical account of the links between psyche and culture, object-
relations theory also arguably hints at a theological account of our
fundamentally sacramental relationship to the world. Starting from the
earliest pre-Oedipal chapter of psychic development—a beatific vision, one
might say, where the mother’s loving breast is, in Klein’s words, “the source
of joy, beauty, and enrichment”—Klein and Winnicott maintained that a
stable and flourishing personality depends on the existence and durability
of “transitional objects”—toys, dolls, blankets—which symbolize a child’s
union with and separation from the mother. Complicating the standard psy-
choanalytical reduction of the object to a surrogate for the breast, Winnicott
in particular contended that “its not being the breast . . . is as important as
the fact that it stands for the breast”. Through these objects, the child learns
to accept the reality of other things and people which are not subject to her
will. Over time, the child’s world of transitional objects becomes the adult’s
world of culture, a realm of achievements which mediate between the psyche
and the external world by channeling unconscious desires for maternal
reunion through work, art, play, and religion. “Transitional phenomena
become diffused”, in Winnicott’s view, “spread out over the whole interme-
diate territory between inner psychic reality and the external world, that is
to say, over the whole cultural field.”31 In short, we find the mother in
things—a psychoanalytical brand of transubstantiation, I would argue, but
still a suggestive parallel to theological conceptions of sacrament.
While Winnicott and Klein drew only the vaguest social-democratic polit-
ical implications from object-relations theory, Joel Kovel fuses object relations
and commodity fetishism in a way that points more directly, if unsuccess-
fully, toward some enchanted, beatific resolution. Like Marx’s “god among
commodities”, contemporary capital-as-money assumes, in Kovel’s analysis,
a counterfeit divine status, combining “intrinsic worthlessness, mystery, and
awesome, ever-expanding power”. More productive and psychologically
sophisticated than its nineteenth-century predecessor, late capitalism
embeds its authority in the innermost psyche of the consumer, fetishizing
commodities by appealing to and even shaping the fantasy life of the uncon-
scious. Indeed, as the market weakens or assimilates mediating institutions
such as the family or religious community—representatives of the cultural
world valorized by Winnicott—the self’s desires can be more directly admin-
istered and even generated by capital. Thanks to its pervasive and ingenious
instruments of cultural production, late capital, Kovel fears, is capable of “so
magically transforming the very air of reality that desire can be exhaled
directly into it”. Commodities are now, in this view, almost perfectly if dia-
bolically sacramental, mediating and even imposing the presence of capital’s
godlike, “ever-expanding power”. Against the mellow apocalypse of late
capitalism, Kovel holds the (increasingly spectral) hope of a socialism in
which, through their “transcendent praxis”, workers re-appropriate the
means of production and commence an “aestheticization of work”—the cre-
ation of a world that gratifies and objectifies desire.32 For Kovel, Marxism
fulfills the beatific desire named by psychoanalysis: the restoration of “joy,
beauty, and enrichment”.
But in so far as Kovel conceives of politics and the psyche in purely
“secular” terms, his “transcendence” runs up against the very disenchant-
ment mandated by psychoanalytic theory—the same boundary that Brown
could not cross. Although clearly better versed and disposed toward theol-
ogy, Brown ultimately dismissed it in favor of a disappointingly reduction-
ist account of religion. Acknowledging that psychoanalysis “reaffirms
ageless religious aspirations”, and conceding that the Jewish and Christian
traditions understood human destiny as “a departure from, and an effort to
regain, paradise”, he sided with Freud in locating this drama on a purely
earthly plane—as do, it must be said, object-relations theorists, whose mater-
nalized rendering of the beatific vision places enormous weight on the shoul-
ders of human mothers. The redemptive incompetence of religion lay in its
cosmic pretensions, Brown thought, “delusions of grandeur” about the mere
body that appeared most poignantly, for him, in the theology of Augustine.
Citing Augustine’s reflection on cor inquietum—the “restless discontent” of
the heart—as well as his account of the war between “true love on the one
hand and the lust for power on the other”, Brown upheld Augustine’s con-
viction that “the riddle of history is not in Reason but in Desire; not in labor,
but in love”. But Brown disclaimed Augustine’s faith that the end of this
enigma depended on a supernatural power expressed through a community.
Since religion, Brown concluded, saw the repressed “only in the form of pro-
jections”,33 then the transcendence of capitalism and the money complex
awaited the resolution of anality, not the repudiation of libido dominandi.
Brown’s proclaimed affinity with Augustine, together with his longing for
a “resurrection of the body”—a recovery of the entire body’s capacity for
vigorous life and rapturous experience—remained a parody of Christian
eschatological hope. For if, as Graham Ward observes, psychoanalysis recalls
“something forgotten, an image of human plenitude lost”—joy, beauty,
enrichment—its economy of desire is “an endless game of producing sub-
stitutes for a demand that can never be satisfied”.34 Yet we could go further
than Ward and assert that precisely because this game does come to an end
in the grave, the refusal of an eschatology that does envision the fulfillment
of desire must mean the acceptance of death’s finality; a Hobbesian endorse-
ment of life as libido dominandi; and a quest for survival and power incarnate
in the pursuit of money. Capitalism embodies, in other words, the
necrophilia of Bataille, and the victory of that very disenchantment which
Brown himself considered demonic.
Holy Things: The Liturgical Consummations of Labor and Fetishism

If we discount Brown’s covert disenchantment and affirm his Pauline
description of religion as “the wisdom of folly”, then perhaps theology can
fathom the “money complex” and the perverse desires that galvanize it. If,
as Augustine thought, desire is the riddle of history, then could we not
appeal to Brown’s own invocation of Augustine to determine how theology
might enlighten us about the enchantments of capitalism? To play the music
of enchantment that haunted Weber; to observe the theological niceties that
piqued and eluded Marx; to bless the accursed share of festive expenditure
that beguiled Bataille; to quicken the life against lucre that animated
Brown—to accomplish all this, we need theology to narrate the perversity
of capitalism. Following Milbank’s characterization of Augustine’s City of
God as the inaugural volume of a “Christian metanarrative realism” which
secures “the original possibility of critique that marks the western tradition”,
Christian historians need to recover a theological idiom that links history
and criticism.35 As my previous references to Milbank and Pickstock indi-
cate, I believe that the constellation of concerns and approaches encapsu-
lated in “radical orthodoxy” contains tantalizing possibilities for historical
analysis and cultural criticism. Like and yet against Marxism, it harbors a
materialism that constitutes both an ontology and an anthropology of eco-
nomic and historical action. Indeed, if, as Marx rightly implies in his discus-
sion of commodity fetishism, religion works like an economy, then it forms

