Card-Carrying Christians: Debt and the Making of Free Market Spirituality in Colombia 9780520977068

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Card-Carrying Christians

Card-Carrying Christians Debt anD the Making of free Market Spirituality in ColoMbia

Rebecca C. Bartel

univerSity of California preSS

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Rebecca C. Bartel Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bartel, Rebecca C., author. Title: Card-carrying Christians : debt and the making of free market spirituality in Colombia / Rebecca C. Bartel. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020045079 (print) | LCCN 2020045080 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520380011 (hardback) | ISBN 9780520380028 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520977068 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Evangelicalism—Social aspects—Colombia. Classification: LCC BR1642.C7 B37 2021 (print) | LCC BR1642.C7 (ebook) | DDC 332.7088/280409861—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045079 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045080 Manufactured in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude. —Gabriel García Márquez

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Preface Introduction: Aspirational Faith

xvii 1

1.

Credit

35

2.

The Soul

57

3.

Deregulating Christianity

86

4.

Inclusion

109

5.

Multiplication

136

6.

Becoming

158

Conclusion: Necrofinance

183

Notes

203

Bibliography

249

Index

277

Illustrations

1.

New Year’s fireworks, downtown Bogotá

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2.

“Easy Credit” sign

3.

Main auditorium of the Misión Carismática Internacional

4.

A moment of praise and worship

12

5.

“Let’s Reconcile” sign

24

6.

Small-group worship at the Misión Carismática Internacional

36

7.

Christmas lights at Usaquén Park

43

8.

Usme, southern Bogotá

59

9.

Makeshift poster for an Opportunity International workshop

66

10.

Micro-business bookkeeping

71

11.

Welcome sign at the village of Garzal

89

12.

The Four-Square Pentecostal Church in Garzal

92

13.

Outside the Four-Square Pentecostal Church in Garzal

99

14.

A member of the Garzal church with his cacao crop

102

15.

Children looking into a school classroom in Garzal

127

16.

The G12 Convention Center in Bogotá

145

17.

Bogotanos vote in historic referendum in 2016

161

18.

Evening worship at the Four-Square Pentecostal Church

193

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Acknowledgments

The writing of this book has been sustained and supported by many generous readers, critics, friends, and family. I conducted the research over numerous years in Colombia, and the project grew from my time living in the country for eight years prior to beginning my Ph.D. I have now been engaged with Colombia for two decades, and this book would not have been possible without the web of relationships I have been fortunate to forge over these years. I am deeply grateful to the community from the neighborhood of Veraguas in Bogotá, where many of the early ideas for this book developed through long discussions on political economy and religion, faith, hope, and the vibrancy of Colombian life. To Arturo Orrego and Viviana Machuca, Alejandro Perez, Leidy Orrego, Andrea, Alejo, Jennifer Manrique, Matty and Pacho, Emerson, Julietta and Pablo, Juli, Andreita, Bibiana, Hermana Flor, Diana, Jhon, Alejandra, Pablito, David, Tere, and all the others—gracias. I remember here also those who are no longer with us: Hermano Héctor, Hermana Ofelia, and Hectorcito. Que descansen en paz. In Colombia I am indebted to the human rights organizations and networks that shaped my political understanding of Colombia’s armed conflict, and the herculean efforts for peace that have been sustained for decades by generations of indefatigable xi

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activists, scholars, and peacebuilders. I am especially grateful to the people of Justapaz and Mencoldes, the Mennonite Church and Anabaptist Seminary, and the communities where I first began to learn how “religion” operates as an embedded social realm, specific to culture, history, and context, not a sui generis genre of human experience that can be assigned universally or understood as a discrete category of human life, separate from politics or economics. I am thankful to the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) for the opportunity to work as their regional policy analyst for Latin America during the last four years I lived in Colombia. This work allowed me to experience Latin America as a region as well as the many distinct peoples, histories, and contexts of individual nations, cultures, and communities. My work with MCC also gave shape to some of my initial questions about the relationship between political economies and religion that developed into the research themes for this book. Thank you. My time in intellectual communities in Colombian universities, where I earned an M.A. in political science and a graduate diploma in armed conflict resolution at the Universidad de los Andes, and then later had the great privilege of teaching and leading a research team at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, has been foundational to my thinking and scholarly trajectory. I am thankful especially for the collegiality and generous inclusion into Colombian scholarly conversation extended to me by William Maricio Beltrán Cely and Clemencia Tejeiro at the Universidad Nacional; Arturo Orrego at the Universidad Libre; Viviana Machuca, through her work with World Vision; Jeferson Rodriguez, through his work with World Vision and the Fraternidad Teológica de Latinoamerica; Angélika Rettberg, who shepherded me through my M.A. thesis on political economies of war at Los Andes; and the wonderful folks at the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia. Gracias. I am grateful to the scholarly community at the University of Toronto where the budding ideas for this book were nurtured by many sage mentors and colleagues. This ethnography grew from my dissertation and I am thankful to my advisor, Kevin O’Neill, and his inexhaustible pursuit of excellence. Kevin’s pioneering, and deeply ethnographic work into the moral worlds of evangelicalism, violence, security, and politics in Latin America influenced many of the insights I develop in this book, and his mentorship and encouragement has been unparalleled in my professional

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growth. Thank you. Ruth Marshall and her intolerance of mediocre thinking, Pamela Klassen and her truly unique mind and brilliant guidance in the curation of an argument, and Simon Coleman and his dazzling ability to cut through the chaff and offer the most delicately perceptive insight into growing ideas helped shape so many early ideas. I thank you all. At the University of Toronto, I also developed relationships and professional friendships that I still rely on, and gain energy and perspective from, to this day. Arun Brahmbhatt, Ian Brown, Jenn Cianca, Anna Cwikla, Matthew King, Rebekka King, Paul Nahme, Mike Ruecker, Justin Stein and so many others. I am grateful for you all. My collegial community at San Diego State University has supported the culminating research and writing for this manuscript. I appreciate the challenges and deep questions from my graduate students, especially in my seminar on Religion and Economy, who provided me with fresh angles from which to approach the themes in this book. I am deeply grateful to the conversation partners and readers at SDSU who have become so important to my intellectual development, and the development of many of the arguments that became fine-tuned through the final writing of these pages. Drew Thomases and Jocelyn Killmer have become steadfast friends and colleagues, and I am grateful for the many vibrant conversations around the nature of religion and culture, the challenges and privileges of early professorhood, and ways to write a good book. Thank you for all the times you read, chatted out ideas, and encouraged me. Erika Robb Larkins has been a friend, a confidante, and mentor, as well as a brilliant reader of so much of this book. I am deeply indebted to her astute perspectives on writing ethnography, and building an intellectual community. Thank you also to Raechel Dumas, John Gove, Risa Levitt, Jess Whatcott, Joanna Brooks, Angel Nieves, Ramona Pérez, and Kate Rubin for the lively conversations, lending your ear to my ruminations, asking the good questions about the work, and pushing me to finish well. Thank you. Other conversation partners and colleagues have brought sophisticated queries into this work and invigorated my thinking. I am particularly thankful for the many conversations and debates with Janna Hunter-Bowman, who shares a commitment to peace in Colombia and whose own outstanding work on religious communities and peace-building in Colombia has been an inspiration and a model.

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I am also grateful for the friendship and wisdom of Lucia Hulsether, who has, with verve and vitality, pushed me to think better about capitalism, religion, and the seductions of the secular. I have shared parts of this work over the years, including at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, a workshop of the Religion, Economy and Law Research and Teaching Network at the University of Tübingen, the Fraternidad Teológica de Latinoamérca (Latin American Theological Society) workshop in Bogotá on Gender and Pentecostalism, the Colombian Institute for Anthropology and History workshop on “The Sacred” also in Bogotá, a workshop on the “Religious Situation: 1968–2018” at the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture at Indiana University– Purdue University Indianapolis and various other colloquia. All these spaces for workshopping contributed to the depth and scope of this work, and forged new questions and avenues for exploration. I have also had the opportunity to present sections of this work at professional association conferences, including the American Academy of Religion meetings, the American Anthropological Association meetings, the Latin American Studies Association meetings, and many other smaller conference spaces. Each one of these conferences and workshops provided opportunities to expand and refine points in my arguments and presentation, and I am grateful for all the feedback and discussion that these venues provided, in diverse spaces from Europe to Latin America, and from so many distinct disciplinary perspectives. I am indebted to Kate Marshall and Enrique Ochoa-Kaup at the University of California Press for enthusiastically supporting this project, and providing guidance and encouragement along the way. I am grateful to Alex Fattal and Kathryn Lofton for their tremendously generous reading of this manuscript and their insightful questions and suggestions. You helped me to clarify ideas, crystallize concepts, and refine the overall narrative arc of this manuscript. Thank you. I am also deeply thankful to Kali Handleman, the book whisperer, who guided a dissertation into a book with patience, and all the panache of a New York City editor. Thank you. The research for this book has been supported by various grants and fellowships: The Social Science and Humanities Research Council JosephArmand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholarship, the W. Garfield

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Weston Fellowship for International Doctoral Research, the National Vice-Chancellor for Research and Solidarity Extension of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and the University Grants Program at San Diego State University. The research was also supported by fieldwork grants from the University of Toronto, San Diego State University, and the Michael Smith Foreign Study Grant. Deep curiosity and appreciation of diverse dimensions of the human experience, especially in the realm of faith and finance, come from my family. My mother, Jocelyn Bartel, possesses a faith that informs her daily life and her economic habitus, as well as how she ethically and responsibly has guided the financial well-being of so many others in her work as a financial advisor. My father, Dietrich Bartel, never allows an idea to sit idle, always genuinely engaging with curiosity about my research and writing, and has supported and encouraged every step on this journey. I am infinitely thankful to you both for your presence and sustaining support. Thanks also to my brother—one of the smartest guys I know, who has always wanted to know more and debate about class, economics, and the political—I often thought about how you would understand what I was writing, and thought about what questions you would ask. Thanks for making me a better writer and teacher, Greg. My dear Aunt Victoria has provided sustenance and refuge from the very earliest stages of this manuscript, to the very end. Thank you for your generosity, your big heart, and your boundless care for others. And to my compañero, Javier Augusto Núñez, who has offered patience, encouragement, and bright insights into so many of the ideas that swirl around these pages, thank you for accompanying me through this research, journeying with me to Bogotá’s mega-churches and through the Magdalena Medio jungle river basins. Your deep listening and gentle questioning of cultural assumptions and clichés have made this book better. Some of the photographs in this book were taken by Javier, and his sensitive eye and deep appreciation for the beauty and effervescence of Colombian life shimmer into relief through his artistry. Gracias. This book is dedicated to you all.

Preface

Ursula pulled deeply on her cigarette, head down. She kicked at the coals of the New Year’s bonfire we had made in the street with cardboard and bits of recycled wood from old fruit boxes. It was the dawning of 2014, and we stood outside on a chilly December 31, along with most of the neighbors in her barrio (neighborhood) of central Bogotá. The neighbors around us were either burning makeshift bonfires like ours or burning the Año Viejo (the “Old Year”) represented by a life-size straw figure, filled with fire crackers that popped and boomed, kindled at the stroke of midnight on the eve of a New Year. Competing music, salsa and vallenato, blared from stereos in parked cars and garages. Ursula, in her late fifties, took another drag and said to me: “I am in so much debt.” At midnight on New Year’s Eve, the people of Bogotá flood into the streets to ignite explosive symbols of newness (figure 1). The excitement of beginning again, of starting over, is palpable in the streets. Aspirations for the incoming year burst into the air as fireworks crack in the sky above the city. Revelers eat twelve grapes at midnight, each sweet fruit infused with a desire for each month of the new year. Ursula’s desires for the new year flared as she reflected on her financial situation, confessed in private to me while her family, my hosts on xvii

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Figure 1. New Year’s fireworks, downtown Bogotá. Photo by iStock.com/PabloACruz.

this Bogotá New Year, ate grapes and natilla (flan) and pulled suitcases around the block in hopes of much travel in the new year. Ursula nodded to herself and mumbled, “Tengo muchas deudas. Pero este año será diferente. Este año será mejor.” (I have a lot of debt. But this year will be different. This year will be better.) She then turned her face toward mine and looked into my eyes, pleading: “They don’t know. Please don’t tell them, okay? I did it all for them, for my darlings, for my family. I wanted prosperity. I know God wants that for us. I believe that. I must. This year will be different.” Her hopes for newness sparkled as the fireworks fizzled. Ursula desired a new time, even if the new time cost more than she was able to pay at the moment. Ursula grew up in the hard knocks of rural life, in poverty and in the crosshairs of Colombia’s civil war, before making her way to Bogotá, like so many of the capital city’s inhabitants. When she was a young, single mother in her late teens, she migrated to the city in search of a better life. Ultimately Ursula succeeded, finishing high school through distance learning in her twenties, and then completing a medical degree online in her forties. Now a doctor, Ursula found herself independently earning enough money, through shift wage labor, to provide for her extended family. The upturn in her economic situation also qualified Ursula for

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numerous credit cards and loans, albeit bringing with them her debtor’s anxiety. The debt that sustained Ursula’s story of emergence and financial wellbeing is at the crux of this study. So too is Ursula’s belief that God would prevail with the promise of prosperity if only she managed her debts correctly. Going into debt, taking on more credit, and organizing her life increasingly around ordering her debts, Ursula put to work an interiorized set of practices animating the Christian morality that, I argue, underwrites financial capitalism. By managing her faith, Ursula maintained the conviction of many Colombian Prosperity Christians—that prosperity would lead to peace, because inequality is understood by so many to be the root of violence in Colombia. “Violence is rooted in suffering,” Ursula told me one afternoon as we sat at her kitchen table during an extended interview. “I believe in peace. But without bread, there is no peace. Peace without justice is just another form of war.” The belief that Ursula articulated served to make her own life believable amid the ever-present state of violence in Colombia, and it expressed part of the nation’s longing for peace as well as her own desire for believing herself to be an active participant in that vision. As Gabriel García Márquez articulated in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, and as I quote in the epigraph that begins this book, “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels,” all share in asking so little of the imagination because the great problem of Colombia has been to find the conventional forms to make life believable; so macabre, so creative, so historical has been the story of violence, that reality often surpasses fiction.1 This is the root, García Márquez laments, of the solitude of Latin America, and in particular, Colombia. It is also the central theme of his magical realist masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which provides a pointed critique of paternalistic fictions and neocolonial (de)formations of power and violence in the region.2 All of this framed the belief that Ursula put to work to understand her own role in seeking prosperity as a path to peace, within the story of a nation scarred from the unbelievability of its own history yet committed to forging ahead toward a horizon of a peaceable future. I have known Ursula for over fifteen years. During my fieldwork, I was fortunate to often stay on the second floor of her house located in the

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neighborhood of Veraguas, a lower-middle-class neighborhood in central Bogotá. Her home buzzed with the mayhem of multigenerational family living. Many evenings were spent with extended family talking about the past. I heard stories of black roses arriving for Ursula’s son, who was the pastor of small evangelical church; the roses were a clear threat to any leader of a church who wouldn’t pay a vacuna, or extortion fee, to local urban paramilitary militias that ran the neighborhood. I heard stories of the times when three family members shared one egg because there was no other food in the house. I heard stories of survival and gumption, betrayal and despair. But so many of our conversations about the past turned to imagining new futures. The future always seemed bright in the shadows of the violence and poverty that had dominated the past. Ursula, and her family’s desires for prosperous futures echoed the nation’s desires for newness, for peace and a “new time” in Colombia. These aspirations were especially resonant because peace talks between the longest-standing guerrilla insurgency in the hemisphere, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the Colombian government were taking place in Havana during the formative years of this fieldwork. In 2014, at the turn of the new year, peace was on the horizon. After over six decades of civil war, two generations, peace was the buzzword echoing in the public sphere throughout Colombia.3 The historic peace deal was finally signed between the Colombian government and the FARC in 2016, yet “peace” in Colombia remained, and still remains, far from established. Since the signing of the peace accord, hundreds of land rights defenders have been assassinated.4 Indeed, some would argue that the violence has worsened in some ways in post-accord Colombia. For example, in late 2019 some disgruntled factions of the FARC, frustrated with broken promises, ongoing targeted assassinations of ex-combatants, and a new administration that seemed reticent to implement key elements of the accords, announced their rearmament.5 The reasons for such endemic violence are myriad and, at times, contradictory. However, three central elements that have prolonged the violence are economic inequality, the uneven distribution of agrarian terrain and wealth, and unregulated foreign direct investment and extraction of natural resources for foreign gain. These were key components of the 2016 peace deal and without the effective apparatuses and political will to guarantee the redistribution of wealth and lands, the

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social leadership of peasant-farmer populations, along with indigenous and Afro-descendent communities, as well as urban populations, remain a target of economically driven violence.6 And yet, despite the ongoing terror and the dark shadows that hang over the horizon of peace, aspirations for peace and prosperity resound across the county. Ursula’s aspirational Christianity orders her rapprochement with finance, futures, and practices of faith. Her debt has been incurred, on the one hand, through her reliance on credit in a freshly deregulated and credit-fueled economy (seen displayed in figure 2). On the other hand, it works in tandem with an arrangement of Christian practice that relies on indebtedness as a specific disciplinary program that shapes processes of interior and financial reform. The accounts in this book all illustrate, in different ways and in different social sites, how the deregulation of the market, deregulation of Christianity, and the deregulation of violence in Colombia have coproduced a financial morality, and a moral financial subject that is unique to late capitalist modernity.

Figure 2. “Easy Credit” sign on the back of a taxi in Bogotá. Photo by the author.

Introduction aSpirational faith The great paradox of the twenty-first century is therefore the appearance of an ever-growing class of slaves without masters and masters without slaves. Certainly, both human persons and natural resources continue to be squeezed to boost profits. This reversal is logical, after all, since the new capitalism is above all specular. —Achille Mbembe

“Debt is faith.” Fernanda said this as she sat across from me at the coffee shop on the Misión Carismática Internacional (MCI) campus, centrally located in the heart of Bogotá. The little café had a line out the door as people flowed out one exit of the church compound from the 10 a.m. service, while the next group of congregants bustled into the church for the 11:15 service through an adjacent entrance. The MCI, Colombia’s largest megachurch, takes up four city blocks, with space for up to two hundred thousand people in the main auditorium, and features a food court, a merchandise plaza, three auxiliary chapels, two coffee shops, an education building, an administration building, and a host of other amenities. As Fernanda and I shared a tinto (a small, strong coffee), after church this Sunday morning, I asked why she thought people would tithe on their credit cards, as I had witnessed during the service. Fernanda shrugged her shoulders and stirred the sugar in her coffee. “Giving on faith is a sign that you trust God; that you trust God will deliver. Going into debt is a sign of faith.” She sipped her 1

2

introduction

coffee and some of her “disciples” arrived at the table with cheese breads and cookies. They began a Bible study surrounded by the din of noisy visiting, group prayers, and other small Bible studies happening at nearby tables around us. At any given Sunday morning service at the MCI—and there are typically seven services every Sunday—there comes a time when ushers with canvas bags ready for tithes, covenants, and seeds of financial faith take their positions at the edges of the hundreds of rows of chairs in the church auditorium. Credit card machines begin circulating in plain sight, held up high in the air by the specialized ushers, for those who don’t have (enough) cash and wish to give an offering on their credit cards.1 On this particular Sunday, César Castellanos, the head pastor and local personality of the MCI was preaching, and Fernanda was jotting down points of the sermon in her notebook as I also took notes. Castellanos urged: “If you are having any problems in the financial area, remember you have the blood of Christ, the life offered by Jesus, you can beat this financial problem. Repeat after me: I declare that ruin is defeated by the blood of Jesus. I declare that all spirits working against the blessing of Jesus’s blood are conquered in the name of Jesus!” The music softly started up in the background, and the cue for prayer time was by now acutely tuned in the actions of the believers. Hands lifted and eyes closed. “Make your offering count today. Show your faith to God. Make your offering a sacrifice to demonstrate your faith.” The lights dimmed and the music became louder and drowned out the rustle of thousands of hands reaching into thousands of wallets to make their sacrifice to God, performing their prosperity and performing their belief. With the worship band providing an emotive cadence to the fervent prayers, darkly clad ushers circulated throughout the convention hall with the credit card machines. They looked like floating lights. The faithful hailed the ushers over, and the credit card machines illuminated their faces as they entered their PIN and signed their receipts. The usher always asked, “How many payments?” for electronic tithing often employs payment plans of up to forty-eight months, with interest rates as high as 28 percent. These ushers ultimately added: “May God reward you a hundredfold.” This book is about faith and finance in Colombia and the debt that ties these worlds together. It is also about Colombia’s emergence and the discourses that link economic progress with moral improvement, at the

introduction

3

Figure 3. Main auditorium of the Misión Carismática Internacional in Bogotá. Photo by the author.

level of the individual as well as the level of a nation struggling to overcome decades of brutal civil war. However, while the reality of the armed conflict is omnipresent in Colombia (as shown in the preface with Ursula’s casual conviction that economic justice would lead to peace), this study deliberately turns away from foregrounding the trenchant presence of the armed conflict and looks to the quieter thrum of everyday Christian life.2 This is not, then, a book about Christians and peacebuilding or the religiosity of bellicose acts. Rather, I present a study of the Christian morality that underwrites late capitalism and the “free market spiritualities” that accompany the proliferation of financialization as it becomes embedded in Colombia, one soul at a time. I understand financialization as a disciplinary regime that operates at the intersections of Christianity and capital. Financialization, at its simplest, is the process of incorporating individuals into the financial system

4

introduction

through mechanisms of financial inclusion: opening bank accounts, assuming debt, formally becoming “banked.”3 Financialization as a program of late capitalist expansion refers to a temporal moment beginning in the 1970s when profits from capitalist material commodity production were surpassed by financial speculation and financial revenue.4 The financialization of capitalism was driven by the development of financial services by corporations and banks that rely on personal incomes of individuals for financial gain. For example, Colombian department stores now offer credit cards and their own lines of financing. Banks have turned to transactions in financial markets through the stock market or via private lending to households. Household debt and personal income are now grist in the financial mill. In Colombia, this process of financialization is still emerging, however quickly, and thereby offers a singular vantage point from which to analyze the ways in which financialization intersects with social order, as well as the localized moral rubrics that accommodate its expansion. These affective and internalized repertoires of moral practice give shape to financialized subjectivities that are animated by the desires of individuals who comprise Colombia’s growing markets for consumption and debt. Financialization sponsors their dreams, their desires, and their aspirations. This book, then, is also an ethnography of aspiration. I link aspiration to Christianity and to flows of capital by charting an anthropology of deregulation focused on four sites of Christian practices of prosperity: A Neo-Pentecostal megachurch, a US-financed Christian microcredit corporation, a Mormon-founded direct sales marketing company, and a rural Pentecostal community fighting against being displaced from their lands. At its most theoretical, this book is an exploration of the relationship between capital and Christianity and the ways that debt connects these spheres of social practice, imbricated in different ways through acts and practices of deregulation. To explain, in Colombia, Christianity and capital have become deregulated, inasmuch as they are decentralized, highly mobile, and flow transnationally. In 1991, the Colombian government rewrote the constitution. In so doing, they instituted, among hundreds of progressive clauses, two fundamental ideals: the freedom of religion and the liberalization of the economy. Since that moment, both Christianity and capital have become

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5

increasingly diversified, decentralized, and deregulated. Estimates suggest that the Colombian population is nearing 20 percent non-Catholic Christian affiliation, and most of those adherents participate in Pentecostal, charismatic, and neo-Pentecostal expressions of Christianity.5 Alongside religious diversification, Colombia’s investor rating has steadily improved, and cheap credit has flooded the market. Credit card use has expanded by some 500 percent in the last fifteen years, and Colombians are spending. The most notable evidence is the rapid upsurge in credit card spending, which now averages approximately $2.5 million USD every hour, placing it within the top five credit card–using countries in the Americas, after the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Brazil.6 The net result is the revelation that debt is now central to Prosperity Christianity, and faith is foundational for finance.7 I situate my consideration of such deregulated Christianity alongside other efforts by anthropologists of Christianity to trouble the idea that contemporary Pentecostal, or Prosperity, Christianity operates as the “handmaiden of neoliberalism.8 Pentecostalism’s focus on individual salvation and, in the case of Prosperity Christianity, emphasis on consumption and upward social mobility, have been interpreted by some scholars as an indication of Pentecostalism’s neoliberal guise, or worse, Prosperity Christianity’s unavoidably “American” nature.9 Jean and John Comaroff ’s astute analysis of millennial capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century charged Prosperity Christianity with transforming the discourse of neoliberalism into the Pentecostal vernacular, saying, “for them [Prosperity Christians], and for their many millions of members, the Second Coming evokes not a Jesus who saves, but one who pays dividends . . . one who promises a miraculous return on a limited spiritual investment.”10 While such critiques of the phenomenon of Prosperity Christianity and its exponential growth throughout the world are ethnographically relevant, especially in the Global South, my interest lies in troubling these rather flat readings of the prosperity gospel’s relationship with late capitalism. Instead, I argue that Christian practices of prosperity in Colombia, in the throes of financializing capitalism amid an ongoing armed conflict, provide rubrics of aspiration, agency, and survival for individuals who otherwise have little control over their lives in the complicated milieu of Colombia’s political and economic landscapes. However, this work also

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suggests that aspirational pulls are often stymied by despair when financial structures fuse with routines of war. Daily existential threats to life in Colombia produce specific arrangements of subjectivity that are at once the product of internalized methods and procedures of governance, while also accompanied by the relentless possibility of violence or elimination. Everyday life in Colombia is marked by aspirational faith as much as by the necropolitics of financialization, or what I call the necrofinance of late financial capitalism.11

neCr o fina nC e For Cameroonian philosopher, Achille Mbembe, politics in late modernity operate as a “work of death.”12 In the opening epigraph of this introduction, Mbembe states that in the time of late capitalism, slavery remains, in his estimation, as a shape-shifted formation of subjectivity vis-a-vis the brutal speculation of finance capital in mastering populations without the necessity of the master to be personified.13 Capitalist arrangements of power function through determining which populations may thrive, and which are disposable. For Mbembe, the political, as an ultimate expression of sovereignty, resides “in the power to dictate who is able to live and who must die” in order for the living to maintain their power.14 This argument challenges the Western, Foucauldian notion of biopower (life-power), that orders the human species and the human body through sets of procedures and technologies.15 Biopolitics is concerned with controlling, ordering, and administering human life and death. However, Mbembe argues that the notion of biopolitics alone is “insufficient to account for contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death,” and that late modern power truly operates, in tandem with biopolitics, through necropolitics—the deployment of death or a permanent state of near-death—in the management of populations through rendering certain lives as lives that matter, and others as disposable.16 Necrofinance operates with similar impulses to necropolitics. Necrofinance is imbued with the right to kill, if necessary, for financial gain. Such has been the case in Colombia when paramilitaries have publicly assassinated community leaders or land defenders and have left their tortured

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corpses in town centers as messages to the rest of the community to vacate the land, which might then be used for growing African palms or the construction of an oil pipeline.17 Over five million people have been internally displaced in Colombia, rivalling the numbers of internally displaced populations in Syria, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria, and many of those millions have been forced to leave their land because of economic interests in natural resources, strategic corridors for moving drugs and arms, or the cultivation of coca or poppies.18 The displaced populations in Colombia are often relegated to the “non-space” of de facto urban refugee camps, where precarious futures are driven by aspirational narratives of overcoming and survival. Necrofinance, like necropolitics, also exposes individuals to death when, for example, health care is privatized and those who cannot afford insurance must fend for themselves, or die, if illness besets them. Or, in Colombia, there is the possibility of social expulsion, or violence, if debts are not paid on time in the group loan programs of most microfinance organizations. Social or civil death are real possibilities if the rest of the group must pay for the outstanding debts of an owing member. In chapter 2 I detail the workings of group loan programs with microfinance organizations, but I note here that violence and indebtedness are related in ways that require a faith in finance to mobilize the internalized rubrics of morality that Colombian Christians cultivate in response, and in service, to the economic and social precarity generated by late finance capitalism. The specificity of the Colombian context, one that is circumscribed by an ongoing, protracted political armed conflict, infused with the macabre violence sustained by drug economies, cartel struggles, and licit forms of extractivism and agro-industry for dominance of land and transport routes, provides a particularly salient atmosphere in which to consider the ways that the financial system can also operate, and support, systems of death. Debt plays an important role in necrofinancial networks, especially through practices of predatory lending and usurious interest fees. While blood debts, social debts, political debts, and economic debts fuel conflict and violence in complex, and historical ways, I am particularly focused on financial debts and the debt that accompanies credit in different forms, from credit cards to microcredits. Scholars have elaborated on the nature of money having always incurred debt, money itself being a form of exchanging debt, long before

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credit cards.19 In Colombia, credit and debt also existed before financial credit dominated the world of debts. My interlocutors Ursula and Remedios both spoke of the risks of having to rely on loan sharks through illegal gota a gota (“drop by drop”) or cuentagotas (drip-account) loans that would rack up weekly rates of interest that amount to extorsion, and result in certain violence if not paid on time.20 These forms of loans still exist throughout Colombia, and other Latin American countries, and generally operate through organized crime networks. Often individual debtors would rather flee their land or place of residence and go into hiding if they cannot pay back a loan or the interest, or, sadly, many commit suicide.21 In fact, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s fallout, of the 2020s, these extortionary loans were reported to have ensnared millions of Colombians who began relying on these dangerous forms of credit for survival in the midst of massive job loss and shelter-in-place orders that disproportionately affect the most vulnerable and those who rely on daily income from the informal economy to survive.22 There is little time or room for nostalgia of any kind in Colombia, and certainly very little romance surrounds economic memories of times before credit cards. Indeed, for many, the sanitized, hygienic, and supposedly depoliticized credit managed by the financial system offers legitimate and safe credit. Yet, as the financial system insists upon indebtedness as a sign of inclusion and moral fortitude, crisis reveals the precarious nature of financialized subjectivity. Debt fuels necrofinancial violence and contributes to the broader context of violence in Colombia, inasmuch as individuals might sell their land for licit or illicit purposes to pay off a debt, or violence might ensue because of unpaid debts in a microcredit group loan, or unpaid debts might drive individuals to participate in illicit economic activities. However, what I trace throughout this book are ways that individual Colombians articulate faith through economic acts, and ways that religious worlds are embedded in economic logics. In this sense, I conceptualize debt as my interlocutors do: as an act of faith. In relation to necrofinance, debt can lead to death— even if incurred through faithful action. Necrofinance functions through financial interests that order systems of violence in Colombia. Embedded within these systems, determining whose lives are worth sustaining and whose lives are expendable. In this sense, I interpret the aspirational conditions of what I call “free market

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spiritualities” that my interlocutors practice as forms of “cruel optimism,” in the words of Lauren Berlant.23 The optimistic promise of prosperity that proponents of financialization offer crumbles when debts cannot be paid. The prosperity that my interlocutors so deeply desire is also the obstacle to their liberation, since this prosperity often demands indebtedness. This is because, in the late modern condition of finance capitalism, it is debt that underwrites desires for prosperity, and it is debt that is the handmaiden to financialization. In this sense, the cruel optimism of late modernity intersects with aspirational urges fostered through the conviction that outward signs of prosperity reveal an inner morality. The cruelty lies in the underlying threat of foreclosure, or worse, since prosperity in Colombia is bankrolled via debt. This constellation of indebted consumption as an aspirational thrust toward upward social and spiritual mobility, especially as it arranges Christian practices of believing and imagining, becomes particularly nefarious when tied to necrofinancial orders of violence and abandonment. This curation of a financialized subjectivity that is unique to late capitalist modernity is especially evident in the analysis of Prosperity Christianity and the struggle for survival in Colombia. Throughout this book I ask questions and conduct analysis about subjectivity, power, and the disciplinary technologies of financial capitalism, using a Foucauldian framework. However, the Colombian context necessarily complicates straightforward applications of Foucault’s concepts. For Foucault, the installation of modern rationality saw the state fostering life and growth, and care of populations, ushering in a regime of biopower.24 However, in Colombia, we must also ask of the concept of biopower, as Mbembe has, “if we imagine politics as a form of war, . . . what place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?”25 In Colombia’s environment of political strife and internal armed conflict, a Foucauldian formulation can only take us so far because the processes by which financialized customs and habits are internalized are always accompanied by the very real possibility of devastation if debts are not paid. When we observe how a debt unpaid can lead to social disintegration or violence, the way an unexpected illness can lead to deeper impoverishment or homelessness, or how a sudden change in the markets can lead to bankruptcy, the cruel optimism of financialization becomes

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clear. Colombia’s financialization is a program of internalized rubrics of financial governance, with the constant threat of social, structural, or even political violence hanging over it. This is necrofinance. Foucault’s conceptualizations of internalized technologies are good to think with, to a point. In Colombia’s context of endemic, and public, displays of disciplinary violence, however, our analytical frame must shift and expand. The Foucauldian project was to consider the genealogies of modern, Western power on modern, Western subjects. This project does not include and thus cannot be expected to account for the very material effects of modernity on nonwhite, non-male, colonized, and racialized bodies that continue to be violently and publicly deemed a threat to be exterminated, in order to secure the interests of power. I recognize the limitations of a narrow Foucauldian analytic for a full inquiry into Colombia’s financial and religious landscapes. For this reason, I activate other concepts, such as aspiration, deregulation, becoming, and necrofinance, to complicate and deepen my analysis. I speak of subjectivity as precarious, fragile, elusive, and under threat because subjectivity, in the Global South, in a time of necrofinancial capitalism, is bound up with the constant threat of elimination. At the same time, the promise of prosperity preached by Colombia’s churches and financial architects banks on technologies of selfreform that, they insist, will lead to a new financial outlook and even a new nation, one soul at a time. Throughout these pages I seek to advance two main arguments. The first is that there is an inextricable link between Christian morality and the morality of finance capitalism as it has developed in Colombia. The second, related to the first, is that aspiring, believing, and becoming are the organizing social forms of finance. This is relevant for understanding the conditions of finance capitalism and Christianity in Colombia, but also on a global scale, as these social forms are being reproduced the world over. In countries like Brazil, South Korea, and South Africa, emerging markets repeat a pattern of dramatic increases in the use of credit cards alongside exponential Evangelical growth. These card-carrying Christians are changing religious landscapes and economic realities throughout the world. In sum, Prosperity Christians in Colombia animate a regime of practice rooted in possibilities of economic futures, based in credit and in faith,

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and these practices make prosperity Christians “proper” financial subjects. Faith in markets has been transferred to the interior person: a faith in the market has become faith in the self. Another example illustrates this well. In the great auditorium of the Misión Carismática Internacional, twenty thousand enthusiastic parishioners were on their feet, cheering for head pastor, local celebrity, and Christian cultural influencer César Castellanos. Castellanos, suave in a bespoke suit that shimmered in the spotlights, flipped open his tablet and quieted the chanting multitude with a wave of his hand. He began his sermon: If the honor and glory are in Jesus, why are so many of us here struggling in the area of our finances? How many pastors here haven’t been able to purchase their own land for their church? How many of you have not been able to buy your own house? How many haven’t even been able to lease a car? Do you know why you haven’t been able to? Because Satan doesn’t want you to believe it’s possible. To have prosperity, it doesn’t depend on your employment, or your inheritance: It depends on your faith!

Castellanos’s face loomed over the crowd on five oversized screens that framed the auditorium, looking over the sea of faithful devotees. Then he asked: “Do you believe in financial resurrection?” Finance operates through aspirations, the “plasticity of the human subject” in late capitalism, and promises a new becoming; a resurrection.26 The work of new becoming, as João Biehl and Peter Locke outline in their anthropology of becoming, is “inherently a work of creation.”27 I suggest that this work of creation can be expanded to consider the force of the aspirational that also may lead to a notion of resurrection—of making life in the unlivable milieu of war, for example, livable. And resurrection is an inherently Christian concept. The Christian belief that God raised Jesus from the dead is a defining characteristic of most Christian belief systems, whether based in literal or nonliteral theological interpretation.28 The semiotic force of the resurrection narrative infuses the realm of the impossible with the itch of the believably possible. Representations of the immaterial, or the unlikely, as being somehow simultaneously present, or possible (such as the raising of the dead, or the resurrection of finances) might seem paradoxical to some, and certainly not to be taken literally.

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Figure 4. A moment of praise and worship at the Misión Carismática Internacional Convention. Photo by the author.

But as Matthew Engelke states, “In a Christian rendering . . . , the presence in a representation might in fact be considered literal.”29 Similarly, finance dwells in the realm of speculation and possibility, just as ideals of prosperity are tied to wagers made on faith—and credit. The promise of resurrection is a promise of new life—it is a literal promise of becoming. This personal becoming is necessary not only for individual newness, new souls, and resurrected finances, but also for a new country, in a post–peace accord time. Newness and becoming are resounding organizing principles that both religious and economic landscapes are merging toward in Colombia, even if the goal remains a moving target. After many decades of deepening depravation and violence in the country, a courageous hope, nay, faith in peace drives desires that coalesce around the possibility of something new. The collective aspiration, that peace and prosperity are finally arriving in the nation, urges the growth

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of the economy and of a new form of Christianity that are both arranged around deregulation. The specters haunting this aspiration, however, are the disciplinary regimes of indebtedness that shadow late financial capitalism and Christian prosperity practices.

Ch r iStian ity a n D a S piration “Siempre podemos mejorar” (We can always improve), Lorena Castellanos admonished the crowd during worship. Lorena is one of the daughters of head pastors Claudia and César at the Misión Carismática Internacional, and is also the lead musician of the MCI’s house praise and worship band, Generación 12. At a convention worship service, she paused at the keyboard while the rest of the band continued to thrum prayer chords and pick guitar licks. The drumkit thumped. Lorena lifted her arms to the air with eyes closed, her right hand pointing and keeping time with the drum beat. “Don’t let the spirit of poverty, the attitude of poverty, rule over you. God’s love is eternal. You can always be better.” She breathed the last word, “better,” lifting her head and raising her other arm. Chords strummed even more intensely on cue. Through dimmed overhead lights and darting laser lights across the auditorium and stage, the people around me nodded and swayed, arms lifted, heads bowed. They willed away poverty. They strove for improvement. They aspired to be better. Aspiration is an enduring element in Christian scriptures and theological treatises. The word aspiration has its roots in the Latin aspiratio, meaning, first, “to breathe into; to influence,” bringing together spiritus, or spirit, and intention. Images of spirit and God’s intentional breathing life into lifelessness fill the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, beginning with the stories of creation found in Genesis: “Then the Lord God formed Adam from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being,” (Genesis 2:7).30 The primordial life breath of Creation is the first instance of “becoming” that the Christian narrative tells. Dust becomes human through breath. Again and again, the scriptures narrate the aspiration for new life, speaking of God showing mercy by breathing life into death, by creating anew, and by instilling redemptive desires for a second chance at life—or

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third, or fourth. The Psalmists and the prophets of the Hebrew Bible recite the power of the breath of God: “I will put sinews on you, make flesh grow back on you, cover you with skin and put breath in you that you may come alive; and you will know that I am the Lord” (Ezekiel 37:6). “Then He said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath.’ Thus says the Lord God, ‘Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they come to life’ ” (Ezekiel 37:9). “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, And by the breath of His mouth all their host” (Psalm 33:6). In the Christian scriptures, the Spirit, God’s breath, and God’s wisdom, form a powerful aspirational trifecta. The texts themselves are said to be “breathed out” by God: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). And finally, Jesus is often portrayed as the medium for God’s breath, as in the Gospel of John, after the resurrection, when Jesus appears to the disciples: “Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:21–22). Prosperity Christianity’s adherence to beliefs in the miraculous movement of the Spirit is based upon these, among many other, verses in the Hebrew and Christian texts. In this sense, the aspirational energy of Spirit-filled financial acts relies on theological convictions that Prosperity Christians point to as inspired by the scriptures. In the same way, biblical verses are interpreted to support the idea that God desires the faithful to become healthy and wealthy. Especially if they were not before. The connection between aspirating, breathing, and becoming lies in the metaphorical possibilities of resurrection and the new life that being born again promises. There is no more effective story of becoming than the Christian narrative of life breathed again into Jesus after his crucifixion. In Colombia narratives of resurrection abound. Indeed, in the heady days after the ratification of the peace accords in 2017, the country’s Office for the Postconflict (Oficina del Postconflicto) unveiled a program and slogan for disseminating the details of the accords throughout the country, and named it “Colombia Renace” (Colombia is born again).31 The government organized ferias, or fairs, in all departments and municipalities to highlight the plan for the postconflict, and called them “Ferias Colombia

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Renace.” Even the popular coffee chain Juan Valdez promotes a new line of coffee products that designate a portion of its profits to regions in the country that have been affected by violence. The coffee line, too, following the “born again” theme, is called Renacer. In the political imagination that produces the image of a born-again state, the fairs and sales pitches serve dual purposes, disseminating information as well as cultivating hope in the possibility of a resurrected nation. Through the consumptive power of born-again marketing, the invitation is to consume our way to newness. Prosperity Christianity operates on both planes, maintaining resurrection as a powerful metaphor for financial as well as spiritual rebirth, as Castellanos, above, displayed in his sermon on financial resurrection. Such curated aspirations lead to a deeper consideration, and undercurrent throughout this book; the affective pulls of becoming, both spiritually and financially. As I draw attention to the affective pulls of becoming, I also consider indebted aspiration as a mode of subjectivity that is undetermined, malleable, and within the realm of possibility, as well as inherently precarious. The aspiration to become, in Colombia, is tethered to both a Christian conception of the power of resurrection, and the power of capital to organize the desires that drive financialization and indebtedness in the name of prosperity.

finanC e a nD a S piration Finance capitalism is deeply aspirational. Indeed, finance relies on market speculation and the possibilities of future returns. The high-risk, highreturn slogans of financial investors slinging easy money, is laden with an aspirational swagger. Deregulation is key to the strut, and free market crusaders doggedly gnaw at the few checks and balances that still remain after decades of dismantling. Now, the aspirations of potential investors carry as much promise as product. Michel Feher aptly surmises that “for every economic agent, raising expectations, rather than generating revenues, has become the prevailing condition of success.”32 Randy Martin sums up the shift from the savings-centered Puritan asceticism, which Max Weber detailed in his treatise The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, toward financialized subjectivity thus: “The financial planning bug is a

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different worm to catch than the nearly extinct species called savings. Savings rested upon a mass psychology of deferred gratification, putting off the pleasure of expenditure today for a rewarding tomorrow. . . . The selfmanaged life will be freed from its Puritan past to turn life into an endless business school course where, finally, education is fun because the teacher has been banished.”33 The banished teacher might be understood as regulator, or the effective regime of a theology of predestination. Without regulations, enshrouded in a theology of “buy now, pay later,” the ultimate wisdom of a financialized market is ordered by future aspirations, rather than the piety of balanced books. Central to promises of future prosperity is credit, and credit always means debt. Indeed, the credit card industry has played a key role in bridging the gap between the earning capacity of laborers and their spending capacity. While earnings and salaries have not increased substantially in the last thirty years, costs of living certainly have, and purchasing power has stagnated. In 2019, Colombia’s minimum wage is $828,116 CUP, or $246.14 USD, per month. According to the Department of National Statistics (DANE), the average costs for a family of four, per month are $3,488,577 CUP, or $1,038.27 USD, per month. In other words, the average family of four would require over four minimum salaries to survive daily life in Colombia. Credit cards are, thus, used to cover this gap between earnings and costs.34 In Colombia, the credit markets blossomed after the economic opening of 1990–1991. Since then, credit card use has skyrocketed to the point where household debt made up 27 percent of the national budget in 2019, up from 10 percent in 2007.35 The fastest growing sector in Colombia’s economy is the financial sector, which now makes up almost a quarter of Colombia’s gross domestic product.36 Credit cards and their aspirational pulls produce disciplinary orders that are underwritten by a distinctly Christian morality in Colombia.37 I am treating debt, and indeed finance itself, as central to a specific regime of late modern governance. Michel Foucault’s consideration of neoliberalism in his 1979 lectures emphasizes that the first neoliberals, the Mont Pelerin Society established in the 1930s and led by Friedrich von Hayek, insisted that the “restoration of the liberal order was less about getting the state out of people’s lives than about getting public officials to govern in the interest of the market.”38 The internalization of

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the neoliberal spirit has become a central feature of the changing role of government. Yet, while neoliberalization clearly tasked the state with retreating from the economic sphere, the strength of the state has become re-entrenched in the service of securing conditions for the free, deregulated movement of capital. In Colombia, this process of state intervention has provided political conditions that have accelerated foreign direct investment, loosened restrictions on financial activities, and otherwise favored free market trade, often relying on state military, police, and paramilitary to enforce the acceleration.39 The move toward financial deregulation and market liberalization in the early 1990s saw the government slash import tariffs from 16.5 percent to 7.0 percent, essentially eliminating most state protections of, for example, domestic agricultural production from the influx of highly subsidized product from the United States and Canada.40 Additionally, the reforms of the opening led to export-driven projections for the Colombian economy, radically changing the provisions of importsubstitution policies that had supported the development of strong local economies, for example coffee and agricultural production, for export. Colombia transitioned from exporting agricultural products in the 1970s– 80s to exporting natural resources and agro-industrial commodities like gold, petroleum, coal, and African palm oil in the years after economic liberalization. In 2018, Colombia’s top exports were products and derivatives of resource extraction, making up almost 50 percent of all exports, while agricultural products represented 7 percent of exports, down from 27 percent in 1995.41 The regions of the country where these resources are extracted are also victim to the orders of violence that have accompanied massive displacements and union-busting by paramilitary, state military, and guerrilla forces.42 Thousands of Colombian farmers and land defenders have been killed and millions have been displaced in service to the restructuring of the economy.43 As part of the reforms, regulations on the financial sector were dramatically reduced and rules governing foreign direct investment in the country and out-of-country banking avenues opened a new era for growth in domestic credit markets.44 These programs of financial opening also served the interests of the post-Escobar narco-crime syndicates who took advantage of off-shore havens for illicit moneys as well as effective shadow transactions for

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money laundering.45 Deregulation of the financial sector allowed for accelerated whitewashing and sterilizing of narco-currencies, expanding the drug-trade (and therefor violence), on the one hand, while also elaborately integrating drug money with political institutions.46 State involvement in guaranteeing the security of capital has resulted in acts of cruel violence but also in training an interior set of reforms at the level of the individual that equally serve the interests of capital, like believing in financial resurrection.47 The state’s involvement with tilling the political soil for the installment of a regime of financialized governance is clear, and emerges as the neoliberal form of governance. Lorena’s call to improve the self in the above vignette also illustrates the way that aspirations to become better and to improve shape a particular subjectivity and create a subject of progress. The particular formation of Christianity that the MCI enacts in Colombia operates as a force of power that trains individual believers in financial practices that are ordered around logics of capital. Late financial capitalism operates as a form of governance that requires internalized rubrics of aspirational practice. The promise of prosperity is the belief upon which the contradictions of financial capitalism reside. You can be prosperous. All you need to do is believe—in yourself, in God, and in the invisible hand of the market.

Ch r iStian ity : D er egu l ate D The possibility of God’s interceding, invisible hand in the personal lives and finances of the faithful reveals a highly individualistic and decentered sacred connectivity that puts a premium on direct access to the Spirit. The theological roots of this possibility lie in the global Pentecostal/charismatic Christian tradition that today comprises the second-largest (after Roman Catholicism) and fastest-growing Christian tradition in the world.48 A neat definition of Pentecostal Christianity has eluded scholarship, and this allusivity is one of the driving factors in research on the subject. In the oft-quoted words of Roy Wagner: “The things we can define best are the things that are least worth defining.”49 Thus, the twenty-thousand-plus distinct denominations of Pentecostal Christianity in the world and, more importantly, the stress that individual Pentecostal-charismatic-Evangelical

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Christians put on their distinctiveness from each other must give us pause.50 I suggest that what makes Pentecostal Christianity so difficult to define is precisely its deregulated nature. However, its deregulation is also the very thing that makes Pentecostalism such a plastic, malleable, and therefor “successful” movement. The word Pentecost is derived from the Greek word for “fiftieth” and originally referred to Shavout, the Jewish festival commemorating the day that God gave the Israelites the Torah, and coinciding with the fiftieth day after the resurrection of Jesus as narrated in the New Testament Book of Acts.51 In the text, the Apostles were gathered for Shavout when they were overcome by the Holy Spirit: “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them” (Acts 2:1–4). And so, perhaps the only two globally unifying elements that unite most Pentecostals are, first, the necessity of having a personal, born-again conversion experience and second, the aspiration to be “filled with the Holy Spirit”—or being “born-again and Spirit-filled.”52 Pentecostalism is primarily concerned with the Spirit, as discussed earlier in this introduction. Pentecostalism is particularly attentive to the Spirit’s movements, its influence, and its embodied sensations. The Spirit is felt. Pentecostalism is an intensely affective form of Christianity.53 And the Spirit works. The Spirit is productive. The labor of the Spirit can lead to the resurrection of material things: the body, the family, the nation, or the bank account. This is key to Prosperity Christianity. “Prosperity Christianity” is a cultural and social formation of Pentecostal Christianity that, at its most basic, holds to a theology that interprets physical and fiscal well-being as a sign of God’s favor. The tradition is usually considered to have been popularized in the United States with the “seed faith” televangelism of Oral Roberts in the 1950s, influenced by the New Thought Movement of Phineas Quimby and the mind healing movements of the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries.54 Prosperity gospels around the world have been treated by historians and anthropologists of Christianity from varying scales of analysis. For

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some scholars of Christianity, the prosperity gospel is an export of USstyle commodified Christianity, infecting charismatic and neo-Pentecostal movements throughout urban centers around the globe, and especially in the Global South.55 For many historians of US religion, the prosperity gospel is a uniquely North American iteration and interpretation of Christianity that is the vanguard of the neoliberal ethos. However, theologies of prosperity, according to Virginia Garrard, are now some of “the most dynamic movements in Latin American Neo-Pentecostalism today.”56 Garrard clarifies that one of the distinguishing features of this brand of prosperity theology is its multidirectional transnationalism that is characteristic of late modern neo-Pentecostalism more generally. Garrard writes, “Latin American practitioners are just as likely to be influenced by African or South Korean innovations as they are, themselves, to influence the practices and beliefs of believers in North America or Europe.”57 For example, the inspiration for the MCI’s evangelization strategy is not a North American church, but the world’s largest evangelical church, the Yoido Full Gospel Church, located in Seoul, South Korea (more on this in chapter 3). Many rigorous studies carefully detail the manner in which these emerging forms of charismatic Christianity rely on logics of the market, or respond to effects of the market, in order to guarantee their expansion and their success.58 Simon Coleman, however, complicates this notion that Prosperity Christianity can be understood as a linear arrow toward capitalist conversion, noting that the ways in which Prosperity Christians employ economic practice is very different from secular economic practices. For Prosperity Christians in Colombia, covenanting on a credit card in the hopes of deliverance from economic precarity blurs the distinctions between economic and religious, finding the religious in the economic and the economic in the religious. Coleman provides the rubric of a “sacrificial economy” as an alternate “model of agency and origination, where moderation is devalued and lack of hesitation is encouraged,” when considering Prosperity Christianity.59 Notably, Coleman situates the powerful approach of Jean and John Comaroff in interpreting Prosperity Christianity practices in the African continent as translating forces of globalization and hegemonic domination into a “vernacular language,” retreating into the occult shrouds of magic

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and mystery, alongside the work of Daromir Rudnyckyj. Rudnyckyj, on the other hand, considers the “spiritual economies” of Islamic interpretations of neoliberal reform in an Indonesian steel factory. For Rudnyckyj, economic change is interpreted as a matter of religious piety, “spirituality becomes a site of management,” and “self-discipline, accountability, and entrepreneurial action are represented as Islamic virtues.” 60 Coleman concludes that “many Faith adherents . . .work on the dividing line between imagination and aspiration, positive thinking and positive action.”61 Pentecostal Christianity in Colombia began to emerge as a recognizably distinct set of Christian practices in the mid-twentieth century, primarily in rural enclaves where the Catholic church had not fully enveloped the local communities where indigenous mythology and practice still held sway or specific professional sectors that had liberal tendencies.62 The movement quickly spread to marginalized urban communities, often tracked from rural displacements to urban peripheries. Prosperity ideas and practices, however, have spread beyond denominational boundaries and have influenced Christian practice in congregations and denominations that wouldn’t necessarily identify as Pentecostal, including Catholic and historical Protestant churches. The crossbred nature of Prosperity Christianity is noted by Colombian sociologist of religion, William Mauricio Beltrán, who calls it a “hybrid movement, in constant mutation and fragmentation. . . . It has adopted elements from popular Catholicism and indigenous and afro-descendent traditions. These three religious systems—indigenous, popular Catholicism, and Pentecostalism—share beliefs in curses, hexes, and the power of demonic forces. Furthermore, the plasticity of Pentecostalism has fomented particular adaptability with indigenous cultures which has resulted in ample varieties of ‘ethnic Pentecostalism’ throughout the country.”63 All of these characteristics make Pentecostal Christianity generally, and Prosperity Christianity specifically, particularly malleable and undetermined, which means it is also exceptionally mobile. I emphasize the point that while Pentecostal Christianity as a denominational category is very much distinct (at least in discourse) from traditional Protestant and Catholic doctrines of practice and theological frame, Prosperity Christianity, as it fits within a Pentecostal scaffold, is also a diverse set of practices that adhere less to denominational doctrine and more to logics of capital, through a sacralization and

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ritualization of financial practice. To be sure, the endurance of endogenous traditions (like the relation between covenanting and “paying a promise,” in Prosperity and Catholic traditions respectively, see chapter 3) are always present, yet Prosperity Christianity has some unique characteristics. The practice of covenanting in the MCI is a particularly unique practice that illustrates the way logics of capital do not determine Christian practice, nor does Christian practice blindly acquiesce to secular models of exchange. Rather, prosperity practices, like covenanting on a credit card, sacralize and internalize finance capital’s repertoires of indebtedness in ways that blur the lines between the secular and the sacred. Indeed, covenanting on credit renders the swipe of a credit card a sacred act. The sacrifice of tithing on credit demonstrates an economy of faith, one that relies on exchanges of financial commitment—such as going into debt as a covenant with God in order to receive a particular blessing. The covenant—pacto—is a premeditated investment, a sacrificial contract with God for a job, a house, healing, or growth of individual ministry. The prevailing logic is a primordial obligation to God and the sacrificial power of giving more than one has—giving beyond one’s liquidity. The practice of tithing is a practice of believing in a highly legible Christian animation, and a most observable social act. The sacrifice implied by the morality of tithing is a virtuous debt, correcting an always-already sinful nature. As Ursula’s story reminds us, as well as those of other interlocutors who speak through these pages, the discipline of debt works in sites of “articulation of practice,” in the pews on Sunday, and on the streets in the everyday lived reality of deregulation.64 Through considering the believing practices that build the foundations of financialization, this study reveals that seemingly secular practices (such as double-entry bookkeeping, punctual debt payments, constantly giving accounts of the self, and the affective toll of debts) work to render Colombians like, Ursula and Fernanda, as Christian, through financializing capitalism.65 Easy credit, sparse financial education, abundantly accessible credit cards, subprime lending, a stable investment-grade credit rating, relative political stability, and limited financial regulation have been the secret to Colombia’s economic success story of a rising aspirational class

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that enjoys unprecedented levels of prosperity.66 But at the level of the everyday, the underside of prosperity, as Ursula shared with me, is the crushing debt that accompanies credit. In the end, this study also insists that to consider debt as a marker of the late capitalist condition is to move past the aha moment of revelation. Revealing the “secular” market to be anything but performs a political act that implicates me, as scholar and observer, and the reader, within the structures that we all inhabit.67 There may be no outside of capitalism, as Marx predicted; however, there are ways to think better about the condition of indebtedness and the Christian morality that drives the affective pulls toward aspiring to “the new.” However, perhaps the challenge that we encounter is rather that imagining the end of capitalism has become as difficult as imagining that capitalism has no end.68 In order to imagine anew, rethinking the conditions of indebtedness and Christian morality ideally leads to critical practice that can remake the world through denaturalizing the logics of capital and carefully considering the labor relations that produce capital in its discursive, as well as material, conditions.69 The intention is to move our conversation beyond revelation and toward recognition of the many methods and praxes that reproduce uneven forms of labor power, because capital, value in motion, is also a social relation.70

o n War an D Metho D S It is impossible to write a book about Colombia and not consider the war, a war that has been raging in different forms and with differing repertoires of violence for over sixty years. Since the twentieth-century civil war began in 1948, the regularity and particular modus operandi of violence in Colombia have become a permanent backdrop to the political, social, and religious landscape. Massacres, massive displacements, grotesque forms of public executions deployed by armed groups to incite those displacements, and horrifying stories of domestic violence infect the populous on a daily basis. In Bogotá, frustrating traffic jams, displaced families on buses and at traffic lights begging for help, and the devastating tragedies

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Figure 5. “Let’s Reconcile” sign outside the offices of the Catholic Social Ministry (Pastoral Social) Photo by the author.

of the daily loss of life remind the population that there is still a war going on. No longer does the population of Bogotá worry daily about the explosion of car bombs, but it was not so long ago that bombings were a semiregular occurrence. Bogotá, as the rest of Colombia, is emerging. However, the war continues. Nonetheless, the reason I leave the war as the backdrop, not the focus, is because at the level of the everyday, people still live their lives, go grocery shopping, make love, raise families, and go into debt. People also go to church, make offerings to God and the saints, and practice their personal economies in accordance with a believing structure, believing in what could be and what could have been. Millions of Colombians also struggle and resist for a more just and inclusive society. These same Colombians insist that their nation, their experiences, their complex cultural milieu, the incredible geographies and biodiversity in the country illustrate much more than only a story of war. The aspirational force tied the proposal of a “new Colombia” plays on the political imaginaries sustained by the proponents of both prosperity

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and peace accords—Colombia becoming reborn, one soul at a time, is as much a vision of a new and peaceful country as it is the promotion of the prosperous individual lives that will make it so. The collective moral imaginary of what “peace” actually means is embryonic. Peace is imagined differently by every Colombian. This is because the war has affected every Colombian, but in deeply different and contradictory ways. An elusive and abstract peace rides on the hopes that deregulated political economies traffic in—a nebulous imagined future that is at once collective and individualized. Colombia’s current wave of internal armed conflict is generally dated to the 1948 assassination of liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitan, an act that spurred a bloody era of civil war in Colombian history known ambiguously as La Violencia. The formation of the oldest guerilla movement in the world, the FARC, began only years later as a peasant guerrilla army that arose out of long-standing regional disputes, fresh memories of La Violencia, and the centralized, exclusionary political practices established by the political and economic elite in their efforts to quell the violence. In the wake of the establishment of the FARC, numerous other smaller guerrilla armies and movements arose throughout the country, including the Movimiento 19 de Abril, the Ejército Popular de Liberación (Popular Liberation Army), and the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (The Army of National Liberation). The development of the drug trade in the 1980s and its subsequent institutionalization within the furthest reaches of Colombian political economy led to the formation and consolidation of paramilitary armies in the late twentieth century. These factors, along with ongoing struggles for land distribution, political representation, social security, and economic equality, have contributed to a civil armed conflict that has claimed over two hundred twenty thousand lives (82% being civilians), has internally displaced over eight million Colombians, and has left a legacy of terror in Colombian collective memory.71 War is the devastating backdrop to any study on Colombia; it is the frame within which life in Colombia plays out. I was often asked by friends, interlocutors, and colleagues, “Why not write about the war? Or about the Christians who are working for peace? Or about the victims of the violence?” In many ways, this book is about all of those things, however indirectly. I intentionally do not foreground the

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war, but war, like finance, is at once everywhere in Colombia while also often resting as a shadow on horizons of the future, making itself known in silences and absences as well as harrowing presence. Violence operates on a multitude of levels in the context of protracted civil armed conflict, from macabre and grotesque uses of terror through massacres and machete blows to the more subtle messaging of military police casually patrolling streets with automatic assault rifles at the ready; from military check-points on highways to bomb sniffing dogs in the grocery store parking lot; from overtly armed violence to endemic structural violence. War in Colombia is contradiction and horror, because it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Or, in the words of Achille Mbembe, war is an intractable paradox because of its “simultaneous idealism and apparent inhumanity.”72 The aspirations of warfare—to defeat the enemy, to make a profit, to take over land, to displace a population, to control a population, or to eliminate a population—are in a persistent balancing act between the possible and the impossible. But aspiration, belief in the goal, is foundational for successful war campaigns. In Colombia, government war propaganda is disseminated through the nightly news and daily radio, writ large on billboards across the country with the image of an infantry soldier declaring, “Even though I don’t know you, I’m willing to give my life for you. Heroes in Colombia DO EXIST!” If you have traveled on the highways of Colombia in the wake of the peace accords, the soldiers at the highway checkpoints salute the civilian vehicles. The war in Colombia is in many ways persistently present and affects everyday life despite actual combat affecting a smaller proportion of the population. The discourse of war is omnipresent, and the marketing of warfare, and peacebuilding, have infiltrated all of Colombia, from the depths of the most remote jungle to the heights of Bogotá’s highest skyscrapers.73 This inescapable violence, both armed and structural, has left very little control in the hands of Colombians who are not active agents in warfare or members of an economic or political elite to decide over their lives. For Ursula, violence and poverty drove her to leave her hometown and take up residence in Bogotá. After struggling in Bogotá for a number of years, poverty and sexual violence persuaded her to seek work in Japan in the fish markets. Threats of political violence against her son, and desires for upward social mobility inspired Ursula to study medicine with the

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aspiration of achieving prosperity and stability in her life. The aspirational satisfaction of consumption, of purchase, even at the cost of deeper indebtedness, provides a mechanism for agency that war in Colombia has effectively limited. Designing a prosperous future, no matter how chimerical, and based in speculation, is the sparkling domain of possibility that late financial capitalism has engineered as it has emerged as a hegemonic financial force. I consider such spheres of possibility as they are performed through rituals of hope, the sacralization of seemingly secular acts, and the political act of believing in a future with peace and equality. In this way, I also respond to the frustration that my friends and interlocutors (and various colleagues) expressed in response to my research: “The real problem in Colombia, of course, is the war,” Ursula would tell me, “not the economy.” This is why I consider Colombia to be a prime site to ask these questions. The economy is the contaminated ground in which violence has festered and spread throughout Colombia, like a deadly infection from an unattended wound. Disputes and struggles over land use and ownership continue to justify ongoing assassinations of land defenders. Colombia competes with Brazil for the highest rates of income inequality and inequitable distribution of wealth. The economy and its political infrastructure remain one of the most significant impediments to the success of the peace accord signed between the FARC and the Colombian government. Despite indications that peace is far from being a tangible reality, the aspirational pulls toward peace and prosperity organize a subjectivity that responds to and enacts the program of financialization. The questions that surrounded these political economies of war and faith led me to the research that informs this book, and throughout these pages I return to my ultimate concern; the possibility of peace in Colombia. I established my sites of ethnographic field work and main interlocutors through research visits to Colombia between 2011 and 2013. The sustained research was carried out from January 2013 to July 2014, during which time I also taught at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in the sociology department. Follow-up research trips to Colombia took place in 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2019. I chose my sites because they represent a diverse composition of Christian life in Colombia, beyond the confines of a church. To be sure, the church field sites of La Misión Carismática

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Internacional in downtown Bogotá, and the rural Pentecostal church of Garzal in the Magdalena Medio, frame the narratives I present in these pages. But the intimacy of Ursula’s debts and her home life, the spectacle of the multilevel marketing firm Nu Skin, and the crystal-clear financial dynamics of a Christian-run microfinance organization all fill out the layers of life that illustrate everyday Prosperity Christianity in Colombia and the Christian morality that bolsters financial subjectivities. I had visited numerous megachurches in Bogotá during preliminary research and decided that the MCI was where I would focus my time. I decided upon the MCI because it is Colombia’s largest and most notorious megachurch, and because Fernanda, my principal informant, opened the doors to her life and her vision as an MCI faithful—and indebted follower. The leadership team of the MCI boasts a cast of political congresspersons, lawyers, prominent business owners, and senators. The MCI is able to mobilize a significant electorate and has generated a loud public voice on a variety of controversial political issues, such as the popular referendum on the peace accords mentioned above. The MCI also encourages members to actively recruit new members from their places of work, their families, their friend network, and in any opportunity that might present itself. Evangelizing strategies are also ordered by political objectives. For example, the scores of schoolteachers who attend the church, like Fernanda, have organized against sexual education reforms for middle and high schools, have organized vigils and marches to protest proposed legislation, and understand themselves as the front line in the battle against moral decay in the education system. Sofia, Fernanda’s sister, and I connected through the multilevel marketing company Nu Skin. I had been introduced to Nu Skin by an acquaintance with no ties to the MCI, and had accompanied this friend to my first recruitment meeting on a Saturday afternoon. The Nu Skin recruitment meeting powerfully illustrated the evangelical spirit of the free market, the emphasis on “becoming one’s own boss,” the rejection of wage labor, and the mystery of the multilevel marketing system that relied as much on “believing in the self ” as it did on selling anything. Additionally, in order to become a Nu Skin salesperson, individuals were required to purchase a starter kit, starting at two million pesos ($750 USD)—a significant sum for the primarily unemployed and lower-class audience. I noticed people

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taking out credit cards in order to make their first purchase of the kit, with dreams of millions of pesos in sales in the short-term future. The sacrifice on credit was reminiscent of the ways in which I had observed credit cards being utilized for covenanting in the MCI, as I described earlier. This practice also echoed practices of New Thought, which is so foundational for Prosperity thinking, and the pyramid model of multilevel marketing seemed an obvious parallel to the MCI’s evangelization strategies. The MCI relies on its evangelizing strategy, what Castellanos has branded as the G12 Vision. The G12, or “Government of 12 Strategy” is the patented expansion strategy that César and Claudia Castellanos have developed for their MCI franchise. The tactic relies on the concept of “multiplication,” or pyramid-like evangelizing, based on four pillars, “Winning” (bringing people to Jesus), “Consolidating” (committing people to the church), “Discipling” (training people to evangelize) and “Sending” (having individuals begin their own discipleship groups). This system has been designed, developed, and patented by César Castellanos, and is patterned after the twelve disciples of Jesus, “in whom He reproduced His character, and they became His representatives in the world.”74 With fifty thousand cell groups in Bogotá, over three hundred thousand satellite groups across Colombia and thousands of franchises around the world, this burgeoning spiritual following and religious industry is growing at such a rate “a Wharton business school couldn’t have designed a better growth strategy.”75 However, the G12 is also a brand name. Registered with the Colombian Chamber of Commerce as G12 Congresses and Conventions S.A.S., the G12 brand is one of the corporations behind the MCI church. César and Claudia Castellanos Ministries Inc., an export-import company registered in Florida, and Castellanos Ministries Corp. along with G12 Tours are some of the other corporate entities run by the Castellanos family. Pastor Claudia Castellanos is chief executive officer of the corporation. The MCI church itself is also a commercial center, with a jewelry store, perfume vendors, clothing lines, book sales, DVD and CD stands, fifteen different kinds of Bibles for sale to suit personal preference, and stationary materials. And this is all for sale on cash or credit. Remedios was introduced to me as one of the most “evangelical” clients of Opportunity International, a transnational Christian microfinance

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corporation. Her restaurant was turning a profit, and she had brought her daughter and her husband in to the microfinance program of the NGO. Remedios is a leader in her “solidarity bank” and was willing to share her stories and experiences of microfinance with me. Over the course of eight months I regularly visited her in her restaurant in the southern Bogotá neighborhood of Usme. Sometimes we would have formal interviews, when she had time in the middle of busy days of cooking and serving a clientele primarily made up of bus drivers and local families. Other times, I helped prepare lunch or serve the burly clients while I chatted with Remedios and her daughters who helped in the restaurant. I also regularly attended solidarity bank meetings that were run by Opportunity International. Opportunity International itself is a fascinating site of study, a Chicago-based, Christian-centered nongovernmental organization that specializes in microfinance and various financial services for the poor and underserved around the world. The organization was founded in 1971 and to date serves over twenty-three million clients in twenty-three countries. The first loan the organization made was in Colombia, in 1971, and they opened their first field branch in Bogotá in 1993. Currently, the organization boasts seven hundred trust groups throughout the country. Opportunity International is an emblematic example of Christian microfinance organizations that make up a significant sector of the microfinance industry, and promote both economic and spiritual missionization. Lastly, it was essential for my research to include a rural dimension in order to more fully investigate the matrix of the political economy of war within which financialization and prosperity were conflating in Colombia. The reasons are myriad, but they primarily stemmed from the fact that Colombia’s war has significantly affected its rural terrain. The jungles and mountains of Colombia have become the stage upon which much of the violence has played out, as it is land ideal for drug production and provides strategic corridors for trafficking weapons or natural resources. Although urban violence is, and has been, a real and present reality, rural communities, forgotten municipalities, and countryside hamlets often with little access to the urban comforts of accessible health care clinics or regular electricity, have suffered a particularly brutal experience of Colombia’s violence. These communities also, ironically, produce much of Colombia’s wealth as hubs of small-scale agricultural production and lands rich in natural

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resources. These reasons all contribute to the systemic migration of Colombia’s rural populations through waves of forced displacement, spurred by violence, and the arrival of these displaced populations into the edges of Colombia’s urban centers, as well as movements between rural enclaves. The community of Garzal is one such community, with no running water, no electricity, no clinic, and one elementary school. Since the mid-1990s, the community members have been embroiled in a conflict to remain on their lands, on which they cultivate papaya, corn, beans, mango, pineapple, manioc, and cacao. The struggle to remain on their land, in spite of death threats and threats of displacement first from guerrilla armies, then paramilitary, and most recently, a drug baron who claims land title, is being led by a Pentecostal Four-Square church in which some fifty families congregate. In my initial visits to the community, I encountered stories familiar to me from the many other rural experiences I had witnessed throughout my time in Colombia. The community felt abandoned by the state; its members confronted armed actors in their region with fierce faith, strongly rooted in their Pentecostal conviction that the Spirit, angels, and even God Himself directly intervene to protect them from the threats that abound. Of all my sites and interlocutors, Ursula perhaps best illustrates the formation of the financialized soul, with so much access to unencumbered credit, including five credit cards, a major loan from a commercial bank, an emergency line of credit, and a refinanced mortgage, she has become the ideally indebted subject of emergence. But because Ursula believed in the banks and her financial advisors, within the course of two years, she found herself under a mountain of debt bearing compound interest rates as high as over 30 percent. Believing got her into this mess, and believing, she was convinced, was going to get her out of it. Ursula’s prosperity rode on her capacity for going into debt. Her believing put into operation the constellation of practices that I name free market spiritualities that accompany the economic emergence Colombia is experiencing today.

th e b o o k Throughout the book, I use the methods of ethnographic research to define this nebulous regime of deregulated finance and aspirational faith

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in Colombia through the voices and experiences of individuals, communities, government, and media. The first chapter develops the relationship between credit and believing as practices of becoming in financialized capitalism through a reconsideration of the gift. The chapter outlines challenges to enclosing pre-capitalist, capitalist, and financial capitalist formations of social (in)cohesion in gift relations. The second chapter considers the ways in which prosperity and austerity are tied together in relations managed by Christian-run microfinance programs. The chapter focuses on Remedios and Opportunity International as emblematic examples of the impacts of financialization and faith at the level of the everyday. Chapter 3 articulates a genealogy of Christianity in Colombia. The chapter details the relationships between the Catholic Church and Colombian economic history more broadly and articulates the role that the drug trade has played in the formation of a certain economic culture throughout the country. Chapter 4 explores the very nature of social relationships, cohesions, and ties that are formed and fabricated through financializing markets. The chapter delves into the murky depths of financial inclusion, financial education, financial citizenship, and finance as a human right. The chapter aims to unravel the ways in which the financialized market, practices of indebtedness, and social ties produce a new formation of “financialized kinship,” based on relations of trust and obligation mediated through state financial institutions and commercial banks. The fifth chapter considers embodied believing as central to financial capitalism, and especially in forms of disciplining gender. The chapter develops the argument that debt disciplines the soul in a way specific to finance and that women and the family have become objects of financial desire as much as desired financial subjects. The chapter suggests that finance capitalism is ushering in new forms of masculinity, femininity, patriarchy, and the family, and that Prosperity Christianity offers insights into these evolving gendered social formations. The last chapter develops the relation between believing practice and the politics of becoming as they play out in financial capitalism. With a close analysis of the Mormon multilevel marketing company Nu Skin,

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and a microfinance development program, this chapter details the belief in the self, and the reformation of the soul that financializing capitalism relies upon. The chapter also challenges an apolitical approach to considering Prosperity Christianity as a phenomenon that exists outside of webs of colonial relations and colonialized power dynamics, and introduces an analytical frame through which to understand prosperity practices in critical perspective. The crosscurrents throughout the book are the subjective pulls of “becoming,” and the affect of deregulated finance itself: aspiration. Christian organizations and churches support credit initiatives across Colombia. Credit is hailed as the key to upward mobility, both socially and spiritually. While credit underwrites the future, a backdrop of political tumult is ever present. The country is currently abuzz with a thinly veiled evangelical sense of “becoming,” fueling speculation that a belief in the future is possible. As prosperity becomes conflated with peace, survival becomes conflated with credit. Colombian banks promise the endless potential of credit, with MasterCard boasting Bogotá and Cartagena as cities of “Priceless Possibilities.” As Ursula explained, “We must claim the vision! We make that claim by making the sacrifice through an offering on credit. That claim, that vision, can be endless in its potential!” Such evangelical aspiration frames the practices of Prosperity Christians in Colombia. Card Carrying Christians connects this sensation of becoming to the speculative drive of finance and credit. The entanglement of faith and the future mark the lives of the collaborators who drive the narrative, as well as the theoretical interventions that this book offers.

1

Credit It is not simply to show power . . . that a man throws copper into the sea . . . in so doing he is also sacrificing to the gods and the spirits. —Marcel Mauss

We must believe in capitalism, in the ways that [some] early Protestants were asked to believe in predestination. —Arjun Appadurai

Fernanda swiped her credit card. She then took a deep breath and closed her eyes, praying silently amid the thousands of swaying bodies and arms around her. The usher tore off the receipt and handed it to her to initial. She emerged from prayer with pen ready. The usher leaned in, “May God reward you a hundredfold.” Fernanda replied in agreement, “Merry Christmas.” She turned and smiled at me, then stood and moved to the aisle so she could dance freely to the rhythms of the offertory music, her face turned upward, arms raised high. It was Christmas in Colombia, we were at the Misión Carismática Internacional (MCI) in the middle of Bogotá, and Fernanda had just given God a “gift” of 2 million pesos (approximately $1,000 USD). With compound interest accruing immediately on her debt, Fernanda acted on the belief that God would reward her. “You’ve gone into debt to give to God?” I asked her. Fernanda laughed, “Of course. Hasn’t everybody?”

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Figure 6. Small-group worship at the Misión Carismática Internacional. Photo by the author.

Cr eDit an D bel iev in g: Cre d e re This chapter details the debt upon which the prosperity gospel rests in Colombia. Throughout my time in Colombia, I found that Christmas time was when the overlap of debt and religious fervor became the most legible. Such blatant and enthusiastic resignation to indebtedness spurred the question: What does religious practice reveal about the gift in financial capitalism? Specifically, this chapter demonstrates that the relationship between financial capitalism and Christianity are particularly interrelated through the social relations bound up in the gift. Financial capitalism modifies the gift, from a gift based on social debt to a gift based on financial debt. The profound impact of this modification is a new social relation, a relation between the debtor and the immaterial spirits of finance. Credit card companies, banks, and other financial service providers are

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the guarantors that mediate gift relations in financial capitalism. The focus of this chapter illustrates the centrality of belief to the program of financialization. Fernanda’s gift to God, animates this new relation of exchange in a particularly salient way. Fernanda’s gift is “different and deferred” as Pierre Bourdieu suggested of the gift relation, but it is based on a new kind of economy of exchange that requires a believing economy.1 While belief can be understood as being a characteristic in relations of exchange before finance capitalism, the ways in which I understand believing in relations of financial exchange is different. I understand believing as a social relation, as a practice of social mobility and, as Michel de Certeau states, “the subject’s investment in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true.”2 The proposition of believing in the context of Colombia’s rapid financialization is tied to credit insofar as credit, and specifically credit cards, facilitate exchanges impossible without them. The gift relation is one relation of exchange that is most affected by the distinct form of relationality that propositional belief in credit provides. Finance capitalism changes the gift relation in two important ways. First, giving on credit mobilizes a third party in the gift relation. In precapitalist societies, like the ones that Marcel Mauss addressed in his assessment of the social and political crisis of capitalist society in terms of social relations, two actors operated in the field of exchange: the giver and the receiver. As Mauss states, quoted in the epigraph of this chapter, gifting, or “throwing copper into the sea” functions also as an act of sacrifice to the gods because, in the act of gifting, the object gifted retained the hau—that is, a part of a person remained as part of the object (or person in the case of women as wives) that was gifted.3 As Michael Taussig explains, “The fetishism that is found in the economics of precapitalist societies arises from the sense of organic unity between persons and their products.”4 The process of reification between produced commodity and laborer is the first distinction that the gift exchange in capitalism represents. The credit card company facilitates the exchange of gifts, reifying the relation between commodity and laborer twice over. The gift on credit, if it is a material commodity, is bought with the credit money that profits not only the capitalist merchant, but also the bank and the credit card company.

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The second difference is that the use of credit in order to gift money, credit money, introduces an immateriality to the gift that Mauss did not consider, and further extrapolates the idea of Bourdieu that the gift in return must be different and differed. Perhaps resembling more closely the Vedic principle that inspired Mauss’s analysis, that sacrifice “is a gift that compels the deity to make a return,” Fernanda’s gift of credit money was an immaterial offering that did expect return (as all “gifts” do).5 What is different is that giving money to God, or the gods, that comes from one’s own physical money—pound of gold or coin—or on a debit card is already a reification of the contradictory money form. However, credit money is fictitious capital; it exists only as a promise yet is understood as a materiality. “Money,” as Marx declared in reference to credit moneys, what he names “fetish capital,” “is now pregnant.”6 It is this incredible contradiction that prompts Taussig to ask, “How could such a mutually reinforcing combination of rationality and fantasy so systemically coexist?” Holding this contradiction in tension is where the productive power of believing enters this now diffuse social relation, between giver, receiver, facilitator, merchant, and processor. The gift relation that Marcel Mauss explained as foundational to precapitalist systems of exchange was based on “interested and obligatory” reciprocity, rather than a simple equation of “voluntary presentation.”7 As Mary Douglas in her foreword to the 1990 translation of Mauss’s essay states, “There are no free gifts.”8 The point of revealing the gift relation in precapitalist societies, for Mauss, was to recognize the total social fact of reciprocal giving. The example of the potlatch in West Coast First Nations communities, the Haïda and Tlingit, is a case in point. Douglas explains, “The cycling gift system is society.”9 Tied up in the gift relation is the pursuit of honor. A failure to return the gift, and oftentimes in excess of the original gift, is to lose the competition for honor. This, however, is different from “interest,” as it is imposed on a financialized credit card expense, and these should not be confused (more on this below). Most importantly, Mauss’s essay on the gift is a commentary on politics and economics, issues that Mauss understood to be in disarray, even crisis, in his context of Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, on a steady path of industrializing capitalism. More specifically, Mauss wrote against the utilitarianism of English liberalism.10 The Gift is an essay about human solidarity.