an alternative community of ontology, goods, and desires. And if Marx
wrongly implies that fetishism is merely an ideological distortion of some
more “basic” social practice, then we can say that Christianity constitutes the
ontological and historical truth of enchantment, a sacramental materialism
which affirms the divine presence in the material world.
The porousness of the boundary between the corporeal and the incorpo-
real allows Milbank to maintain that the Catholic tradition of sacramental-
ity endows both the material world and the labor of creativity with religious
import. Rejecting Calvinism and its Weberian denouement as deviations
from Christian orthodoxy, Milbank argues that material objects and human
poesis are portals onto divinity, goods that “open up our awareness of the
sacred in the presentation of compelling forms”. Far from being the curse of
Adam, labor in its original, non-debased form is “always a form of play”.
Maintaining that Christianity effects a “transvaluation of values” in the
understanding of work and leisure, Milbank applauds the engraver and
social critic Eric Gill, who thought that work was a state in which “a man
does what he likes” and that spare time was “the serious time of redemp-
tion”. Work and leisure were one, Gill wrote, “when what a man likes to do
is to please God”. Thus, sacramental labor and consumption anticipate the
final consummation and redemption of human destiny. “Eschatology”. Ward
asserts, “is both not yet and is being realized in our midst, through our
labourings.”36
This conception of human labor as, in Milbank’s words, “an aesthetic and
liturgical work offered to God”, constituted the basis for two contempora-
neous but (apparently) unrelated moments in Christian social thought: the
“sacramental socialism” of many British Christian socialists in the decade
before World War I, epitomized in the work of John Neville Figgis, and the
“sophic economy” envisioned by the Russian philosopher and theologian
Sergei Bulgakov. Both the sacramental socialists and Bulgakov formulated
their economics in conscious opposition to the metaphysical and historical
materialism of Marxist orthodoxy. As Peter Jones has reconstructed the
sacramentalist position, Christian socialism pivoted on a doctrine of divine
immanence which detects “God’s presence everywhere, in nature and in
man, destroys the artificial distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’
worlds, [and] sanctifies the material life”. At the same time, sacramentalist
advocacy of a “pluralist state” was indissolubly wedded to a guild social-
ism which anointed the churches and the labor movement, not the Prole-
tariat and the Party, as the revolutionary David against the capitalist Goliath.
Rehearsing these themes in a Russian Orthodox idiom, Bulgakov, in Philos-
ophy of Economy (1912), repudiated both what he considered the “Kantian-
ized and metaphysically emptied” economics of Marxism and liberal
theology. Rather, Christian socialists, he believed, needed an economics
rooted in the “Christian materialism” of Athanasius of Alexandria and
Gregory of Nyssa, a materialism which recognized that divine wisdom, or

Sophia, radiated throughout the physical world as “the primordial purity
and perfection of the universe”. When performed for the purpose of re-
creating the multiform image of God, human labor “partakes of the divine
Sophia”. To the extent that Bulgakov sketched out an institutional frame-
work from this theological economics, he appears to have endorsed a decen-
tralized form of socialism similar to that of the British guildsmen.37
It seems to me that if the partisans of radical orthodoxy wish to make good
on contemporary gestures toward “Christian socialism” or “eucharistic anar-
chism” or whatever term they choose to encapsulate their hopes, they need
to revisit (and obviously repave) these roads not taken in socialist theory.
More specifically, they must rewrite and incorporate both the Marxist “nar-
rative of proletarianization” and its complementary account of commodity
fetishism. How might this look? When re-inscribed in a theological narra-
tive of modern economic history, “proletarianization”—the sine qua non of
capitalism and, it should be recalled, of secular socialism—marks the sub-
ordination of liturgical poesis to “productivity”. Here we should draw upon
Gill and Simone Weil, contemporaries during the 1930s (arguably one of the
most creative periods in Christian social thought) and two of our keenest
theological students of modern work. Along with art and science, labor, Weil
wrote, was a way of “entering into contact with the divine order of the uni-
verse”, while for Gill it was an education in beatitude, a “training of persons
for the end envisaged by religion . . . to see all things in God”. Just as God
united thought and action, so the perfection of the imago dei wedded con-
sciousness with physical life in labor during which workers were “obliged
to think while acting”. On this basis, Weil proposed that such a theological
analysis of work in capitalism would, like Marxism, begin from the relations
of production, but would continue “in terms of the relationship between
thought and action”. Because it took poesis rather than productivity as the
standard of labor, such a social analysis enabled Weil and Gill to affirm the
indissoluble unity of soul and body, avoid the trap of “progress” that
ensnared both liberal and Marxist politics and scholarship, and dispel the
reactionary romance of agrarian life and pre-industrial technology. Thus,
while they saw the divine likeness most clearly in the medieval artisan, they
did not demonize all modern factory labor. In a society of liturgical work-
places, Gill thought, the artist is not “a special kind” of worker, but every
worker is “a special kind of artist”. If practiced as liturgical poesis, modern
labor could be artisanal and ecclesial. “The fully skilled worker, trained in
modern technical methods, resembles most closely the perfect workman”,
Weil believed, and thus “a plant or factory could fill the soul through a pow-
erful awareness of collective life.”38
This critique of capitalism was thoroughly sacramental and liturgical. In
both the scientific management of Frederick Taylor and in the Fordist regime
of routinized, mechanized production, Weil saw an attempt to uncouple the
soul from the body through the mystification of managerial expertise.

Because modern science and technical education had become “a corpus of
knowledge closed to the working masses”, they comprised an “outstanding
mystery” analogous to theology or the occult. The mystification of manage-
rial expertise facilitated the entrusting of management, not to workers as
freely associated persons, but to “a curious machine, whose parts are men,
whose gears consist of regulations, reports and statistics”, and whose pro-
ductive practice tried to “imitate the effort of thought to life”. Taylorized,
Fordist capitalism wrought a massive desecration of sacramental labor,
because only in the unity of thought and action could work afford “a certain
contact with reality, the truth, and the beauty of the universe and with the
eternal wisdom which is the order in it”. Thus, for Weil, it was “sacrilege to
degrade labor in exactly the same sense that it is sacrilege to trample upon the
Eucharist.”39
In a similar way, a theological reformulation of commodity fetishism
permits us to identify political possibilities unimaginable in the Marxist
tradition. For one thing, the similarities between commodity fetish and
sacrament underline Marx’s inability to banish the “religious” from his
“scientific” account of commodities. As Milbank points out, sacramental
rituals do indeed “fetishize” objects, yet “this convention really organizes
human actions and relationships”. Drawing on anthropology, Milbank con-
tends that material objects are always laden with a variety of meanings and
identities, and that exchanges of goods always foster human affairs. Thus, if
both “religion” and “economics” are practices of exchange in which mater-
ial and symbolic actions are intertwined, then “there appears”, in Milbank’s
judgment, “little reason for giving the one causal priority over the other”.40
But if we cannot maintain the priority of production over culture, then we
cannot share the Marxist eschatological hope that a secular unmasking of
fetishism—or, to say the same thing, a secular transcendence of reification—
will revolutionize a transparent social reality.
The insufficiency of Marxist demystification—or, for that matter, of
Freudian therapeutic transparency, or of Weberian weltschmerz—makes the
trinity of faith, hope, and charity all the more discerning and imperative as
political virtues. As Terry Eagleton has observed, the theory of commodity
fetishism, while it “forges a dramatically immediate link between capitalist
economic activity and human consciousness”, does so “by short-circuiting
the level of the specifically political”. Do all groups, he asks, “all share the
same ideological universe, universally imprinted as they are by the mater-
ial structures of capitalism”? Eagleton highlights the problem of the “imma-
nent critique” inseparable from Marxist discourse: how, exactly, does a
properly socialist consciousness emerge from the womb of capitalism?
Though Marxists point to the collectivizing imperatives of capitalism itself
as the bases for revolutionary consciousness, it remains unclear why a col-
lectivized consciousness—especially one shaped in the crucible of the cultural
industries—should necessarily be a revolutionary one. As Gill noted, con-