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Pierre Bourdieu further theorizes the gift within a paradigmatic form, or rather, social strategic form, in which gift giving becomes a strategy. “Until he has given in return, the receiver is obliged, to show his gratitude towards his benefactor, or, at least, to have regard for him.”11 The gift must be different because, according to Bourdieu, to return the equivalent gift would be to annul the gift relation. The gift must also be deferred because “to abolish the interval is also to abolish strategy.”12 Referring back to Michel de Certeau, the need for deferral in the return of the thing given is as much about the gift as it is about believing: “A plurality and a historicity are knotted into the act that posits, by the same gesture, a different partner and a deferred restitution. This temporal practice of difference endows delay with all its social pertinency. It is by this ‘deferred’ that believing is separated from seeing.”13 The gift is imbued with power and hierarchical social structures reflective of the capital, both symbolic and financial, that circulates in society. Although credit is not a gift from MasterCard, per se, the exchange of payment operates according to the logic of different and deferred payment through interest. It is the injection of time into the equation that brings the gift at Christmas in Colombia back to questions of believing and commerce in the form of credit. Here, Michel de Certeau’s analysis of believing illuminates relations of exchange, and the crediting system, anew: “The object of exchange is itself altered by the distance between moments, since the due—or expected—is not the same as the given, but an equivalent: the analogy between the offered and the received would be the work of time on their identity. The sequence of the gift and restitution thus temporarily articulates an economy of exchange. . . . It will develop on the side of credence, or ‘crediting’ of the creditor or the ‘believer’ and, more explicitly, towards credit, where Marx sees ‘the judgment that political economy bears on the morality of man.’ ”14 Credit differentiates and defers the gift, but return on the gift is based in new systems of belief that are tied up in ongoing interest payments and extended return over time. Giving a gift on credit introduces a new dimension to the gift relation. Credit underwrites the gift in financial capitalism, because long after the gift is given, the lingering remnant of debt weighs on the devout soul and profits the bank and credit card company. Fernanda made a covenant with God in her Christmas gift, but importantly, she also made a covenant with the

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gods of finance: the credit card company and her bank. This new system of gift relations, I argue, rests upon the practices of believing that financial capitalism requires. And at no other time do believing and credit collide as legibly as during Christmas.

beli ef an D b el iev in g The financial system is (at least in part) a “system of belief ” and belief underwrites the practices that make up the everyday operations of Colombia’s emerging credit system.15 It is in this sense that Arjun Appadurai, as the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter cites, suggested that capitalism requires a certain degree of belief.16 One objective of this chapter is to engage in the ongoing debate among scholars of religion that has revolved around the usefulness (or uselessness) of the concept “belief.” To do so, I consider both believing and credit as relations of exchange and as social practices central to finance capitalism. This exploration into believing and credit leads me to problematize the oft-assumed divide between the categories of “religion” and “economy” through querying the distinction between “belief ” and “practice.” The beginning point for this inquiry is based in an etymological curiosity found in the Latin verb credere—the root of both belief and credit—and the work that credere does on the gift. This chapter develops a distinction between credere, or believing, on the one hand, and belief or a belief system on the other. In order to support this claim, and to illuminate its significance, I lean on Catherine Bell’s exploratory work on belief and believing.17 Bell invites the scholar of religion to take a step away from considering belief as a closed system, a fallback anthropological method of differentiation (i.e., “Those people believe such and such, those other people believe some other such and such”), or a term collapsible with either “culture” or “religion.” My ethnographic research pushes the “question of belief ” toward a question of believing. This question develops a deeper consideration of religious worlds embedded in credit-based social and economic relations. Through employing categories of economic exchange, assumptions about believing and capitalist economy are unveiled. At the same time, thinking with believing and credit in complex relation offers an important analogical insight into

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the functioning of finance capital, its temporality, and the contradictions inherent therein. To do so, I focus on believing in relation to the gift in order to illuminate the shifts in emerging forms of financial social forms.18 Doing so reveals a temporal contradiction deeply embedded in finance capitalism: short-term profiteering rubs against tempos and time frames of long-term accumulation strategies and interrupts production. The intrinsic instability of such a temporal contradiction reveals a conceptual opening that is held together by believing and credit—and, critically, debt. Belief is a slippery category that has fascinated and frustrated the scholar of religion since Durkheim claimed that “religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is, things that are set apart and forbidden.”19 Yet, as Catherine Bell aptly pointed out, while religious practices have been a focus for the study of religion, belief has not been the subject of significant scholarly attention in the field. This is ironic, she notes, because “Although it is ignored in all formal senses, the field makes nearly constant reference to the idea of belief in nearly every publication.”20 Overlooked in the field of religious studies, the “problem of belief ” has nevertheless been addressed in various other disciplines, such as anthropology,21 philosophy,22 cognitive theory,23 and of course extensively in theological studies.24 Bell assigns blame for the oversight in religious studies to the “routine reliance on [belief]’s nebulous status passing back and forth raw datum and theoretical tool.”25 This tacking back and forth has maintained a tendency toward sidestepping belief as a category of inquiry in itself. Assumed, yet without theoretical foundation, is that the study of religion preserves the distinction between internal “beliefs” and outward “rites,” collective and coherent ritual acts that represent what “those people believe” and how distinctions between the sacred and the profane are maintained.26 This tendency has resulted in “a scholarly imagination interested in meaningful differences rather than hierarchical interconnections.”27 The bright distinctions drawn between belief and practice preclude the study of complex entanglements between believing and practice, hierarchical interconnections of power and discipline, and Prosperity Christianity and financial capitalism. In this vein, the argument follows Bell’s suggestion that rather than belief, the scholar of religion should consider believing, as verb and as social practice.

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Ch r iSt M a S a n D Cr eD er e in Col o M b i a Bogotá mayor, Gustavo Petro, boasted to the local press, and the country at large, that Christmas 2013 was going to be one of the best and brightest in all of Latin America.28 Petro announced, “We invite all Colombians to Bogotá. We want you to witness how the Capital [city] experiences a disarmed Christmas. Without weapons, a new time can be lived. This Christmas must send a strong message of security to counter what has happened in previous celebrations, where homicides increased in Bogotá.”29 This invitation emerged amid ongoing revelations of mass graves filled with the broken pieces of over five thousand bodies, tortured and dismembered for the most part, and scattered throughout the country. Colombia’s “new time” that Mayor Petro called for was more than an economically new time, but a political and social new time of a “disarmed Christmas” and a disarmed country. In light of the ongoing violence, and the shared hopes throughout the country for a peace agreement to be signed soon, Mayor Petro’s invitation was understood as a call to Bogotá, and the rest of Colombia, to believe in the real possibility of peacetime—new time. Colombia’s new time, it can be argued, is half a century coming and, many will further claim, will take at least twice as long to fully arrive. It is a new time that suspends itself teleologically within a belief in the future. It is a vague promise of a new and peaceful country that is tied up with prosperous aspirations of economic development. This drive to make anew, however, rides on believing and credit, and so Fernanda’s gift reveals so much more than a simple gift. In Bogotá this year, there would be nearly five hundred Christmas shows around the city with synchronized water fountains, light displays, and musical events. This so-called Ruta de la Navidad (Route of Christmas) would have “48% more lights” than the year before, and the light shows would play every evening beginning the first week of December until the New Year.30 Twelve million lights would illuminate a city of ten million people, and snow-machines would shower biodegradable snowfoam onto delighted children throughout a city tamped down by greater military presence in the streets, army patrols around shopping malls, and police presence in all commercial centers.31 The disarmed Christmas was

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Figure 7. Christmas lights at Usaquén Park. Photo by iStock.com/ChandraDhas.

to be the kind of peace that disarms the civilian population and assigns military might to those representatives of official state power. In part, Colombia’s economic emergence has been tied to the greater liberalization of its markets, and the influx of foreign direct investment in the financial sector. This has translated into markets flooded with easily accessible credit. Economic ability is a marker of middle-class security and the globalization of Colombia’s markets has infused the growing middle class with credit, allowing for greater purchasing power. Prosperity and peace are once again conflated. However, in Colombia both prosperity and peace are desired futures because they are not yet. They are the expectations of greater economic development and peace agreements. Credit puts into practice the belief that a new time is possible at all, and Christmas is heralded as the proverbial new time that Colombia has been seeking—in myriad forms and campaigns. The new time, then, of prosperity is put into practice by giving gifts that perform a kind of middle-class wealth despite those gifts being purchased on credit.

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This refrain of a “new time” has been marketed as the horizon of hope for an ostensibly optimistic nation with the shared conviction that peace is possible, happiness is always just around the corner, and prosperity is attainable for all.32 The most aggressive push of the new time narrative at Christmas emanated from state-sponsored messages and boisterous advertising campaigns by Colombia’s government. Mayor Petro’s office plastered billboards around the city, wishing all Bogotános a “Merry Christmas” and proclaiming, “Peace and Prosperity Await Us.” President Santos declared in his Christmas message to the country that “the God-child of Christmas brings a message of forgiveness [and peace]. In order to begin anew, to commence a new era . . . we must forgive, be humble, seek peace, and work together for prosperity.”33 We must begin anew. Peace, so the logic holds, will be waged by means of prosperity. Economic and social prosperity will produce peace. Recollecting the conversation of the political economy of war in the previous chapters, this claim is not entirely misplaced. However, some of the loudest voices calling for a new time were also coming from burgeoning Pentecostal and Charismatic movements throughout the country; and especially from the charismatic movements growing in Bogotá’s urban centers, like the Misión Carismática Internacional.

aC tS o f bel iev in g The hundreds of ushers at the MCI, in the center of Bogotá, wear blue vests, indicating their role. Those who carry the credit card machines have the word DATAFONO stitched on the back of their vests in bold, white, capital letters. At the time of giving offerings, tithes, or financial covenants, the machine-wielding ushers begin to pace the aisles of the enormous church, holding high their wireless electronic devices. At any given service, there may be upwards of two dozen of these ushers. The service in which Fernanda gave her gift to God depicted above was during the week leading to Christmas. An LED screen, framed by Broadway lights, flashed the theme of the week, “Jesus es la Luz” (Jesus is the Light), and illuminated the stage. After a rousing half hour of singing, dancing, light show, and prayer time, the band left the stage, and the house lights began to brighten. As soon as Pastor César Castellanos walked on stage, a close up

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of his smiling face was simultaneously projected on five, movie theater– size, screens throughout the auditorium, and the credit card ushers began to unobtrusively mill at the intersections of the aisles, scanning the crowds for hands waving them over. The first “teaching” at an MCI service is usually an invitation to “make a pact with God” “claim your vision” “make the promise a reality” and other such prosperity aspirations. As Castellanos speaks, hands begin to rise from among the bowed heads. The hands wave down the machine-carrying ushers. The ushers rush over to the giver, the donor, the debtor, and, if possible, crouch intimately over the person. There is an exchange of information—what kind of card? How much? How many payment quotas?—the card is swiped, and the receipt spills out of the machine. The merchant’s copy must be signed and handed back to the usher. The receipt is handed to the giver. “Nothing is impossible for those who believe!” Castellanos’s voice boomed in stereo, and he proceeded to tell the story of David and Goliath. “Your giant is your finances. Prosperity is real, it is biblical. This moment of pacting is to conquer your giant of debt, of scarcity, of ruin. This is the time for financial freedom!” Castellanos paced up and down the stage, speaking to the multitudes. “You can be the blessing you want to be this Christmas season. How many believe that this month of December you will be able to conquer what you weren’t able to conquer in the last eleven months?” a chorus of “Amens” affirmed that everyone believed. “Think of all the gifts you need to give. Giving is better than receiving. God gave so generously; he gave his son. This Christmas we remember that God’s greatest gift is Jesus Christ. Jesus is the light!” The band returned to the stage, and an upbeat, Spanish version of “O Come All Ye Faithful” began to play into the auditorium. The credit card machines darted around the floor. As the music became louder, it began to drown out the rustle of thousands of hands reaching into thousands of wallets to make thousands of sacrifices to one God. Like Fernanda had done. Once cards had been swiped and cash had been dedicated, thanking God for his gift of Jesus, receipts were held up in the air alongside envelopes stuffed with faith-based investment. “Repeat after me” Castellanos exclaimed, and receipts and envelopes clouded the air in the convention center. “I am prosperous! In the name of Jesus, I am prosperous!” The crowd enthusiastically

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echoed Pastor Castellanos. “Now say to the person beside you, ‘Wow! You look prosperous!’ ” Fernanda came back to her seat beside me. She placed her hands on my shoulders and told me, “You look prosperous!”

Wh at iS a b el iev er ? Christmas in Colombia is not only about the lights and the cheer, the excitement of a new time. Christmas in Colombia is also about a different time, the after-effect of overspending, overeating, overdrinking, and over-hoping. Despite the promise of prosperous futures, paying off debts of Christmas in Colombia seeps into the new time of the New Year, leaving most everyone involved with a financial headache—or worse. In more ethnographic terms, growing access to credit in Colombia has reframed the Christmas gift in ways that elongate rather than eliminate this interest-laden payback. Colombia’s recent moves to free up credit for the masses offers particularity to this insight, inasmuch as new credits are promoting access to forms of consumption that produce an aspirational class, while being propelled by the aspirations of individuals who were denied access until recently. Credit cards were not available to the large majority of the population, even ten years ago. Now, credit card machines are available in corner stores, bakeries, and beer vendors, when a decade earlier these establishments would accept only cash. Credit in emerging Colombia, however, represents much more than just accessibility, because credit in Colombia is tied to a future that is still under construction. Emile Benveniste etymologically traces the concept of believing to credo, stating, “From the time of the earliest texts the meaning of “credit” is extended to include the notion of “belief.”34 Benveniste provides the initial clues that led Michel de Certeau to challenge the Durkheimian divide between belief and practice. Benveniste states, “To believe . . . is to give something away with the certainty of getting it back”—at some point in the future, we might add.35 De Certeau proposes that belief, indeed, concerns “what makes it [society] run.” Believing, for de Certeau, for Bell, and for me, is relational. “Belief is perceived by the more or less strict links it maintains with what makes it happen and/or expects to see happen.”36 In this sense, believing concerns what makes the credit system run. To

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believe is to act, and this action could be called reciprocal social practice. Financialization is not the ending of social relations, or the complete disconnection between debt and obligation. Financialization reforms the ways in which social relations, debts, and obligations are realized. When belief ceases to exist within a relational web, I argue, it ceases to be believing; it ceases to be a social practice.37 While Fernanda ostensibly makes a covenant with God, her two million pesos go to the MCI’s coffers, and the interest payments will go to the private energy company CODENSA, who provides her credit card through a contract with the Colombian bank Colpatria, which is owned by Canadian conglomerate, Scotiabank, and distributes the credit cards for CODENSA. And MasterCard, the “processor,” owns the technology that animates the credit card machines and receives a fee for every devout debt that is created. MasterCard does not tire of reminding the world that they are “the driving force at the heart of commerce” providing the technology for millions of electronic payments to be made every minute of every day, around the world. MasterCard facilitates the guarantee from banker to merchant to consumer. The guarantor is always absent, yet omnipresent. This is what MasterCard is, throughout the world. MasterCard runs the technology through which credit card transactions occur. MasterCard is a brand name of the card that uses their technology. As they explain on their website, “MasterCard is more than the brand you see on your card. We’re the technology making payments happen around the clock. In fact, we operate the world’s fastest payments network, processing transactions in more than 150 currencies.”38 The role of banks in this process is to serve as “issuers”; they hold the money and send the money for the purchase made with the credit card. MasterCard is, essentially, a network. For every transaction, MasterCard receives a payment. MasterCard, then, is everywhere. They are an invisible, fiber-optic network that facilitates exchange. This distinction, between presence and absence, “here and there,” “real and imagined” is central to believing, and clearly, central to the financial system. Indeed, de Certeau tells us, “The coincidence of absence and presence is one of the secrets of believing.”39 MasterCard is precisely this confluence of absence and presence; while some things are priceless, everything else—everything else—can be purchased on credit. As the credit card company boasts, they are the heartbeat of the

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global financial order, they are the mediator for exchange of everything that is not “without price.” As the well-known advertisement states: “There are some things money can’t buy, for everything else, there’s MasterCard.” However, what separates believing from knowing or seeing is the suspension of return on an act of belief. Time. Believing is a practice hinged on expectation of future recompense—being rewarded a hundredfold for a virtuous financial sacrifice, going into debt in order to gain an education with a vague assurance that a prosperous future awaits a university graduate, or, and importantly in the case of Colombia, believing in a new time of a peaceable future after decades of civil war. Believing in Colombia is a practice that moves beyond the expectational toward the aspirational. And in Colombia, at Christmas, the narrative of prosperity is the illuminated future that is aspired to through giving on credit. Financialized capitalism ushers in a complex management of aspiration through the temporal contradiction that finance requires: immediate satisfaction accompanied by long-term debt has become a new form of accumulation. Indeed, interest payments on credit card debt are central to profit making in financial capitalism. Production of profit has moved from the factory and sale of commodities to accruing interest and profiting off time itself. Herein lies both the enchanted dimension of financial capitalism and its weakness. For such a contradiction creates an inherent instability in the system, as was effectively felt throughout the world with the credit crisis of 2007–08.

Cr eDer e The private energy company CODENSA has a monopoly on electricity distribution in Bogotá. A subsidiary of the European company Grupo Enel, it was formed through the privatization of Bogotá’s public energy company in 1997. Over the last decade, CODENSA has paid a large part of the city’s Christmas light show expenses. For Christmas 2013, the CEO of CODENSA explained, “Illuminating Bogotá is a [Christmas] gift for all Bogotános, because it will be free and we estimate that millions of people will enjoy [the lights], from within the Capital as well from the rest of the country.”40 CODENSA’s motto is “mucho más que energía” (much more than electricity), and according to their advertisements, they distribute

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alegría as much as energía (happiness as much as electricity). CODENSA’s gift of light suggested as much. Incidentally, CODENSA is also one of the largest commercial credit card providers in Colombia—and it charges some of the highest interest rates in the country.41 CODENSA credit cards are the most accessible cards for a majority of Colombians, as they are available to everyone who makes at least a minimum wage. CODENSA has a monopoly not only on electricity, but also credit cards for the lowest income bracket of Colombians. These cards carry credit that can be paid off over a period of up to four years, with interest rates exceeding 28 percent.42 To CODENSA’s own benefit they do distribute much more than electricity. The easy credit they distribute is about improving “quality of life” and buying “what you’ve always desired,” they claim. In other words, it is about channeling aspiration toward attaining a better life. Prosperity, for many of the faithful masses that hold this conviction, affirms that “something new” and “something better” is not only possible in this lifetime; it is what both God and the Corporation promise faithful followers. In one of his best-selling books of instructions for fulfilling a predestined plan of prosperity, Pastor Castellanos explains that, “[believing] is the capacity to see oneself in a future that is completely different from the present reality.”43 Castellanos explains that believers must “enter the spiritual plane and see there all the blessings God has for every one of us.”44 Central to accessing these blessings is the work of clearly articulating and visualizing the hoped-for result. “When these images are engraved in the mind, your lips begin to easily confess what your heart is fully convinced of. Scientists have been able to prove that what a person is able to perceive in their mind, the nervous system receives as though it has already occurred, in other words, understand it as reality.”45 And for churches like the Misión Carismática, there is no harm in stating your vision, and then using your CODENSA credit card to make a financial covenant (pacto) with God in order to bring about that completely different reality. It is an act that demonstrates believing power—a gift that serves as a contract. The economic sacrifice is to be recognized with celestial and material interest. However, as levels of consumer debt steadily rise in Colombia, the interest payments extend gift giving beyond a onetime sacrifice. The credit-fueled gift is the proverbial gift that keeps on taking.

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Christmas in Colombia is a time of abundant hope in a vague newness, as much as a time for giving. And churches, corporations, and even the state, encourage generous giving—on credit if necessary. CODENSA calms anxious yet committed consumers with marketing campaigns that guarantee a happy Christmas with credit cards that require no payment until February the following year.46 Pastor Castellanos chides congregants of the Misión Carismática for allowing doubt to cloud prosperous believing, encouraging members to “be the blessing you could not be all year, now. At Christmas.”47 And Bogotá’s mayor invokes the message that Colombia wants the world to hear: Peace and democracy await not only Bogotá, but also the entire country.48 Even former president Juan Manuel Santos, architect of the 2016 peace agreement, joined the call for believing in a new country. “We will convert this nightmare of violence into the rebirth of our homeland,” Santos assured the crowd at a march for peace.49 While talking of the need for the rebirth of the nation, Santos donned a shirt that stated, “My contribution is to believe” (Mi aporte es creer). CODENSA’s Christmas lights brighten the refrain that Colombia can indeed “live a new time.” It is this potential, this newness, the perceived image of something that can be real amid all of these lights, that provokes a fundamental ethnographic observation: Christmas in Colombia rides on believing that “a new time” is possible. The Christian overtones of new life and renewal shimmer into full relief, as credit cards become mediators of endless potential. Believing that Colombia can become new brings into relief the aspirational future practices that credit allows and elongates. However, new times, in Colombia, are borrowed time. Debt with interest will be what deters the complete fulfillment of the dream of the future. War debts, economic debts, drug debts, social debts, political debts will all need to be paid with interest. Credit and believing in Colombia pay for the gift in the present, but the payout is compounded.

beli eving in pr oSper ity : ur Su l a’S g i f t “It’s a new car! It’s for all of us! Merry Christmas!” Ursula clapped her hands and hugged her family. “Now we can all go on holiday together in January. And they gave us a year of gasoline!” The KIA SUV glimmered in

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the light. Ursula’s grandchildren excitedly climbed around the car, while Ursula’s children smiled, hesitantly, at the new vehicle. “How did you pay for this?” they asked. Ursula crowed enthusiastically, “Does it matter? I know how to manage my finances. This is for all of us! Now we can drive together to our favorite vacation spot!” It was only after Christmas that Ursula confessed her credit card calamity to me, “I am in so much debt” she confided. “I did it all for them, for my family. I wanted prosperity. I know God wants that for us. I believe that. I must.” Ursula’s guilt and conviction brought her to max out three credit cards and a line of credit, spending over $25,000 USD in the short course of two years on her family. She expected nothing in return but happiness and security for her family, happiness and security that she never had as a younger woman. She is the Colombian “aspirational class,” and she is the harbinger of Colombia’s “new time. She is the new consumer in Colombia. And while her conspicuous consumption includes new SUVs and tablets for her family, she also consumes the hope trafficked by Colombia’s banks, churches, and the credit card industry. But unique to Colombia, aspirations of the former mayor and the former president for a “new time” of disarmament revealed deeply rooted anxieties about the country’s past and present. Petro was a former guerrilla with the Movimiento 19 de Abril, M-19, and had to spend much of his political career living down this past. While Santos was leading peace negotiations with the FARC, there were continual interruptions by outbreaks of violence. The “old times” were not, and are not, quite yet past. Although the peace negotiations were finally signed, ongoing state-sponsored violence and drug-related bloodshed threaten a fragile and precarious ceasefire. In the collective memory of Colombians, the “old times” of powerful guerrilla armies and drug cartels are still very much present. The macabre violence of the past fifty years leads to a focus on the future, rather than the past, despite these dynamics being still very present but muted for many city dwellers. Christmas is the time of year when the temporal dynamics of forward motion of aspiration are most palpably put into practice. “New time” in Colombia is a mode of social action as much as it is a rhetorical trope. The past in the country is not one for which there is a nostalgic longing. Indeed, in the context of peace talks, the work of historical

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memory is relatively new, and painfully torturous for most of Colombia’s population. Now, three generations have known only a context in which violence as a form of discipline is the modus operandi of the Colombian government and all the armed actors involved in the conflict. This context has affected everyday relations in aggressive, precarious everydayness of living. As CODENSA’s easy credit card affirms, credit, and indeed finance is much more than just electricity—it is about futures and aspirations. The opening toward forms of regulation that are increasingly internalized and controlled through an abstract system of a market can be understood as a welcome shift from the public demonstrations of war crimes and violent moneylenders. CODENSA, as they promote, traffics in happiness, while the Colombian state along with prosperity churches affirm that new times are possible. Financialization, however, might be better understood outside of a teleology of forward-moving economic evolution and rather as a process of new forms of governmentality playing out in a new relation of power. The gift on credit in times of finance capital illustrates newly emerging social relations and the compound work of overlapping discipline and control.

giving iS b el iev in g The gift in Colombia is, of course, about reciprocity, obligation, and the power of gift in social relations, as Marcel Mauss theorized. But Christmas in financializing Colombia brings the credit-fueled gift into new relief and reveals that the gift is now about much more. This analysis also reveals the centrality of belief to processes and procedures of financialization. The vignette from the MCI animates the different and deferred gift as a financial strategy par excellence. Through interest-bearing finance capital, parishioners of the Misión Carismática are encouraged to make their offering count, to “pay it forward” and to do so with compounding interest. The misrecognition of the gift through regarding credit as though it were a liquid asset is the believing practice, and contradiction, that financial capitalism relies upon. Bourdieu’s explanation of misrecognition is animated through what he names the “complicity” of the precarious classes

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in appropriating ideologies (believing practices) of the dominant institutions of power (such as state, church, and bank). De Certeau states, “The process of belief works starting not from the believer himself but from an indefinite plural, presumed to be the debtor and the guarantor of the believing relationship.”50 Believing, credit, the anteriority of past desire, and future possibility open up the resting contradictions that make the credit system an institution of belief. It is this contradiction that ties believing to practice in the sense that Bell proposed, and it is this contradiction that animates credere, believing and credit, as the practices that underwrite finance. It is also this contradiction of believing in the future—believing in the Colombia that could be—and the disastrous human toll of securing the country for greater foreign direct investment and financial stability, that is held together through the believing practices of a population whose debt is conflated with their prosperity. Belief in a prosperous future that is predicated upon practices of extraction, exploitation, and the imminent threat of elimination, is also central to the operations of necrofinancial practice. Believing in the contradiction that capitalist expansion will bring about prosperous futures while the evidence demonstrates ever deepening degrees of inequality, does not negate that capitalism brings wealth. Such belief is necessary to smooth the reality that capitalism does bring wealth, but only to some. Importantly, however, Bell clarifies that such misrecognition is not a “matter of being duped, but a strategy for appropriating symbols, despite how structured and structuring the symbols may prove to be in practice.”51 Prosperity is the ideology of financialized capitalism—and credit is the enabling force that promises to democratize the spoils of capitalism to the masses. The promise of prosperity is inherently inclusive, and therefore not a vehicle of unanimity but great difference within a whole. “Prosperity for all” the Colombian government promised. “Easy credit for all,” the private corporations and banks proclaim. God’s prosperous plan is for all who believe—the practices that make up the micropolitics of everyday life in Colombia play out the power relations that financial capitalism embeds in its foreclosure of alternate (economic and religious) practice.

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even Santa Cl auS bel iev e S in C o lo Mb i a “My contribution is to believe; I believe in peace.”52 This was a governmentally coordinated social media campaign that accompanied the peace negotiations between the FARC and the government in Havana 2012– 2016. In a widely viewed television commercial, Colombians of all ethnic backgrounds, geographic locations, and socioeconomic status, including well-known personalities such as rock-stars Juanes and Shakira, tell the nation, “My contribution is to believe.” Juanes, the last of the celebrities in the clip, states, “I believe in peace. Do you?” Driving along the busy streets of Bogotá at Christmastime, billboards show a Rockwellian Santa Claus sipping contentedly on a bottle of Coke. The billboard smiles down on Bogotá, and states, “I also believe in you.” Even Santa Claus believes in Colombia. To further animate this point we need to dim the bright lights of the illuminated city streets, and those ten million light bulbs and their unlimited potential of new time. It means stepping into the shadows of January, into light of Ursula’s own Christmas tree, which was still decorated weeks after the New Year. Her deferred, different, and devout gifts were now a financial reality. She explained her belief in prosperity, her commitment to a “new time” through counter-disciplinary spending, in light of a dark past.53 Ursula held back tears as she told me why she wanted prosperity for her family. Having been married at fifteen to an evangelical missionary twice her age, she had her first child at sixteen. After numerous new converts that her husband brought home had tried to rape her, she fell into an extreme depression, and after three failed suicide attempts, she left her husband, taking her young child with her. She met another suitor and had her second child. Without any education, she worked in construction for a number of years—a highly dangerous and machista workplace. After two years of construction work, she decided to leave her children and work illegally in Japan in the fish markets.54 Her sister had gone before her and had helped secure a travel visa. More details were not forthcoming. “One of my largest regrets, my deepest pain, is that I left my children.” She caught her breath on a surge of tears. “I decided then that I would do anything and everything, that I would “salir adelante y voy a tener algo pa’ mis hijos” (get ahead and have something for my children).

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After having worked in Japan for some time, she returned to Colombia with enough money to make a down payment on a house and to demonstrate her debt-worthiness for a mortgage. “I got down on my knees and I felt that God was there. I felt . . . I have never felt anything like that day; that day something happened, the earth opened, and great miracles were possible. That day I believed, and I kneeled and said, Lord Jesus, I beg you, with all my heart, that you open a door. I want a house for my children. Tell me what I have to do. And in faith I said, ‘Lord, give me a house, a place to be with my children, where no one can take them from me, where no one will humiliate me ever again.’ ” Ursula began to work in Bogotá, where she bought her first house on credit. She began to study nights to finish her high school diploma with the goal of one day becoming a doctor. Fifteen years later, she had graduated from medical school and got her first job as an emergency ward doctor in a small town outside of Bogotá. Her children by that time already had children of their own, and Ursula was receiving a steady income and qualified for credit cards and an open line of credit for the first time. Since then, she has remortgaged her house “four or five times” and entered into significant credit card debt. But rarely does she go into debt with purchases for herself. “It’s better to give than to receive, I think,” she told me in the glowing lights of the Christmas tree still standing toward the end of January. “I’ve never had this much debt. And yes, the debt is great, but God is greater. God will provide, God knows what He is doing; nothing is impossible for God.” Ursula’s debt is conflated with the happiness that CODENSA promises. It is the contradiction of being tied to debt payments for years, refinancing her debts with different banks, and remortgaging her house, while at the same time being able to renovate her house for her children and purchase a vehicle for family vacations that animates the gift-as-believing in Colombia. This contradiction is what believing permits. Believing and credit do the work of reimagining the gift. Her “new-time” financial woes are tied to old-time struggles and heartaches. Ursula smiled at me, her CODENSA bill on the table, along with the other credit card statements she had been showing me. We had sat down to analyze the debts, about which she was receiving phone calls from the bank. The compound interest payments and all the additional charges on

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her credit card bill were overwhelming. Account maintenance fees, transaction fees, fees for things she could not identify. Each debt and each card had its own rate of interest. “Ladrones,” she breathed. “Crooks.” We made a plan to bundle her debts with a different bank that had approached her, with lower interest rates and the promise that there would be no hidden fees. A different bank would be a better option. She touched my arm as we finished up, “It’s true, you know. If you believe, anything is possible. I choose to believe that God wants prosperity for my family. I am showing that it is possible. The gifts I gave this Christmas put me into debt, but nothing makes me happier than giving. I’ll get out of this debt. God knows, believing makes anything possible.” Ursula’s conviction was a revealing practice that tied her commitment to her family to a prosperous future. Ursula understood herself as included in the campaign of prosperity preached by pastors, government, and banks. The contradiction, however, lay in the debt that accompanied her inclusion. The practices of believing that were working on Ursula were training her soul to adhere to logics of financialization. Despite the risks of bankruptcy, and the ominous threat of job loss—that particular, intentional anxiety that contractual work generates—or simply the possibility of violence at any moment, Ursula’s belief sustained the idea that debt was necessary for designing a prosperous future. She was financializing her soul.

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The Soul On top of suffering from his destitution, the poor man suffers from having to make the debasing plea to the rich man for credit. With this completely ideal existence of money, man must counterfeit his own person. —Karl Marx

“Well, credit cards are for poor people, right?” Remedios commented as we went over her various credit card debts and bills. Less a question than a realization, Remedios looked to her list of payments. “Rich people don’t need credit cards,” she huffed. “Or they use them because they want to, not because they have to.” We stood in the kitchen of her diner, at the southern edge of Bogotá. This small business made Remedios an entrepreneur and, as such, eligible for various forms of private and public lines of credit: microcredits, credit cards from commercial banks, loans from the Women’s Bank, and business credits from state-financing institutions. The many credits that Remedios managed (and she was managing five different lines of credit, microcredits, and credit cards) had resulted in a complicated web of debts and payments and meetings with creditors and lenders. Her question came out of a reflection on the many ways banks, churches, and nongovernmental organization (NGO) programs had seemed to conspire to put her into debt. She shook her head and submitted, “Yet, everything we’ve done, the restaurant, replacing the dirt floor with tile, we’ve done everything with credit. Without credit, no se hace nada (you can’t do anything).

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Y pues, claro. Con la ayuda de Dios” (Of course, with the help of God). She proudly placed a hand on her hip. I asked why nothing is possible without credit, and Remedios stated, “Well, because saving is impossible. Saving money is for the privileged. The poor need credit. Instead of saving, you get a credit. With the credit you can do things, like fix your house, put a floor in, an indoor bathroom, plumbing.” She then tied her reliance on credit to her belief in God: “Every time we take out a [new line of] credit, I say, we need to believe that God will accompany us. We need to trust in God that we’ll be able to pay it off. Or rather, God helps me manage my debt.” She paused, before adding: “You know it’s impossible to live without debt.” Remedios is a micro-entrepreneur who practices her Christianity through a financialized economy. Her personhood is indebted, but always a breath away from devastation. Remedios represents the precarious subjectivity that necrofinance cultivates. And, at the end, Remedios becomes one more casualty in the program of financial capitalism that has succeeded in determining that certain human lives are disposable. I met Remedios through a Christian nongovernmental organization (NGO) that brokers a microfinance project in the poorest, most violent, neighborhoods of Bogotá. These are the neighborhoods that circle the city, on the periphery. These neighborhoods, such as Usme, Cazuca, Soacha, Ciudad Bolívar, San Cristobal, and Los Laches, have some paved roads, but many unpaved, mountainous extremities where ramshackle houses have been constructed of cinder blocks and aluminum sheets for roofing. The city and el campo (the countryside) coexist, with occasional livestock, chickens, the odd donkey appearing on the streets. These neighborhoods also have the highest degrees of violence and host enclaves of competing armed factions, including urban paramilitary militias and urban guerrillas as well as militarized police regiments. On more than one occasion, Remedios called me and told me not to come visit her on a given week because the moment was “caliente”—meaning someone, or many, had been killed in the neighborhood and the situation was dangerous for outsiders. Poverty, in Colombia, is always in close proximity to violence. Remedios had her largest microcredit loan from Opportunity International, a multinational Christian organization based in Chicago that deals in microfinance. Remedios was the lidereza, female leader of her

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Figure 8. Usme, southern Bogotá. Photo by the author.

microcredit “solidarity bank,” and she practiced her Christianity through a financialized subjectivity that was motivated by the many micro-debts she managed—and that managed her. I was introduced to Remedios by the “financial officers” from Opportunity International–Colombia whom I had been accompanying on site visits throughout Bogota. On my first visit to her restaurant, Remedios showed me the workings of the simple galley kitchen that lay behind a half-wall separating it from the main dining area: plastic tables and chairs with a loud television in one high corner, and a half-empty drink fridge with a glass door. The small sink in the kitchen only ran cold water, and there was no dishwasher. Mounds of cilantro and green onion littered the narrow, tiled work space. The heavy aluminum pots were neatly organized under the tile counter. An enormous pot sat on top of one of the two single-burner propane stoves, heating water for rice. A pressure cooker bubbled and clanged on the other burner, full of tripe. Mondongo, tripe soup, was on the menu for lunch that day. A large,

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illuminated image of a blond-haired Jesus holding a lamb hung on the wall, beside an old calendar from Opportunity International. The Jesus image stated, “Dios bendice este negocio” (God bless this business). After showing me around, Remedios said, “We’ve made a lot of improvements with the credits. And we’re getting better—I am always working at being a better entrepreneur, a better mother, a better Christian. The credit helps. I aspire, . . .” she paused, “to something better.” The financialization of Remedios’s life, through Christian microfinance and acute aspirational practice, illustrates the financialization of her very being, her self, and her soul. The program of microfinance provides a window into understanding the mechanics of producing financialized Christian subjects.

finanC e an D the S ou l This chapter considers the financialized subject whose soul provides the moral terrain upon which financialization operates. Financialization is productive because it generates a complex regime of self-cultivation and particular practices of being and becoming. Beyond the privatized and internalized concept of the soul familiar in the Christian vernacular, the soul in financialized capitalism becomes a target for reform, particularly when connected to bodies that are read as outside of, or threats to, the political order. In the case of Colombia, poor bodies, marginalized bodies, and women’s bodies, have long been targets for punishment in the violence of civil war. The poor, the marginal, and women, have been disproportionately victimized in Colombia’s war. Conservative estimates suggest that more than 80 percent of the victims in Colombia’s war have been civilians.1 Studies suggest that on average, every hour in Colombia, sixteen women are victims of sexual violence. Sixteen. Of these, young, impoverished, Afro-Colombian women are by far the most vulnerable to sexual violence. In the cases that were registered between 2010 and 2015, over 50 percent of assaults were carried out by a man/men carrying an assault weapon of some kind.2 Regularly, the modus operandi of Colombia’s armed actors has been to make an example of a community leader, a political dissident, a rebellious woman, by “punishing” her: violent sexual assault, grotesque mutilations, public displays.

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Now Colombia seeks to move its historical arc toward peace, and these rebellious bodies host souls in the utmost need of reform. Financialization broadly, and microfinance particularly, enacts power upon these bodies through interiorized processes of cultivating disciplined financial practice and coding this economic practice as moral practice. The forms in which power is enacted on bodies in Colombia are not exactly shifting from the overt, often obscene exercise of violent punishment, characteristic of contexts of armed conflict; rather, that violence now is also layered with more palatable, more socially (and internationally) acceptable regimes of selfregulated control. This layered approach toward managing the population differently, through internalized reform, while specters of violence remain, opens both an analytical and social fissure into which financialization swells. The shift in power occurs through a decentralization of the conditions for control, thereby generating a precarious financial subject. Financialization introduces banking, credit cards, microcredits, microinsurance, and a host of educational programs in financial education and financial inclusion that train financial habits and practice. Opportunity International offers one dimension of this “correct training” in microfinance projects accompanied by Christian values marked by “life skills classes.” They define their work as: “supporting the generation of income through productive activities. Economic resources are accompanied with the strengthening of life skills that allow individuals to act within their context and achieve the transformation of themselves, their families, their community, and their society.”3 The efforts at transformation—of the self, family, community, and society—reveal the depths to which financialization reaches a cellular degree of power, while ordering a multiplicity of elements active in a disciplinary regime. Microfinance, and its educational program of “life skills” offers a microcosm in which to analyze this disciplined behavior and the economic regime of practice that has assumed the character of proper Christian practice. Financialization’s disciplinary regime tethers the millions of microdebts of millions of microcredit recipients to a particularly Christian morality. It is particularly salient to recognize the ways financial inclusion and financial education, mediated through Christian microcredit organizations, financialize the soul. By “financialize the soul,” I refer to all those ostensibly secular techniques of debt management that couple with “life

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management skills” and draw on evangelical assumptions and imperatives, such as punctuality, double-entry bookkeeping, moral accountability, proper hygiene, interpersonal conflict-resolution skills, and correct childrearing philosophies, to render men and women like Remedios prosperous Christians. A notable component of these relations between financialization and precarious subjectivities is the unique relation between accounting and redemption. Accounting for the self, as Judith Butler suggests, results from the avowal of “a causal link between our own actions and the suffering that follows [and also the imperative to] take responsibility for these actions and their effects.”4 Such accounting for the self determines a moral rubric through which subjects of financial inclusion become recognizable. The regime of moral action decreed by the Christian microfinanciers creates a grid of conduct, an internalized administration of accountability to the prescribed codes that form the financially moral subject. As Remedios demonstrates, her continual monitoring of herself and her books is entangled with the requirement to account for herself to all of the regulating institutions that adjudicate her credit-worthiness and, therewith, I suggest, her moral worthiness.5 Calculation and, more importantly, accounting are central to Max Weber’s “Spirit of Capitalism.” Connecting the history of bookkeeping and the “ethical conduct of life” of reformed Protestants, Weber demonstrates that these ascetic Christians “continually monitored [their] state of grace,” through the use of “religious journals”: spiritual balance books, as it were. Weber identifies the tradition of the religious journal as a core feature of modern Catholic piety that was picked up by “the most devout circles of the Reformed Church.”6 The difference between the Catholic confessionally focused procedures of atonement and the moral ledger of the devout Reformers resided in the Protestant’s use of the journal to “feel his own pulse,” rather than transfer power to church authority. Feeling one’s own pulse, regulating the self in accordance with an omnipresent overseer, brings Weber to cite John Bunyan’s allegory of God as Bookkeeper, a medieval idea, that influences the systematization of the “ethical conduct of life” and exists, according to Weber, as the “permeation of the whole of existence by Christianity.”7 Becoming responsible for giving an account of the self is a significant permutation of the moral economies

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tied up in the business of microfinance. For in the microcosm of microfinance, the practice of going into debt, the ethical conduct of promptly delivering payments, and the methodicalness (rather than risk taking) of the rational borrower provide the grounds upon which capitalist microprofit-making is secured.8 Here, I consider the accounting for the self that Christian microfinance animates. In what follows, I frame the argument established through the everyday lived experience of Remedios, as she is the target of the microfinance industry par excellence, whose soul has become the focus of finance and whose personhood is ever on the verge of succumbing to her circumstances. To explore this terrain is to move past the ideals of prosperity animated by flamboyant US Evangelists, or essentializations of African and Latino charismatic Christianities. An attention to the financialization of the soul, in fact, frames prosperity hemispherically, connecting Citibank to Bogotá’s poor barrios, the MasterCard Foundation to Medellin’s comunas, and even the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the empanadas that Remedios sells for a quarter. All three of these transnational corporations are deep into the microfinance business.9 At the edges of Bogotá’s sprawling metropolis, credit ties Remedios’s endurance to the transnational promise of financial education, to the possibility of precarious prosperity in a time of violent austerity.10 According to Elizabeth Povinelli, Foucault’s ethical subject is one that is “in a state of constant ethical reflection and practice in relation to her own ethical becoming.”11 This is central to the disciplinary, and ethical, work that microfinance does on Remedios’s soul and as is illustrated in the following vignette with a financial officer of Opportunity’s solidarity banks. •

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Angie and I met at the Transmilenio Estación del Sur. She was a new financial officer working with Opportunity International. She was not the financial officer of Remedios’s solidarity bank, and led a different group in another southern corner of Bogotá, in the neighborhood of Soacha. We greeted each other with a quick kiss on each cheek, and then she hurried us through the 7 a.m. throng of people, pushing their way toward the entrance of the public transportation system. She grabbed my elbow,

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put her head down, and we shoved our way out of the station. We hustled past the carts selling freshly squeezed orange juice, buttery arepas, and hot empanadas dripping in cilantro-infused hot-sauce. And we waited for the colectivo (van-bus) that would take us up the southern mountain of Bogota, to a “trust group” or “solidarity bank,” that Angie led. She had a degree in business administration and accounting. She had worked in a bank, but then she began attending the Misión Carismática Internacional and had a “born again” experience. This experience, she told me, inspired her to quit her job in the bank and seek out employment that was “more meaningful.” As we waited for the bus, she told me about the group we were about to meet: I’ve been working with this for group eight months. The work of the Lord has been incredible with them. Like, Camilo. Oh, Camilo. I have such dreams for him. You know, he has lived on the streets since he was six years old! He’s showed me his scars from being stabbed so many times. It’s a miracle he’s still alive. But now he’s twenty, and he’s expecting his third child, and the solidarity bank has really helped him learn to believe. The social worker comes every month, and gives them lessons on parenting, hygiene, how to be good Christian families. . . . And I tell him, I tell all of them, “you have to declare what you want! You have to believe it is possible! You must see how Opportunity, and what we teach you, leads the way to endless possibility.” If they learn to manage their money, they learn to manage their conflicts, and they incorporate what we teach them into all parts of their lives.

Angie incorporated the messages of prosperity preached at the MCI into her work with Opportunity International. Believing in the seemingly impossible (economic solvency in the midst of abject poverty) was a central feature to Angie’s leadership. Camilo and his family were recyclers (recicladores). Some of Bogotá’s poorest of the working poor. These individuals used horse-drawn carts, moving around the city mostly in the evening and at night when traffic is lighter, and pick through garbage that is piled on city street corners and in front of residential buildings, looking for anything that can be recycled. The work is dirty, dangerous, and reviled—recyclers often make a mess of a street by ripping through garbage bags and dumping them on the ground. Although the practice of horse-drawn carts has been phased out since 2016, and recyclers are

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now organized into work collectives, with uniforms that have reflective strips, gloves, and vehicles, the work remains grossly unsafe and exploitative. Camilo had started his own recycling depot that consisted of a small warehouse full of plastic, old metal, and cardboard. His family also lived in the warehouse. Angie believed that the microloan program could help Camilo build a small apartment into the warehouse before his new baby was born. Angie’s faith sought to defy the odds and her aspirations for Camilo’s prosperity defined success as one step up from squalor. This was the second time that Angie and I had planned to meet. The first time, a week prior, Angie called to cancel because she had been told by the leader of the solidarity bank that things were caliente (hot). Three boys from a neighboring barrio had been found dead on the street next to the bakery of the solidarity bank leader. Their legs had been broken and then they were shot numerous times. It was unclear who exactly was responsible, but Angie suspected the new neo-paramilitary mercenary groups who were vying for control over corridors running in and out of the city for contraband, drugs, and weapons. It could also be that the boys were connected to someone who owed money in a gota a gota loan (see introduction for explanation). After an uncomfortable forty-five minutes in the van-bus, going uphill, we arrived at our stop and walked another thirty minutes to Pato’s house. “Pato pulled a knife on someone who hadn’t paid their dues last cycle,” Angie whispered to me as we near the house. “She’s a lot more controlled now.” Then Angie smiled up at me, “God works miracles!” Pato was Camilo’s aunt and lived on the second floor of a house perched on the corner of an unpaved hill, overlooking Soacha. When Angie and I arrived, Pato was still in pajamas. She served us heated-up day-old coffee and buttery, fresh rolls. As she readied herself, the other participants began to arrive. When Jaime arrived, Pato came out with her hair up and dressed. When everyone was finally assembled, it was almost nine in the morning. Then we formed a circle, held hands, and prayed. After the prayer it was time to pay weekly dues. Jaime handed over a fistful of change to Angie, and Angie carefully wrote down Jaime’s name on a large spreadsheet she had hand-drawn on butcher’s paper and taped up on the wall. Other members came forward with their weekly payment. Rosalba didn’t show. After everyone paid, Angie facilitated a

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Figure 9. A makeshift poster for an Opportunity International life skills workshop: “Because I value you, you are of great value and I love you” Jeremiah 31:3. Photo by the author.

lesson on budgeting, beginning with a reading from the Bible: “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’ ” (Luke 14: 28–30) After the lesson on budgeting, Angie facilitated a lesson on child-rearing. The lesson emphasized another Bible verse, Jeremiah 31:3: “I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.” This verse of scripture, the group was told, demonstrates how God loves his children, and how parents should love their children. Angie asked how folks around the room disciplined their children, and chastised those who said they beat their children. The lesson ended with Angie giving a short sermon about the importance of telling children that they are loved, and to not mistreat them, even if parents had suffered abuse in their own lives—which many in the group had. After Angie had finished the lesson, people began to leave. As Angie and I finally traipsed back to catch the bus down the hill, she told me she

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thought Jaime had probably stolen the money he had given as his weekly payment. “He would rather steal money to give his payment than risk Pato pulling a knife again,” Angie considered. “You see why it’s important to talk about proper child discipline? People beat their children. There is violence here that we are helping overcome.” Discipline, as a “political anatomy of detail” and a mode for organizing analytical space, has moved out of the factory and the schools in Colombia’s microfinance programs.12 Financial discipline in Colombia has harnessed a Christian vernacular that operates on the soul, providing a salvific narrative of empowerment, development, and improvement. Christian microfinance provides an ethnographic window into the world of microloans that micromanage the souls of Colombia’s most vulnerable. Microfinance cultivates a regime of practice that reforms the soul. And yet the very real possibility of social or civil death works alongside the internalization to construct the financialized subject, who sees himself under threat. The claim here is that at both an individual and a collective level, financialization is emerging in the interstices between systems of domination; between external forces of coercion and internalized rubrics of selfgovernance. This emergence, this “newness,” is channeled in discourse beginning in diner kitchens, as in the case of Remedios, who imagines herself “better” and aspiring to something new; by microfinance NGOs like Opportunity International and their rhetoric of transformation; and by the Colombian government itself, whose new slogan is “Colombia Is Re-born: Post-conflict (more on this in chapter 5). Colombia is emerging. And this emergence is marshalled through a distinct set of tactics that imbricate political economic activity with morally sustained ideals. By emerging here, I refer, first, to the term coined by World Bank economist Antoine van Agtmael in the 1980s to describe countries in the transition phase from “developing” to “developed” status.13 In this sense, “emergence” is an economic phenomenon as well as a social and political event. Second, I lean on Michel Foucault’s definition of emergence as the shift between dominations, as sets of practices that arise in the interstices. Practices emerge in a “web of multiple forces,” and this new articulation of practice actualizes new possibilities.14 Third, emergence in the late capitalist system is tied to financialized practices that form the media and methods of internalized practices of control.

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Co lleC ti v e Cr eD it, Col l e Ctiv e D e b t Usme, the barrio where Remedios has her restaurant, is another neighborhood where Opportunity International works. The neighborhood sits at the edges of Bogotá, and Doña Gloria’s house is up a steep, unpaved incline, where she often stands at the stoop of her little yard. When it rains, the climb up gets muddy and can become quite treacherous. Gloria’s yard is enclosed with chicken wire to protect her fresh herbs and onion bulbs from the chickens as well as the goats and stray dogs that wander through. Gloria, nonetheless, always proudly displays the huerta urbana (urban garden) she fastidiously cares for, and delights in serving hot tea made with fresh mint and chamomile picked from her garden. Remedios strode into Gloria’s living room a little late on this particular morning. Still smelling of cinnamon-scented floor wax, Gloria’s ceramic tiles shone. There were eleven adults at the meeting this cool morning, and three small children, too small for school. They sat tiredly on their mothers’ laps, sucking on pieces of bread dipped in hot chocolate. The mountain breezes chilled most of us to the bone, and everyone was grateful for the warm drinks. Gloria and her daughter served panela, a hot drink made with raw sugar, in plastic mugs. The “financial officer,” Floralba, wore her vest with its NGO emblem, and sat in the corner until 7:10. When the clock struck, she announced: “Okay, everyone. Remember what have I told you about punctuality?” She chided everyone around the circle, “It takes me an hour to get here. I leave my house at 5:30 in order to be on time. I expect the same courtesy from you. One of the traits of a successful business owner is arriving to meetings on time.” She looked frustrated: “We go over this every meeting!” She then smiled to offset the regaño (scolding). “Now, let’s begin with prayer. Who would like to lead?” Doña Esperanza raised her hand. Everyone bowed their head, although glances were shared and snickers were suppressed. Doña Esperanza always wanted to pray: “Papito Dios, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the rain last night. Thank you for [NGO] and Floralba who comes all the way here to help us be better business owners. Thank you for the gringa who is here to hear us and tell our stories. Help us learn today the lessons Blanquita

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brought, and how we can become better people and businesses. I want to especially pray for Don Hector, who can’t be here today because he is sick. I pray for his empanada business. I pray he gets well soon, because he can’t work when he is sick. A tu Gloria, Amen.” The loan officer then took out her list and began roll call. Everyone was asked how their week had gone and to give a short report on their business. This was often an awkward moment, as some members of the group confessed to not breaking even in the week. Sales were down for Alfonso, the shoemaker. A conversation about the importation of cheap footwear because of the recently signed free trade agreement with the United States unraveled. “It’s going to put us all out of business!” Alfonso moaned. Doña Esperanza is a seamstress who makes baby-clothes and bath robes, and she agreed. “My sales are down too—people are going to the malls to shop for clothes. I can’t make clothes that cheaply. God help us all.” Around the room there were murmurs of agreement. When one member was unable to pay their weekly debt, the entire group became responsible for that payment. This is the central logic of the “solidarity bank.” Floralba the social worker was sympathetic, but convinced that micro-businesses, even in the face of cheap US imports, will continue to be useful. She emphasized by saying, “If you remain faithful in God, and responsible in your payments, your business will succeed. Don’t forget, you are your own bosses! You can’t be fired! If your business is failing, you can change things to compete. If you make changes, your future reality could be much better than your current reality. Now, let’s look at our lesson for today. Budgeting.” Everyone took out their notebooks, and was able to show that they had dutifully recorded their expenses and revenues. Except for Remedios. She had forgotten her notebook. “That’s the second time this month, Remedios,” the NGO worker nagged. Remedios was annoyed. “It’s not my fault! One of the empleadas put it somewhere, and now she can’t remember where it is.” “Just make sure you are making a note of all the money that comes in and goes out. You know you need to hand in a financial report at the end of this cycle.” The worker referred to the fact that each group microcredit loan is to be paid back within a six-month cycle. At the end of the cycles, all the group members need to show their financials, demonstrate liquidity, and have paid back the full amount—with interest.

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However, Remedios is no fool, and found the solidarity bank meetings tedious. As we left the meeting, and walked toward her restaurant, her frustration showed: “What we are always told,” Remedios complained, “is that we need more discipline. Discipline? I get up at 4:30 a.m. every day, work until 7 p.m., and I go to all the meetings. I even have to miss work to go to those meetings. And I’m always on time with my payments. I just have to believe in my own self, I suppose.” Remedios conflated her management of herself with the potential of her entrepreneurial spirit. This stubborn commitment to a different future for herself, and her children, drove her work ethic—along with putting up with the weekly meetings. “I began this business with a credit of 2 million pesos” Remedios told me in one of our first meetings at her restaurant. “You have to go into debt in order to have the things you want. To be able to make money, you need to go into debt. If you don’t take the risk, you never gain anything. Dios te acompañe en el riesgo (God accompanies risk). Yes, prosperity requires risk. But I believe.” In the restaurant, the practices of financial education were legible. Every time a customer paid, Remedios dutifully pulled out her tattered and grease-stained notebook that sat behind that counter. The income was noted. Every time a neighbor, sister, one of her daughters, or stranger, came in asking for money, she took out the book again, and flipped to a back page. She made a note of who owed her money. “We have to show the workers (from the NGO) that we are doing this. We get in trouble if we don’t.” Remedios flapped the book. The same book that she forgot to bring to the meeting discussed above. Although a useful business practice, the practice of noting all the money coming in and going out, in order to show someone else, created an anxiety in her, and she would sometimes forget to write down a sale, or a few coins passed to a passerby. Then, at the end of the day, she would pull out the notebook, with her calculator, and struggle to find out why the books didn’t balance. The actions here might not read legibly as “Christian” to some. However, the affect that the moral imperative of balanced books cultivates certainly is. “I need to show that I’m balancing my budgets; this is how they decide to give us another loan,” she explained. “We have to go the meetings on time,

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Figure 10. Micro-business bookkeeping. Photo by the author.

pay on time, plus this. This is how we show we’re trustworthy.” Remedios needed to know her revenues and expenses as well as she needed to know herself. And prove it. Opportunity International, like many microfinance organizations, primarily deals in group loans managed through “solidarity groups.” While Opportunity names the strategy of collective responsibility for shared group loans as “building social capital,” Remedios often gets frustrated. And the fall-out can be devastating. “Manuela didn’t pay again. I had to pay for her this week. Again! I call her and she doesn’t respond. I’m so tired of this. But if I don’t pay, well, I’m her fiadora. I’ll be put into Datacredito.” Remedios is Manuela’s guarantor. If Manuela doesn’t pay, Remedios gets stuck with the bill. And if Remedios doesn’t pay, her name will be entered into the national debtor’s list, Datacredito—Colombia’s credit reporting agencies. The trust groups function, supposedly, as an equalizing metric of accountability. More of a threat, however, is the Datacredito list. Once on this list, individuals are unable to purchase even a cell phone, let alone access other credit. Her anxiety about being on the list made Remedios

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shake with anger and frustration as she complained about needing to pay double at the solidarity bank meeting that week. “Some solidarity! You know why I go to the big banks for other credits? It’s not only that I need more money, but I don’t have to be responsible for anyone else, and I don’t need to go to a meeting every week.” Then she paused, “but if it weren’t for [the NGO], I would never have been able to get the other credits. And we would still be living with a dirt floor.” This confession tied Remedios’s simple desires to a reliance on credit. The control exercised upon her from the Christian NGO includes exhortations to save, work hard and often, and pay down debts punctually. The pressure from her peers in the “solidarity group” works as a simultaneous “peer pressure”—perhaps a more apt description would be the democratization of the panopticon—that everyone in the group places on each other.15 Together, these work to construct an entrepreneurial interiority that places Remedios in the crosshairs of subprime lenders to the “bottom billion”—meaning, it should be noted, bottom billion women, grouped into the homogenous categories of responsible homemakers who will be responsible creditors in the service of gendered and racialized economic stereotypes. Women, and most prominently women of color, now make up almost 90 percent of microcredit recipients.16 Remedios explained to me what she used the credit cards for. “Groceries, tuition for my grandson, clothing for my four other children, uniforms,” along with the materials for the running of the restaurant and the loans she had taken out to finish her house, buy a separate bed for all her six children, and have a proper kitchen, with running water. Remedios certainly does not spend extravagantly, and the risks of taking on greater debt are linked to her conviction that God will accompany her risky credits and that only through debt will she prosper. The spirit of financialization celebrates prosperity in the midst of fiscal austerity, despite the social limits to future visions of finance. Yet microfinance is marketed as the key to a prosperous future. Austerity has forced the hand of survival. Where an already weak system of social security has been replaced by private insurance policies, where housing is not guaranteed but bank loans for house renovations and purchase are ubiquitous, when education is no longer a right, but credit can be used to pay for tuition, financialization has turned austere conditions of

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disintegrating social safety nets, state interventions in the economy, and a generalized move toward free market liberalism into the ideals of prosperity. Remedios has become a permanent borrower, and a poster child of the faithfully indebted. Her financial education bends her thoughts and actions to the “correct” behavior of moral economic activity. As she works to diversify her portfolio, seeking out loans from other institutions and other banks, Remedios’s debt accrues. And she puts to work her financialized soul.

pr oSper ity i n C. The ultimate aim for both the Christian NGO Opportunity International and their clients is prosperity. For Remedios, she wants to open another restaurant after she replaces her dirt floor with ceramic tile and sees her children through school. For the NGOs, prosperity takes place at a different scale. “We provide,” Opportunity International explains, “stable financial systems as a way to reduce unemployment, social unrest, and violence in [Colombia].” Opportunity International is not alone in this microfinance industry of Christian development. According to Ananya Roy, some of the largest and most important microfinance programs in the world are run by Christian organizations.17 These organizations work at the crossroads of Christian ethics and finance, and they link the structural causes of poverty with the spiritual lack that finance can resolve. As one Christian microfinance champion Brian Fikkert writes: “Both the scriptures and the empirical evidence indicate that oppression of the poor is often a factor in their poverty. It takes the power of Jesus Christ over sin . . . to remove the oppressor. His power is the answer, and the poor need to cling to this hope.”18 While Roy emphasizes the moral caution with which the Christians she met with approached microfinance, organizations like Opportunity International proudly advertise their Christian values as central to an alternative microfinance program that charges lower rates of interest, and instills values in clients that “transform lives” through helping them achieve prosperity. “Prosperity” Remedios waxed, “I’m working toward that. That’s what all the solidarity bank meetings tell us we can achieve. And the credits

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are necessary for prosperity! How would I do any of this without credit?” The prosperity that Remedios aspires to is similar, but distinct, from the more visible prosperity gospels that loudly proclaim grandiose material abundance as a sign of God’s favor. This is not the “Name it and Claim it purpose-driven life” preached by the Osteens or Tammy Faye Bakker’s “Praise the Lord” Club.19 It’s not even the prosperity carefully detailed in such seminal studies as Kate Bowler’s Blessed, discussed in the introduction, or the close relation between American consumerism and religion found in Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah. Nor is Remedios’s prosperity exactly the same as how Marla Frederick carefully outlines the prosperity thinking, rooted in Benny Hinn and Creflo Dollar, of her subjects in Between Sundays.20 The prosperity to which Remedios aspires does not reside in the ostentatious but rather in the cold, hard fact of survival. Remedios’s prosperity relies on credit and it is disciplined by debt. I am interested here in the Christianity evoked by regimes of indebtedness. This relationship, between debt and Christianity, is particularly evident in programs of financial inclusion and financial education, mediated through Christian microcredit organizations. This is what I name the financializing of the soul, by which I refer to all those ostensibly secular techniques of debt management that draw on evangelical assumptions and imperatives, such as punctuality, double-entry bookkeeping, and moral accountability, to render men and women like Remedios prosperous Christians. I am particularly interested in the relation between accounting and redemption that Arjun Appadurai, among others, proposed already in 2011, and again in his most recent book, Banking on Words.21 Calculation and, more importantly, accounting are central in Weber’s development of the concept of “Spirit of Capitalism.” Before Weber, Werner Sombart had established that double- entry bookkeeping is a central component to the development of capitalism. Sombart wrote, “capitalism and double-entry bookkeeping are absolutely indissociable; their relationship to each other is that of form to content.”22 It was, however, Max Weber who furthered the idea that it is the Calvinist entrepreneur whose methodicalness provides the grounds upon which capitalist profit making is secured.23 What is central to the current discussion, however, is the accounting for risk, through accounting for the self, that Christian microfinance, and indeed, prosperity as survival promotes.

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Remedios, a card-carrying Christian par excellence, whose soul is the target of finance, illustrates this well.

finanC e a nD Col o Mbia’S beC oMi n g Most analysts of the Colombian armed conflict, and the subsequent impairment of Colombia’s economic development, agree that the prolongation of the war has brought on the confluence of a multifaceted entanglement of drugs, US military intervention, political exclusion, territorial disputes for control over land, and deep-seated socioeconomic inequality (more on this in chapter 3). Many of those same analysts also agree that economic salvation is the best response to it all.24 The context for this claim begins in the 1990s, when Colombia’s public debt was re-financed, under tutelage of US economic advisors and multilateral banks—many of which are now shareholders in microcredit institutions like Opportunity International.25 Colombia’s public debt had relied on foreign loans for financing from the post–Second World War establishment of Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (what would later become the World Bank). In the 1990s, refinancing worked through the deregulation of banks and crediting agencies, trade liberalization, and the privatization of state-run institutions (e.g., health care and education; see chapter 4). The economic opening set the stage for the influx of both micro- and macro-credit that is now flooding the economy. Refinancing transferred public debt to the shoulders of individual debtors, with greater access to credit cards, microcredit, and new forms of financial inclusion. The result has been an increase of nearly 400 percent in consumer debt.26 In the booming microcredit industry, more than a third of microcredit recipients find themselves “under water” and a quarter of microcredit users access more than three different microcredit products.27 The prosperity preached by the microcredit industry, and the promise of self-sufficiency through self-employment, rides alongside the exhortation to become “banked.” Forty-seven percent of Colombians still do not have active bank accounts, which is read by many investors not so much

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as a problem but rather as an opportunity.28 More bank accounts means more accounting, which means more clients accessing credit, which translates into more profit. Opportunity International, the NGO that floats Remedios’s microcredit, brokers this transition to bankedness with financial education. “Our clients are partners, not charity cases,” explains Opportunity International on their website. The organization’s advisory board is an impressive collection of CEOs and scholars, including Luella Chavez D’Angelo, president of the Western Union Foundation that finances programs in microfinance and financial inclusion. Opportunity continues: “We walk and work with the world’s marginalized women and men. They can build a business. They can provide for their family. They can lead. And we empower them by investing in the God-given talents of each of our clients. In fact, we see many of our clients like the Proverbs 31 woman.” The Proverbs 31 woman, or the “virtuous woman” is the same woman promoted in Fernanda’s MCI cell group meetings, and championed by the Christian NGO that manages the Opportunity International program in southern Bogotá (See chapter 5 for a full transcription of this text). Opportunity International offers four hundred different modules for financial education. Its local “loan officers” use “trust groups” in ways that make this enterprise as much a moral intervention as an economic practice. These efforts teach individuals about bank accounts, business planning, and practices of saving. They also emphasize good hygiene, food sanitation, self-esteem, and leadership skills. The trust groups meet once a week; after roll call there is a workshop on one of the aforementioned themes. In the case of Remedios, her trust group met every week at a 7 a.m. meeting. In some trust groups, absentee members must pay a fine for missing a meeting. What is noteworthy here is the work on the self that necessarily accompanies the financial education and business training. This assemblage of interior (re)formation and proper bodily comportment is tied to finance. And this is why, and how, I understand this entire effort at financial literacy, education, and even (for some brazen microfinance institutions) financial citizenship an exercise in financializing the soul. There is a Christian morality to Colombia’s financialized economy, one that rests on several leaps of faith. Not the least of them is going into debt in order to

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grasp at ephemeral prosperity. The challenge of financial education programming, dealt through Christian microcredit organizations, lies in coding the moral with the economic. Financialization, in its broadest sense, refers to multifaceted processes of financial institutions, financial actors, and financial motives, as opposed to “real economic production,” increasingly driving economies. Financialization has become the animating force in processes of accumulation. Importantly, financialization, buoyed by the injection of financial products such as credit cards, microcredits, and microinsurance, trains an economic habitus in a new ethics of personhood, a new set of disciplinary technologies of control over the self. Financialization, as I proposed in the introduction to this study, should be understood as a regime of control, a disciplinary program that trains body and soul to the tune of a prosperity that is little more than succeeding at surviving the everyday of late capitalist formations of austerity. Randy Martin states, “Financialization promises a way to develop the self, when even the noblest of professions cannot emit a call that one can answer with a lifetime. It offers a highly elastic mode of self-mastery that channels doubt over uncertain identity into fruitful action.”29 The apparent altruism woven into microfinance has much to do with the modern conception of the soul. Financialization moves the disciplining technologies of debt away from debtor’s prison and punishment on the body to the interiorized site of self-control and constant supervision from Christian “loan officers,” “trust groups,” and, naturally, God. There is a reason that Gilles Deleuze announced some twenty years ago that “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.”30 These are all the techniques of financializing capitalism, and the shift from the public body to the private soul is notable—especially in Colombia where the grammar of death is often public and where the body remains a site of brutal discipline, as I have discussed through the concept of necrofinance and precarious subjectivities. Remedios’s soul is being reformed through the practices imposed on her by Opportunity International, and all the other financialized forms of regulation: from the disciplinary to the testimonial. Remedios must become the chief financial officer of her own self—not to succeed, but rather just to survive.

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aCC o unti n g f or the S el f Remedios has been a microcredit recipient for a decade. Her entrepreneurial activity as much as the running of her restaurant has confessional practices of weekly business updates, bookkeeping accountability, and punctual payment. The pastoral role of the NGO worker is the filter of the transnational pastoral power exercised by Opportunity International, its shareholder the Inter-American Development Bank, and akin corporations such as MasterCard Foundation, which demand obedience to a strict economic moral code reminiscient of the “in-depth-Christianization” of the modern era.31 Most important are the technologies of accountability that train and retrain Remedios’s soul, because financializing the poor, in late capitalism, is accompanied by a set of accountability mechanisms through which the indebted are also held to account. This is the Christian practice that Foucault explained as the technology of the self that is capable of transforming the self. And self-transformation is the ostensible root of financial capitalism. Money management also assumes an accountability to God. Remedios has been forced into the frame of the “virtuous woman” and these surveillance measures work to make sure she stays one. Financializing the poor, at least in Colombia, is accompanied by a set of accountability mechanisms through which the indebted are also held to account. Some are easier to accommodate than others. Photocopies of identification cards, birth certificates for children, marriage certificates for spouses, references, utility bills—bureaucratic governmentality functions through photocopies in Colombia. More consuming, however, is the work of accounting for the self while being accountable to webs of institutions that the financialized poor are indebted to. Mandatory home visits from bank-employed social workers are required by some microfinance institutions. A tour of the microbusiness is generally compulsory for most microcredit organizations. The weekly “solidarity group” meetings with the NGO are another form of accounting. And Remedios was preparing for monthly meetings with loan officers from Bancoldex, now having landed another business loan. This was the latest crediting agency that she was beholden to. These sites and strategies of accountability are yet another way to understand the

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soul and its financialization. Interiority is cultivated not only through self-motivated practices and technologies of selfhood, but also through the multiplicity of gazes, at multiple scales. Indeed, giving an account of oneself, to use Judith Butler’s phrase, works upon the soul in new ways through deterritorialized finance across the Americas.32 The different loans and microcredit programs supported the restaurant. Yet, as Remedios explained to me how she managed her different lines of credit, it became evident that the very act of applying for a credit was an entrepreneurial practice in itself. Remedios is a micro-entrepreneur. Her business was the restaurant. But Remedios was regularly seeking out new credits, different forms of financing, and rallying herself to be trustworthy and believable as a woman and as a business owner. Indeed, Remedios’s entrepreneurial practice increasingly hedged in the very activity of accounting for her moral worth. The time and resources that she invests into becoming a financially “governable subject,” renders her “truthful” in this discourse of conduct and relation of power.33 For all of her resistance to it, Remedios is constantly monitoring herself, and in so doing, working to make herself recognizable to God and, in different ways, to the bank. The kind of Christianity that Remedios puts to work balances her consciousness and her actions, rendering her capacity to survive with her ability to borrow. The prosperity Remedios aspires to is regulated and formulated in accordance with the Christian values of transparency, honesty, and worthiness she is beholden to by Opportunity, Bancoldex, and all the rest. Remedios herself as debtor has become the medium of exchange in a lived economy—her soul the site of production, her very being the margin of profit. On one of my visits to her restaurant, Remedios recited her litany of debts to me. “I pay 4 million pesos (approximately $1,500 USD) in debt payments every month.” She sounded almost surprised at the sum, as though she had never before added up all of her debts. “There’s the weekly payments for the microcredit program, then there’s the Woman’s Bank payments, the MasterCard, the Visa, the Diner’s, and the new loan we have from the bank.” She shook her head, furious with poverty and the situation she was in. It all was so degrading, and Remedios was indignant. “All of these organizations come here saying they are here to help us. To give us credit to improve our lives. Ha. They charge such high interest; I can never pay it all back.”

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The small difference in the rates of interest charged by microlenders, compared to commercial banks, is initially significant. Millions of times over, however, with a monopoly on the bottom billion, the percentage points add up. The behavior of the indebted becomes more predictable, and cordoned off comfortably. Remedios’s astute negotiations of herself are central to her prosperous ideals—and her trials of surviving one more day. And then life caught up with her. Remedios fell ill, to the point of needing to sell her restaurant because she was unable to work and unable to pay the medical fees. The privatization of Colombia’s health system ties intimately to the processes of financialization that cover up the social gaps gouged by austerity measures and colonial legacies of exclusion. US medical insurers now make up a good number of the service providers in Colombia, and money transfer institutions, like Western Union, mediate migrant subjectivities and the webs of surveillance that regulate bodies and souls outside of formal structures of documentation. Once again, we see how the logics of necrofinance have rendered lives, like that of Remedios, disposable. Remedios does not have a sister, or an aunt, who might have sent her a lifeline through Western Union when she got sick, to keep her restaurant afloat, or pay some off some of the debts. She is now selling empanadas with her husband, out of their unfinished house, which still has a dirt floor, and the future is unclear. The story is unfinished. When Remedios states that credit is for the poor, she evokes the Christian context of the Americas in all its complexity. Her lived religion reflects her lived economy, and through the messy contours of religious practice, framed hemispherically from Bogotá to Boston and entangled with political economies, a new dimension of what it means to be prosperous emerges. It is a strategy for survival in the shadows of modernity—or perhaps more accurately, surviving in the very heart of the late modern condition of indebtedness and the necrofinancial appetite for accumulation through dispossession.

Managing Mon ey, Ma na gin g the S o ul Managing money has become a question of virtue. Money management practices are precisely what make an individual “debt worthy”—so a new

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space of value can then be occupied. When an individual can go into debt, she begins to exist; she is on the grid. And that is what gives her value, worth. As Nietzsche suggested, “The debtor, in order to inspire confidence that the promise of repayment will be honored, in order to give a guarantee of the solemnity and sanctity of his promise, and in order to etch the duty and obligation of repayment into his conscience, pawns something to the creditor by means of the contract in case he does not pay, something that he still ‘possesses’ and controls, for example, his body, or his wife, or his freedom, or his life (or, in certain religious circumstances, even his afterlife, the salvation of his soul, finally, even his peace in the grave).”34 Debt implies a process of subjectivation that Nietzsche named “labor of man on himself ” in a form of “self-torture.” Capitalism has designed the person capable of promising, of attempting to control the future. Humans are calculating animals, but the calculation is not in exchange of labor but in debt.35 The risks assumed in a creditor-debtor relationship fall upon the individual debtor, and the externalized risks of the state and corporations are subsumed into individual responsibility. The vanguard of neoliberalism—financial capitalism— holds a firm logic of internalized guilt and responsibility. The cross to bear is the possibility that the endless potential promised through credit will not be realized. This, of course, can be traced to nothing other than an individual’s own lack of motivation, entrepreneurial spirit, and dedication. There is no broader structure, financial capitalism tells us, that affects a person’s capacity for wealth accumulation and prosperity. “Credit,” Marx tells us in an early essay, “is the economic judgment on the morality of man.”36 He continues, “Human individuality, human morality itself, has become both an object of commerce and the material in which money exists.”37 Human beings in a process of financialized capitalism that is hinged on the creditor-debtor relationship, find themselves to be the very medium of exchange. The commodification of belief, then, has become the commodification of the self. It is the action in Prosperity Christianity that reconfigures a believing practice into an exploitative social relation based on credit. In the essay, “Comments on James Mill” found in Marx’s Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844, Marx further elucidates the believing component of the spirit of money: “Christ represents originally: 1) men before

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God; 2) God for men; 3) men to man. Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society. But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money.”38 The alienation that Marx understood as central to capitalist modes of production, in which the labourer is distanced from her product, and profit is further estranged from the working class, is in this quote painted as a central feature of Christianity and Capitalism in collusion. Money and Christ are both originally representations of direct relations. The key to understanding these relations in the light of the dialectical program of Marx, however, is to recognize the emphasis placed on the idea of “representation” and that while Christ represents direct relations, the structure of the governing church has corrupted this relation, just as in relations of exchange, and Christ alienates as money does. The importance of the second degree of alienation through finance money is central to the concept of the social that the Garzal community dwells within. The alienation, the reification of the social, is articulated by Santiago, my companion in Garzal, when he speaks of the two pillars of social cohesion and safety, in a profoundly unstable political context: “The angels will protect us, and loans will allow us to prosper and improve our agricultural practices.” The logic is obvious yet devastatingly telling. The conviction that an alienated Christ mediates for a distant God is as effective as a bank loan. This is not a prosperity theology that seeks excess, but rather a minimum: survival. Can it, then, still be named prosperity?

fr oM Ca Sh to Cr e D it: Ca Shl e SS S o C i e t i e S When I discovered that some members of the community in Garzal were opening bank accounts, and that some had qualified for credit cards, I was curious as to their motivations. Santiago, one of the first in the community to have both a checking account and a credit card, explained to me how many people in the community saved money. “Of course, people bury money. They keep money under their mattresses. They invest their

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money in livestock or land. The banks are too far away, and too expensive.” The nearest municipality with a bank was about three hours away by boat. Santiago explained, “If we want credits from the bank, we need to open an account. When women qualify for Familias en Acción, they have to open a bank account. But a lot of people don’t trust the bank. Opening an account usually means we lose money. They charge for everything— they even charge for checking how much money we have! It’s safer to bury the money.” Familias en Acción is a governmental subsidy program for women who are heads of households, primarily in rural Colombia. The women receive a small subsidy every month, depending on how many children are in their care and what other levels of income are accessible (cash crops, etc.). I interviewed the director of the governmental social bank, Banca de las Oportunidades, which coordinates the program, on three separate occasions. Beginning in 2012, the Familias en Acción program had begun to make direct deposits into bank accounts. The director explained to me the ways the money used to be dispersed: We would go into the local municipal centers, and women would come from communities all around. Some had to travel for hours. They lined up in the central plaza, and we set up a table. We had a sack of cash, and a list of names. The men would be waiting around, many of them drinking because it was payday. Children ran all around. It was actually kind of celebratory. The women waited in line for hours, . . . coming up individually, giving their identification card, and receiving their stack of cash. It was incredibly cumbersome. The direct deposit allows the women more control over their money, and much less hassle. But it has not been easy to educate the women in how to use a bank.39

He explained to me the difficulty in convincing the women to open bank accounts, for similar reasons: “The women would make photocopies of their cards, and present them to the tellers. They would laminate their debit cards and try to use them. The women who lived in the vereda would give their cards to the one woman going to town to shop or sell vegetables in the market, and tell her how much money they wanted her to take out for them. They don’t realize that every time they check their balance, the bank charges them. These are the problems we’ve encountered. It has not been easy.”

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When I interviewed Doña Lizette in El Garzal, about her experience with the Familias program, she was candid: “The banks rob us. But I can’t get the money any other way.” While the money from Familias is not credit, the process of “banking” the population in Garzal certainly falls within the purview of financialization. The insight here is that opening a bank account in Colombia is equivalent to owing the bank money— immediately. There are fees for account management, and the government instituted a tax on withdrawals from any bank that isn’t the bank branch where the principal account is held as a tax for defense funds. There are also other incidental fees that begin to add up very quickly. All of this makes having a bank account a costly endeavor. The further insight is that financialized capitalism does not rely first on exchange, but rather on inequality.40 Economy and society are coordinated through power differentials, not systems of exchange, as classical economists would purport. This of course does not imply that exchange does not exist. It does. However, exchange does not come first, and does not function according to forms of equality; rather imbalance and difference are the driving logics. The logic of financial capitalism operates and transforms itself in accordance with the cultural context in which it must thrive. This is how microfinance approaches the specific milieus into which organizations place it, and this is also how finance relates to Christianity. In Colombia, these logics are shaped by the context of the ongoing armed conflict. For example, Angie, the financial officer from Opportunity International shared with me the stress she was experiencing with one of her groups. The financial officers are assigned neighborhoods and then are charged with entering those neighborhoods and identifying community leaders and small business owners to begin a “solidarity bank.” Angie had received death threats from local criminal syndicates that bristled at the idea that an NGO would disrupt the control they had over the loan business in their barrio. More concerning for Angie, however, was the group she told me about, in which the group received the loan from Opportunity International and then collectively refused to pay it back. Angie was sure that the group had members of warring urban militias, from the guerrilla and the paramilitary, and the violence that the microfinance loan had created between the groups, she feared, would spill over and she would be in the

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crosshairs. Most troubling of all is that if the group refused to pay back the money, she would be responsible for the loan. The breakdown of financial governmentality occurs at these points of violence, where necrofinancial pulls become powerful generators of insecurity and precarious subjectivities. The way that violence and Christianity have informed each other in Colombia is the focus of the next chapter.