sumption in capitalism—the “Leisure State” as he envisioned the future—
becomes a dreary round of sensation and contempt. “People won’t really love
the ‘good things’ they enjoy in such plenty . . . in reality they will despise
everything. Things will be made only for passing enjoyment, to be scrapped
when no longer enjoyable.” In Gill’s view, the culture of consumption breeds
not rebellion but cynicism—and boredom, as Michael Hanby has suggested,
perceiving that, because none of the “choices” offered in consumer capital-
ism are intrinsically compelling, the ideology of “choice” facilitates not the
triumph but the atrophy of the will. But because it emerges from an alter-
native (if also lamentably weakened) education of desire, a specifically Chris-
tian commitment to overcome the fetishism of commodities would derive
not from longings generated from within capitalism itself but from “a dif-
ferent desire”, as Milbank puts it laconically, a distinctive eschatological
longing and destination identified within the polis of the Church. As Gill put
it, what we might call a beatific consumption would be a practice whereby
we use goods “as holy things, things in which and by which God is
manifest”.41
If capitalism works like a religion, then we can study and critique it as a
religion, a form of enchantment, an ensemble of rituals, symbols, moral
codes, and iconography. Yet it is on precisely this score that radical ortho-
doxy needs revision in order to realize its enormous promise as a reservoir
of critical power. Because Milbank and his comrades define modern secu-
larity as the creation of a space of untrammeled human will-to-power, they
obscure or even miss the full significance of their own discernment of reli-
gious residue in capitalist theory and practice. Milbank, for instance, empha-
sizes the persistence of providential notions in classical conceptions of the
market (the “invisible hand”) and notes the transvaluation of Christian
virtue into the skinflint and specious probities of sobriety, punctuality, and
self-restraint. D. Stephen Long—whose Divine Economy (2000) is a remark-
able fusion of historical theology and intellectual history—rightly asserts
that Adam Smith “articulated a metaphysical-moral vision for capitalist eco-
nomics”, and examines how contemporary Christian intellectuals such as
Michael Novak and Max Stackhouse have tried to align the verities of eco-
nomics with those of theology.42 But neither Long nor Milbank appears to
consider the perdurance of this perverse sacrality a reason to abandon or
revise what Jeffrey Stout has called “the secularist theory of secularization”
that structures their accounts of capitalism and political economy.43
Rather than rely on what Stout rightly considers a discredited seculariza-
tion narrative, radical orthodox scholars might adopt the more promising
mode of criticism suggested by Pickstock and William Cavanaugh. Moder-
nity, Pickstock asserts, is marked by “the refusal of liturgy”. But if, as she
also writes, “modernity must live off the capital of what it denies”, might
this not suggest that the “secularization” so often attributed to modernity is
not so much the refusal of liturgy as it is the parasitical and perverse refor-
mulation of liturgy?44 Even more provocatively, Cavanaugh argues that the
modern nation-state is a “simulacrum, a false copy, of the Body of Christ”
with “an alternative soteriology to that of the Church”. “It is not enough”,
he contends in a highly suggestive but undeveloped passage, “to see what
is called ‘secularization’ as the progressive stripping away of the sacred from
some profane remainder”. Modern nationalism is “the substitution of one
mythos of salvation for another”—“extra respublicam nulla salus”, as he wittily
encapsulates it—and this nationalist mythos has succeeded “because it
mimics its predecessor”. In other words, there is a sacrality inherent in secu-
larity, and the state is, in short, a perverse form of religio. But if, as Cavanaugh
notes, “the power of the state grew in concert with the rise of capitalism”,45
might not the history of the latter be a similar story of mythic mimicry and
substitution? Might not capitalism appropriate “the capital of what it denies”
and reinvest it in the liturgy of accumulation? Extra agoram nulla salus?
If, then, we follow out Cavanaugh’s and Pickstock’s intimations to their
conclusion, then what we have called “disenchantment” or “secularization”
is actually the repression or displacement of sacrament—and, to borrow from
Freud, the repressed and displaced always returns in a different but malig-
nant form. Miller says as much in terms of a critique of commodity culture
when he writes that “the most pressing challenge of consumer desire . . . is
not its difference from, but its profound similarity to, the form of the mysti-
cal ascent”—an ascent, he adds, frustrated by consumerism’s “derailing of
eschatology”,46 its re-routing of our redemptive expectations toward the
marketplace. A theological critique of “disenchantment” could then avoid
the tiresome and flat-footed opposition of secular and sacred, and enable us
to suggest that while moderns claim to disenchant and de-sacramentalize
matter, they “fetishize” goods by shifting faith in divine power to the trans-
formative properties of commodities. Likewise, the love of accumulation is
a corrupted love of God, a private and spoiled Eucharistic banquet. And as
the site of poesis deformed into productivity, the corporation is a grotesque
of liturgical labor.
The “Supernatural Economy”: A Sketch of Enchantment in

American Economic Culture
Guided by some of the ideas I have sketched, I have become convinced that
American cultural history abounds with evidence that enchantment or sacra-
mentality has persisted throughout the evolution of capitalism. Even before
the advent of corporate capitalism in the late nineteenth-century, American
economic culture had featured an ongoing tension between a Cartesian-
Calvinist worldview that disenchanted material life and a more fluid,
enchanted sensibility that bore Campbell’s “other Protestant ethic”. After
generations of putting the New England Puritans at the center of colonial
Christianity, historians of American religion now agree that pre-Revolution-