3

Deregulating Christianity Much has been written about the violence, but there is no agreement as to what it means. —Eduardo Luna, Germán Campos, Orlando Fals Borda

Over the last decades, the business of war has become an increasingly profitable enterprise in Colombia.1 Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to today, the strategy of Colombia’s military, in concert with paramilitary forces, and the result of warfare between guerrilla, military, and paramilitary forces, has been the displacement and repression of the civilian population. In many instances, the strategy has been intentional on the part of the military and paramilitary, following the logic of “draining the pond” in order to weaken the insurgency. To “drain the pond” is a political and military strategy that responds to the instructions of Mao Tse-Tung for the guerrilla to “move like fish in water,” meaning the support of the “people” is essential for the success of guerrilla warfare.2 Draining the pond became a strategy for counterinsurgency warfare and has resulted in the assassination and displacement of millions of Colombian civilians. The economically significant outcome is that over the last four decades, massive forced displacement has resulted in the emptying of over six million hectares of land and the generation of almost eight million internally displaced persons that have dispersed throughout the country.3 Despite this draining of small-scale agricultural producers from rural Colombia, agricultural production in Colombia has maintained steady 86

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growth. This is, in part, because displacing communities and individual farmers off of their land has become a modus operandi of economic development practices in Colombia.4 The current moment of Colombian economic growth has been supported by industrial agriculture and natural resource extraction that has followed a logic of violent land accumulation through dispossessing peasant farmers off their land, generating the growing precariat in urban peripheries.5 Armed groups, from the guerrilla to paramilitary to drug cartels (sometimes working in collusion, sometimes fighting each other) have profited off of the massive displacements and taken over the “emptied” hectares for cultivating coca, poppy, and marijuana, as well as “licit” activities such as palm oil production and other kinds of resource extraction. As Frances Thomson states, after extended study of the political economy of agrarian conflict in Colombia, “displacement is often an incidental consequence of conflict, but in Colombia it is frequently the cause of violence.”6 Along with the extortion of large landowners, the war taxes levied by the guerrilla and the enterprising paramilitary on local business owners throughout the country, and strategies of kidnapping for ransom, another important factor in the proliferation of the drug economy was the economic opening and deregulation of the financial sector beginning in 1991. Colombia’s move toward full trade liberalization was made official when the National Council for Political and Social Economy (CONPES) drafted the “Program for the Modernization of the Colombian Economy.”7 This plan operated as did most neoliberal trade programs in the region that imposed structural adjustment programs. These programs clawed back social spending, privatized public commons, deregulated finance, decreased agricultural subsidies, and lowered import tariffs.8 Under the tutelage of International Financial Institutions (like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) and advisors from the United States Federal Reserve, the Colombian government steadily cut subsidies to the agricultural sector, leaving the underdeveloped agricultural economy in Colombia to compete with international agricultural imports. Between 1991 and 1993, over two hundred thirty thousand people were left unemployed; many of them migrated to urban centers, joined the armed groups, or moved toward coca production.9 The effects of neoliberalization produced a further weakening of an already impoverished small-scale agricultural industry. Small-scale farmers

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saw the price of licit commodities, such as fruit, manioc, corn, and potatoes decrease in value, while the costs of production increased.10 In the wake of the reforms of 1991, it became far more lucrative and feasible to cultivate coca and sell to the local drug cartel. A kilo of coca paste would render roughly 1 million pesos profit (roughly $500 USD), while twenty kilos of manioc cost much more to produce, transport, and sell for a fraction of the price.11 The neoliberalization of the Colombian economy worked in favor of the proliferation of illicit economies as well as industrial agriculture, and served to prolong violence in a new way. The economy of war also muddled the lines that kept armed actors in discrete political and geographic camps. Insofar as the monopoly on the drug trade decentralized after the assassination of Pablo Escobar (1993) and the extradition of the Orjuela Brothers (1995), new and smaller drug organizations sprang up throughout the country. Meanwhile, the paramilitary groups organized under one umbrella organization, the Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (CONVIVIR) and AutoDefensas de Colombia (AUC) which would also later splinter into competing factions. By the late 1990s, “the FARC and the ELN were fighting the military, the AUC were fighting the leftist guerrillas, the military was supposedly fighting the AUC, the FARC, and the ELN, and the drug barons were fighting the government while simultaneously collaborating with both the guerrilla and the paramilitary.”12 It was the murk and political muddiness of civil war. Already in 1962, preeminent Colombian thinkers Germán Campos, Eduardo Luna, and Orlando Fals Borda lamented that despite extensive writing and analysis of Colombia’s violence, little had been said that presented one, cohesive explanation for what seemed to be never-ending and increasingly complicated violence.13 As already stated, it would be erroneous to dismiss the political and social grievances that birthed the guerrilla movements in the 1960s and produced the right-wing political agenda of the AUC in the 1990s.14 However, today almost all of the illegal armed groups are participating in the drug trade and the war economy in some way or another, and the lines between political struggle and economic struggle have become increasingly blurred. Now, the ELN in Arauca coordinate with the reemergent paramilitary and local drug-traffickers, and former FARC combatants in El Choco collaborate with the paramilitary group, Los Urabeños, and sell their cocaine to the Mexican crime

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syndicates with bases in Central America. In the wake of the 2017 peace accords, there has yet to be a comprehensive economic reform agenda put into place. The violence has changed, but continues.

Ch r iStian ity, Chr i S tia n itie S , anD Ch r iStia n S in Col o M b ia In the midst of all of these shifts in the nature of the violence in Colombia, and in relation to it, religious affiliations and practices have also morphed and shifted. The relations of power at work at the level of everyday violence affect and are affected by emergent Christianities. Diverse populations throughout the country have followed regimes of practice that uniquely (to Colombia) bring practices of believing into broader analytical grids in which Christianity and economic power bump up against and shape each other.

Figure 11. Welcome to the village of Garzal, Peace Community. We are 100 families accompanied by these organizations. Photo by Javier Núñez.

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An example from fieldwork illustrates this confluence of violence and Christianity. The region of Magdalena Medio, where Pentecostal farmers in the community of Garzal have developed strategies of survival, both religious and economic, has been named a “laboratory of war.”15 All the waves and stages of violence, from the first arrival of the Spanish conquistadores to the deregulated murk of economically driven violence, have proliferated in this region, as it is one of the richest and most geopolitically strategic.16 The region borders the longest river in Colombia, the Magdalena, and leads from Bogotá to the Caribbean coast. All of the armed actors have organized and attempted to control different sub-regions and territories throughout the river basin.17 The community of Garzal has repeatedly found itself in the crosshairs of this tumult. In other words, the political economy of war has developed in the Magdalena. As such, the Magdalena Medio has been a hotbed of political uprising, and consequently the community of Garzal has lived through the various waves of violence.

th e Devil r eq u ir eS S a Cr if iCe We rode on horseback, slowly, through thick mud paths crossing through cane fields. Santiago, a campesino and community leader in Garzal, was also a member of the rural Pentecostal church where I had been carrying out research. Our conversation had begun at the edge of the river where my research partner from the Universidad Nacional and I had been dropped off by the chalupa after a three-hour ride up the river from Barrancabermeja, Santander.18 Santiago greeted us with an embrace. “God bless you! You’ve arrived safely!” he rejoiced as he grabbed our bags and equipment and loaded them onto the horses. We mounted our horses, and began our two-hour journey to the community of Garzal. The air was thick and damp; the sun beat down. Everywhere, grasshoppers, mosquitos, and all manner of other tropical insects buzzed and sang and leapt in between the cane and papaya trees, often smacking against us and the horses we rode on. I picked up a conversation Santiago and I had begun during my last visit. I had heard from numerous members of the community about the collective impression that some wealthy landowners, especially those with ties to the paramilitary or the

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drug cartels that had threatened the community over the previous decade, sacrificed human lives to the devil in order to retain their wealth. We rode side by side, rocking with the careful steps of our horses as they picked their way over fallen branches, muddy slopes, and jungle growth between fields. It had rained the night before, and the mud was thick. I asked Santiago to tell me his interpretation of the threats the community had received. He looked around us at the vast green of sugarcane, manioc, and plantain, and the papaya trees bordered by the tropical forest of the Magdalena. Without answering my question, he responded: “Have I told you about the time the army of angels protected us from the paramilitary?” Santiago began to tell the story. “We heard that the paramilitaries were going to come. El Señor, had threatened the pastor. It was 1994.” The moniker, “El Señor,” referred to the drug baron whose air landing strip bordered the land of the Garzal community.19 The drug lord had threatened Pastor Miguel in the township just days earlier. He wanted the land that the community of Garzal had settled over generations. For drug running, for an African palm plantation, for mining—it was unclear what the drug lord wanted the land for.20 What was clear was that the community was under threat. The drug lord wanted the community to leave. The regimes of power that manage the deployment of force in much of rural Colombia translated this desire for land into a potential massacre, as had been occurring throughout the countryside for generations.21 “We knew that there were paramilitary forces in the area. They had machetes and chainsaws. They were staying on El Señor’s land.” The story weaved together Santiago’s recollection of the events that had transpired, chronology and clear narrative abandoned, as traumatic events are often recalled outside boundaries of exactness. Our horses waded through the thickness of jungle growth and into the next plantation of banana and manioc. On that night, only a few years prior, a paramilitary convoy had arrived at the river’s edge, close to where my research partner and I had been dropped off. The paramilitaries arrived in the darkness of night and began to move toward the community. That same evening, the Pentecostals of Garzal had been up late, praying and singing in the wood-slatted church that sits in the middle of the hamlet. Individuals had petitioned the angels to protect the community,

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Figure 12. The Four-Square Pentecostal Church in Garzal. Photo by Javier Núñez.

to hold off the paramilitary armies with armies of heaven. The spiritual warfare that these Pentecostal Christians waged had effects, according to them, in the material realm of the all-too-real world of forced displacements and death threats. Spiritual practices such as summoning angels for protection against violence reveal a particular form of acting in the world that is specific to Pentecostal Christians in Colombia (more on this in following chapters). “Angels arrived and made a heavenly racket!” Santiago exclaimed. The spiritual work of the community had successfully summoned an army of angels to scare off the paramilitaries who would have surely committed a massacre in the community; so goes the narrative. The miracle of survival was a sustaining story that buoyed spirits and deepened faith. In the context of Colombia’s rural communities, the fact that the people of Garzal have indeed not been forced off their land might be very much read as miraculous. For the community of Garzal, spiritual warfare was reflected on the material plane as real. Their believing practices had been effective. However, understanding both Christianity and capitalism as systems of

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relations, as analytical grids, as such, that produce particular forms of difference in the specificity of Colombia is necessary in order to further understand financial capitalism in relation to the broader Colombian context.

pr o teS ta n t, p en teC oSta l , e van g e li Ca l The first Protestant missionaries arrived in Colombia in 1825. The Scottish Baptist James Thompson arrived with the British Biblical Society intending to found a similar group in Colombia. The society was accepted by the liberals, the masons, and a small group of Catholic priests, since the Protestants, Franco masons, and liberals valued economic opening and freedom of expression and religion.22 These protestant missionaries had been invited by the Liberal party, with the support of some Catholic clergy, demonstrating, first, their approach to religious diversity, as well as the moves by the Liberal party to work at dismantling the Catholic hegemony that held the constitution and political system in the grasp of the Conservative elite.23 The next wave of missionaries arrived in 1856, with the Presbyterian Missions Board. The first Presbyterian church was inaugurated in 1862 in Bogotá. Churches were planted in Medellin in 1888 and the coastal city of Barranquilla in 1892. The liberals seeking support in their crusade to weaken Catholic and conservative power encouraged the Protestant missions to establish churches, along with schools, clinics, and social clubs. This resulted in the establishment of the Presbyterian-run “American Schools,” which continued operating even after the new constitution of 1887 handed complete responsibility for primary school training back to the administration of the Catholic Church. Even as Protestant missions entered into the country, conflict raged. The conflicts that surrounded the political direction of the country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, culminating with La Violencia, have been understood as conflicts between the Conservative and Liberal parties. However, Colombian sociologist, Orlando Fals Borda (a Presbyterian himself, alumnus of the American school in Barranquilla) summarized a large body of Colombian scholarly opinion when he stated, “The internal conflicts after 1853 that were fought ostensibly for the control of the budget, or for changing the Constitution, were

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really fought on religious grounds.”24 The religiously charged conflicts had more to do with political economy than any challenge to a monopolized religious passion, revolving around the “romantic socialism” that the Liberals and, by default, Protestants, were understood to espouse.25 As early as 1850, the periodical of the Archdiocese warned that “anarchists had misused the gospels to persuade people that ‘communism is the fundamental principle of Jesus Christ.’ ”26 In this early context, Michael Taussig identifies the binaries as Manichean. “Good against Evil, Liberal against Conservative, Equity against Equality. It is a natural law that things divide into two.”27 The Catholic versus the Protestant became a trope of political competition. Christianity was the stage upon which violence played itself out. Yet, according to William Mauricio Beltrán, Catholic hegemony was not truly cracked until the Constitution of 1991 redrew political lines and Protestant and Pentecostal movements that had been operating semi-covertly for decades were able to flourish in the newly liberalized religious landscape.28 And what of Liberation Theology? There is a saying in circles of religious scholars, observers, and theologians in Latin America. It goes something along the lines of: “The Catholic Church opted for the poor, and the poor opted for Pentecostalism.”29 Latin American liberation theologians introduced a notion of material salvation in a theological exegesis that understood God to have a “preferential option for the poor.”30 Yet, as Colombian philosopher and theologian, Arturo Orrego laments, “The liberation theologians attempted to develop a theology of the subject without recognizing their subject.”31 Liberation theology in Colombia fell flat because, in part, it was repressed by Catholic officialdom, which viewed the movement as a threat to conservative social and cultural values, and because the provincial population, largely rural and illiterate, was already steeped in the kind of popular religiosity much more compatible with Pentecostalism. More importantly, perhaps, was the intentional extermination of some of the most prominent proponents of liberation theology in Colombia by the State. For example, Camilo Torres, a leading figure, was a priest, chaplain of Colombia’s Universidad Nacional in Bogota, and cofounder of the Sociology Department; together with a group of like-minded clergy, he formed the Golconda Group of liberation theology in Colombia. Torres eventually

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joined the guerrilla movement of the ELN, along with other members of the Golconda Group, as their theological and political convictions led them to the conviction that the only path to liberation in Colombia was through armed struggle. This is in part because in Colombia, the liberation theologians and sympathizers were targeted as suspected insurgents through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, leading some to join guerrilla ranks, and others to soften their political activity, or flee the country.32 That said, in Colombia there remain many individual parishes, socially committed priests, and Catholic leadership, both lay and formal, as well as movements of Ecclesial Base Communities (Comunidades Eclesiales de Base) that work as grassroots-level enclaves of community building and contextually informed “popular” biblical hermeneutical work.33 Perhaps one of the most prominent in Colombia is the urban movement of Casitas Bíbilicas, based in southern Bogotá. This movement of ecclesial-based communities has organized ten neighborhoods in community urban gardening, social outreach, and political activism, all based in a hermeneutic that privileges the poor and the oppressed in society.34 Here it must be said that while liberation theology as a movement and popular form of Catholic (or otherwise Christian) practice has not become a dominant theological and political expression in Latin America, as it was first conceptualized by Gustavo Gutiérrez and the founders of the movement, I insist that in no way is liberation theology a fully “failed” project. Liberation theologians throughout Latin America continue to expand and experiment with feminist, mujerista, Black, indigenous, queer, and other extensions of liberation theology. The work of Elsa Támez, for example, a Mexican feminist theologian, critiques neoliberal structures from the perspectives of a feminist biblical exegesis in The Bible of the Oppressed.35 Argentinian theologian Marcella Althaus Reid writes a queer liberation theology that springs forth from the intersections of postcolonial studies, critical gender analysis, critical sexuality studies, and political spiritualities in Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics and more specifically addresses the new generation of liberation theologians in her most recent book, Liberation Theology and Sexuality.36 Nancy Cardoso Pereira is a Brazilian theologian who formulates an ecofeminist theology of liberation. Pereira has published work on hunger and migration from a biblical perspective, mining, labor and rebellion in the

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Bible and religious experience and gendered identities.37 Ivone Gebara is a Brazil-based, Belgian-born liberation eco-feminist whose book, El rostro oculto del mal (The hidden face of evil) written in 2002, challenged liberation theology’s internalized patriarchy.38 Afro-Colombian theologian Maricel Mena critiques and extends liberation theology to consider Afrolatinidades and critical Black studies in a new theology that is intersectional while liberative.39 Bolivian theologian Roberto Tomichá presents a liberation theology that takes into account indigenous perspectives and cosmovision.40 What these new waves of liberation theology represent is a further diversification of religious practice and ethos that also flows across lines of denominational borders. In the sense that liberation theology is concerned with the material well-being of its adherents, there is a commonality between liberation theology and theologies of prosperity, as they are connected in Pentecostal realities of spiritual warfare that reflects lived political, social, and economic strife. While Pentecostals, megachurch charismatic fundamentalists, and liberation theologians would themselves resist seeing any commonalities, I return to the invitation to consider Christianity, as such, as a discursive tradition that may be interpreted from a dialogical approach.41 When considering the divergences that Christians establish for themselves about what makes their specific denomination a more correct form of Christian practice than others, a Bakhtinian-informed dialogical approach offers inroads to understanding the “competing claims to truth and authority as the condition in terms of which all human interaction takes place.”42 In this sense, the struggle for authenticity and authority within and between Christian communities themselves has been a characteristic feature of Christianity as a historical tradition since its origins. Nevertheless, a word on the idiosyncrasies of Colombian Pentecostalism is necessary here. Pentecostalism in Colombia can be understood as a movement of a diverse collection of churches who hold central to their faith a commitment to evangelism, the free movement of the Spirit as manifest through glossolalia, miracle work, and the centrality of spiritual warfare against demons, hexes, and enchantments.43 William Mauricio Beltrán considers Pentecostalism to have developed within the cradle of an already hybrid popular Catholicism that had adopted indigenous spiritual traditions, together with the conviction of miracles from saints, and a sensual,

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affective phenomenology translated across cultures and languages in Colombia. Given the plasticity of Pentecostalism, many of the formations of what I refer to as “Prosperity Christianity” find their roots in Pentecostalism already modulated for locally specific contexts. For example, the Misión Carismática Internacional (MCI) has adopted a model of expansion from the South Korean Yoido Full Gospel Church and its lead pastor, David Yonggi Cho, who according to Beltrán, incorporated elements of Buddhist tradition, like “anticipated visualization of miracles” into the prosperity message. This message was picked up by César Castellanos (more on this church in chapter 5) in his calls for the congregation of the MCI to “visualize their blessing.”44 The “indigenization” of Pentecostalism is one its few most defining features. Covenanting, or pactando, giving financially to God (often with a credit card in the case of the MCI) in exchange for miraculous action, can also be interpreted as related to popular Catholic practices of sacrificial offerings to saints in hopes of healing or blessing. “Pagando una promesa,” or “paying a promise” is a widely practiced devotional utility throughout Latin America. The devotee promises a sacrificial offering or penance in exchange for a miraculous work, in any realm of life: health, finances, employment, fertility, intimate relations, and so on. When the blessing is received (e.g., health restored), the devotee might make a pilgrimage to the church or site of the saint. In the covenanting practices of Prosperity Christians, the offering is made in anticipation of recompense.45 Worthy of note here, once again, is Beltrán’s mention that Christianity in Colombia in general, and Pentecostalism and Prosperity Christianity specifically, are hybrid traditions that are ever on the move: adapting, changing, and evolving; rupturing with each other, but building on familiar rites and tropes. According to Cornelia Butler Flora, “As of the 1960s, Pentecostal congregations [in Colombia] began to appear in different parts of the country with the expansion of missionary work.”46 These Pentecostal missions differentiated themselves from prior Protestant missions. They did so with their emphasis on evangelizing and even developed a certain martyr complex, given the harsh conditions of violent resistance the missionaries encountered in the midst of bi-partisan violence throughout the country in which anything non-Catholic was understood as an affront to Catholic and conservative values.47 In 1953, the Colombian Evangelical Confederation

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published a report, documenting the persecution the Protestant church had suffered: “42 churches have been destroyed by fire or dynamite; 110 evangelical schools have been closed, 54 by decree of the government; 51 evangelicals have been assassinated because of their faith, 28 by the hands of the national police and governmental officials; approximately $370,000 in damages.”48 The persecution did not, however, diminish the evangelizing efforts. If anything, according to Beltrán and Clemencia Tejeiro Sarmiento, before and throughout La Violencia it worked to their favor insofar as the Pentecostal preachers presented themselves as martyrs in the name of freeing the country from the hold of the Catholic Church.49 According to Butler Flora, in 1974 the International United Pentecostal Church (IPUC) counted an estimated sixty thousand members. In 2007, that number had risen to an estimated four hundred thousand.50

r eg iMeS o f p raCti Ce in Col o Mb i a n rural p enteCo Sta l i S M “They [the paramilitary] were going to kill us. Or at least some of us.” Santiago waved his hands, agitated, his voice was raised as we rode on and he continued the story. “They were stopped just about here, they say.” We stopped our horses on the path surrounded by thick jungle. “They say they heard a tremendously loud noise. I don’t know what they saw, what they heard, but they were scared, and turned away.” Santiago looked at me, pointed his finger with all severity. “It was the angels. What else could it have been?” He then laughed, joyously, almost surprised. We moved on. He called back over his shoulder, “We’re safe here. No te preocupes. Don’t worry. We’re protected by angels.” What the Pentecostals in the community of Garzal articulate in their Christian practice is a political spirituality unique to their context. When the threats began, the church initiated a series of practices that worked to construct a sense or, at the very least, the illusion, of control over a situation entirely out of control. “We would meet every night and hold prayer vigils. We would sleep around the pastor’s house. We fasted. The women met separately and took turns fasting for weeks at a time,” Santiago continued to explain. In another interview, the pastor of the community, Pastor Miguel who received the threat directly, told us: “We would

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Figure 13. Outside the Four-Square Pentecostal Church in Garzal. Photo by Javier Núñez.

drink some water in the morning, but no food. No food. For twenty days we fasted. We would sing together, pray together, read the Bible, and talk about what to do if the paramilitary did come into the community. I was never left alone. But we also fasted for the development of our community. The cacao project has changed many lives. It has also kept people from fleeing when the threats come.” The recognizable Pentecostal habitus, of prayer, fasting, and Bible study, works on the soul of these devout, yet precarious, Christians. Importantly, this community does not solely rely on heavenly intervention. They also participate in an economic practice inspired by the selfgovernance that the absence of state authority and the terror of persistent death threats generate. Individual farmers were chosen by the church leadership to participate in an alternative development project that began in the mid-2000s. Each one of those chosen to participate were members of the Garzal Four-Square community, and each participant was charged with a few hundred cacao plants and had a cacao drying structure built on their property. The communal agricultural project of cacao production, directed at a few individuals, has placed the entire remote Pentecostal

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community in the crosshairs of not only drug lords seeking to take over their land, but also the industrial agricultural conglomerates seeking to drain the region of oil or use the land for African palm or banana plantations. The Pentecostal piety at work in Garzal thus ties an internal set of religious practices—of fasting and reading the Bible, of consuming nothing but water for twenty day-and-night-long vigils—to the business procedures of applying for development grants from international NGOs and loans for cocoa seeds from local banks. Tied together in this knot of “free market spirituality” is a piety that trains souls through brutal competition and an absent state. The community of Garzal has had little choice but to engage with the competition of the savage market that pits paramilitary against guerrilla against drug lords against licit corporate orders in Colombia’s race to appropriate land for exploitation and profit. The community has countered the threats of displacement with this mélange of miracles and market competition.51 The morality that accompanies security through economic development is an important component of Colombia’s emergence, a component uniquely Christian because the prosperity that the community aspires to relies on individual capacities for development, and in this sense is especially capitalist. Believing in angels, harnessing the performative power of prayer, and bending collective will toward an openness to the spirit is a specific regime of Pentecostal—and Colombian—practice that operates in relation to a political economy of war, and a conviction that spiritual deliverance will be “on earth as it is in heaven.” Far from the causal relation afforded to religious tenacity as a response to or reasoning of or contamination of the political and the social, the Pentecostal regime of practice in Garzal does different work. I refer here to arguments that build on assumptions of difference, such as the following from Jean Comaroff: “Commerce, government, education, the media, and popular arts—nothing seems too trivial or debased to offer grist to the spiritual mill. The task . . . is to put ‘God-in-everything,’ so ‘anything-can-be-holy.’ ”52 The central assumption here is that, first, there are things that are “holy” or “unholy.” Second, that there always already exists a distinction between these sites of religion, on the one hand, and commerce, education, and so forth, on the other. The work of this book is to take one step back, and consider how, instead of

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closed categories of “holy” and “commerce,” these two realms operate and deploy power in forms far less detached. Indeed, my intention is to question whether distinct “realms” even exist, and focus, instead, on power in shared regimes of practice. Waves of Christianity in Colombia have produced a particular kind of subjectivity in rapprochement with waves of globalizing markets, freer trade, and the ever-present context of violence. Tracing the regimes of Pentecostal practice in the midst of the violent precarity that the Colombian armed conflict has generated reveals the contours of a deregulated Christianity that bases itself in a spectrum of free market spiritualities. While the cacao project is a collective project, at least as it is talked about and written about in grant applications for further funding, the project also relies on the individual farmers to responsibly and efficiently cultivate their crops as they cultivate their souls and marketing strategies. The market forces that have regulated violence in Colombia operate according to the truth of liberalization and free market competition. From the drug trade to processes of opening up the financial regime of credit, Colombia’s steady march toward greater freedom of the market has coincided with spiritualities that seek to survive the violence that market competition has brought with it.

go o D bu Sin eSS iS g o D ’S bu S in e SS “We have an alternative kind of development here in Garzal. We have a holistic business model. We are not participating in the drug industry or industrial agriculture. That’s why we received threats, and that’s why we need to be even more responsible in our management of the cacao project. Good business is God’s business. The government doesn’t help us, but we trust God will provide.” Pastor Miguel spoke under the shade of one his cacao plants at a halt in our trek across the terrain of Garzal. “Things have really changed with the cacao project.” He turned and went on, trudging over thick underbrush, ducking under branches. “People have built proper zinc roofs on their houses, filled dirt floors with concrete. Prosperity here is what we strive for. This is the vision. Electricity, a school, safety. Prosperity is something we pray for.” The cacao plants were close to harvest,

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Figure 14. A member of the Garzal church with his cacao crop. Photo by Javier Núñez.

and the pods hung low and heavy with seed on the trees. The faint smell of chocolate wafted from the plastic-covered huts where seeds were laid out to dry before being roasted and mashed into chocolate paste. Prosperity for these Christians was not an issue of excess, but, again, of survival. The economy of war in Colombia produces an elusive personhood that seeks legitimation and protection not from the idea of the state, but rather from a modulating and turbulent collection of powers competing for recognition from the corporate guarantor. The deregulation, decentralization, and disentanglements from direct engagement with denominational authorities in the North, compose a Christianity that operates within a rubric of political economy and power structures ordered by forces of capital. Pastor Miguel’s commitment to responsible bookkeeping, regular debt payments, and developed business plans are some of the demands he faces as he seeks out further development grants and establishes “good” business models that can be replicated. Management of funds works through the management of souls; good business, for Pastor Miguel, is also “God’s business.” Developing, economically and spiritually, is the weapon with

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which to wage peace in a context of war. These contexts stretch conceptions of cultural Christianity into the webs of shadow economies and the gray spaces of political economic power. These are not enclosed spaces. The power of civil war is put into operation as the power of the corporation is, without delineated form and with shadowed interests, through formlessness and the force of speculation. Power is exercised through internally motivated moralities and the mere threat of external action. Indeed, it can be said, that these sites of control operate at an internal level, as well as an external level, on the edges of the seen and unseen. Santiago is one of the first members of Garzal to have successfully brokered an individual agricultural loan from the Banco Agrario, the state-supported agrarian bank, since the community has worked their way out of collective debts to the bank. A few days prior to riding horses into the rural outback of Garzal, the research team from the Universidad Nacional had traveled from Bogotá to Barrancabermeja, three hours upriver from Garzal, to meet with the community leaders, including Santiago, and with members of international accompaniment teams, the local United Nations attaché for human rights, and a local human rights defense group that led a workshop on best practices for collective security. Early warning systems with air horns and radios, regular visits from the international accompaniment teams, and financial security were all components of the self-defense strategies the community began developing in the workshop. “If we can secure loans from the bank to improve our crops, we’re more secure, because we’re less likely to leave our land. As soon as one of us leaves, we become weaker,” Santiago stood up to declare. “We’re already moving out of the red with the bank, and they are considering collective loans for us again, after the last few years of ineligibility.” Political security and financial security were conflated in a construction of debt worthiness as a means of defense. After defaulting on collective loans for a number of years, the agrarian collective that had organized with farmers from the community had responsibly been paying off loans. Angels and interest rates, it would seem, collude in the production of a secure community. The paradox and contestation within this knot of governmentality draws not only from the aforementioned interventions, but also from Colombia’s paradoxical process of governance itself.

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The political economy of war became increasingly individualized through the economic opening of 1991, characterized by the decentralization of financial control from the Central Bank (Banco de la República) to foreign banking institutions and the loosening of controls over foreign investments of Colombian money, as well as greater foreign direct investment moving into the country. This economic opening was accompanied by constitutional reform that rewrote the economic policies of the country in line with the free market rationality of the post–Cold War global economy, and it allowed drug money to be laundered in ways that in the previous decade had been complicated by tight protectionist financial policy. The constitutional reform also formally recognized religious freedoms, delinking the Colombian government from explicit ties to the Vatican. With Catholicism no longer the official, or only, religion of the state, a veritable deluge of non-Catholic Christian churches applied for charitable status and recognition by state institutions. The economic and religious landscapes burst open to new forms of financing, new forms of economic growth, and, naturally, new forms of violence. The war has become the market as well as the producer of markets in Colombia’s political economy. Emergence is not simply the displacement of one structure of power by another. Financial emergence builds atop decades of neoliberalization in Colombia and the entrenchment of religious practice with political economy as a social fact, an ethnographically legible regime of everyday practice. The layering of dominations in Colombia’s financializing economy and simultaneously emerging nationhood, produces personhoods founded in a financialized subjectivity made possible only in the particular historical present that Colombia’s war market secures. Financial security overlaps with political security, and the Christian imaginarium of new life, rebirth, and salvific functionality operates in a deployment of hope narratives and aspirational practices of becoming. Credit mobilizes an accessible entrance into greater consumptive practices, while economic growth is touted as the foundation of Colombia’s new beginning. As the economy grows, credit ushers in a new dimension of power through disciplining the debt of an overzealous aspirational class of consumers in the form of predatory lending. Illusions of prosperity coalesce with illusions of peace, and the nation, buoyed by the optimism promised by greater individual purchasing power, grasps tightly

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onto imaginings of the future. The current epoch of the Colombian war has been amplified by a political economy of violence, fueled by the injection of drug trafficking and war taxation, a growing industry of natural resource extraction, and ongoing struggles of land reform.53

th e Devil iS S til l at W or k To end this chapter, I relate this vignette from Pastor Miguel’s house, in Garzal. On the way to the community, heading down the languid Magdalena River, Pastor Miguel explained that at one particularly terrible moment of violence, bodies and body parts were regularly seen floating in the thick brown water. He told one particularly grisly tale with a laugh: “Fishermen caught a huge bass, one of the biggest they had ever seen! When they cut it open, they realized that they had really gotten lucky: there was a complete hand inside the fish, with a fancy watch still on the wrist! They had won the lottery!” The pastor dissolved into peals of laughter. Once again, I wondered to myself, “Why am I writing about the economy?” The details of violence were ubiquitous and top of mind for so many people. Yet, once at Pastor Miguel’s house, that evening I had a conversation with a member of the church community, Arcadio, that connected the violence back to the relationship between Christianity and financializing capitalism. “You know that Shakira made a pact with the Devil, right?” Arcadio looked sidelong toward me. It was an unsurprisingly sweltering night in Garzal, and the community had just finished a three-hour-long miracle service. Cavities had been inexplicably filled and cancers wondrously vomited onto the floor, all guided by the machinations of a traveling evangelist preacher/miracle healer. The fan hanging from the high ceiling of Pastor Miguel’s wood frame house—a common architectural form in Colombia’s rural towns—sluggishly stirred the heavy air. Arcadio’s eyes supported heavy eyebrows that furrowed as he gazed intently and uncomfortably into mine when I didn’t answer immediately. “She made a pact with the Devil, and that’s a fact.” We were sitting on plastic chairs, watching a news program while the generators were still on. Pastor Miguel was chatting with some parishioners; children lolled on the floor playing, coloring, or watching the old

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TV with us; the church building beside the house was still buzzing with activity. I asked how he knew this fact about the famed Colombian pop star, and Arcadio was eager to explain. “Look at her,” he pointed to the cracked television screen where Shakira was dancing in a Colgate advertisement. “You can tell from the way she dances and the lyrics to her songs. She even looks different than she did before. But mostly because of how rich she became. She moved to Miami. She’s not Colombian anymore. She sold her soul.” I was intrigued. “Does everyone who becomes rich make a pact with the Devil?” I wondered. Arcadio leaned forward, his eyebrows dripping sweat, his eyes intense. “Not everyone, but a lot of them. Probably most of them.” He smiled, satisfied, and leaned back. “Who else?” I prodded. “Well,” he thought for a moment, “they say the guerrilla commanders also did. The guerrilla kidnapped a pastor once, and he said that every night witches would come to dance with the commanders disguised as beautiful women. They say Coca-Cola has also made a pact with the devil—they sacrifice a child every year. That’s how they keep their profits so high.” Another community member, Aureliano, was watching the news with us. He chimed in: “It’s true. It’s almost impossible to become a successful company without making a pact with the Devil.” I couldn’t help but share with them the legend of Faust, and they listened intently.54 “But that’s just a story, right? I’m talking about real things that have really happened,” Arcadio chided. He crossed his arms high on his chest and gave me a half-smile. The Colgate advertisement was over, the electrical generator had just run out of gas and we were plunged into muggy darkness. The buzz of a jungle evening, frogs croaking and crickets chirping, sounded all around. Gentle wailing wafted into the house from the church next door, where some women carried on praying and singing. While selling one’s soul to the Devil in order to achieve fame and fortune and dancing the night away with witches are decidedly supernatural events, the violence and perversion that has accompanied wealth accumulation in Colombia is terrifyingly real. Beliefs in witches or miraculously

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cured ailments or the Devil eating children that Coca-Cola sacrifices every year exist on a continuum that negotiates and makes sense of necrofinancial terror. Michael Taussig suggests that the very concept of “devil” was an idea introduced in South America through the arrival of European colonizers, and has become a symbol of the proletariat spirit. “The Devil,” Taussig says, “is a mainstay of production or of increasing production, but this production is believed to be ultimately destructive of life.”55 For these rural Colombians, whom I met many years after proletarianization of the Colombian peasantry was well established, the devil is now found in the detail of accumulation by dispossession, and not only in the commodification of labor. The problem for these Colombians is not the transition to wage labor and the accompanying shift to forms of capitalist labor relations. The problem for the Colombians of this small evangelical community in the Magdalena Medio region is the unjust accumulation of wealth through the violence that has accompanied Colombia’s economic liberalization since the 1990s. The big issue raised by Shakira, the guerrillas, Coca-Cola, and the many wealthy landowners and corporations named or unnamed by Aureliano and Arcadio, as well as by the millions of Colombians who have been labeled the “victims” of the political violence, is the corruption and violence associated with rapid wealth accumulation. The uneven movement of capital, the extreme dimensions of class difference, and the concentration of land and wealth in Colombia has been marked by declared and undeclared violence, increasingly unpredictable and deregulated. Colombia’s wars have been fought along lines of political and social inequity, but in the last three decades the violence has taken on a markedly distinct economic tenor. Here is, once again, where the rise of necrofinance is palpable. And it is worth emphasizing that although I write about a community in rural Colombia, the unique conditions of their experiences, and the particularities of their spiritual and political struggle, I caution against discrete lines being drawn along the imagined rural/urban divide. Not only is rural Colombia an abstraction that in no way should be romanticized or applauded as a place of nostalgia to which we may return, but also the edges of urban Colombia now only exist in blurred proximity to the rural, because people are constantly moving between cities and municipalities, from el campo to la ciudad and back again. The “rural” and the “urban” converge and shift together as trends

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of political violence and economic change have converged and shifted, affecting where safety may be found and daily life may be lived in relative tranquility. What I return to is the current of this book: the role that late capitalism has played in these shifts and convergences, and the ways that aspirational beliefs and practices sustain particular subjectivities within Christian realms of being part of economic systems of power. The capitalism that has proliferated in Colombia is savage and accompanied by violence. As David Harvey details, accumulation by means of dispossession operates on various registers, including displacing native and small-scale agricultural populations off of their land, the privatization of the commons, the commodification of labor power, the slave trade, and ultimately, the entire financialized credit system.56 These media of accumulation operate in Colombia through public violence, as well as internalized forms of control that operate as structuralized violence. Yet, even as Colombians collectively struggle to imagine a country at peace, there is no agreement on what the war is about, or what will be necessary for a lasting peace to blossom. The people of Colombia agree and don’t agree on the degrees of violence, on who has been responsible, or on the lasting effects of the violence. What there might be agreement on is a shared aspiration toward becoming a new nation. Neither a discretely disciplinary society nor a society of control, Colombia sits in the troubled terrain of an economy emerging while also struggling to free itself from decades of war. Debt and the aspirational pulls that drive indebtedness through Christian morality produce a new kind of violence, a financial violence that is deregulated, privatized, and internalized. The next chapters illustrate the ways in which financial violence functions by means of aspirational inclusion and debt.

4

Inclusion In the years of the privatizations, Everything was raffled off, Even the stones of the sidewalks, And the lions in the zoo, And everything evaporated. And the citizens, the invisible ones, they have been left without their countries, with an enormous debt to pay, broken plates from this distant celebration, and with governments that do not govern, because they are governed, from afar. —Eduardo Galeano

“Welcome to the Davivienda family!” said the banker, and he shook Ursula’s hand. Ursula beamed. As hands were shaken, she exclaimed: “You’ve saved me!” She turned to her friend, Fabian, who had brought the banker to her house. And thank you, Brother Fabian, for bringing your colleague here. I know I can trust you!” Ursula had just consolidated her Christmas debts with a new bank. The Davivienda Bank “family,” which had a small red house as its logo, offered Ursula a streamlined debt payment plan. With her debts bundled so that she only needed to make one payment per month, Ursula felt relief. Brother Fabian was a member of Ursula’s church community and worked with the “Davivienda family.” Fabian had arranged the house visit with the financial advisor. 109

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“Of course, sister. You know that this is a better situation than what you were dealing with before. You will be able to pay off your debts much faster now!” Ursula had invited me to witness the friendly takeover of her finances by the Colombian banking giant. After confessing her debts to me during the New Year’s Eve celebrations (see introduction and chapter 1), and considering her options, Fabian, a financial planner himself, had suggested to Ursula to take her debts from one bank (by whom she felt betrayed), to Davivienda, where she would enjoy a “financial service appropriate for her portfolio.” At least, so said the financial fixer. Ursula’s inclusion into a new financial family was a moment of “salvation,” as she put it. This chapter considers the theological underpinnings and political weight of financial inclusion as the vanguard of disciplinary financialization. While Ursula’s story involves an advanced level of inclusion (i.e., she had a bank account and various financial services at one bank already and only shifted her assets and debts from one to another), and is not an example of becoming “banked” for the first time, it demonstrates how the concept of financial inclusion orders new ties of kinship, around capital. Central to the process of financialization is the work of financial inclusion programs and policies as well as financial education. To consider inclusion as a form of regulation serves to deepen our analysis of the political economy of deregulation in Colombia’s rapprochement with global markets, and especially in relation to Christianity.

finanC ial i nClu S ion : D e S ign ing D e Ma n D Financial inclusion is defined by the World Bank as “access to financial services through formal accounts [that] enable individuals and firms to smooth consumption, manage risk, and invest in education, health, and enterprises.”1 In another World Bank publication, the concept is much more streamlined, and defined simply as the “use of formal accounts.”2 According to the Colombian Bank of the Republic, financial inclusion is the “integration of financial services with everyday economic activity of the population, which may lead to economic growth insofar as it may limit the costs of financialization, security, and management of resources

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for individuals and for companies.”3 For anthropologist, Anke Schwittay, financial inclusion is the “global assemblage that constitutes materially poor people as fiscal subjects, financial consumers, and monetary innovators.”4 All of these definitions assume an inclusion into something, through the technological tools and the services commercial banks offer. According to the United Nations, access to a smoothly running financial infrastructure is the key to poverty alleviation. The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs extols the benefits: “Financial inclusion is universal access, at a reasonable cost, to a wide range of financial services, provided by a variety of sound and sustainable institutions. . . . Financial inclusion can improve people’s lives by generating income and economic activity, creating jobs, increasing access to social services and protecting people from unforeseen risks.”5 What all of these definitions share is a concept of the individual, the subject, the person or firm that will have increased admission to the club of credit, a club that is opening up membership for those formerly excluded. This inclusion has a direct, and intentional, effect on personhood; it is a further expansion of the financialization of personhood, by which I mean the ways in which Ursula, and the subjects of deregulated Prosperity Christianity in Colombia more broadly, constitute themselves as prosperous. The ethics of this particular personhood, a financialized personhood, are constructed through the practices of banking, accounting, spending, owing, and believing that all of these practices are reforming the self along with a bank account. Becoming banked is more than a ploy of the commercial banking sector to increase profit. Higher profit margins are consequences of financial inclusion, and profit has become a motivator for commercial financiers, but profit also generates a program of discipline. Ignoring, for a moment, the uneven hierarchies of power and benefits that the process of financialization may produce, what the United Nations, the World Bank, the Colombian Bank of the Republic, and Schwittay all agree on is that access to the formal financial system will change people somehow. Furthermore, the prevailing assumption of the financial system’s beneficence goes without saying for the banks and the United Nations. Schwittay demonstrates this well, explaining that financial services are an “absence that is translated into a need,” which then results in “a tension

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at the heart of the assemblage between ‘financialization of development’ that constitutes poverty alleviation as the new frontier of capitalism, and ‘the democratization of capital’ that promises access to financial services as an eradicator of poverty.”6 Just as “development” itself as a concept of “improvement” is a contested and ambiguous category, the financialization of development compounds the assumptions of its effectiveness.7 Those assumptions, held by the development industry and the champions of financial inclusion, consider the financial system to be benevolent and contend that the primary hindrance to overcoming poverty is lack of access and understanding. As the World Bank states, financial inclusion revolves around “banking” the population. The gateway financial product of a savings account is seen not only as a pathway toward sustainable development, but also as something [enforced saving] that “can . . . help empower women, increase productive investment and consumption, raise productivity and incomes, and increase expenditures on preventive health.”8 Saving money, as Max Weber projected a century ago, is a central component of becoming a responsible, and pious, capitalist. For Ursula, improvement upon the self involved a forensic analysis of finances in which she laid out her manifold financial sins and weaknesses in the form of credit card statements, mortgage statements, bills, and financiers’ threats across the living room table for a fiscal authority to see, judge, and then recommend appropriate conduct. Ursula’s pecuniary confession rendered her an ideal subject of financial inclusion into the Davivienda family. She had confessed, been judged, and now would reform her inner self and become a born-again borrower. To do this, Ursula began a new regimen of asking for receipts for every purchase. If receipts were unavailable (which in Colombia is common), she now had a notebook in which she wrote down every expenditure. Ursula began to carefully analyze credit card statements, calculating interest, assessing her expenditures in comparison to her income, paying more than the minimum payment, and recognizing how much more the actual expenditure was in comparison to the price the commodity was advertised as. Ursula began to calculate compound credit. For example, a grocery shopping trip costing $100,000 CUP (roughly $50 USD), paid back over twelve months at an interest rate of 28 percent would result in the final

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cost of the groceries to be $196,000 CUP, almost double the original cost of the groceries. Ursula began to realize how much was actually being charged for use of the credit card, and her bank account. The locus of Ursula’s soul, within the strictures of spreadsheets and databases, illustrates the new focus of moral management in the process of financialization. Proper economic practice became the juggernaut of a reform in Ursula’s fiscal, and therefore moral, habitus. Both actions, on the self and of the self, required Ursula’s believing practice to be deployed in the form of correct monetary behavior, in order for her inclusion into the system to be maintained in healthy form (i.e., avoiding the debtor’s list of DataCredito, the Colombian regulating body that registers debtors in arrears and thereby actively limits access to credit, even a cell phone account). However, Ursula’s commitment to her new financial family was as much about managing debts in a new way as it was managing her payment options, her credit rating, and her self-governance. “Seré mejor!” (I will be better), she affirmed, as much to herself as to everyone around her, as she gathered up her receipts, and bills, and payment planning charts after the meeting with the Davivienda rep. She would “be better” because she would now be part of a new family, starting anew, beginning fresh, being saved from her chaotic debt and delivered into the world of regulation and self-control through a stern talking-to from the financial advisers and confidence that she would make it all right again. With the words “Seré mejor,” Ursula outlines what financial inclusion sells and what financial inclusion manages: the fiscal management of the self.9 Her practice of confessional credit placed Ursula into the economic domain of crediting and borrowing that had shifted from specialized access for the economically elite, to the promise of happiness through proper administration of the soul as universally accessible.10 Ursula began praying about her debt in morning services at her house church and speaking about it in more open way with her family. She also enrolled in an online financial literacy course. Her “will to improve” incorporated a balance of prayer, confession, and training.11 Ursula put to work a new ethic in the development of her prosperous selfhood. Her debt worked to train a soul that was constructed not as a historical Christian, Catholic theological conception, “born in sin and subject to punishment,” but “born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision, and constraint.”12 Ursula felt she

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was being punished for irresponsible spending and not saving; now she was being supervised anew, and central to the message from the “debt fixer” was: “you must spend less.” Restraint in consumption is one more contradiction, among many, of finance capital. On the one hand, credit suggests that consumption is encouraged, on the other, financial inclusion preaches restraint. Financial inclusion as a national project and policy was officially launched in Colombia in 2007, when the government of Alvaro Uribe decreed financial inclusion as a policy initiative for all commercial banks and the Bank of the Republic.13 The initiative was in keeping with the growing worldwide commitment to the work of “banking the unbanked” and financially including the unbanked masses into the formal banking system by way of “financial products that specifically attend to the needs of the poor.”14 Accessible education, services, and credit have become the operating mandates of dominant economic development strategies. The enterprise of financial inclusion dealt a favorable hand to microfinancing institutions especially and generally reframed the concept of poverty. Socioeconomic conditions and political structures became secondary problematics to the precedence of “access.” As the Banca de las Oportunidades, the Colombian government’s development bank, proclaims, “we seek to improve access to financial services for the population, so that they might have the same opportunities to save, obtain insurance, acquire credit, and make transfers quickly, easily, and safely.”15 The World Bank has declared access to financial services to be a central component for economic development. Indeed, the World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, declared a goal of achieving “universal financial access” (UFA) by 2020. The point here is that, according to these institutions, the reasons for poverty, for economic inequality, for crippling debt, are ostensibly a lack of access to and education about the financial system. Once education and access are resolved, the “system” should work for individuals. At this point, individuals are responsible for their own well-being. The actual composition of power relations within the structures are not questioned, nor even considered as relevant. As the Uruguayan thinker, Eduardo Galeano laments in the epigraph for this chapter, in his poem, “Los Invisibles,” imperial power relations between Latin America and the brokers of financial aid and arbiters of foreign public debts, such as the IMF, the

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World Bank, and the InterAmerican Development Bank operate ostensibly to aid inclusion of the countries of the Global South in the systems of financial circulation that dominate the world’s economies. However, often these institutions, and the interests that sustain them, leave countries to be governed by forces other than the best interests of their citizens, by hegemonic interests that drive the mechanisms of global finance.16 Financial inclusion plays on the trope of prosperity, inasmuch as inclusion is sold as a medium for securing wealth and economic development, and correct financial conduct is coded as a question of morality. Ursula’s inclusion into the Davivienda family illustrates just that. Through becoming part of a bank “family” Ursula’s personhood is reconfigured as Homo oeconomicus “all the way down.”17 Her financial subjectivity is newly reformed through a revised set of practices she is expected to carry out as part of the Davivienda family. Regular payments of her debts, careful accounting of her interest payments, prayer for restraint, and acts of saving all contribute to the regimen of fiscal responsibility that acts on Ursula’s bank account as much as it does on her soul. Now having confessed her debt, Ursula enters into a new contract with a new banking family to which she is now committed.

life pr o je CtS a nD f ina nCia l e D uCat i o n To offer another example, the international consulting and “multi-sectoral network” Child and Youth Financial International (CYFI), funded by the MasterCard Foundation among others, has worked with the Colombian Bank of the Republic, as well as Bancolombia (the largest banking conglomerate in Colombia), and Asobancaria (the private banking lobby firm) to develop financial inclusion and financial citizenship programs for children and youth in Colombia.18 They declare that “to improve the financial inclusion of every child, CYFI aims to ensure that every young person has the right to own and operate bank savings accounts by working with banks and other financial service providers.”19 In a conversation with the director of Thought, Leadership, and Consultancy with CYFI, he told me: “Listen, having a bank account is a human right, and economic citizenship is the way we want children to be thinking of themselves, as

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part of a national community and a financial community. I mean, the best time to start training financial education is even before kids enter kindergarten. We hope that soon banks will start subsidizing entire schools, then the economic education will be a transversal value that kids get in all their subjects.”20 Banks becoming the owners of institutions of learning has been ongoing for decades, as part of programs of austerity that work to increasingly push the public commons into private hands. The concern, of course, is the strings that would be attached to curricula designed by banking institutions, making finance, and a very particular version of what an “economy” is, a program of financial proselytization, and a naturalized representation of very socially constructed ideals of prosperity. Indeed, as the program of bankrolling schools illustrates well, finance has become the epitome of the virtual gaze. This is the gaze that operates at the level of digital accounts and numbers in order to animate a governance of the self, of the digital self, in an age of democratized economics. Away from the stratified class structures of proletariat, bourgeoisie, and capitalist classes, the secret of finance is found in the mirage of deregulated power, and the extrapolation and networking of the panopticon.21 Furthermore, in the individualized, privatized, and differentiated realm of the neoliberal soul-scape, it is truly a risk to be excluded from the credit system. Credit, credit cards, and other forms of microcredit, without a doubt, create possibilities for consumption, for education, for purchasing groceries in the midst of precarious employment, or even unemployment. Credit offers an immediate and miraculous degree of access that was not available without it. Colombia’s largest bank, Bancolombia, was the first national bank to design a financial education curriculum to be implemented in elementary schools. Following the tutelage of international advisory organizations, like Child and Youth Financial International and the World Bank, Bancolombia has developed an educational platform available online, as well as a twelve-module educational packet that begins in kindergarten. On the online platform, children can play games that teach them about different kinds of financial services, such as savings accounts, checking accounts, the difference between a debit card and a credit card, interest rates, and the concept of “investment.” Central to the financial education program is the overarching theme of “Proyecto de vida,” or life project.

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The life project is a transversal axis of financial education programming. The children that are the focus of these programs are school age, between five and sixteen years old, in public schools throughout the country. The Bancolombia program has been implemented in 160 schools throughout the country (Atlantic Coast, Antioquia, Cundinamarca, including Bogotá, Valle del Cauca, Cauca, Córdoba, and Northern Santander). Over one hundred thousand children have been trained in the financial education modules in schools and almost ten thousand are registered on the online platform. At the entrance to the offices of the for-profit advising company that helped Bancolombia write the curriculum, posters of smiling nineyear-olds greet the visitor to the world of inclusion. “Financial education from Bancolombia gives me the possibilities of working for the future of a new society,” beam the bright letters on the shiny, framed poster picturing an eloquent, but clearly poor, sixth grader. “Financial education has taught me to save money to live my life project,” says another poster, featuring a smiling youngster. The leitmotif of “life project” places financial inclusion within an overtly moral register. Yet this is nothing new for strategies of banking the poor.

Civili zing Mi SSion S of b a n k in g Despite being presented in the flashy gloss of the early twenty-first century, the strategies of financial inclusion are not all that recent. The move to “bank” populations in Europe and Euro-America through the implementation of national currencies and paper money began already in the late eighteenth century. Campaigns of education and inclusion labeled the practice of hoarding money under the mattress as “barbaric,” and the “civilizing mission” of generating national reserves was presented as a democratizing move. The socialization of the hoard in the form of nationalized currency, a central reserve, and democratization of banking played a central role in Europe and Euro-America’s rise to global dominance. “One can see that history attests to the gradual creation of one, giant mattress [under which the collective savings of the nation should be secured]. In the United States, this mattress is called Fort Knox,” anthropologist Gustav Peebles tells us.22 “Hoarding” has been a maligned practice for

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centuries.23 Hoarding has been associated with “barbaric” practices of immobilizing capital and even putting into question the humanity of those who remained outside the financial system.24 National currency and the accessibility of banking services as a campaign of empire also resulted in the elevation of the practice of saving (in a bank) as a moral good and proper Christian practice. Christian reformers were the first advocates for banking services for the poor in England. Indeed, “Sunday banks” were the first banks in which deposits were accepted after the services. Oliver Horne’s 1947 book, A History of the Savings Bank, explains how the influence of Jeremy Bentham, the inventor of the panopticon and the inspiration for the constancy of an external gaze, was central to the establishment of the first “Industry Houses,” which would employ the “burdensome poor” and retain “Frugality Banks.” “If no Industry House was near, the Church Vestry might serve as the bank” explains Horne.25 The problem of the poor and their assumed hoarding tendencies was the focus of the “Sunday Banks” and the “Frugality Banks” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Scotland and Great Britain. Similar to the logic of financial inclusion in Colombia today, the early charitable reformers from religious groups, like Priscilla Wakefield who championed the first Sunday Banks in the region of Tottenham, said: “From observing that many of the poor, particularly servants, either squandered away their savings or lent them to those less prudent than themselves, from the want of a convenient opportunity of placing them where they would be secure, it occurred to me that an association might be formed which would afford them complete safety, in their own neighborhood, by the guarantee of a few respectable persons of property.”26 The pooling of savings performed a regulatory function as much as the important role of bringing greater sums of money into circulation, thus strengthening national economies and currencies.27 Peebles offers that “by circulating one’s economic wealth as capital, one is announcing a trust in social institutions, a willingness to trust things outside oneself.”28 This is an important component of the growing trust in the financial system that has been necessary over the centuries to secure the belief structure that sustains international finance today. These moves toward a centralized banking system are often written into history as simply the natural evolution of economics, and, indeed, part and parcel of the beneficent and improved effectiveness of banking institutions. As

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the “Father of Savings Banks” Henry Duncan, attested: “Those who know anything of the situation of the lower orders will readily be aware of the temptations and discouragements to which such a plan [to store money under the mattress or under a rock] is necessarily subjected. . . . The temptation to break in upon the little stock on every emergency might be too strong to resist.”29 The process of banking the poor, even two centuries ago, was a civilizing process as much as an effort to produce a financially responsible subject. The objective was to train not only money handling but also the body—and the soul. This process, of course, developed a special class of workers who would take over the commons of public assets and relieve the worry of individuals in protecting their hoard. These were the bankers and bill brokers and upstanding property owners.30 By removing the temptations of money from the individual and transferring responsibility to upstanding members of society, the church or the banker, in these early cases, the proper use of money was instilled in the errant and uneducated populace of the “newly banked” or in modern parlance, the “newly served.” This was a positive development for all parties involved, so the history tells us, as it converted tiny hoardings of individuals into interest-bearing capital and provided a new source of investment money. At the same time, the people newly inaugurated into the banking system were trained in bodily comportment and moral regulations befitting of the new status they had acquired as “diligent investors.”31 As one “banking school” taught, the manners and benefits of depositing money required combed hair and appropriate attire.32 Financial education and inclusion, then, began as an intentional campaign to strengthen national currencies through the wide circulation of paper money and a democratization of the banking system. Peebles points out the importance of the banking endeavor in the establishment of the European powers moving into the Industrial Revolution and the twentieth century, citing an article from the Edinburgh Review shortly after the Battle of Waterloo: “It would be difficult, we fear, to convince either the people or their rulers that such an event [the spread of savings banks] is of far more importance and far more likely to increase the happiness and even the greatness of the nation than the most brilliant success of its arms or the most stupendous improvement of its trade or agriculture—and yet we are persuaded that it is so.”33

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I belabor this history because in the era of financial inclusion in the twenty-first century, much of the rhetoric and discourse of the morality of banking the poor remains a constant and is becoming entirely naturalized— even celebrated. However, inclusion into the financial system is as much a project of the financial elite as it is a project of the charismatic faith that this study considers.

a nti- h oarD in g, pr o - Chr i Stia n The history of anti-hoarding is also part of US fiscal history and, thereby, Colombian banking history. In the 1930s Herbert Hoover initiated an “Anti-Hoarding Campaign” in response to the Great Recession.34 In 1933, incoming president Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a governmental decree, Executive Order 6102, that made it illegal to “hoard gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States by individuals, partnerships, associations, and corporations.”35 It should be noted that the development of the Colombian Bank of the Republic, its operations and its philosophy, was significantly influenced by economists and “bank doctors” based in the United States, who had inherited English banking systems. These bank doctors were involved in the development of the central banking system of the United States that became one of the most powerful institutions in the United States, and, arguably, the world, especially as it grew in power in the wake of the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”36 Already in 1923, the Colombian government invited Edwin Walter Kremmerer, a renowned “bank doctor” who was in high demand as a consultant and advisor for the development of “healthy” banking systems around the world in the post–World War I era. Kremmerer advised the Colombian government to establish a central bank, which became the Colombian Bank of the Republic. The creation of the Bank of the Republic constituted centralized control over money creation (minting and printing) and thereby established federal management of liquidity in the Colombian economy. In a 2014 missive, the Colombian Bank of the Republic called for individuals to put their “coin into circulation” through spending and investing (by opening bank accounts), stating: “the high demand for metallic money [coin] . . . is related to public hoarding . . . which has restricted

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free circulation of coin as a method of payment and generates pressure on other forms of payment.”37 This hoarding of coin had to do with, first, the lowest denomination that had been printed in bills until 2013, the $1,000 pesos bill, being taken out of circulation and produced in coin. Second, the call from public institutions for Colombians to “save money” backfired, as millions of Colombians took their new, $1,000 peso coins, along with all the other coinage, $500, $200, $100 pesos, and threw them into piggy banks, instead of using them in circulation. When the public sector, the banks, the government, and the public education system enjoined the Colombian public to “become banked,” they meant to persuade people to put their piggy-bank savings, the savings under the mattress, the money buried in a field into a bank account, and, simultaneously, to affect the manner in which individuals think about saving and money. As the director of financial inclusion for the Bank of the Republic told me in an interview: “Colombians don’t have a culture of saving. They don’t trust institutions. But we need to change this culture. Banking the population is a way to change the culture of hoarding money under mattresses and in holes dug in the ground. Their money is so much safer in a bank.”38 In conversation with Pastor Miguel in Garzal a few weeks after this interview in the bank in Bogotá, I asked him about people burying their money. “Oh, of course people do that. Yes. They bury it in a secret hiding place on their land. Or under their house.” I asked why people did not put their money in a bank. The pastor laughed. “Because it’s not safe there!”

fer nanDa’S i n Clu Sion I sat in Fernanda’s kitchen, watching her busily make coffee. First, she reached for the aluminum chocolatera, or chocolate maker, an appliance also appropriate for making tinto, thick, and often very sweet, coffee. She filled it with water and set it on the gas stove to heat. She stirred in raw, brown sugar, and then waited for the water to boil. As the water heated, she got out the Sello Rojo coffee. The recognizable red, shiny bag flashed. It was a sunny morning, but ceramic tile floors always give a cool, mountain chill to a room on the first floor of any apartment building in Bogotá.

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Fernanda lived in a quaint residential neighborhood in Bogotá’s east end. Her apartment was in a gated residence, guarded by security guards around the clock, with large shotguns under their desk and muzzled rottweilers who sniffed cars for explosives upon entry into the parking lot. As a public school teacher, and middle class to be sure, Fernanda was proud to show me her lovely home. It was a sign of God’s blessing upon her life that she was a homeowner; that is how she explained it to me. Busied with the coffee, Fernanda told me about the first moment she realized God was “working in her life.” It was at her mother’s funeral, when she felt inexplicably compelled to give an offering to a Pentecostal pastor from her mother’s church. “I was still an atheist. . . . I never understood what the Lord did with me.” The water boiled, and Fernanda turned off the burner, scooped two heaping tablespoons of ground coffee, stirred, and then covered the chocolatera with a plate to let the coffee “sit” or filter through the water. She poured the coffee into a cup that proudly read “Colombian Coffee” through a cheesecloth sieve. Finally, placing the tiny tinto cup on a tiny saucer in front of me, Fernanda sat down and told me why she had been moved to give money to the pastors of the church. “I saw them [the pastors] and I told them, “Take, take this offering. Use some of it for your buses and transportation to visit people and give the rest as an offering to your church.” Fernanda told the story of her gradual conversion or, as she puts it, “drawing closer to the feet of the Lord” her “salvation” and “being well with God” as a genealogy of small miracles. And many of those small miracles were small financial interactions, or what she called milagros cotidianos (everyday miracles). “The first thing I did was give them money, and I didn’t even know why. God works in wondrous ways.” Notably, Fernanda describes her initial participation in God’s plan as through the gift of money. The pastors of her mother’s church had visited Fernanda’s mother in her last days, and Fernanda noted, “My mother’s face changed when the pastors spoke with her about God or read the Bible to her.” In retrospect, Fernanda realized that the first moment she began to include herself, or feel drawn to participate, in the community of believers of the Misión Carismática Internacional (MCI), was the moment she economically engaged. The practice of giving money to these particular pastors for Fernanda was completely different than “giving alms to [Catholic] priests who take everything, and all other manner of dishonesty.” This

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was different. This was a true and God-directed decision, according to Fernanda. It was her first promise, her first pact, her first sacrifice, her first contract with God, her first debt payment, and her first commitment sealed through financial transaction. It was a ritual practice of believing and inclusion into a realm she had not yet comprehended. Inclusion for Fernanda, into God’s Kingdom, into the community that is the MCI, in her cell group led by a senator of the Republic, Melisa García, and her inclusion into the nation, turned on a central practice of monetary transaction. What began to emerge in Fernanda’s story is that financial transaction has been a signifier of vital importance in her “faith journey.” After having gifted her mother’s church with an offering, she had a miraculous experience only a few months later, with a sister who was already a “pastor” in the church.39 “What do you want? Ask for it, and I will pray for it for you” Fernanda’s sister had told her. Fernanda asked for an apartment. Just three months after praying for an apartment, Fernanda won the lottery in a work-sponsored rotating savings and credit association (ROSCAS).40 This win was enough for Fernanda to put a down payment on her apartment. She was now eligible for a loan from the bank. “If it hadn’t been for that miracle, I would never have been eligible for a credit from the bank.” The economic miracle was more than simply providing Fernanda with the liquidity she needed to become “debt worthy.” It was, in her mind, a direct intervention from God in one of the most resolutely miraculous and difficult areas of life for members of the MCI, and Colombia generally: finance.

DeC o lo n izin g p r o S per ity For Fernanda, as for Ursula and for Remedios, practices of consumption— from the basic level of survival to the bold level of a down payment on a house—were revelatory of God’s abundant love for them. The practices of prosperity became central to Fernanda’s engagement with the MCI and Remedios’s involvement with a local microcredit NGO. At the MCI, congregants consume the dozens of books written by the pastors César Castellanos and his wife, Claudia, as well as the other tomes by evangelists and pastors from around the world, such as Benny Hinn, David Yonggi Cho,

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and Joel Osteen. The “Commercial Center” at the church was relentlessly abuzz with women and men contemplating the new jewelry collections that came weekly, CDs and DVDs of the local celebrity church music group, Generación 12, clothing, stationary, and all other manner of products, not only attracting the consuming habits of an aspirationally upwardly mobile congregation, but indeed branding them as a particular kind of Christian in the streets of Bogotá. Youth proudly sport their G12 backpacks and notebooks, while the women recognize each other’s jewelry and umbrellas, and the gentlemen compare Bibles. These acts of consumption proudly announce inclusion into the institution of the MCI. They also reveal a purchasing power made possible by an increasingly affluent and also indebted urban population in Bogotá. This conspicuous consumption marks the faithful as fully included in the MCI, and proud of it.41 Yet, the promise of prosperity offered in remuneration for faithful practice is only where the MCI and Christian credit begin the program of inclusion into God’s Kingdom. The promise animates a louder discourse of inclusion coming from governments, banks, and nongovernmental institutions in Colombia: invitations to “become part of something new” or at the very least something “better”; the promise drips with potential prosperity, advancement, and the ever-elusive “development.” It is tremendously appealing, of course. However, the promise and the reality are deeply contradictory. To be included does not always mean to be included equally. Prosperity practice is perhaps most legible at the level of the ostentatious. Scholars who study Prosperity Christianity have indeed spent significant time analyzing these manifestations of prosperity practices, which include the purchase of such nonessentials as new television sets, milliondollar houses, private jets, iPads, thousand-dollar shoes, fancy cars, and the like, by successful prosperity evangelists. From Susan Harding’s The Book of Jerry Falwell in 2001 to more recent articles like, “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” published in the Atlantic in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, prosperity theology has been cast in a critical light, shaped and interpreted often through Harding’s lens of the “repugnant other.”42 These approaches tend to position Christianity in relationship to economic and political change. Either as victim or reactive force, variously named “evangelical” or “prosperity” or “charismatic,” Christianity is kept in a separate sphere from the economic and political.

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More productive, I suggest, is connecting nodes of practice between religion and economy. Prosperity practices, then, can be read as blurring stark distinctions between the sacred and the proverbial profanity of the market, and exist and emerge precisely in the spaces of encounter between the economic and the religious. An analysis of Prosperity Christianity from this point of view overrides any judgment of correct doctrine or theology and instead works to identify a broader phenomenon. Yet prosperity is the not just the promise of a select few Pentecostal churches in the Global South.43 Nor is it only about flat-screen televisions.44 Centuries of colonialism in the Americas have found epistemological, even ontological, justification in “prosperity.” Through the construction of the very idea of Latin America, the prosperity of dominant classes has been cloaked in the ethic of coloniality and an ethic of entitlement veiled in religious discourse.45 Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Romanus Pontifex in 1455, saying as much: We weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation, and noting that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso—to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit—by having secured the said faculty, the said King Alfonso, or, by his authority, the aforesaid infante, justly and lawfully has acquired and possessed, and doth possess, these islands, lands, harbors, and seas, and they do of right belong and pertain to the said King Alfonso and his successors.46

According to Walter Mignolo, as well as many Latin American scholars and scholars of Latin America and America at large, the colonial project of “inventing” America is a project that is ongoing. For Mignolo, this invention of the “idea of America” was a historical moment in which capital transfigured itself into the regime of capitalism.47 Mignolo explains that the colonial, empirical, and racializing project of Europe through the

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Enlightenment to the era of modernity was accompanied by, tied to, and necessarily a part of coloniality. Mignolo proposes that the “logic of coloniality” be understood within four domains of human experience: “(1) the economic: appropriation of land, exploitation of labor, and control of finance; (2) the political: control of authority; (3) the civic: control of gender and sexuality; (4) the epistemic and the subjective/personal: control of knowledge and subjectivity.”48 This colonial history, resists linear historical lines because in order to understand coloniality as it operates today as a program of power one must recognize its heterogenous historico-structural form. To understand the ongoing project of modern and late capitalist forms of accumulation and subjectivation is to understand capitalism as continuing its expansion over lands, over bodies, and over souls. Max Weber did not consider Latin America in his analysis of industrial capitalism and the spirits that guided its progress. In Latin America, the Spirit was not, initially of a Protestant nature, yet the end game of colonial capitalism was designed within a religious frame, albeit Catholic.49 The prosperity of the empires of Spain and Portugal, the two most significant colonizers of the Americas, developed within the “civilizing project” of the Christian conquistadores. The Americas were conquered, and particular historical understandings of prosperity shaped religious colonial America. Of course, prosperity in the fifteenth century was understood differently than prosperity in contemporary Colombia. However, the point here is that accumulation by dispossession during the conquest was a brutal overtaking of land, looting of communities, and indigenous genocide. Today, in Latin America, capitalist modes of production and debt relations require these practices to continue alongside dispossession by financialization—the accumulation of credit card and other financial forms of debt. Capitalism develops differently in conquered lands than in conquering lands. The spirits, then, that guide its movement look and act differently. Where capitalism develops determines how capitalism develops. It is a spatialized and emplaced process of “vertical encompassment.”50 Capitalist practices of prosperity within a Weberian analytic, many centuries after the launch of colonial capitalism, focused on industrialized capitalism in the United States and Europe, and tied capitalist development to a distinctly pious ascetic, a Calvinist focus on predestination, and

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Figure 15. Children looking into a school classroom in Garzal. Photo by Javier Núñez.

an impenetrable individualism.51 Weber staked the claim for a series of interrogations into the “mentality of Western capitalism.”52 Of course, Weber was very critical of German Catholicism’s “traditional, hostility to progress, and culturally ‘inferior’ ” approach to economic development, above all, their “unworldly” pietism that seemed antithetical to the “philosophy of avarice” championed by the Protestant founders of North America. Invoking the famous words spoken by the quintessential capitalist Benjamin Franklin, Weber describes what this “spirit” of capitalism that separated the New World from the Old might be: “Remember that time is money. . . . Remember that credit is money. . . . Remember that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. The most trifling actions that affect a man’s credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or eight at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy sixmonths longer.”53 Practices of prosperity for Weber’s Protestant capitalists were rooted in a disciplined ethic of austerity and accumulation. This had as much to do with their Protestant sensibilities as it did with the site and mechanics

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of capitalist development and production. Colonial capitalism animated a different set of practices of prosperity. Although significantly tied to Catholic structures of organization, governmentality, and bureaucracy, Latin America was produced by colonial capitalist progress and indeed was not, has never been, detached from capitalist development in North America. Indeed, there are those who suggest that if it were not for the conquest of the Americas, global capitalism, as we know it today, would not have developed.54 The genealogy of both colonialism and capitalism entangle endlessly with the shifting religious landscapes of the Americas. The emergence of religious practices and discourses that give animation to prosperity practices within the matrix of colonial capitalist development are as much a response to said development as they are productive of it. In the current wave of capitalist emergence, financial capitalism, pluralistic and diversified practices of prosperity are required for furthering financial reach. In this sense, the democratization of Latin America that took hold in the region in the early decades of the twentieth century has been as important to religious diversification as economic liberalization has been. Far from confirming David Stoll’s well-known question, “Is Latin America turning Protestant?” religious diversification and pluralization in Latin America has been the trend of the last century.55 Religious deregulation, or the diversification of religious freedoms to officially recognize religious traditions other than Roman Catholicism, has also become a central component of Latin America’s growing inclusion into the global community, including growing inclusion into the world’s expanding financial institutions. Diversified practices of prosperity cross the borders between bounded sites of religion and practice. Prosperity today is the promise that capitalism holds, shrouded in the mysteries of microeconomics, financial architectures, central banks, and religion. Practices of prosperous inclusion take place as both religious and economic practices.

f o r ei gn D eb tS : i nC lu S ion a S e n Co M pa SS Me n t Debt as a national practice of inclusion has a storied history in twentiethcentury Latin America. Being included into the global economy like a state, to borrow from James Ferguson’s concept of “encompassment” and

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the very idea of spatializing the state, is a helpful category to think with when considering inclusion into the market or the economy. As Ferguson and Gupta explain, “It is here that it becomes possible to speak of . . . State[s] . . . as constructed entities that are conceptualized and made socially effective through particular imaginative and symbolic devices that require study.”56 It is important to consider the economy as spatialized, in the way that Ferguson and Gupta suggest thinking about a state. Inclusion into this market, the specifically capitalist market, has been stimulated through debt relations in the Americas. The region of Latin America and its inclusion into the global economy through (primarily US) external financing began in the nineteenth century in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine, and broader geopolitical contexts.57 As economist Victor Bulmer-Thomas reflects, “Throughout the subcontinent, it was generally thought that the best hope for rapid economic advancement in Latin America was based in a more direct integration into the world economy by way of exporting products and importing capital.”58 To explain, the Monroe Doctrine was: “the declaration of a policy that had slowly ripened with American nationalism. As such it so well suited the position, the interest and sentiment of the United States, as to become a doctrine, deriving its sanction as no less from faith than from experience; and like religious doctrines, used to justify their later developments that their founder would hardly have recognized.”59 While the declaration is often read by historians as American isolationism and exceptionalism— a break from European encompassment—it was certainly an act of inclusion of Latin America into the hemispheric empirical architecture that the United States government then leveraged to balance power across the Atlantic. One of the effects of the Monroe Doctrine was staving off European armies seeking debt payments from Latin American countries. Even before the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine, hierarchical relations of debt and land ownership blurred lines of sovereignty and autonomy, as many national economies of the region have found themselves dwelling in varying degrees of sovereign debt crises from the time of Independence. The implementation of the Monroe Doctrine effectively spatialized Latin America in reference to North America (more specifically, the United States) and marked Latin America off from European colonial advancement, even though intimate ties remain between Europe

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and the region, beyond only the colonial. The uneven inclusion of Latin America into the imperial designs of the unitedd States has produced a particular stratagem of power, a matrix of contradicting invitations to inclusion in the broadly hierarchizing order, which is the market. It was the debt crisis of the 1980s that most significantly and devastatingly affected contemporary Latin American economic history.60 This “lost decade,” preceded by significant shifts in the global economic agenda, pushed Latin American nations into the program of financialization through debt relations and structural adjustment at levels of both collective nationhood, and individual personhood. The dissolution of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971, the OPEC oil crisis of 1973, the unhinging of global currency from the international gold standard and the shift to the US dollar as global standard for currency pricing, along with the establishment of the Federal Reserve in the United States, all contributed to significant transformations in world financial relations during the 1970s. The New York investment banks found themselves with a surplus of liquid assets and scarce sites for investment, after several decades of significant economic growth after the Second World War. In the 1970s, the threat of stagflation pushed the US government, under President Carter, to begin a process of restructuring production in the United States through dissolving labor organizations, privatizations, and the massive shift of capital investment abroad in search of cheaper and less-organized labor.61 The recycling of “petro-dollars” in the post1973 OPEC crisis resulted in a flush Wall Street with desperate need to seek investment opportunities abroad. The countries of the Global South lined up for loans. The US financiers, along with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, offered loans to Latin American countries of far more than what the countries could feasibly pay back. Effectively, these were subprime international loans, and the wager was made on foreign debts incurred at national levels of responsibility. David Harvey regards the New York banks as upholding the “US imperial tradition” through continuing imperialism, without “colonies” per se, but through financialized debt relations. Harvey cites Nicaragua as another paradigm case.62 In the 1920s, US marines were deployed to Nicaragua in order to protect US economic and political interests. Finding themselves embroiled in an insurgent guerilla war, led by campesino

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Augusto César Sandino, the United States sought out a local strongman to help repress an uprising that would potentially lead to the establishment of a government unfriendly to US interests. Through CIA collaboration, General Anastasio Somoza Garcia took control of the country in a coup d’état, and Sandino was assassinated by the military dictatorship in 1934. The dictatorship of Somoza would last for the next forty years in Nicaragua, and it effectively secured not only Nicaragua, but also the whole region of Central America, for US interests.63 This model of US military intervention in Latin America continued throughout the region for the majority of the twentieth century. Bethany Moreton names this US convention, coalescing in 1989 with the “Washington Consensus,” the “hardware of neoliberal perestroika in the Western Hemisphere.”64 Connecting back to Nicaragua, Moreton tells the “quiet backstory” of free trade in the Americas through rigorous research of the Christian overtones that shape-shifted political economy in the Americas. Moreton outlines the concomitant process of Pentecostal revival and free-market capitalism in Latin America as tied together in the making of “Christian Free Enterprise.” She cites the private-sector “Bentonville Consensus” as the Christian counterpoint to the Washington Consensus, saying “transnational evangelism dwarf[ed] other popular globalisms.”65 A series of privatizations, undoing of labor laws and protections, and inverting economies from import-based to export-based through what Bulmer-Thomas, among others, has named the “New Economic Model” were the characteristics of the Washington Consensus.66 Within the confines of international capitalist relations, the process of reducing the production potential of Latin American economies through the narrowing of national production to specialized commodities began with subprime loans and flooding the Latin American financial sector with easy credit. Countries awash in foreign capital began to invest as their economic advisors tutored. Many of those tutors were trained in Chicago School economics and received their MBAs in the Ozarks and Christian-based universities of America. The “Lost Decade” of the 1980s was a major win for US and other international private interests. Unable to pay the money owed, Latin American countries found themselves in the position of relying on foreign governments and International Financing Institutions (IFIs) to continue lending

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in order for them to continue paying. Defaults on debt payment, however, were tied to policy intervention and under the conditions for further loans, debt forgiveness, or other forms of international aid (earmarked for natural disasters, humanitarian aid, etc.). These conditions were most clearly established in the aforementioned Washington Consensus. Made up of the ten commandments of economic growth for the world’s developing economies, the Washington Consensus became the blueprint for policy reform in Latin American countries that defaulted on debt payments. These countries were instructed to implement a strict regime of economic and political discipline outlined in the consensus. The ten commandments of the Washington Consensus are as follows: 1. Fiscal discipline—strict criteria for limiting budget deficits 2. Public expenditure priorities—moving state economies away from subsidies and administration toward previously neglected fields with high economic returns 3. Tax reform—broadening the tax base and cutting marginal tax rates 4. Financial liberalization—interest rates should ideally be market determined 5. Exchange rates—should be managed to induce rapid growth in nontraditional exports 6. Trade liberalization 7. Increasing foreign direct investment (FDI)—by reducing barriers 8. Privatization—state enterprises should be privatized 9. Deregulation—abolition of regulations that impede the entry of new firms or restrict competition (except in the areas of safety, environment and finance) 10. Secure intellectual property rights (IPR)—without excessive costs and available to the informal sector67

These structural adjustments make up what is generally understood as “neoliberal policy.” These were the steps that indebted countries were instructed to implement in order to be included into the global economy and be eligible for more credits from the international financing institutions. The case of Colombia is particularly interesting, as Colombia was the only one of the major Latin American economies to avoid defaulting on

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foreign debts in the 1980s, in large part due to the flourishing drug economy that had infiltrated all sectors of government and society. Pablo Escobar, manager, mastermind, megalomaniac, and magician of the Medellin Cartel, supposedly offered to pay Colombia’s entire foreign debt in exchange for not being extradited to the United States. The shrouds of mystery and myth that surround the legendary capo (mafia boss) continue to inspire film and television empires, and re-animate the overt nature of Escobar’s political, spiritual, and cultural influence to this day, including the recurring revelations of intimate relationships between drug mafia and political elite.68 Indeed, the debt relations and relations of exchange between drug lords and politicians in Colombia constitute yet another theme for a more in-depth study. For the moment, this study will only mention the importance that the drug economy had in terms of Colombia’s foreign debt, in light of the broader debt crisis that brought Latin American economies into the program of financialization within the designs of neoliberal restructuring.

finanC ial i nClu S ion, be CoM ing ba n k e D, a nD t h e Co lo nial iS M of eC on o Mi C e nC oM pa SS M e n t I sat down with Juan Carlos in his corner office, overlooking the Bogotá skyline. Juan Carlos was then the director and inventor of DaviPlata, Colombia’s first e-banking system for cell phones, offered by the banking conglomerate Davivienda. He had just been awarded the McKinsey M Prize for Management Innovation by the Harvard Business Review for his work in financial inclusion through DaviPlata. He was happy to share his ideas with me. I had contacted Juan Carlos after a meeting with a broker for DaviPlata whom I had met through a friend. I had introduced myself as a Canadian researcher from the Universidad Nacional looking into processes of financial inclusion in Colombia. That was enough for Juan Carlos to make time in his busy schedule for me to have three meetings with him. He swiped his desk clear, revealing a desk whiteboard, and pulled out three different colored markers. “What are your questions?” he probed, looking at his watch. “I have forty minutes.” Juan Carlos was a busy man. The DaviPlata service has become one of the most successful strategies for financial inclusion that Colombia has experienced. “We realized we

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had saturated the peak of the market. Colombian banks had focused on the top tiers of economic productivity, and the top of the pyramid.” Juan Carlos sketched a large pyramid on his desk and circled the peak. “The wealthiest sector of society has been banked for decades.” I nodded, and sipped the thick, black coffee that the office empleada (maid), Manuela, had brought me on a silver platter in a tiny cup that teetered on a tiny saucer. “There was a whole other sector of the market that we weren’t exploring. The bottom two-thirds of the economic spectrum in Colombia are underserved, or unbanked.” He was referring to the fact that thirty-two million people in Colombia (out of a population of forty-five million) still do not have a bank account. “And there is money at the bottom of the pyramid. In general, there is money in all sectors of society. We just needed to find a way to access the market. That’s how DaviPlata—mobile banking—developed.” Financial inclusion was not a humanitarian mission for Juan Carlos. It was about channeling the millions of pesos that circulated in cash every day in Colombia into the formal financial system. It was about funneling the money that millions of women like Manuela sent to their mothers every month in remote rural towns through official financial channels. It was about including Manuela into a system that had excluded her for most of her life because of her social and economic condition. It was also about making money from her transactions. “There are no poor in Colombia, there are only people who don’t know how to manage their money,” Juan Carlos shared, making evident his position on the promise of harnessing the “poor” into the financial system. “Davivienda Bank believes that the human is an endless source of value,” the winning proposal to the Harvard Business Review states. It goes on to say, “This concept represents the center of its culture. The bank shares the Group’s [Bolivar Group] Higher Purpose: to enrich life with integrity.” The human is an endless source of value, and the Higher Purpose of the Bank is to enrich life with integrity. The moral designs of the banking program cannot be overstated. Financial inclusion is as much about “enriching life” and accessing the endless value of every person as it is about making money. Indeed, the very logic of financial inclusion was revealed as the firm conviction that every human being is a commodity in and of himself or herself. They have an intrinsic monetary worth. They are resources to be tapped. More specifically, their actions, such as sending an ailing mother

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money, and practices such as tithing in their churches, are to be harnessed within the financial system. “We are in the business of breaking the root of how things are done. We are introducing a new model” the Harvard proposal stated. Financial inclusion is the vanguard of banking around the world—and has been for centuries. The role of the moral management of bodily comportment entangles with the moral management of money, of life projects, of responsible consumption, and of becoming part of a financial family. Even if the state has not been able (or willing) to establish its presence in the entire country, in the form of schools, hospitals, security, and so on, the financial sector has certainly made the moves to become completely accessible and present in all sectors of Colombian society. Indeed, the initiative for financial inclusion was a state-decreed enterprise, only ten years ago. Where there are banks, it would seem the logic concludes, there is organized debt. Where there is organized debt, there is control. While profit is the central goal for financiers and bankers, like Juan Carlos, the broader consequence of the project of financialization is the control of subjects through a prescribed regulation of morality and action. The believing practices of prosperity work as vehicles of control in an increasingly financialized society. From Ursula’s inclusion into the Davivienda “family” to Fernanda’s inclusion in the MCI, to Colombia’s inclusion into the global markets, deregulated finance and deregulated Christianity organize their relational ties of inclusion around capital. From the criminalization of hoarding to the moralization of banking, capitalism has fed and grown off of the idea of “inclusion.” What becomes increasingly clear, however, is that such inclusion operates and organizes itself around capital in a hegemonic and hierarchical regime of power. Specters of colonialism haunt financial capitalism, especially insofar as “inclusion” often translates as a de facto vehicle for indebting the population. These forms of inclusion promise an aspirational eschatology, one in which prosperity will be possible through the endlessly demanding practices of fiscal discipline. Such is the encompassment that operates as a hierarchical structure of uneven power. Such is the essence of financial capitalism. Inclusion is a vehicle for indebtedness, especially as it harnesses the anxiety of increasingly deregulated aspirations. In particular, these vehicles act on the bodies of a newly accessible demographic: women.