ary and even antebellum spiritual life was a veritable hothouse of magic,
animism, astrology, and other occult practices. From almanacs and dream
books to seerstones and divining rods, colonial Americans—even Puritans
like Cotton Mather—participated in what one historian has dubbed a
“supernatural economy”, a brisk and voluminous trade in the parapherna-
lia of enchantment. After the Revolution, this supernatural economy per-
sisted, shaping what Lears, following Mikhail Bakhtin, has called the
“carnivalesque” spirit of the burgeoning market culture that emerged in the
1820s and 1830s. Fuelled by evangelical emotionalism, this antebellum com-
mercial culture contained numerous instances of enchantment or sacramen-
tality, from magical thinking and worries about the “influence” of peddlers
to widespread belief in the exotic, transformative possibilities of jewelry and
patent medicine.47
These beliefs in an enchanted world were not restricted to farmers, trades-
men, and slaves. None other than Ralph Waldo Emerson saw the new market
economy as a part of the harmonious transcendental architecture of the
world. Writing in the midst of the commercial and manufacturing revolu-
tion that enshrined the market near the heart of American life, Emerson
draped political economy in the raiment of sacrament. In “Wealth” (1870),
one of the most popular and oft-reprinted of his many traveling lectures,
Emerson put the texts of capitalist economics on a par with the Jewish and
Christian scriptures. “Political Economy is as good a book wherein to read
the life of man . . . as any Bible which has come down to us.” Despite (or,
perhaps, precisely because of?) his post-Unitarian theology, Emerson con-
sidered commodities quasi-sacramental tokens, vehicles of spiritual truth
in a supernatural economy. “All things with which we deal, preach to us”,
he wrote in “Nature” (1836). The moral law at the center of the universe
was “the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every
process”.48 Emerson’s affirmation of antebellum commodity culture suggests
that, far from being a protest against the spiritual devastation wrought by
the market, American transcendentalism was one of the earliest expressions
of capitalist enchantment.
Emerson’s contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne was not so enthralled. In
“The Celestial Railroad”, Hawthorne crafted a harrowing parable of capi-
talist sacramentality that fuses Pilgrim’s Progress and the City of God. The
story’s narrator recounts a dream in which, accompanied by a “Mr. Smooth-
it-Away”, a railroad investor, he boards a train for “the Celestial City”. They
stop for a while at Vanity Fair, “the great capital of human business and plea-
sure”. “Such are the charms” of Vanity Fair, the narrator writes, that many
tourists mistake it for “the true and only heaven”. Indeed, they become so
“enchanted” that they exchange celestial “tracts of land and golden man-
sions” for “small, dismal, inconvenient tenements”. After resisting Vanity
Fair’s blandishments, the narrator passes through “Beulah”, a pastoral land
whose luscious fruits and foliage had been “propagated by grafts from the
celestial gardens”. Like a distorted sacrament, Beulah and Vanity Fair bear
the distorted image and likeness of the Celestial City, and afford a corrupted
foretaste of heavenly bliss. Arriving at the Celestial City’s gates, the narra-
tor’s companion reveals his true identity as an “impudent fiend” with smoke
billowing from his nostrils and flames darting from his eyes. “Thank Heaven
it was a dream!” the narrator gasps.49
But Mr. Smooth-it-Away assumed a more genial visage over the latter
nineteenth-century, as proprietary capitalism gave way to a corporate dis-
pensation whose regime of enchantment was crafted under professional-
managerial auspices. Over the course of the twentieth-century, an array of
writers in the reform, academic, and corporate intelligentsia—from Progres-
sives to advertising moguls, from pragmatist philosophers at Harvard to
business journalists at Fortune—attributed moral and sacral significance to
the capitalist corporation and its commodity culture. Josiah Royce, for
instance, considered the corporation a prefigurement of the “Beloved Com-
munity” he augured as the modern solution to The Problem of Christianity
(1913). In War and Insurance (1914), Royce marveled at the corporation’s
fusion of mortal material assets with an identity, legally conferred but
nonetheless forceful, which constituted an immortal selfhood, an “essen-
tially intangible soul”. Herbert Croly, one of the founders of the New Repub-
lic, identified Progressive Democracy (1914) with the “holy city”, built with
the hands of corporate workers. Modern sanctity, he believed, depended on
the “fund of virtue” or “spiritual heritage” invested by a modern clerisy
of “learned or holy men”—especially the “democratic administrators” and
“scientific managers” who possessed the discursive capital of social
science.50
Corporate intellectuals closer to the daily activities of business shared
these enchanted and expansive hopes. Eager to counter charges that corpo-
rate business was a soulless and avaricious leviathan, members of the busi-
ness community increasingly argued that corporate labor, when properly
managed, bore a religious import. J. George Frederick, managing editor of
Printer’s Ink (then the advertising industry’s leading trade magazine) called
upon corporate leaders to spread “the ideality of the human spirit” through-
out “our vast mechanism of production”. Bruce Barton, perhaps the most
famous (or infamous) advertising man of the twentieth-century, came even
closer to articulating an ecclesial, liturgical conception of the corporation. In
his best-selling The Man Nobody Knows (1925), Barton (son of a Congrega-
tionalist minister) asserted that Jesus “picked up twelve men from the
bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that con-
quered the world”. Easily derided as a mite of kitsch, Barton’s remark should
be noted for its implicit identification of the church with the corporation.
Moreover, Barton explicitly anointed corporate work in language which, if
placed in a very different political and discursive context, would have
merited the applause of Weil or Gill. “All work is worship; all useful service
prayer”, are the words with which he concluded his book. “Whoever works
wholeheartedly at any worthy calling is a co-worker with the Almighty in
the great enterprise which He has initiated.” Yet if Barton the liberal Protes-
tant still retained some sense that the church and the corporation were
indeed distinct communities, other corporate ideologues presaged a form
of corporate cultural hegemony less tightly bound to Christian religiosity.
Declaring in Business the Civilizer (1928) that Americans were already living
in a “business millennium”, the advertising executive Earnest Elmo Calkins
argued that corporate business was both the most auspicious modern venue
for romantic adventure—“our Field of the Cloth of Gold”, he rhapsodized,
where men could earn “the glory [once] given to the crusader, the solider,
the courtier, the explorer, the martyr”—and the site of moral and sacral
authority. “That eternal job of administering this planet must be turned over
to the business man”, Calkins wrote. “The work that religion and govern-
ment have failed in must be done by business.”51
One of the largest and most influential venues for this corporate religios-
ity was management theory, exemplified in the work of Peter Drucker—a
prolific and revered figure often referred to as a “management guru”. It is
not noted enough that Drucker began his career, not as a management con-
sultant, but as a cultural critic indebted to the right-wing “corporatist” social
thought of the interwar period. Intervening in the crisis of corporate cultural
hegemony occasioned by the Depression in the 1930s and 1940s, Drucker
supplied to the business intelligentsia a moral economy that synthesized
Catholic corporatism and “human relations” managerial ideology. Drawing
on the work of Austrian Catholic corporatists in search of a “third way”
between capitalism and socialism, Drucker called on corporate managers to
become, in effect, a clerisy infusing a “new order and creed” to replace liberal
individualism. Because, in Drucker’s view, “there has never been a more effi-
cient, a more honest, a more capable and conscientious group of rulers than
the professional management of the great American corporation today”, then
corporate managers were the main repositories of the “Christian concept of
man’s nature: imperfect, weak, a sinner, and dust destined unto dust; yet
made in God’s image and responsible for his actions”.52
After the Second World War, faced with the new challenge of countering
Soviet Marxism, Drucker moved even further in the direction of corporate
clerical ordination in three pivotal tomes of postwar managerial thought: The
Concept of the Corporation (1946), The New Society (1950), and The Practice of
Management (1954). On one level, Drucker attributed ecclesial qualities to the
business corporation, arguing that the corporate firm was now “our repre-
sentative social institution”, having supplanted the family, the church, and
even the state as the main agent of social identity, cohesion, and vitality. It
provided both “the standard for the way of life and the mode of living” and
“the symbol through which facts are organized in a social pattern”. The
ecclesial corporation required, of course, a clerisy and a theology, and