5

Multiplication

DanCi ng f or the lor D “Mujeres! It’s time to dance for the Lord!” Claudia Castellanos, the indefatigable copastor of the Misión Carismática Internacional, swayed on stage with the worship band as back up. She cried out: “The Lord wants to multiply you! Call Him to multiply you! Multiplícame, Señor. Lord, multiply me!”1 Fernanda and her sister, Sofia, stood on either side of me in the crowd of women at the MCI Women’s Convention, which bore the name “Un solo corazón” (One single heart). They began to jump, clap, and twirl together with Pastora Claudia. She danced, she threw her head back and laughed, she raised her arms in the air and twirled. She grooved all over the stage. Castellanos is a lawyer, a mother of five, a doting wife, an ex-ambassador to Brazil, a former senator, a onetime member of Congress, and a successful CEO.2 In front of the sea of women, she wore a red dress and highheeled black leather boots. She had wagged her finger and demanded explanations from a male ex-president earlier in the morning and had argued with a male presidential candidate the day before—her public 136

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interview a performance of empowerment and bravado in front of the nation’s patriarchs. At this convention, she was selling her latest book, Dale color a tu vida (Give color to your life). Commercials for the book flashed on the large screens around the convention center every hour, during breaks. “Special offer! Today only! $15!” On the cover of her book she wore the same red dress she now danced in. The book—written for women, begins, “Queridas lectoras” (Dear female readers) and explains that God has a plan specifically for women: “The invitation God makes is to experience the life He has designed for you, a life in which you can have it all!”3 She recommends “finding your fragrance,” for every Christian woman carries a unique “fragrance of the Spirit.”4 She makes fashion suggestions to flatter the physique, for every Christian woman “is beautiful and should reflect the beauty that the Lord blessed her with.”5 She encourages being “anointed with the spirit of shopping” because “all women love to shop, and God wants his daughters to delight in their prosperity.”6 She is the multiplied “she.” All women, yet one woman, she is the product and the producer, the universal particular of Christian womanhood. All these pieces of herself make a whole and impressive sum. Her example is at once celebrity and intimate pastor; sisterly confidant and sage mother. And here, high up on stage, in front of thousands, she danced. The women followed suit, seeking their own multiplication. Fernanda grabbed my hand, and pulled me into the aisle of the church to dance with the mass of women. This chapter is about women—our bodies, desires, and aspirations as products and producers in late capitalism. This chapter also recasts the patriarchal forms of accumulation and control of the means of production in the light of necrofinancial realities. In the end, I suggest that finance capital is engineering new forms and methods of gendered subjectivities, of being a man or woman, at once precarious in their materiality, under threat, and at the same time fluid in their movement through spaces of power and submission. Multiplícame, as concept and as practice, is both an entirely idiosyncratic invitation from the female leadership of the MCI and a productive term to think with in a critique of financial capitalism and the Christian morality that underwrites it. Multiplícame encapsulates desires for multidimensional growth, including aspirations of prosperity, fertility, recognition, and leadership. The

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term is especially productive when thinking through “womanhood” in the frame of deregulation because the inherent contradictions of capitalism, particularly financial capitalism, are nowhere more apparent than in the lives of women.7 The contradiction lies in the ethnographic fact that while women are increasingly engaging in the public economic sphere of Colombia, earning salaries and becoming professionals, financializing capitalism, especially as it sustains gendered regimes of consumption practices, regulates women’s desires as it controls the performance of womanhood. Deregulated economies and deregulated Christianity act on the female body, on sexuality and on aspirations, and establish new hierarchies of gender, class, and race. Indeed, in this frame, gendered relations must also be understood as class relations, just as “women’s history” must also be understood as “class history.”8 To think with the idea of multiplication is to recognize the reproductive demands forced upon female bodies as these became means of labor production, in the brutal penetration of the capitalist order throughout the Americas, beginning with the reordering of gendered class relations with the European arrival, through to the much more recent programs of harnessing the consumptive and productive power of women as they have engaged the economic and political spheres. While Claudia Castellanos performs a liberated sexuality and emancipated economic and political power, the performance is bound to a heteronormative and patriarchal economy of distribution and plays out a degree of emancipation limited to the confines of the moneyed elite. Her mandate to the MCI women to multiply themselves accentuates the class differences between who is on stage and who aspires to be. Claudia’s own aspirations, second only to those of her husband and children, are reduced to a specific brand of purchase. Her power, while formidable, is tempered by the very biopolitical forces that continue to render the female body a site of control and discipline. The aspiration to become more, to be multiplied, especially as this is tied to orders of consumption and indebtedness, generate new mechanisms of control over the female classes who have ventured into the wage-labor force over the last decades. The forces to which I direct our attention are financialized capitalism and Christianity.9

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Capitali S M, La Co n qu i sta , anD th e Mu ltipl e W o M a n As discussed in detail in chapter 2, indebtedness is a form of internalized governance that has achieved a particular resonance with “women’s issues” given the force of the discourse on the feminization of poverty throughout the Global South.10 In part, this is due to the fact that only recently, within the last fifty years, have women become a target for programs of financialization, as an emerging working class and, thereby an emerging class of consumers. This is also related to the second wave of feminist development discourse, beginning in the 1970s with the recognition that women around the world experienced the social and economic inequalities of capitalist expansion differently, and usually more acutely, than men, and that the majority of the world’s poor were women. This movement motivated the “Decade of the Woman,” declared by the United Nations as 1975–1985. These developments coordinated the “emancipation of women” with the neoliberal imperatives of individualized entrepreneurial effort, micro-financialization, and the further privatization of women’s reproductive rights, alongside the essentialization of the feminine subject.11 On another level, the feminization of poverty has its roots in colonial capitalist reordering of gendered class relations, which relegated the reproductive labor of women into the “private” sphere, essentially segregating women to the home and rendering them politically invisible, while privatizing land ownership and establishing productive labor as the only labor of any value.12 Capitalist expansion into the Americas begins with the genocide and exploitation of Indigenous populations, forcing them into an early capitalist labor force for the production of those precious new commodities the Americas offered: gold and silver. Women’s bodies became sites of labor production, especially as up to 95 percent of the Indigenous populations of the southern Americas were annihilated in the first century of conquest, and labor power became scarce.13 Sustaining the conquest, and protracting alongside it, was the Iberian Catholicism that underwrote the Doctrine of Discovery (see chapter 4).14 Women were doubly marginalized through the establishment of new orders of class and

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labor, as well as a new racialized religious cosmovision. The Virgin Mary, for example, is a predominant figure in Latin American Christianity, yet she was initially introduced by the conquistadores as a strategy for the domestication of women. The original manifestations of the Virgin Mary were the representations of noble Spanish women connected primarily to the Spanish ruling class. She was also white. Mary represented the embodiment of a racialized hierarchy and a distant and detached expression of God. During the colonial era, the imposition of a colonial political and socioeconomic order rendered women as impure objects, inherently flawed, and second class, as well as reproducers. They were the essentialized Other, meant to be seen and not heard—or felt. Women were expected to be submissive to their fathers, brothers, husbands, and priests. Indigenous, Afro-descendent, and women of other mixed races were doubly othered, as they were categorized by their race into lower social castes than European women. Black, Indigenous, and mestiza women were prohibited from participating in religious ceremonies, from being nuns or leaders in the church, and were subject to sexual violence from not only Spanish conquistadores, but also priests themselves.15 The trans-Atlantic slave trade was established to replenish the diminshing labor force, and enslaved women became both producers and reproducers of New World commodities as well as labor.16 Bolivian sociologist, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, illustrates that Christian, and later “Victorian” ideals of paterfamilias as first authority, after God, in the lives of women operated in concert with processes of proletarianization of the work force, and colonization of familial orders. “Modernity” as it arrived to the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth century continued the privatization and domestication of Indigenous women through disregarding the authority of their knowledge as spiritual leaders, weavers, and ritual authorities.17 Italian historian Silvia Federici fastidiously documents the linkage between the emergence of capitalist modes of production and exploitation alongside the proliferation of a “war against women” in the formation of capitalist economies in Europe and the Americas. Federici tells us that feminist scholarship generally agrees that “the witch-hunt aimed at destroying the control that women had exercised over their reproductive function and served to pave the way for the development of a more oppressive patriarchal regime. . . . The witch-hunt was rooted in the social transformations

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that accompanied the rise of capitalism.”18 Federici poses that, in capitalist societies, “femininity has been constituted as a work-function, masking the production of the work-force under the cover of a biological destiny.”19 Biopolitical regimes of control notwithstanding, the relegation of women into spheres of reference defined by male authority in the Church, the State, and the home have produced a conflated problematic in which women in contemporary Colombia experience the forces of gendered regimes of control upon grids of class differences, racialized differences, and the differences produced by proximity to armed conflict. Efforts at managing female sovereignty continue in force today in Colombia, particularly in the spaces of deregulated Pentecostal and Evangelical Christianity. At the “Un solo corazón” convention in Bogotá, an entire day was spent on sermons and workshops that emphasized a rupture with brujería (witchcraft). Traditional healing practices, wisdom passed from grandmothers to granddaughters, folk secrets around conception, anticonception, marital harmony, and all manner of domestic matters that are managed within feminine networks of relations were named as dabbling in the dark arts of witchcraft. At the MCI convention, male pastor César Castellanos called on the women in the audience to abandon these un-Christian sources of wisdom, healing, and advice for surviving. “Don’t talk to your sister, or your mother for advice on how to keep your husband happy, or how to increase your fertility. Talk with your pastor. Pray to God. Come to church. La brujería te lleva por el lado oscuro” (Witchcraft will lead you down the dark path), Castellanos chided the women, as many wept their confession and nodded their acquiescence. Given the emphasis on rupturing these female ties, outside of “properly” Christian womanhood, we can gather that resistance to this break is widespread and continuing. After César’s sermon, the mega-screens in the auditorium flashed again their promotion of Claudia Castellanos’s new book: Here was the proper guide for prosperous, multiplicitous womanhood. For only $15. Multiplícame refers simultaneously to making more of the self as well as making more in material terms. The term points to work on the self in relation to external materiality, as financialization also does, “as a means of acquiring the self.”20 Fernanda explained to me that God’s work of

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perfection is never done—the self is an eternally unfinished project, just as the accumulation of goods is unending. “Multiply me” posits the individual as the product and the production of multiplicity in the financializing economy. The following vignette further illustrates this idea of multiplication.

“g oD Want S to g if t y ou ” “When God created women, he created them with a nature of purity, in her thoughts, her emotions, and her words. We need to recuperate our pure nature. Our identity is clear. It is not right for a man to be alone. Women were created to be the ideal helper. Dios te quiere encomendar” (God wants to gift you).21 The pastor and senator of the Republic Melisa García explained to the women their condition of commodity.22 It was a breakout session at the women’s convention, and Fernanda and her sister Sophia scribbled down notes and repeated the Bible verses that were being quoted to me, hoping I would write the verses down, not just my observations. These practices, technologies of the self that train and order womanhood, these performances of believing a “right” kind of woman into being, these are the practices that in the emergence of finance capitalism reshape the “desiring subject” into becoming the properly desired subject. “God wants to gift you” forces a consideration of woman as commodity, or rather the idea of woman as commodity, as “sign and signifier” in a masculine economy of exchange.23 Invoking a critique of structuralist anthropology, Judith Butler clarifies that Levi-Strauss’s consideration of the bride-gift and collateral-gift appeals to the misogynistic relational structures that strip woman of identity for herself and render her only as a reflection of male identity.24 To become the “desired subject,” “the gift,” in financializing capitalism is to perform the correct relational practices in reference to others, especially by going into debt in order to more fully perform the womanhood prescribed.25 Going into debt in order to put into practice the self-grooming and commodification of the relations that define women in reference to children, husband, and church, is part of the regime of believing practices that animate such a becoming. Ursula’s Christmas gift (chapter 1) is one illustration of this regime of practice. “I did it because I

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wanted prosperity for my family. God wants us to be prosperous. I believe that. I must.” Capitalism, the violence with which it forced itself upon the Americas, and the Christianity that accompanied and shaped it, required the extermination of feminine sovereignty. The transition to capitalism in the Americas does not begin with the movement toward wage labor in the twentieth century, and biopolitical power is not established through the end of the great famine in Europe (as Foucault suggested). Following the sociohistorical work of Federici and Cusicanqui, among others, we discover that biopolitical power and its necessity as a regime of control in budding capitalist endeavors in the Americas begins with violent conquest and the brutal regulation of procreation. Women were the first objects of biopolitical, and necropolitical, reach. Women are now the enduring targets of biofinance and necrofinance. The colonial roots of Christianity and capitalism as the matrix of power upon which church and state exercise their control of women’s bodies remain relevant when considering the regimes of control that today discipline womanhood in Colombia, often fatally managing female bodies and policing their aspirations. Bogotá is one of the most dangerous cities in the world for women and children, in terms of the risks of sexually motivated violence.26 Women in Colombia are also disciplined by the multivariant forces of financializing capital, including the drive to perform degrees of prosperity through regimented practices of consumption and indebtedness. “Multiply me,” operates as an impossible more-ness, expanding on the long-developed feminist consideration of the female body as at once a source of identity and liberation and, at the same time, a prison, constrained by discourse and violence.27 “The body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged labor; their primary ground of exploitation and resistance,” Federici sums up.28 In Colombia’s emerging financialization, credit cards designed especially for women, commercial microcredit programs that cater only to female heads of households, and the Banca de la Mujer (Bank of the woman) demonstrate a growing trend in financializing capitalism: women are the new financial subject.29 In Colombia’s deregulated Christianity, women are offered a promise of prosperous freedom only possible through tightly

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regimented practices and aspirational faith. Both financialization and deregulated Christianity police women and their aspirations via debt and violence. Indeed, the very deregulation of finance produces the violence of debt; a regime of control under which the aspiration to become a “prosperous woman” grinds upon the women who are already summarily policed in their practices of consumption, and their efforts to not be entirely consumed.

Co nSuMe or b e Con Su M e D To be sure, the women in Colombia’s burgeoning loci of deregulated and prosperity-driven Christianity movements are breaking out of an “elevated domesticity” with conversion to evangelical Christianity.30 Female leaders in La Misión Carismática Internacional (MCI) hold law degrees and public office. More like Oprah in their influence than quieted queens of domesticity, MCI leaders celebrate spiritual consumption, financial independence, entrepreneurialism, and public life. However, the majority of women in the MCI, as with Colombian society, are not lawyers or senators. The promise that greater access to credit in emerging nations will create conditions of “financial democratization” especially for women to be more significantly included in the economic system, creates an entirely new dynamic of risk to the most vulnerable members of society: poor women.31 The exhortation to “believe in yourself ” to live as the prosperous Christian woman you “can be” draws aspirational women into uneven processes of economic and spiritual access. Consumption and religion in financializing Colombia shape the gendered limits of a performed prosperity.32 I understand consumption and religion to be two sides of the same coin; indeed, they should be understood as intertwined in a “symphonic way” that places them as practices not “in opposition to each other but rather in collaboration.”33 As I illustrate in chapter 1, I continue here in the consideration of believing practice as an order of embodied practice. Tying practices of consumption to financialized systems of believing reveals ways that gender is disciplined through consumption, as well as the emancipatory promises of credit and the female selves that credit multiplies and reproduces.

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Figure 16. The G12 Convention Center in Bogotá. Photo by the author.

Claudia Castellanos might appear to be a sort of Colombian Evangelical version of Oprah, yet she represents and demonstrates, some clear differences. Kathryn Lofton explains the “spiritual capitalism” exemplified by Oprah as the “overlapping of the nature of these categories” (production, commodity, and consumption) traditionally defining capitalist processes. Lofton highlights that Oprah is both capitalist and consumer—but it is her taste that is so very productive; her O-pinion, as it were.34 Castellanos represents something similar, and while her taste (in perfume, in fashion, in hair color, in Bible translation) carries heavy weight, it is her relations of exchange and meaning that are productive. She, and what she represents, is more complex than a simple commodification of the Christian woman, although she also represents the commodification of the self. At the convention, on stage, she performed not only for the Lord and her disciples in the congregation, but also for her husband, copastor César Castellanos. On the stage of the women-only

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conference, César peeked through from behind the curtains on stage as his wife undulated in front of him, making appreciative faces at her dancing derriere for the whole congregation to see on the big screens around the hall. The women at the conference cheered and shrieked in appreciation of such conjugal sexuality. Claudia Castellanos does not operate in the individual vacuum of removed royalty that Oprah does. She operates only and entirely through a web of relations and social reproductions—and obligations, or debts. These webs of debt are the ties that construct the Christian woman, the consumable woman, and the consuming woman; the Christian woman becomes both the object and the instrument of financial capitalism.35 The Christian woman, according to many more conservative Christian traditions and theologies, is primordially in debt. She owes her existence to Adam’s rib and God’s (understood as celestial Father) efforts at creating her to be Adam’s companion.36 The MCI woman is reminded that she is first a daughter, then a wife, then a leader in the church, then a mother. “Dios nos sacó del hombre” (God made us from men), a sermon at the women’s conference reminds the women. It is the very idea of correct womanhood, the “regulatory fiction” that is the consumable product, and that makes the product desirable.37 The act of consuming that idea is what pushed Fernanda to go into debt in order to attend the women’s conference at the MCI. And it propelled Fernanda’s sister Sophia to begin her own business with a multilevel marketing company called Nu Skin, for which she went into debt. She told me, “Everything I learn here in church prepares me for working with Nu Skin!”38 Finance as a system of governmentality, as a disciplining regime, works on the idea of womanhood in its becoming—as Christian womanhood, as prosperous womanhood, as financialized personhood, and this work is never complete. Financialization as governmentality, then, produces the discursive regime within which womanhood performs itself into a “desired subjectivity.” “Today, liberate yourself from the mentality of a maid (empleada),” writes Claudia Castellanos in Dale color a tu vida. “You are not a slave, you are a daughter of God, and God’s inheritance is for you. Financial resurrection is possible in God; you can be multiplied.”39 Multiplication harnesses the aspirations of women operating within the frame of a deregulated Christianity. These aspirations are driven by believing

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the self upward on the ladder of social mobility. The desired subjectivity that Fernanda and Sofia strive for is one through which they will be desirable to God, recognizable to Claudia Castellanos, and resurrected from the hardships of financial difficulty. Much of this aspirational practice takes place through consumption, but also holds itself relevant within malecentric relations of reference.

go D a S father , g o D a S hu Sba nD Christian womanhood has become an important site of discipline of the prosperous woman hawked by the prophets of emergence in a Colombia becoming new. The “financialized woman” may proudly look to credit, credit cards, and microcredits, in order to liberate herself from the confines of scarcity. Her web of relations is the matrix of intelligibility through which consuming practices define and discipline her into the “virtuous woman” she is expected to be. Prosperity is tied up with consumptive power, and the prescriptions of materiality that shape gendered performance of the prosperous Christian kind. César and Claudia Castellanos, the pastoral couple of the MCI, animate the narrative of an ideal marriage, the desired family, the prosperous life. Melisa García, who in 2013 was a state senator, and part of the Castellanos’s personal cell group of twelve “disciples,” said as much in her cell group meeting after the women’s convention: “When we see the relationship that pastors César and Claudia have, that is how our relationship should be with God. Their relationship is how our relationship with God should be.” García led the cell group to which Fernanda and Sofia belonged, and I attended for 18 months during fieldwork. On this particular Tuesday evening, García held our “disciples” meeting in the Castellanos’s private quarters backstage at the MCI. The room, more like an apartment, had its own small kitchen, sleeping quarters, office space, bathroom, and dressing area. It was, in effect, a luxurious greenroom. Leading to the vaulted ceiling were grand white walls, bedecked with professional photographs of the Castellanos family. Larger than life, the central image of the Castellanos pastoral team, César and Claudia, smiled down upon our small group of “disciples.” They were the example to follow. The effort to become them ever unfinished.

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The Castellanos relationship is, in all of its celebrity swagger, the idyllic vision of a healthy, hetero-normative, loving relationship. César Castellanos respects his wife, as far as the spectators can see, and Claudia Castellanos plays the character of the willful wife, while at the same time maintaining the balance of demure obedience and deference. However, César and Claudia also perform the appropriate marriage dynamics of feminine sexualization for male pleasure. The issue here is not with the sexualization of women, but with the question of whose power this sexualization submits to. Claudia Castellanos reminds the female readership of her book that her relationship with her husband also reflects her relationship with the Spirit. She writes of an argument she had with César. He became angry with her, and for three days, was short with her and acted “indifferently.” (Three days!?) When he called her up to the stage at a conference, still angry, she writes that her words were: “Brothers and sisters, the Pastor has been indifferent to me. He has been cold to me over the last three days. But through prayer, the Holy Spirit has taught me an important lesson. We have been indifferent to Him. My feelings of sadness and rejection reflect the way the Holy Spirit feels about His church. He has been very sad and very afflicted. We must ask for forgiveness. It is time to allow the Spirit to enter, because He is a gentleman. It is time to reconcile with the Holy Spirit.”40 Back to the stage at the women’s conference, Claudia pretends to be unaware of her husband’s appreciative gaze as she performs for him, for the women of the conference, and for God. Only after the dancing is over, does César come out from behind the curtain to “surprise” his wife, and proceed to publicly confess his love and admiration for Claudia. The cameras filming the romantic moment close up on their faces, on Claudia’s tears as she listens to her husband praise her, on César getting down on one knee . . . the women scream with delight. César pulls out a diamond ring and asks his wife to recommit their marriage vows. The theatricality of the publicly shared performance of intimacy is commonplace in the MCI. Intimacy is a spiritual currency par excellence in the worship services, small group meetings, and one-on-one prayer sessions, and it is heightened for the conventions. Intimacy is how the Spirit moves in hearts and souls. The practice of “entering your intimate space with God” is regularly invoked and encouraged by the MCI leadership. Throughout the women’s convention, this intimacy is fabricated and

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constructed, by the women in attendance in prayer groups, in lunchtime conversations, in tearful laying on of hands during break-out sessions— the ecstasy of intimacy is bright and alive. It is produced in the regime of corporeal practices invoked during worship times. Raised arms, kneeling on the carpeted floor, crying, dancing, clasping hands together in prayer, twisting on the floor in torturous agony of despair, hugging those around you, holding hands, jumping; these are all variations of a corporality of intimacy with the Spirit that is a prescribed performance at the MCI. These are physical technologies of discipline. So too are specific practices of consumption. The promise of economic independence, of acquiring the self through practices of consumption is at the heart of financialization, as Randy Martin reminds us. Financialization is the dialectic work of making the self both product and production, commodity and consumer, subject but not complete. This is the soul of profiting without producing. And it is at the heart of “multiplicame”—“multiply me.” These practices are encouraged by a process of emergence that holds in tension an ancien régime of discipline and terror in Colombia (through the war, the high indices of domestic violence, and the rampant urban violence so common in large Latin American metropolises), while simultaneously introducing a modern model of biopolitical governance of debt perpetuated through believing financial practice. In Colombia, there has not been a clear “modern” shift from a disciplining governmentality to internalized technologies of the self as closed and complete, especially insofar as the idea of “woman” is concerned. The technologies of the “female self ” as internal policing and selfanalysis in order to reform the soul, grate against the external, constantly and violently enforced reminders of what “being woman” means. Domestic violence, violence against women in the home, is as ubiquitous as it is silent.41 Colombia reports astonishingly high levels of domestic violence, and significant popular legitimation for violence against women. A 2015 study reveals that 37 percent of Colombians agreed “women who dress provocatively put themselves in danger of being raped” and 45 percent of Colombians believe that if a woman continues a relationship with a man who has beaten her, it is because she enjoys being beaten.42 Indeed, as of 2010, an average of 80 percent of women in Colombia had experienced some level of domestic violence, and the percentage of women

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who reported physical abuse by their husbands rose from 18 percent in 1990 to 38 percent in 2010.43 In Latin America, cases of femicide are on the rise.44 Violence against women operates to discipline the feminine body and narrowly prescribe a performance of gender that reinforces phallogocentric and patriarchal economies of circulation and exchange. As Argentinian anthropologist, Rita Laura Segato has brilliantly summarized on the connection between capital and female death, “Femicide demonstrates the direct relation that exists between capital and death, between accumulation and unregulated concentration and the sacrifice of poor, mestiza women, devoured where the monetary and symbolic economies, the control of resources and the power of death are articulated.”45 The prescription of “identity” in relation to a patriarch (God, Father, Husband) closes off the critical theoretical work necessary to deconstruct (once again) the “naturalness” of financializing worlds. It follows that the hegemony of financialized logics are threatened through querying the very “nature” of gendered relations. Credit, debt, and consumption discipline Christian personhood in Colombia, and in a particular way, gender performance. Look no further than the “I Am a Girl” campaign run by Plan International, in 2015. This program, funded by MasterCard Foundation, Visa Foundation, and the United Nations Financial Inclusion branch, among other sponsors, sells sponsorship of girls as the key to developing countries. “Invest in me because I am a girl. Watch me grow and watch your investment grow. Your investment will allow me to go to school.” So go the television commercials. All of this messaging, to North American and European audiences, reinforces the idea that investing in girls is the key to improving the developmental conditions of the generic “Third World.” They also further the subjectivation of woman as a “site of investment,” her very body becoming a site of profit production. Both consumption and debt are ways that the body believes. Prosperity is prescribed through performances that produce the “prosperous woman,” who is the multiplied woman and at the same time the nonentity, in the MCI and in other diverse spaces of financialization in Colombia. The disciplining power of debt and consumption defines gender in Colombia. Women are the new objects of financialization’s reach, and the intimacy of debt reproduces practices of indebted womanhood.

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feeling the S pir it Mov e in y o u “You’re thinking too much,” Fernanda chided me. I stood with my principal informant in line to enter the woman’s conference at the Misión Carismática Internacional. Fernanda had been explaining to me why going into debt in order to attend this conference was a spirit-led decision. In the busy lineup of women, I knew that many of the faithful had made significant financial sacrifices, many on credit cards, to attend the four-day conference. My questions (and noted lack of engagement with the Spirit) were beginning to annoy Fernanda. “Stop asking so many questions, and just surrender to the Spirit,” she told me as we jostled into the main church building. The throng of women was loud and thick in the main foyer of the church. It trailed out the doors, down two city blocks, rippling with excitement and expectation. Thousands of women were preparing to feel the spirit move. Thousands more had already felt the spirit lead them to go into debt. Fernanda regularly admonished my barrage of questions with the warning that the devil plays in the dangerous spaces of critical and objective thought. “You must feel the Spirit move in you. You can’t understand anything with so-called ‘rational’ thought. Tienes que sentirlo mover en ti” (You have to feel him move). The movement of capital and the movement of the Spirit present an ethnographic problematic when believing as practice is foregrounded. Ethnographically speaking, Fernanda’s insistence that I “feel the spirit move” was as much an admonition to internally and affectively sense the spirit move, as it was a demand for corporeal performance of believing practice. And in no other moment did believing practice become as clearly animated than at the moment of going into debt for God. When Fernanda first encouraged me to feel the spirit move, I asked: How? She named a number of actions: opening up, letting go, tuning in. She placed most emphasis on “completely giving yourself over to God”— a central trope of Christian sacrificial economy. She told me, “Once you give yourself over, then you will know what God wants you to do.” But how? I insisted. “Well, the first thing you should do is raise your arms when we are worshipping. Raise your arms high above your head, and

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let God in. What do you feel when your hands are up like this?” “Vulnerable” I responded. Fernanda nodded and looked pleased. While Amy Cuddy would have us believe that raising our arms in the air is a corporeal expression of victory, at the MCI, in South America, the body language was performed vulnerability—an act of embodied discipline; a public display of believing.46 Kneeling. Dancing. Prostrating. These are practices of believing. These are also disciplinary practices of doing the body, as they are practices of doing belief, or, believing. Discernment as doing, then, is central to understanding going into debt—for God, and with God. Receiving the gift of discernment first requires a regime of embodied practice, raising arms, kneeling, prostrating.

finanC e an D S oC ia l r epr o Du Ct i o n Credit is not the equalizing force for economic democracy it purports to be. Until relations of uneven power structures are considered by the prophets of financialized futures, the emancipatory premise of universal credit, bank accounts, and cashless societies unfurl in the web of contradictions that Marx outlined centuries ago. Woman as gift, woman as commodity, woman whose relations are commodified, becomes alienated from herself as product and producer. Indeed, as Ananya Roy has convincingly demonstrated, the poor, and especially the female poor, are disciplined while appeased through “novel experimentations” of varying degrees of indebtedness.47 The discourse around credit as a human right, like much human rights discourse and most financial discourse, works to veil structural exploitation, exploitations of the poor, of the aspirational, of the precarious, and of women. Capital’s reproduction, as Max Haiven has proposed, “depends on and transforms the social fictions that animate society.”48 The injection of credit, or fictitious capital as Marx called it, into society works to reproduce the disciplinary power of capital accumulation through mobilizing debt as a means of creating and deploying surplus value, exploiting labor, and shaping economic and social production.49 Consumption on credit is one of the primary social fictions that credit—and believing—enables. Another example illustrates this well.

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“How are my princesses doing?” Melisa García addressed the small group women gathered for their weekly discipleship meeting. “For the next few weeks we’re focusing on Proverbs 31, verses ten to thirty-one, the story of the Virtuous Woman, in preparation for the Women’s Convention coming up.”50 García thumbed her iPad, looking for the verses on her iBible. She looked up to the group, and ceremoniously removed her glasses. Senadora García began by asking the women if they had ever had a “supernatural experience.” Central to having such an experience, explained García, was to “see ourselves as God sees us. When we can do this, miracles happen.” The group of women furiously scribbled notes, recorded on their cell phones, and nodded vigorously. They had all had a supernatural experience of some kind. Some shared—miracles of employment for spouses after months of joblessness, miracles of fertility after years of barrenness, miracles of children turning lives around and beginning to “walk with God.” García always only allowed for very few minutes of talk before she dominated the realm of biblical interpretation again. “We women are more sensitive and more impatient [than men]” she began. “We have to find ways to be better for God. We’re capricious. We want to tell God what we want, and how we want it. Así no es,” (That’s not how it goes). She continued to explain that women speak too much, that women pretend to know and “impose our own thoughts and opinions” when in fact it is only God who can speak and clarify, through the movement of the Spirit, what right action is.51 “In the proverb,” García explained, “the virtuous woman is married to a prosperous man. She is confident and patient. She does no wrong to her husband. She works joyfully for her household. She is generous and loving. Most importantly, she manages her time wisely.” To illustrate this point, she gave the example of her “dear” empleada, who for twenty-three years had been washing the floors in a way that García considered inefficient. “She isn’t using her time wisely, like the virtuous woman should. See?” García looked around the room, waiting for nods of comprehension. Those seated in front of her, the women in the room, represented a swath of social and economic classes. Some of these women were empleadas themselves. Others had women working in their homes. One of the women that Fernanda had brought with her as a first-time recruit leaned over to me and remarked, “Maybe she should suggest doing the floors differently. I’m sure there is a reason the empleada washes

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them the way she does. Nobody wants to spend more time than necessary washing floors.” I giggled. This woman had been an empleada as so many women who migrate from the countryside as young girls are during their first years in the city. Some transition out of this, as this new believer had, and attend night school. This particular woman had trained in a teacher’s college and become a teacher in the public school system. García’s empleada surely had her reasons for washing the floor the way she did. Perhaps she did want to take more time than was necessary. Perhaps she wanted to finish her duties later in the evening in order to avoid the rush-hour lineups for buses carrying the working poor back to the south of the city. Between four and eight in the evening, on any given weekday, the public transportation system in Bogotá is overwhelmed. It is also the most dangerous time to travel, since with such high traffic, pickpockets and thieves are abundant. However, for García, the time was not spent the way she would spend it, as an educated and powerful woman who had a driver and security detail. The assumption that time must be spent wisely, being patient, generous, and industrious, that the virtuous woman is a prosperous woman, illustrated yet again the limits to correct womanhood. For García, and the women in her Bible study, prosperity emerged through regulatory disciplined practice and in accordance with efficiency and productivity. Pastora García concluded that in order to fulfill the expectation of God for His daughters, (hijas de Dios), virtuous women must also become wives of God. “We must see ourselves as wives of God.” Wife and daughter rolled into one being: the virtuous woman and at the same time, the unrepresentable sex.52 At once child and lover, obedient and constant, Eve created from Adam (not God) in order to reproduce with Adam. Mary de-sexed and pure, yet mother of God, the impossible contradictions of woman, the term is a problematic of gendered discipline. This is what leads Judith Butler to quote Luce Irigaray, who said, “Women are the sex that is not ‘one,’ but multiple.”53 The gendered discipline of virtue that Proverbs 31 explicates appears to outline the “becoming of woman” that the MCI expects. As Simone de Beauvoir definitively stated so many years ago, “One is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one.”54 Butler furthers the idea of “Othering” of woman that Beauvoir radically proposes, and introduces the possibility of a wholly broken system of representation, saying the “falsity

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of the signification points out that the entire structure of representation is inadequate.”55 Butler then makes the intellectual move that defined her as one of the finest thinkers of the twentieth century, proposing that a profound dismantling of the gendered binary works to form the basis of the critique of hegemonic Western representation and, indeed, the “very notion of subject.”56 The becoming is eternal. Herein lies a central contradiction of becoming a virtuous or prosperous woman that the practices of believing hold in tension, as has been explicated in previous chapters. However, the construction/becoming of gender is not an even process. Hierarchies of power, knowledge, and class shape every contour of gendered discipline. While some universals about what “women” are may be shared and deployed culturally across spheres of class and ethnicity, only a particular set of women may “become virtuous” or, for our purposes here, “prosperous.” The rest hang precariously on their way to becoming—never arriving. Prosperity, following this argument, is dismantled and deregulated somewhat from the assumed uniform and unidimensional character given it in many studies of Prosperity Christianity.57 Prosperity is not one specific set of material items or a collectively imagined definition of wealth or health. Herein lies another contradiction that believing practice holds together: García will remain in a position of power able to demonstrate her own fulfillment of these virtuous expectations, as will Castellanos. It is a regime of practice that differentiates potential in actuality, while maintaining an aspirational discourse of equality. The prosperity promised by financialized capitalism differs depending on whether you are a real estate financier in Bogotá or a single mother living in precarious conditions, whose children’s lives are under threat—yours might also be— and requesting microcredits from a benevolent bank or NGO. Late capitalist financial formations are methodically deregulated. Regarding finance in relation to believing is not an exercise in naming financial overstepping—quite the opposite. Putting finance and believing in relation to each other is an exercise in recognizing that finance never has had a set of normative bounds that cordoned one sphere from the other. Finance is also far from a top-heavy financier’s parasite, crawling into corners of social action and contaminating the “pure” realm of the proletariat. No longer. Financialization’s reach is necessarily both a “bottom-up” as well as “top-down” (and everything in between) expansion. Understanding

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financialization as a disciplinary regime, as has been discussed in the previous chapters, then, also requires an analysis of the everyday practices of believing that collectively form the financial imaginarium: this can be understood as the space of becoming. Claudia Castellanos, at the MCI Women’s Convention, continued her sermon: “You don’t “know” the Word, you “feel” it; you breathe it. Now raise your hands to God, and listen to what He tells you. He wants to multiply you.” And the ushers with credit card machines were cued to begin receiving down payments on credit in exchange for a multiplication of the self. These sets of contradictions that dissociate and fragment subjects of neoliberalism are held together through practices of believing. Debt carried is worth gained, and the spiritual gift of discernment is awarded as recompense for the corporeal discipline of believing and going into debt.

th e S pi r it of S hoppin g After dancing, Claudia Castellanos addressed the women at the Solo un Corazón convention: “You go to the mall, and you see the bed you want. But there is glass between you and that bed. God wants you to break the glass. God wants each and every one of us to be protagonists in breaking the glass between what we want and having it. This is the financial fight. We depend on God, and we won’t have financial problems. The last time I was in London, we arrived from Singapore. And when the plane landed, I received the anointing of shopping. How many women here have received the anointing of shopping?” She smiled and nodded at the women who clapped and cheered in the crowded auditorium. Castellanos laughs knowingly. She embodies the commodified spirit, but is also empowered by it. Receiving the anointing of shopping is an ethnographic fact that challenges the divided worlds of religion and consumption, believing and practice, in a vein similar to how Leigh Schmidt explains US rites of consumption for Christmas, Mother’s Day, and Valentine’s Day.58 However, once again, it is important to recognize the distinct context in which the assumed profanity of consumption and the sacredness of believing in Colombia are connected in ways that have not been analyzed before; especially in the case of women. The Christian woman that Claudia Castellanos

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models is a woman who can shop in the spirit, whose clothing, jewelry, perfume, Bible, and hairstyle all coordinate the performance of Spirit in the lives of believers. The consumer debt, however, that begins to rack up with greater access to credit, creates a newly indebted demographic: women of the aspirational classes. The anointing of shopping illustrates yet again a way that the often cordoned-off dimensions of finance, faith, and embodied believing are conjoined. To understand the developing subjectivities of financializing capitalism and the complicated category of gender within it, the study of contemporary Prosperity Christianity opens an important path toward thicker comprehension and the blurring of assumed distinctive categories of consumption and believing. Women—in the MCI, in debt, in conditions of precarity—perform a particular practice of believing that is embodied in a regime of practices that deploy the fictions of financializing culture beyond imagined communities of nation or state. These transnational regimes of practice cut through barriers of access to international financing programs and disciplines of consuming. The relationships, the identities, and the selves of these women are commodified and desired; they are trafficked through the spiritual marketplace, which seeks sacred profit. The next chapter will further explore the logic of desire and embodied aspiration through considering a direct sales company, and the charismatic capitalism that it exemplifies.