Drucker supplied both in short order. The clerisy was the “the new indus-
trial middle class” of managers, engineers, technicians, and accountants; the
theological and moral lexicon was “Human Relations”, which served as both
a “diagnostic tool” in the workplace and a lingua franca for “the whole area
of the social life of the industrial society”.53
Since Drucker’s gray-flanneled time, and as part of the cultural universe
inseparable from the decentralized, “flexible” arrangements of post-Fordist
capitalism, management writers and other corporate intellectuals have
assembled an even more diverse ideological portfolio, ransacking the
world’s religions for symbols, images, and aura. As any student of contem-
porary business culture knows, and as any casual observer of ubiquitous
advertising can see, our corporate-manufactured symbolic universe is
bathed in the luminosity of the sublime. In this respect (as in many others)
they resemble and arguably merge with figures in what has come to be called
“New Age” religious culture. Indeed, writers as diverse as Slavoj Zizek and
Paul Heelas have noted the harmonic convergence of New Age “spiritual-
ity” with the accumulative and cultural dynamics of global capitalism, a
fusion that releases an abundance of spiritual treasure for investment in cor-
porate hegemony. As Naomi Klein observed in No Logo (1999), “the corpo-
rate world has always had a deep New Age streak”, with branding as the
most advanced form of “corporate transcendence”. (Might brands be best
considered in Durkheimian fashion as the latest version of totems, objects
that bear the spirit of a clan?)54
The most popular artifacts of contemporary business literature make
much of “the soulful corporation”, complete with “credos” and “mission
statements”. Often read as a high-minded farrago of moral platitudes, most
of these documents should be read in appalling earnest, whether as perverse
ecclesiological statements, parodies of liturgical labor, or twisted forms of
sacramentality. One best-selling author, Laurie Jones (author of Jesus CEO
[1998]), lauds “spiritreneurs”, employees who “fully integrate their souls
in a workplace enterprise” and exhibit a “passionate commitment to the
cause”—the cause of customer service, the post-Fordist evolutionary descen-
dent of the corporal works of mercy. But the most uninhibited (and vastly
popular) New Age panegyric to corporate business has come from George
Gilder, whose encomia to wealth, computers, and cyberspace mark a new
and dizzying apogee in capitalist enchantment. Echoing Emerson (with a
touch of Carl Jung, another favorite among the New Age set), Gilder thinks
that “capitalism succeeds” because it comports with the laws of “a higher
consciousness”, a “collective unconscious, sometimes defined as God”.
When the mind “merges” with this higher power, it “reaches new truths,
glimpses new ideas—the projection of light into the unknown future—by
which progress occurs”. Gilder reserves his greatest euphoria (and his pur-
plest prose) for “the magic of the solid-state world”. The silicon chip that
undergirds information capitalism both enables an “ever-expanding cir-

cuitry of ideas” and harbors “a truth that sets us free”. Silicon technology
empowers a techno-vanguard which, replacing Shelley’s poets, comprises
“the true legislators for the silent and silenced majorities of the world”. In
short, the marketplace, we learn, is a sacramental space, “a vessel of the
divine”.55
While the silicon chip plays a eucharistic role in Gilder’s cyber-theology,
the greatest irony of Gilder’s digitalized enchantment lies in its ultimately
gnostic repudiation of matter itself. Wealth becomes curiously immaterial in
Gilder’s world, wherein the “metaphysical capital of ideas” constitutes “the
true substance of economic growth”. Gilder’s incessant references to “mind”,
“idea”, and “consciousness” disclose the growing immateriality of life in late
capitalism, a development celebrated by none other than Michael Novak
when he announces that in democratic capitalism “materialism” is “more
and more left behind”.56 The investment of hope in money and commodi-
ties—in the sacraments and graces of capitalism—fuels a gnostic rage to
accumulate and to disembody in pursuit of what Marx rightly called “the
immanent spirit of commodities”.
And yet, despite an eclecticism that partakes of the market’s enshrinement
of “choice”, New Age also points, however ambiguously, to the desire for a
sacramental way of being in the world. In Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)—still a trade best-seller and one of the ur-texts
of New Age culture—we find an untroubled confidence in the reality of
enchantment. “The Buddha, the Godhead resides quite as comfortably in the
circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does
at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.” Enchanted, decentral-
ist, and vaguely anti-capitalist in sentiment, Pirsig’s sacramental conception
of technology allows him to resist both a neo-Luddite disavowal of technol-
ogy and the aquarian entrepreneurialism of Ken Wilber, Marilyn Ferguson,
and other enchanters of the post-1960s professional stratum. Attending to
his bike with the artisanal poesis that a Gill would have lavished on his
engravings, Pirsig perceives that his relationship to the material world, even
when mediated by advanced technology, is a spiritual discipline through
which he encounters divinity. For this very reason, Pirsig realizes that broad,
facile rejections of modern technology as “soulless” constitute acts of moral
and political irresponsibility, since they concede to corporations the struggle
to define the religious meanings and practices of technology. Still, in the end,
Pirsig prefigures precisely this New Age disengagement, preferring to take
to the Whitmanesque “open road” in pursuit of an individual sacramental
life.57 Thus, Pirsig’s remains a very Western Buddhism in its airy avoidance
of collective political action. Because New Age sacramentality cannot be
ecclesial, it cannot be political.
While I doubt that the “distributism” of G. K. Chesterton possesses much
in the way of useful analysis or practical politics, his “meditation in Broad-
way”, penned in the wake of his visit to the United States shortly after World
War I, still speaks to our ambivalent delight in the enchanted capitalist par-
adise. Unlike so many dour moralists, Chesterton did not claim immunity
to the majesty of the modern metropolis: rich in goods, sumptuous with
peoples, and studded with lights and ads, it beckoned any sensitive soul to
contemplate “a brotherhood broader than Broadway”. Because he confessed
his attraction to the spectacle, Chesterton was able to capture the sacramen-
tal, redemptive energies surging through New York’s commercial culture.
The life depicted in the signs was a “beautiful superstition” in the skies, a
garden of plenty that outshone the “golden foliage and fruits” of Eden, a
tableau of figures draped in clothing that rivaled the “purple and peacock
plumage of the seraphim”. But Chesterton recognized the managerial
manipulation and aesthetic swindle that led the aspirations of a sinful people
to a phony and malevolent fulfillment. The advertising men with their
“pyrotechnic violence”, the merchants and marketers writing their “com-
mands in heaven with a finger of fire”—only a people gulled by “a sort of
mesmerism” could lavish so much imaginative energy on so sham a bill of
goods.58
Yet because he embraced and refused to despise this beguiling mortal
splendor, Chesterton ended his meditation with “a rather dark sympathy
with those many-coloured solar systems turning so dizzily, far up in the
divine vacuum of the night”.59 Just as Chesterton knew that the ads in the
skies were the tokens of a counterfeit paradise, we must see, in the history
of capitalism, a celestial aspiration, and in the hunger for riches, a sacra-
mental longing. Even in the fretful dreamlands of late capitalism, the world
remains, as Gerard Manley Hopkins knew, charged with the grandeur of
God, even as “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil”. Any
renewal of political hope must rest in the sacraments of the triune God, in
what Hopkins, the poet of sacrament, called “the dearest freshness deep
down things”.
NOTES
1 For their helpful suggestions and encouragement, the author would like to thank William
T. Cavanaugh, Michael Hanby, Stanley Hauerwas, Kevin Hughes, Jackson Lears, D. C.
Schindler, and the anonymous reviewers for Modern Theology. Portions of this article have
appeared, in less developed form, in “The Enchanted City of Man: The State and the
Market,” in Kim Paffenroth, John Doody, and Kevin Hughes, eds., Augustine and Politics
(Lexington, KY: Lexington Books, 2005).
2 For a useful overview of tales of disenchantment, see Jane Bennett, The Enchantments of
Everyday Life: Attachments, Crossings, Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2001), pp. 56–90. On mana, the locus classicus is Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic,
trans. Robert Brain (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1950/1972), pp. 108–121.
3 Weber first used this formulation (entzauberung der Welt) in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons trans. (New York, NY: Charles Scribners, 1904/1958), p. 105.
He elaborated further on its meaning in three separate pieces: “Science as a Vocation”
(1915), “The Social Psychology of the World Religions” (1915), and “Religious Rejections

of the World and Their Directions” (1915), all in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans.
and eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, NY: Oxford University Press,
1946), pp. 129–156, 277–282, 331–359. Robert Heilbroner, The Nature and Logic of Capitalism
(New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1985), p. 135.
4 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, 1843/1899), pp. 2, 8,
139–144.
5 Richard McBrien, Catholicism (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 10; Vincent J.
Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (New York and
London: Continuum, 2004), p. 190; Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Black-
well, 2000), p. 218, but see the entire discussion of sacrament on pp. 197–221;Terence Tilley,
Inventing Catholic Tradition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000), p. 131. I will only note here
my suspicion that the focus on “consumerism” and the disinclination to address produc-
tion stem from reluctance on the part of most cultural critics to acknowledge their location
in the professional middle class.
6 On the Maori and the hau of gift-exchange, see Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. Ian Cunni-
son (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1923/1967), esp. pp. 8–10. For an important but I think
unconvincing attack on Mauss’ interpretation of hau, see Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Eco-
nomics (Chicago, IL: Aldine-Atherton, 1972), pp. 149–168. On sacramental ontology, see
John Milbank, “The Poverty of Niebuhrianism” in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Lan-
guage, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 252 n. 10; “Can Morality Be Christian?” ibid., p.
225; Graham Ward, Cities of God (London and (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 156–161,
quote on p. 157. I must point out that Ward explicitly rejects any conception of sacrament
as “a magical commodity, enchanting the material” (p. 159). I hope it is clear that my dif-
ference from Ward is purely verbal, and that my account of “sacrament” and “enchant-
ment” can accommodate Ward’s salutary caution.
7 Eugene McCarraher, Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social
Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); see esp. pp. 124–129 on Tillich’s
Weimar theology of culture. Tillich first broached the possibility of a “theology of culture”
in “On the Idea of a Theology of Culture” (1919), in James Luther Adams, ed., What is Reli-
gion? (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1969), pp. 159–64, and in The Religious Situation,
trans. H. Richard Niebuhr (New York, NY: Harper and Bros., 1925/1932). Ward’s assertion
is in Cities of God, p. 13.
8 George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York, NY: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1997), pp. 51–59. Marsden does offer salutary advice about how Christian
history should not be written in “What Difference Might Christian Perspectives Make?” in
Ronald A. Wells, ed., History and the Christian Historian (Grand Rapids and Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 13–14, where he contends that Christian his-
torians will ask distinctive kinds of questions, but not always arrive at conclusions only
they can reach. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Black-
well, 1990), pp. 246, 196. Concerned to define theology’s relationship to Marxism (a project
botched, he argues, by liberation theologians), Milbank maintains further that while
Marxism offers “a better reading of the ‘logic’ and ‘grammar’ of capitalism”, theology
“would claim to say—in fully historical terms—more precisely what it is that capitalism
prefers, and what it refuses” (p. 247). For a more detailed theological engagement with
Marxism from which I have learned a great deal, see Nicholas Lash, A Matter of Hope: A
Theologian’s Reflections on the Thought of Karl Marx (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1982).
9 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation”, op. cit., pp. 139, 155; “The Sociology of Charismatic
Authority” (1921), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, pp. 245–248; Karl Polanyi, The
Great Transformation (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1944/1957), pp. 43–55, quotes on pp. 46,
55. See also “The Place of Economies in Societies” (1957) in Primitive, Archaic, and Modern
Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi, George Dalton ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968),
pp. 116–138.
10 Weber, Protestant Ethic, pp. 95–154, esp. p. 117; see also “Religious Rejections of the World
and Their Directions” (1915), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, pp. 323–359.
11 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth and Sev-
enteenth Century England (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1971/1997), and Carolyn
Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York, NY:

Harper and Row, 1980). Max Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World”, p. 331; Protestant
Ethic, p. 182; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1651/1996),
p. 66. My understanding of Calvinist sacramental theology relies on Ward, Cities of God,
pp. 161–167.
12 Max Weber, Protestant Ethic, pp. 91, 97, 105, 138–140.
13 Ibid., pp. 176, 182; on “the last man” see Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Penguin, 1978), pp. 9–24; Francis Fukuyama, The End of
History and The Last Man (New York, NY: Free Press, 1992), esp. pp. 71–108.
14 Weber, “Science as a Vocation”, pp. 148–49; Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit
of Modern Consumerism (Oxford and London: Blackwell, 1987), pp. 118–153.
15 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, pp. 89–98.
16 Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1988), esp. pp. 349–369; Weber, Protestant Ethic, p. 18; Milbank, Theology and
Social Theory, p. 117.
17 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction”
(1844), in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1978),
p. 53; Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Eric Hobsbawm intro. (London
and New York: Verso, 1998), pp. 37, 38, 41.
18 Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” (1844), in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader,
pp. 101–105; Grundrisse, Martin Nicolaus trans. (London: Penguin, 1857/1993), pp. 221, 225.
19 Marx, Capital, Vol. I (New York, NY: Random House, 1867/1906), pp. 81–96, 60. I am
indebted to Milbank’s reflections on fetishism in “ ‘The Body by Love Possessed’: Chris-
tianity and Late Capitalism in Britain” Modern Theology Vol. 3 no. 1 (January, 1986), pp.
56–57. For an exemplary and moving application of commodity fetishism, see Michael
Taussig’s discussion of the “devil contract” and “money-baptism” among rural workers in
Colombia and Bolivia in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), esp. pp. 13–38, 104–109, 129–139. In peasant
and working-class epistemology, Taussig writes, “things contain the totality within them-
selves, so to speak, and can be seen causally, acting on and acted upon by other constituents
. . . they are ciphers and signs that echo the meaning of the system that society forms with
them” (p. 138).
20 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), pp. 23–35.
21 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1 (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 58;
Julian Stallabrass, Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture (London and New York: Verso,
1996), pp. 153, 157–159. It is noteworthy that Stallabrass makes his theological swerve
precisely at the point where he invokes Walter Benjamin, whom I discuss below. David
McLellan, Marxism and Religion (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1987), is an invaluable
history of Marxist encounters with religion, especially Christianity.
22 Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloom-
ington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 212; “Reification and Utopia in Mass
Culture”, Social Text Vol. 1 (Fall 1979), pp. 130–148; Georg Lukacs, History and Class Con-
sciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Rodney Livingstone, trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1922/1971), p. 83; Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London and New
York: Verso, 1998), p. 76; Timothy Bewes, Reification: Or, the Anxiety of Late Capitalism
(London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 30.
23 Bewes, Reification, pp. 5, 44, 46–47, 235–236, 262. Bewes’ remarks on the Eucharist echo those
of Terry Eagleton, whose Marxist theology of the 1960s contains some of the most pene-
trating (and today sadly unexamined) reflections on the connection of sacrament, ontology,
and politics. See, for instance, The Body as Language: Outline of a “New Left” Theology
(London: Sheed and Ward, 1970), in which Eagleton argues that “the eucharist is a sym-
bolic transcendence of all historical alienation” and that “the liturgical life is not an oasis
of authentic meaning inserted into an obscure surge of chaos, but an expressive sign of the
intrinsic sacrality of the redeemed world” (pp. 28, 59).
24 Bewes, Reification, pp. 135–136, 265–266, 5.
25 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin trans. (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 469; “On Language as Such and on the
Language of Man” (1916), in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Peter
Demetz ed. (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1978), pp. 316–317, 326; “On the Mimetic

Faculty” (1915), ibid., pp. 333–334. One-Way Street and Other Writings, Edmund Jephcott and
Kingsley Shorter, trans. (London: Verso, 1979/1997), pp. 87, 93. Sholem’s remark is in Walter
Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, Harry Zohn trans. (New York, NY: Schocken Books,
1969), p. 63. For a subtle discussion of Benjamin’s approach to theo-historical issues, see
Joseph Mali, Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography (Chicago and London: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 228–283. Theodor Adorno was wrong when he asserted
that Benjamin did not cling to “theological relics” and that he looked to “radical, defense-
less profanation as the only chance for the theological heritage which squandered itself in
profanity”: “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin” in Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967),
p. 234. For a later attempt to keep Benjamin on the secular straight-and-narrow, see Susan
Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1989).
26 Benjamin wrote in the first of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) that his-
torical materialism could “be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology”,
which was “wizened and had to keep out of sight”.
27 Benjamin, Arcades Project, pp. 212–227, 893; “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940),
in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Harry Zohn, trans. (New York, NY: Schocken Books,
1969), p. 253.
28 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1967/1988), pp. 25, 28; Theory of Religion,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1973/1992), pp. 43–61; see also Visions
of Excess (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Roger Caillois, “Festi-
val” (1939) in Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology 1937–1939 (Minneapolis, MN: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 279–303, esp. pp. 297–298. For a discussion of the
College’s relationship to Benjamin, see Mali, Mythistory, pp. 276–278.
29 Jean Baudrillard, “When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy” Cana-
dian Journal of Political and Social Theory Vol. 15 (1991), pp. 63, 66; John Milbank, Being Rec-
onciled: Ontology and Pardon (London and New York, 2002), pp. 181–182; Catherine
Pickstock, After Writing: The Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998),
p. 118 n. 30. For an illuminating reflection on the affinity of Bataille’s thought with trends
in cybernetics and finance capitalism, see Jean-Joseph Goux, “General Economics and Post-
modern Capitalism”, Yale French Studies Vol. 78 (Spring, 1990), pp. 206–224.
30 Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959/1985), pp. 234–302, quotes on pp. 240, 245, 252. The
ur-text of psychoanalytical thought on money is Freud, “Character and Anal Erotism”
(1908), in Joan Riviere and James Strachey, eds., Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II
(New York and London: International Psychoanalytical Press, 1927), pp. 45–50.
31 Melanie Klein, “Love, Reparation, and Gratitude” (1937) in Love, Reparation, and Gratitude
and Other Writings 1921–1945 (New York, NY: Delacorte Press, 1975), p. 336; D. W. Winni-
cott, The Child, The Family, and the Outside World (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964),
pp. 193, 195. For an able and lucid attempt to transform object-relations theory, and espe-
cially Klein’s work, into social and cultural criticism, see Michael Rustin, The Good Society
and The Inner Life: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Culture (London: Verso, 1994), esp. pp.
177–198.
32 Winnicott’s social and political views, such as they are, are represented in Home Is Where
We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1986), pp. 169–268;
Joel Kovel, The Age of Desire: Case Histories of a Radical Psychoanalyst (New York, NY:
Pantheon, 1981), pp. 182–190, 242–260.
33 Brown, Life Against Death, pp. 16, 98.
34 Ward, Cities of God, p. 101; Brown, Life Against Death, p. 231.
35 Ibid., p. 227; Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. 389.
36 Milbank, “The Body by Love Possessed”, pp. 54, 60; Eric Gill, Art-Nonsense and Other Essays
(London: J. M. Dent, 1929), p. 1; Ward, Cities of God, p. 94.
37 Peter D’Arcy Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival, 1877–1914: Religion, Class, and Social Con-
science in Late-Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp.
85–302, esp. pp. 275–281 on Figgis; Sergei Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy: The World as
Household, Catherine Evtuhov, ed. and trans. (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1912/2000), pp. 37–38, 145; see pp. 142–56 in general on the “sophic economy”.

Bulgakov deserves much greater attention; for an introduction, see Catherine Evtuhov,
The Cross and The Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 101–114, 145–186. On Gregory of Nyssa’s
understanding of corporeality, see Ward, Cities of God, pp. 87–91, esp. p. 89.
38 On “Christian socialism”, see Milbank, “On Complex Space” in The Word Made Strange, pp.
268–92, and Being Reconciled, pp. 162–186; on “Eucharistic anarchism,” see William
Cavanaugh, “The City: Beyond Secular Parodies” in John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock,
and Graham Ward, eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London and New York: Rout-
ledge, 1999), pp. 194–198; Simone Weil, “Fragments, London 1943” in Oppression and Liberty,
(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), p. 168; “Theoretical Picture of a
Free Society,” ibid., pp. 100–101, 108, 110; Eric Gill, Sacred and Secular (London: J. M. Dent
and Sons, 1940), pp. 39, 89; It All Goes Together (New York, NY: Devin-Adair, 1944), p. 127;
see also “Art and Industrialism” in Beauty Looks after Herself (New York, NY: Sheed and
Ward, 1931/1933), pp. 180–207.
39 Simone Weil, “Factory Work”, Politics Vol. 3 (December, 1946), p. 369; “Human Personal-
ity” in Richard Rees, ed., Simone Weil: Selected Essays 1931–1943 (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 1962), p. 185 (my italics). For a similar perspective from Frankfurt School
quarters, see Axel Honneth, “Work and Instrumental Action”, New German Critique Vol. 26
(Spring-Summer, 1982), pp. 31–54. See also Tillich’s remarks about a “cultic consecration of
technological production”. Paul Tillich, “Religious Socialism” (1930) in Political Expectation,
trans. and ed. Franklin Sherman (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 53, and The Social-
ist Decision, trans. and ed. Franklin Sherman (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1933/1977),
pp. 150–160.
40 Milbank, “Body by Love Possessed”, p. 57.
41 Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 88; Michael Hanby, “The
Culture of Death, The Ontology of Boredom, and the Resistance of Joy”, Communio Vol. 31
(Summer, 2004), pp. 181–199, esp. 184–188; Gill, It All Goes Together, p. 162; Milbank,
Theology and Social Theory, p. 193.
42 Michael Novak’s theological economics, it must be noted, is the most forthright and out-
rageous of all these efforts. The corporation, he writes, is “the best secular analogue to the
church”, indeed a “Suffering Servant” representing “a much despised incarnation of God’s
presence in the world”.
43 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, pp. 27–48; D. Stephen Long, Divine Economy: Theology
and the Market (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 13–56, quote on p. 25; see also
D. Stephen Long, The Goodness of God: Theology, The Church, and Social Order (Grand Rapids,
MI: Brazos, 2001), pp. 233–260; Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 2004), pp. 101–102. Stout directs this criticism, not only at radical
orthodoxy, but at a broader “new traditionalism” he associates with Alasdair MacIntyre
and Stanley Hauerwas (pp. 92–161). Michael Novak’s remarks are in Toward a Theology of
the Corporation (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1981/1990), pp. 29, 39.
44 Pickstock seems to entertain this possibility when she writes of “anti-liturgical liturgy”, but
this seems to me only to muddy the water.
45 Catherine Pickstock, “Liturgy and Modernity”, Telos Vol. 113 (Fall, 1998), pp. 27–28; see also
Milbank, Being Reconciled, p. 171, who remarks that “the secular sustains a certain . . . ‘irra-
tional’ and yet nihilistic variant of the theological”. Cavanaugh, “The City: Beyond Secular
Parodies” in Radical Orthodoxy, pp. 182, 190, 192. Cavanaugh appears to consider the nation-
state a more pivotal political actor than the multinational corporation. In Theopolitical Imag-
ination (Edinburgh and New York: T&T Clark, 2002), p. 99, he contends that “globalization”
[itself an obfuscatory term, in my view] represents “a hyper-extension of the nation-state’s
project of subsuming the local under the universal”. While this view has the merit of chal-
lenging facile assumptions about the demise of the nation-state, it obscures the deference
of the state (and especially of the US state) to multinational corporate capital. On this issue,
see Leo Panitch, “The New Imperial State”, New Left Review Vol. 2 (March-April 2000),
pp. 5–20.
46 Miller, Consuming Religion, pp. 126–37, quote on p. 128.
47 On the enchantment of colonial and early republican American religious culture, see David
D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England
(New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), and Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianiz-

ing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 67–97,
225–256. On what I would dub the enchantment or sacramentality of colonial and early
republican economic culture, see Alan Taylor, “The Early Republic’s Supernatural Economy:
Treasure Seeking in the American Northeast, 1780–1830”, American Quarterly Vol. 38
(Spring, 1986), pp. 6–34, and Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Adver-
tising in America (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1994), pp. 40–101.
48 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Wealth” (1870) in The Complete Essays and Other Writings, Brooks
Atkinson ed. (New York, NY: Random House, 1940), p. 702; “Nature” (1836), ibid., p. 23. I
am indebted to two accounts of Emerson, from both of which I dissent in different ways:
Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 9–41, esp. pp. 25–28, and Christopher Lasch, The
True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1991), pp.
261–279.
49 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Celestial Railroad” (1843) in The Celestial Railroad and Other
Stories (New York, NY: Penguin, 1963), pp. 185–202.
50 Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 2 vols. (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1913), II, pp.
163–213; War and Insurance (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1914), pp. xxvii-xxviii; Herbert
Croly, Progressive Democracy (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1914), pp. 191–193, 353, 409–410.
On the emergence of corporate capitalism after the Civil War, see Martin Sklar, The Corpo-
rate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Law, The Market, and Politics (New
York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
51 J. George Frederick, “Humanism as the Emerging American Philosophy” in Frederick, ed.,
A Philosophy of Production (New York, NY: The Business Bourse, 1930), pp. 258–259; Bruce
Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill,
1925), pp. 105, 179–180; Earnest Elmo Calkins, Business the Civilizer (Boston, MA: Little,
Brown, 1928), pp. 118, 232–233.
52 Peter Drucker, The End of Economic Man (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1939/1969), pp.
85–111; The Future of Industrial Man (New York, NY: New American Library, 1942/1965),
pp. 148–150.
53 Peter Drucker, Concept of the Corporation (New York, NY: John Day, 1946), pp. 6–7; The New
Society: The Anatomy of the Industrial Order (New York, NY: Harper, 1950), pp. 25–26,
157–167; The Practice of Management (New York: Harper, 1954), p. 262. In The Practice of Man-
agement, Drucker compared a company’s organization manual to a volume of canon law.
54 On “post-Fordism” see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the
Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 141–197, and Ash Amin, Post-
Fordism: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Slavoj Zizek, On Belief (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000), pp. 12–15, 34–36; Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of
the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 30–32, 90–96; Naomi
Klein, No Logo (New York, NY: Picador, 1999), p. 22. Catherine Casey, Work, Self, and Society:
After Industrialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 189, writes that the new
corporate culture provides employees with “a replica of religious virtuosity”.
55 Laurie Jones, Jesus, Entrepreneur: Using Ancient Wisdom to Launch and Live Your Dreams (New
York, NY: Crown, 2001), pp. xiii, xxvii; Laurie Jones, Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for
Visionary Leadership (New York, NY: Hyperion, 1995), p. 50; George Gilder, Wealth and
Poverty (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1981), pp. 263–265; George Gilder, The Spirit of Enter-
prise (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1984), pp. 127, 258.
56 Gilder, Spirit of Enterprise, p. 127; Novak, Theology of the Corporation, p. 48.
57 Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York, NY: William Morrow,
1974), p. 16. Heelas contends that New Age represents dissatisfaction with the rationalism
and bureaucratization of modernity. See The New Age Movement, pp. 138–141. On the
ideological functions of Western Buddhism in Europe, see Peter Sloterdijk, Eurotaoismus
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989).
58 G. K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America (New York, NY: Dodd and Mead, 1922), pp. 34, 40,
44.
59 Ibid., p. 46.

The Enchantments of Mammon

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The Enchantments of Mammon

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Modern Theology 21:3 July 2005

ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

When I say a bottle of Coca Cola . . . , I mean it as an outward and visible

course of unshackling production and exchange from moral and religious

plenitude, our confidence in God’s power”. Christians assert that we always

“Religiously Unmusical”: The Weberian Tale of Disenchantment

account of capitalism—“man’s economy, as a rule” was considered by pre-

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

is the rationalized accumulation of wealth, undertaken, Calvinists convinced

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

We could begin to answer this question—and many others—by consider-

“Metaphysical Subtleties and Theological Niceties”: Commodity Fetishism and

capital is consecrated in a murderous baptismal rite of accumulation. Yet

“a miracle, the materialization of an ideal in which all marks of its making

heroes sheathing their swords before monetary units”—all “ornamenting

sun which—like the Christian God—“dispenses energy—wealth—without

a survey of historical and anthropological literature, that money actually

Holy Things: The Liturgical Consummations of Labor and Fetishism

sion of commodity fetishism, religion works like an economy, then it forms

Gregory of Nyssa, a materialism which recognized that divine wisdom, or

soul from the body through the mystification of managerial expertise.

industries—should necessarily be a revolutionary one. As Gill noted, con-

The “Supernatural Economy”: A Sketch of Enchantment in

Christianity, historians of American religion now agree that pre-Revolution-

ecclesial corporation required, of course, a clerisy and a theology, and

undergirds information capitalism both enables an “ever-expanding cir-

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

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