6

Becoming They say revolutions turn out badly. But they’re constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people’s revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Man’s only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable. —Gilles Deleuze

“Who here wants to make more money?” “Who wants more free time to spend with your family?” “Who wants an all-inclusive vacation?” “Who wants MORE?” Manuel, the Nu Skin Diamond Distributor, was half crouching, fists clenched, shaking them at the crowd like a football coach, drawing increasingly enthusiastic cheers. The people around me at the Nu Skin recruitment meeting, in a hotel conference room in northern Bogotá, were cheering, clapping, and vigorously waving their hands in the air. They wanted those things. They were interested in more. In having more. Becoming more. Manuel straightened up. His face sobered. “This proposal can change your life and turn it into something better.” Nu Skin is a Mormon-founded, multilevel marketing company based in Utah that specializes in skincare and health products, and now boasts a network of over one million distributors operating in over fifty countries.1 Colombia is a growing market for top-shelf skincare, and self-made pyramid schemes. Multilevel marketing taps into deregulated economies, channeling aspirations for prosperity by trafficking in hope and rugged self-determinism. Nu Skin peddles in the eternally unfinished nature of the entrepreneurial subject, the eternally becoming self, and the salvific 158

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hope that lies in the entrepreneurial acumen of the individual.2 Capturing at once the free market spirituality of deregulated Christianity in Colombia and the unregulated regimen of the informal economy, multilevel marketing activates practices of becoming in response to intolerable social and economic conditions. Sofía, Fernanda’s sister and a Misión Carismática Internacional (MCI) disciple, had invited me to this meeting, as she was a newly promoted “executive-level” distributor (the lowest ranking in the Nu Skin directsales hierarchy). Nu Skin was one of many growing direct sales companies finding fertile ground in the precarious lives of the Colombian unemployed yet courageously hopeful. Sofía had explained to me that what she learned at the Nu Skin meetings and what she learned at the MCI services and Bible studies reinforced each other. The Nu Skin meetings, she told me, strengthened her faith and gave her new skills to recruit new distributors for her marketing network, and the MCI cell group meetings and Bible studies infused her business goals and sales techniques with faith-based aspiration. Direct sales and direct faith reinforce each other in financializing Colombia.3 Debt drives the discipline necessary for the success of both. Sofia had gone into debt, to the tune of $785 USD, in order to purchase her Nu Skin start-up kit. Deregulation drives the motivation. Sofia was confident she would become her own best boss. Deregulated Christianity, with its emphasis on becoming, arises in response to what evangelical Christians in Colombia read as a spiritual crisis of structural proportions. Colombia’s nascent advances toward peace and restitution in the wake of the 2017 peace accords are accompanied by a cacophony of civil society organizations, international humanitarian organizations, the United Nations in every flavor, governmental aid programs, and religious movements and foundations of all stripes.4 Millions of individuals, organizations, and dollars are engaged in a robust peace-building industry, which will hopefully generate sustainable results. Notably, however, the transition to “peace” generates wildly varied projections of what such “peace” should consist of. The moral imaginaries that inspire a vision of the future are as diverse as Colombia is.5 The moral imaginary that encapsulates public discourse about the policies, practices, and legal structures necessary for a just and sustainable peace to flourish in Colombia is contested terrain. Yet, for many Colombians, peace will rely on prosperity.

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This is especially true for those who are actively engaging with practices of prosperity, such as microcredit, financial literacy and inclusion programs, debt refinancing, credit-based covenanting, and multilevel marketing. The call to save the self, prosper the self, as a vehicle of saving not only the nation, but also the way of life of a religious politics, brings the power of financialization into new relief. This chapter details programs of “becoming.” Becoming is the fulfillment of desires that drive financialization, and the entrepreneurialism of the self that propels direct sales and direct faith. The focus here is on the ethnographic connection between practices of becoming as they are imbricated with practices of survival in the midst of an economy of futures: financialized hope. Direct selling promises prosperity through deregulated markets, but more importantly, it offers a full transformation of the self, through managing the self and self-improvement.6 The vibrancy of the Christian morality that underwrites financialization is perhaps nowhere more legible than in programs of direct sales marketing. The connections lie in motivations that drive the interwoven powers of network-focused sales strategies and networkfocused evangelization strategies of deregulated Christianity, alongside the shared emphasis on becoming: becoming something better, something multiple, something new.

th e a nthr opol ogy of be CoM ing Colombia’s efforts at “becoming new” echoed across the media and methods of public discourse, evangelical efforts, and international relations throughout the political and economic sphere in the years of the peace negotiations.7 “Colombia Renace” (Colombia is reborn), declared the High Office for the Post-conflict (Alto Consejería para el Posconflicto) on billboards across the country. Reborn Colombia Fairs (“Ferias Colombia Renace”) were organized by multiple governmental stakeholders (local, municipal, departmental, and federal) throughout the country as a campaign responding to the specific needs and struggles of the armed conflict’s victims. The fairs featured representatives from entities offering services in employment certifications, identification documents, and bancarización (becoming banked). These efforts, said the director of post-conflict, Claudia

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Figure 17. Bogotanos vote in historic popular referendum on the peace deal between government and FARC in 2016. Photo by Devasahayam Chandra Das.

García, were an “interinstitutional initiative in which the commitment and empowerment of local and departmental [governmental] authorities are important factors in forging ties of trust between the State and the communities that have been affected by the armed conflict.”8 The fairs were one of the many efforts being carried out by the Colombian government to generate trust between civil society and the State, after so many decades of the government’s absence, particularly in the parts of the country most severely affected by the armed conflict. Yet, despite these efforts, the labors of Colombians to survive the everydayness of life reveal the fundamental work of believing, imagining, and aspiring toward peace and prosperity as necessary for quotidian being. This is because the violence continues and inequality only seems to be increasing. So, despite ongoing violence and deepening inequality that accompanies the tumultuous transition from wartime to peacetime, the possibility of becoming peaceful and prosperous is the common denominator of prosperity practice in Colombia.

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From closed economies to open markets, from regulated and limited access to credit to deregulated financial services, the deregulated Colombian subject is formed as through a process of becoming. To bring this view into focus trains ethnographic attention on the potential of individual desires and aspirations to become and be formed as “assemblages of multiple heterogenous elements; not a given, but always under construction; not a product of an imagined interiority, but a folding and bending of outside forces,” as João Biehl and Peter Locke argue.9 Biehl and Locke follow Gilles Deleuze’s thoughts on the centrality of desire, imagination, and becoming, including his thoughts on revolution as a form of becoming, as referenced in the epigraph of this chapter.10 The concept of becoming is a complex program of “becoming-other,” in the sense of “casting off what is intolerable.”11 Deleuze introduces these affects as the contours under which the subject, as produced in societies of control (as opposed to the Foucauldian fixedness of subjective interiority in disciplinary societies), is “a being-multiple, instead of being-one.”12 In such multiple beingness, the everyday practices of Colombians like Ursula, Remedios, and Sofia all reveal the eternal unfinishedness of peace processes and prosperous subjectivities more generally. Such ethnographic focus foregrounds desiring and imagining as practices of dissent, engendering a politics of potentiality that harnesses the promises of late financial capitalism in a subversive imaginarium, at once subverting power while at the same time succumbing to the ruthless logics of financial indebtedness. Here we return to the idea that deregulation, as concept and as practice, arranges power around capital, and it is capital that motivates ideas of “the state,” the “church,” and “the self.” In other words, the organizing principle that directs violence, finance, and aspirational Christianity in Colombia today is capital. The in-betweenness of transitional times (from war to peace), of times emergent between forms of domination, complicates clear distinctions on a linear line from discipline to control. In moments like a direct sales company’s recruitment meeting, in the basement conference room of a downtown hotel, filled with desperately hopeful Christian Colombians, some having been displaced from the countryside to the city because of the armed violence, neither the frame of disciplinary societies nor of control societies is entirely appropriate to encapsulate the operationalized practice of becoming. Becoming, as

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prosperity and the debt that underwrites it in financializing Colombia, is increasingly about survival.

nu S kin: “ D i S Cov er the b eS t yo u ” Recruitment meetings for Nu Skin usually began with an invitation to imagine. Specializing in skincare and purging cleanses for weight loss, Nu Skin’s marketing focus is anti-aging technology. The recruitment meetings are called “opportunity meetings” (reuniones de oportunidad), and all participants are invited into the opportunity that Nu Skin promotes. At this particular meeting, the area distributors—a couple who ran the presentation—were converts to Evangelical Christianity from Catholicism. They had met while in Singapore, a monk and a nun from different Catholic orders. He was South Korean, and she was Colombian. “Thanks to God, to believing that I had been shown my true love and my true mission in life, when we met, I knew I needed to leave the Catholic order,” announced Manuel, the South Korean ex-monk and Diamondlevel distributor.13 He continued with his testimonial, “Now we are living our dreams, and making other people’s dreams come true.” The opportunity meeting functioned according to a conspicuously dreamy discourse: imagined futures, desires of what could be, believing with a distinctly evangelical flare, and the words faith, belief, and conviction thrown around as Manuel and Pilar (his Colombian wife) explained how “boxes of the mind” (cajones de la mente) hold people prisoner in lives they don’t want to live. “You have to break down the boundaries of those boxes. You have to think in terms of the infinite,” Pilar explained, while pacing back and forth in front of the group in a pantsuit and heels. She testified about being so excited with her first significant paycheck from Nu Skin sales that she renovated her kitchen floor with higher-quality ceramic tiles. However, Pilar warned, God responded with the question: “And my cut?” Pilar framed her prosperity and success with Nu Skin as a result of the “pact” or “covenant” she had made with God some years previously, when she and Manuel had decided to give everything up for the new life of network marketing—and converted from Catholicism to evangelical Christianity. In this act, she replicated the practice of deregulated Christians

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across the country, putting into stark relief the idea that “going into debt is a sign of faith,” as Fernanda had told me. But, Pilar continued, “God is a gentleman. He doesn’t push. He just reminds us that part of our success is due to His intervention.” The notable tone of limitless possibility, endless potential, and the promise of opportunity conflated with God’s provision and the risk, or necessary sacrifice, of the “covenant,” had a familiar ring to Sofia, who was taking careful notes during the presentation. Going into debt and risking livelihoods in order to fully commit to the Nu Skin life were central to the opening vignettes given by various converts at the opportunity meeting. The refrain emphasized that “anyone can become a millionaire. This company makes more millionaires a year than any other [multilevel marketing company]. Nu Skin makes a millionaire every four days!” Manuel and Pilar shouted this last statistic, eliciting an uproarious round of applause and “Amens!” from the potential recruits. Manuel and Pilar broke down the process of achieving prosperity at Nu Skin through four steps: 1) Tendencies: personal goals, such as more free time or more money—the imagined future; 2) Associates: the centerpiece to network marketing—convincing or converting people (family members, friends, acquaintances at work) to become distributors under your franchise; 3) Technologies: the “undeniable” quality and efficacy of the antiaging products; and 4) Compensation: the promised millions. For Sofía, this formula was an obvious fit with her already well-rehearsed commitment to the G-12 Vision of Winning, Consolidating, Discipling, and Sending (or multiplying). The four-step formula resonated on a deep level. When the four steps were explained, Sofia leaned to me and whispered excitedly, “See? You see how what I learn here helps my Spirit vision, and how what I learn in church helps my business?” The rhetorical questions continued to fill the spaces between testimonies and explanations of the products recruits would sell: “What do you prefer: Giving 100 percent of your own efforts, or prospering off of 1 percent effort from one hundred people?” The logic lay in the obviousness that the Nu Skin products were of such high caliber that they would sell themselves and that every recruit would be able to recruit a fresh group of recruits based on their social networks. In order to properly show how effective the products were for rejuvenating potential clients as well as for recruiting down-line salespeople, Manuel and Pilar gave a demonstration of the miraculous results one

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could obtain from the first-level marketing package—the “Fast Start Package.” A volunteer from the audience was called up to a chair facing the crowd. A photograph was taken of the person’s face. Imperfections, lines, wrinkles, dark spots, and any other forms of aging were noted. Then the Conductive Gel was applied to one side of the volunteer’s face, and the Facial Spa was turned on and applied. This is a hand-held massaging tool, battery operated, that smooths out lines on the face in coordination with the application of the gel. After fifteen minutes of treatment, pictures were taken of the newly smoothed side of the face and compared with the “before” pictures on an amplified screen for all to see. Audible “oohs” and “ahs” erupted from the crowd as the miraculous effects of the Spa and the Gel were displayed. The crowd was convinced. The new Executive-level sales associates were encouraged to purchase the “Fast Start” Package,” which included the Nu Skin Facial Spa™, Nu Skin Conductive Gel™, the ageLOC Rejuvenating Gel Mask™, and NaPCA Moisture Mist™ for the “reasonable price” of 1.5 million CUP ($785 USD). Sofia beamed as the other two recruits she had invited to the meeting pulled out their credit cards to line up and buy the “Fast Start Package.” For individuals who were not convinced by the demonstration, Manuel and Pilar appealed to social consciousness. They presented the “Force for Good” that Nu Skin is in the world through their corporate social responsibility program. Nu Skin’s affirmation that they are “channeling a force for good” in the world is prompted by their corporate humanitarian projects in eleven different countries around the world. The “Force for Good” initiative and foundation forms an important dimension of the marketing program. Not only, they say, does the company change the lives of distributors, but it also improves the lives of millions of children around the world—through everything from agricultural sustainability projects in Malawi to public library projects in China and Korea, called “Nu Hope Libraries.” Pilar posed yet another rhetorical question to the group: “Do you want to help poor children, and get rich? You can be a force for good in the world, and your own life.” Salvation for children millions of miles away and the enrichment of the self were wrapped up together in the promise of direct sales. In the case of Nu Skin, part of the action of and upon the self is the invocation of a distant third party, an intangible sense of being a “force for good” while also fulfilling an aspirational vision of the self—and the idea that poverty was somewhere far away.

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iM ag ine Imagining a “not yet” is part of the work of quickening the return on investment in the Nu Skin scheme and the logic of financialization more generally. Many would argue that Nu Skin is a pyramid scheme. In a sense, that is precisely what Nu Skin—like much multilevel marketing—is. However, the history of multilevel marketing is complex and tied to the emergence of theologies of prosperity; Multilevel marketing develops emerges in the wake of the New Thought Movement in the United States.14 Championed by popular religious figures, like Mary Baker Eddy and Phineas Quimby, New Thought was a movement based on the idea that thoughts have the power to shape material reality.15 Advanced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Transcendentalist philosophy, the New Thought movement claimed that “God not only created humans in His image but also endowed them with divine power.”16 At the turn of the twentieth century, metaphysical writers expanded ideas of New Thought to the pursuit of wealth and the American Dream. As the United States moved toward greater industrialization and capitalist development, New Thought lost its legitimacy as a freestanding movement, and found refuge in institutions like Alcoholics Anonymous and direct sales. Direct sales start-ups relied on the central pillar of direct faith, which assured that the only obstacles to prosperous success were internal, and the best strategy for overcoming them was to think positively.17 Direct sales ventures, from door-to-door sales to the advent of home parties and the feminization of direct sales with companies such as Amway, Tupperware, Mary Kay, and Avon, also lay the groundwork for what would become the “prosperity gospel” teachings, and the feminization of the private sphere. New Thought sermons, buttressed by revival-style meetings complete with worship songs, prayers, and the ever-present mantra of “belief in the self ” colored the rise of Tupperware and Mary Kay, companies that came to rely on the housewife demographic for their growing fleet of sales representatives. Emphasizing, or perhaps creating, traditional gender roles, the major shift in sales strategy emerging forcefully in the post-WW2 era, was self-esteem and belief in the self.18 Foreshadowing the Prosperity Christianity of the 1980s and 1990s, Cahn tells us that “companies like Mary Kay and Home Interiors and Gifts endow the work of selling with the sanctity of helping others” and faith in an abundant God whose designs for humanity are prosperity, wealth, and health.19

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The entrepreneurial innovation of direct sales arose in the United States in the 1950s, and began by offering economically marginalized postwar housewives an opportunity to bring in some revenue for themselves, as well as become part of an enthusiastic community of women who saw inroads to emancipation as successful salespeople. Although the successful career in sales is most often exaggerated by recruiters, and these market relationships only exist within a web of social obligations, as Williams and Bemiller argue, the positive thought that infused the burgeoning direct sales movement burst onto pulpits throughout the United States, then the world, starting in the 1970s and continuing today.20 Direct sales was designed specifically as “non-store retailing,” as some manufacturers sought to keep their goods out of crowded stores in the postwar Golden Age of capitalism in the United States. According to Cahn, the direct sales movement employed the language of direct faith from the beginning. The ways in which career success had been infused with the logic of positive thought—in other words, the assumption that a successful career depended upon a set of internal barriers or openings—led to imbuing the work of selling with cosmic significance. The ethnographically legible act, here, is the shared conviction that “anyone can make it.”21 Anyone is capable of accumulating wealth in the growing economies of the emerging world. Wealth accumulation is no longer an activity reserved for the elite. Peace and prosperity, security in finances and social class, is now attainable for the masses. At least, so goes the overwhelming marketing message of banks, governments, and multilevel marketing companies alike, in Colombia. The promise of opportunity has become the currency of financialized capitalism, the brightly framed narrative that overrides any contradicting realities of debt and austerity. Prosperity is promised to be the result of taking advantage of such an ambiguous “opportunity” promised by financial institutions, multilevel marketing companies, and transnational Christian corporations, like “Opportunity International.” However, this social act of “becoming” is practiced through habits of indebtedness. It is the great contradiction of capitalism as it has advanced in Colombia: the imposition of greater forces of control and, in Colombia’s case, violent repression, accompanied by a frame of future imagining that celebrates prosperity and freedom. As financialization, becoming banked, and becoming prosperous are tied to civilizing processes that equate

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economic success with cultural success and the always elusive “freedom,” the coloniality of the financial system and the exercise of accumulation through debt are fully expressed in multilevel sales marketing. The “cultural” shift encompassed in transitioning an economy from cash based to credit based requires an equivalent yet contradicting shift in believing practices: from austerity to prosperity. The credit industry driving financialization has promised a democratization of wealth. Everyone is eligible for credit. Nu Skin “empowers people to empower themselves” revealing furthermore the rhetoric of access that underwrites aspirational practices of prosperity and that the financial turn promises. Submission to the regime of financial control through this commitment to “believing in the self ” is reminiscent of Marie Griffith’s account of Aglow Women in the northeastern United States who saw their submission to their husbands, and their Father God, as an empowering regime of practice.22 In this sense, the force of financial belief liberates the salespeople of Nu Skin, the faithful of the MCI, and the indebted in the programs of Opportunity International to construct a “not yet” that is very real. The power in this is liberating inasmuch as prosperity thinking creates the conditions for conceiving utopias, for believing the world can be different. Indeed, to believe in the ostensibly impossible is to make a political claim that this life, which the merciless discourse of capital has determined to be unimportant, is worth living. This utopian life is one that poverty and marginalization does not define. This life is one in which victimhood is not the only dimension. Desires for more, for different, and for better lives are shared, in their diversity and individuality, as political longings. They are also cruel hopes, driven by a cruel optimism that exists, as Lauren Berlant has so eloquently articulated, “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.”23 The logic of universal access to prosperity holds this cultural shift from austerity to prosperity in a particularly contradictory manner. “Thinking prosperously” is a forceful deviation from the reality of increased precarity, especially as pertains to the growing precarious class. To think prosperously is to consciously foreground potential while actively overlooking the underside of financializing capitalism and its accompanying elaboration of austerity, scarcity, and sacrifice (of social security, of accessibility to education

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and legal justice systems, of entrenching inequality and concentrations of wealth in increasingly fewer institutions). However, when considering “acting prosperously” through the categories of “believing,” “disciplining,” and “multiplication,” as they have been articulated throughout the chapters of this study, a broader process of collective promising becomes evident—in other words, following Hannah Arendt, a truly political act can be traced. The “small miracles” of health, education, a job, purchasing power— these might not seem miracles to a privileged observer because there is no need for them to be. However, they are not so small to someone with no guarantee of access to health care, for example, or employment. My collaborators’ and interlocutors’ conviction that they deserve prosperity, points to a deeper politics of believing—that is, the claiming of a legitimate space in the world, a world where consumption, as the activity of the “ideal human type,” the promise that everyone can achieve prosperity, is being taken seriously by my informants, and millions of other Colombians. Despite the financial system’s apparent lack of capacity to deliver on this promise, Colombia’s aspirational classes are putting into practice the belief that prosperity is also their right. The consequence, of course, of such contradictory systems is precisely what Hannah Arendt articulated as the possibility of falling into “the ever-occurring cycle of becoming.”24 This cycle of ambiguous becoming is the under-rudder of neoliberalism. It is an empty promise. Ethnographically examining multilevel marketing companies, megachurch prosperity preaching, financial inclusion programs, microcredit organizations, and credit card companies themselves has demonstrated a common thread in the broadcasting of financialization’s promise: everyone has access to opportunity. It is not even necessarily the “money” itself, indeed it is not, but the promise resides in having access to a possibility. It is an anti-teleology.

nu S kin a nD the pr oM iS e Nu Skin is a publicly traded company worth $2.5 billion USD on the New York Stock Exchange, with shares trading at around $50 USD. It is one of the many direct sales companies inundating neoliberal Latin America,

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which has become the fastest growing region in the world for direct sales.25 Direct sales companies are rapidly covering the terrain of unemployment and precarious labor markets by offering a model of self-improvement through self-employment. Especially to unemployed women. Upwards of 88 percent of direct sales representatives are women, and although the targets of the direct sales movement claim no gendered bias in their sales recruits, women remain the overwhelming drivers of this market. As previously discussed, structural adjustment policies (SAPs) were ushered into Latin American economies by the major financing institutions after massive debt defaults in the 1980s. These SAPs restructured the social, political, and economic fabric of most Latin American countries, including Colombia, through rolling back government spending, privatizing public industries, deregulating markets, and freezing wages. Neoliberalism is, in part, the historical, political, and economic assemblage of consequences produced by the implementation of SAPs. The resultant shifts in policies and cultures that were necessary for the SAPs to be implemented make up a broader sociopolitical project that was directed by ostensibly economic interests. What is important to recognize, however, is that economic interests were but one element suspended within broader structures of power. Neoliberal power is mediated by a fundamentally economic rationality.26 What sets neoliberal power apart from other forms of power is an economic rationality insistent on managing traditionally “non-economic” realms—such as health care or education or faith—with as little regulation as possible. Neoliberal power has reached the very interior crevices of personhood, making the self the ultimate site of reform and realization. The privatization of the commons and the proliferation of modes and methods of self-regulation as means of governance is fertile ground in which evangelical entrepreneurialism grows—and the growth is driven by the urge to become. “I have learned to be disciplined in my sales plan, and my evangelical vision,” Sofia told me. Every day she gets up and makes phone calls to three potential clients. She attempts to make at least one sales visit per day. Every week, she hopes to enlist one more recruit to her roster of distributors. In very much the same way, Sofia evangelizes and draws people into her cell group, making phone calls every day and committing to enlisting a new convert every week. Oftentimes her business recruits

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are also her cell group recruits. The line between business and evangelism is porous, and Sofia regularly brings Nu Skin clients to church with her. She brings Nu Skin catalogs to Bible study meetings, and she suggests to as many people as she can that they pick up Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad to understand how self-employment is the secret to prosperity and emancipation.27 Of course, not every week results in a new distributor or a new convert for the MCI community. But these are the setbacks necessary for further improvement. The project of “becoming” is at once responding to and generating the deregulated spirit of late capitalism. The influx of direct sales companies into Latin America is directly tied to the process of neoliberalization.28 In part, this is because direct sales offer a compelling promise: become your own boss and become prosperous. Finance capital, understood at once as a power bloc and a process of capitalism, has reframed the work of salvation into the abstruse boundaries of “becoming.” “Becoming” as ethos, and as practice, precludes “being” in societies of control. Societies of control are the societies ordered by austerity and the violence that permeates the social and political spheres in Colombia. Direct sales companies emerge as the vanguard of the prosperity movement, beyond church walls and not limited to specific programs of evangelism. To say this another way, salvation in the times of precarious prosperity has become a question of self-realization. Neoliberalism moved the populations of Latin America toward increasingly exploitative wage labor and the formation of an inherently precarious and anxious middle class. With few options for steady work and a systematic program of privatization and government rollbacks in social security, “becoming one’s own boss” proved to be an attractive option for many. Entrepreneurship became the favored path to an improved life as millions of Latin Americans found themselves on the losing end of austerity measures enacted by governments throughout the 1980s and 1990s.29 Direct selling, through companies like Avon, Mary Kay, and Amway accelerated throughout Colombia with promises of restoring balance between family and work, the potential for limitless wealth accumulation, and notably, personal transformation through positive thinking. “In becoming a direct seller, distributors unlearn the cynicism of adulthood and replace it with an expansive vision of unlimited success,” Peter Cahn states in his study of direct sales and evangelical

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faith in Mexico.30 Direct sales promises a kind of entrepreneurial spirit that seeks to humanize neoliberal reforms.31 Cahn emphasizes this drive by pointing out the dual meaning of the word commission—a monetary reward for sales, as well as a higher calling to proselytize family members and new recruits to the power of the mind in creating prosperity. Simply put, “Alongside the cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial qualities encouraged by neoliberalism, direct sellers seek to return to a primordial past when humans understood how to control their own destinies without relying on anyone else.”32 Direct sellers and direct believers like Sofía engage in direct sales seeking not only greater wealth and free time, but also personal and internal transformation. Finance as a realm of internal conduct is where Nu Skin, microcredit, refinanced credit cards and mortgages intersect with practices of believing and becoming. While Foucault does distinguish government from political and economic subjectivation, he clarifies that to govern “an individual or a group is to act on the possibilities of action of other individuals” and is a “mode of action on the actions of others.”33 Within this framework, the work of salvation in the neoliberal epoch is a salvation of the self—no longer reliant on the pastor or the governor, but the very conduct of conduct. Redemption and calculation. Management and morality. These are the new dimensions of financial governmentality.

a f o r Ce f or goo D I had been attending meetings for one Nu Skin cell unit with Sofia for a number of months. For Sofía, Nu Skin offered a blurring of the lines between the sacred and the profane and allowed a direct relationship with a benevolent and generous God, a God that desires prosperity for all and a God Sofía could conjure up through unfaltering optimism. Part of the optimism is propped up through biweekly recruitment meetings that Nu Skin brokers hold across Bogotá. When Sofía wasn’t at an MCI Bible study or running her own discipleship cell group, she was attending a Nu Skin meeting. The meetings are held in hotel lobbies and corporate board rooms, and they give the impression of corporate success covered

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in bland carpeting and frosted glass walls, the stale smell of coffee and cleaning detergent always mingling in the air. On one memorable evening, before the meeting had started, Sofia told me as we waited for the doors of the conference room to open, “Sometimes I try to go to more than one meeting a week.” Milling about in the hotel lobby, Sofia explained that the meetings, much like her participation in cell meetings of the MCI, “encouraged, animated, and renewed” her business activities. Later on that evening, the recruitment meeting was reaching a fevered pitch as potential recruits excitedly shared with each other what they would do with more money and more freedom. Sofia turned and smiled encouragingly at me, nodding and clapping, can you imagine? “Te imagínes?” I wondered if she was encouraging me to imagine becoming a Nu Skin distributor myself or if she was simply inviting me into the realm of imagination— imagining a future different from the present.34 For Sofia, the multilevel marketing language of Nu Skin was familiar discourse. The G12 Vision of the MCI operates similarly, as a “structured means for church growth and formation. The idea of the Vision is to make every member of the church an active leader in ministry. In turn, each leader will form and disciple twelve others.”35 This explanation of the G12 Vision is found in student handbooks for the “Destiny Training” course designed for “training committed followers of Christ” in the fourfold path of “winning, consolidating, discipling, and sending.”36 Similarly, the Nu Skin recruitment process is carried out by a process of inviting friends to meetings, consolidating them as new distributors under the supervision of a “sponsor” and with an emphasis on “coachability” educating the new recruits under the rubric of “the power of duplication,” and then sending out the trained distributor to recruit new distributors and repeat the process. Multilevel marketing, of course, becomes a lucrative business inasmuch as every addition to the distribution sequence produces profit up to the top of the distribution chain. To be sure, the G12 Vision and the Nu Skin business model are not equivalent. However, the conflation of improving the self with improving the girth of one’s bank account is a central feature of financializing capitalism: the ambiguous eschatology of monetary becoming that most probably will never arrive, in the sense that it is also antiteleological.

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“o ur Di ff er en Ce iS D eM on S trat eD in o ur o p portu n ity ” Nu Skin is a Mormon-owned company and “the premier anti-aging company” in the world, as the franchise leaders, and the website, affirm.37 Their difference, the company claims, lies in the very opportunity that they offer—exactly what the “opportunity” is, whether new skin, riches, time, or success, is up to the beholder. Nu Skin is a self-proclaimed antiaging company, selling products that include skin creams, ointments, vitamin supplements, weight-loss plans, serums, and machines that remove lines and purportedly “change the levels of elastin fibers” in the skin, and “reset genes” responsible for skin aging. Based in “AgeLoc science,” the Nu Skin promise sounds like an advertisement from dystopian science fiction. Anti-aging skin remedies are persuasive marketing products. The financial system, as it has become conflated with “self-care” and “selfdevelopment” has evidently served the Nu Skin interest—and their bank accounts. As I sat through yet one more recruitment meeting of Nu Skin, I was struck by the emphasis on faith in the self, believing in the self, which was the main thrust of the presenters’ performances. Manuel and Pilar were once again explaining how they had left the “religious life” for a “Nu Skin life.” “Nu Skin became our new lifestyle” Manuel proudly put his arm around Pilar, “and we have never regretted our decision. We’re now Blue Diamond distributors and have more free time and money to spend time with our two beautiful children.” Sofia again nudged me, channeling the excitement in the room, not only for the romantic display of rebellion against the Catholic church, but also the “lifestyle” coding that Evangelical Christians in Colombia regularly use to phrase their understanding of what being a Christian is about. “Not a religion, but a lifestyle” is a regular adage heard in the Evangelical churches, and the reference to Nu Skin as such registered for the evangelical crowd. Nu Skin translated into a promise of new life, new possibilities, through selling “new skin.” It became clear, with the shouts of “amen” that many in the room were indeed Evangelical Christians. Manuel and Pilar inspired this evangelical group meeting in part because of their own story—true love and the

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rejection of the Catholic church—along with the affirmation that Nu Skin was more than just a business opportunity, but indeed was the possibility of completely turning one’s life around. “From its founding in 1984, Nu Skin Enterprises’ mission has been to improve people’s lives,” the website proudly boasts. The company founders refer to their enterprise as a “force for good” and the recruitment meetings relay the promise of not only an entrepreneurial opportunity, self-employment, and rejection of the nineto-five life working for “the man” in a context of increasingly precarious labor, but also an opportunity for self-improvement. Anti-aging is itself a promise of approaching the possibility of perfection and coming one step closer to an impossible immortality. The perennial quest for the fountain of youth, the stuff of Mesopotamian kings and Egyptian papyri, medieval alchemy and colonial conquistadores, is an irresistible quest for these future distributors.38 Nu Skin recruitment meetings present the “science” behind the products, innovative technologies for reversing signs of aging, and a team of scientists, known as biogerentologists, that work out of a twenty-twothousand-square-foot laboratory in Utah and a twenty-thousand-squarefoot lab in Fengxian, China. Photographs of the science team are shown in recruitment meetings, including the credentials of the scientists, replete with PhDs from Ivy League universities in the United States. As much time is spent convincing the potential distributors of the quality of the product as on the benefits that becoming a distributor would offer. “Our difference is demonstrated through our opportunity. At Nu Skin, professional distributor leaders thrive as they inspire and empower others. Distributors’ lives are better today because they joined Nu Skin. We are committed to providing the best opportunity to make your dreams a reality.”39 The promise of Nu Skin is as much a promise of empowerment and improvement in personal lives as it is a promise of monetary gain. Indeed, the “new economy” proposed here is hailed as a vehicle for personal development as much as financial development. It is here where we see one of the more significant shifts from industrial post-Fordist capitalism toward financialized capitalism. In financialized capitalism, investment in the self is as productive as the very idea of financial investment. Finance, unlike and even counter to political economy, operates in a realm of profiting without producing—in part a reason for

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the incredible rise in multilevel marketing companies and the very logic underlying the “new economy.” What financialization offers is not only direct faith, and direct sales, but also direct access. Financialization offers direct access to a promise of inclusion into the realms of the financial elite, or at the least, the middle classes. A promise, after all, is one of the two truly political actions that a human can take, as Hannah Arendt argues. Forgiving and promising are the only true faculties of action, according to Arendt, and she traces the promise back to Abraham’s incessant covenanting with God, until “God was forced to make a covenant with Abraham,” a similar logic to the incessant covenanting at MCI or the weekly covenants—held promises—of microcredit groups meeting to gather a weekly payment.40 The promise is also, however, a double-edged sword. “The power of stabilization inherent in the faculty of making promises has been known throughout our tradition,” Arendt tells us.41 Writing three decades before Foucault, Arendt allows that “keeping a promise” as in paying your debts, is the foremost practice of disciplining a “non-sovereign freedom.” Foucault would reconsider discipline in the bio-political (neoliberal) condition as sovereignty to and of the self. This neoliberal condition was necessary to create the disciplinary space of financialization. Financial promise making, the contract made between creditor and debtor, the installation of a regime of practice specific to this relation, as it is the fundamental relation in financialized society, becomes the relation exercised in Nu Skin, the MCI, microcredit programs, and credit card debt. The promise that unifies a society is the management of unpredictability. Reconfiguring Foucault, however, we are urged to consider what role the power of the “not yet” plays in the construction and design of late capitalist subjectivities that emerge and morph in frames of possibility and faith. Sofia excitedly called me one day, asking if I would give English lessons to her distributors with Nu Skin, who were also her disciples at the MCI. “I am really feeling my Vision developing, and now is the time for fulfilling the mission, don’t you think?” She was referring to the focus of the cell group studies with Senator/Pastor García who had been emphasizing the fulfillment of the “Vision” as part of the focus for the “missioning” weeks. Every few weeks or months, the focus for the entire MCI shifts according to the inspiration Pastor César receives from the Spirit. At this particular

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moment, between January and March 2013, Pastor César had relayed to his Group of Twelve that they should all relay to their respective Groups of Twelve, and so on down the chain of command, that the focus was to be “visioning” and “fulfilling the mission.” The pastor had preached as much. “Imagine your goals. Visualize your prosperity. See what God wants for you. Then fulfill the mission to achieve what God has waiting for you.” It is here where we might pause and ask if Nu Skin’s “Mormon” foundations have any influence on how it is perceived by evangelical Christians in Colombia. Mormonism, as Peter Coviello reveals, seeks to urge individuals toward “becoming like gods.”42 Mormonism has its own particularities and idiosyncrasies specific to its “Americanness”: in many ways, Mormonism is the quintessential American religion, the embodiment of Manifest Destiny and the myth of exceptionalism. In Colombia, while Mormons evangelize throughout the country, and there is a slow trickle of Colombians joining the Mormon church, what ties Nu Skin, Mormonism, and Prosperity Christianity, once again, is that they are organized around capital and its expansion. In this sense, considering modern Christianity in its polemical nature organizes our analysis not along denominational taxonomies in a comparative project, but rather along the lines of political and economic embeddedness, correlated to patterns of power, rather than theological distinction. Prosperity Christianity, a Christianity beholden to promises of possibility, responds to the unpredictability of the social, political, economic contract of financialized capitalism. Desiring wealth, desiring “freedom” and “time” are legitimate in prosperity. The space of enunciation is crucial to recognize, however.43 Sofia, Ursula, Fernanda, and Remedios exist on the sidelines of modernity. Desiring wealth in a condition of exclusion is quite different from desiring, even demanding wealth, where it is a rational demand, even an expectation of the present life. Prosperity Christianity in the spaces of exclusion, in the shadows of modernity, enunciates a different set of controls and disciplines. One manner in which Prosperity Christianity deploys this shift is through moving past the Protestant ethic of austerity, the stoic conviction of salvation in the afterlife and the confidence of “by faith alone” toward the ostentatious rejection of austerity (the theme of neoliberalism/financialism). Deregulated Christianity rebels against the idea that wealth maintains itself as only accessible to an elite

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or chosen few in society. Despite this, sustaining belief in the financial system, in currencies and inflation rates, in stock market prices and interest rates, maintains the system’s operationality.

fr oM Di SCipl in e to Con tr ol , fr oM believ in g to b eC oMin g As Foucault predicted, and Deleuze has suggested, late capitalist societies are moving away from enclosed structures of sovereignty and toward methods of “control.” The institutions that Foucault identified as creating the matrix of disciplining regimes of self-regulation and reform have become privatized and internalized. The school, the clinic, and the prison become dismantled as the defining institutions of disciplinary societies, as education, health care, and a justice system become inaccessible to the masses. The factory has moved overseas, and labor has become outsourced. Indeed, in financializing capitalism, the amorphous noninstitution of the market increasingly becomes the only accessible path to reform, selfhood, and prosperity. The invitation to participate in an imagined future, indeed, to bet on it and make the future productive, requires believing, and believing requires risk. Deleuze illustrates the risk of believing as part of eternal becoming, “endless postponement.”44 Whereas the “endless potential” promised by credit card companies becomes enmeshed with the “endless postponement” of completion, believing requires the risk that becoming will never ensue, that the final result will not materialize, that prosperity is only a possibility, That risk is what creates a miracle. What Hannah Arendt names the “new.” Arendt explains, “The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.”45 The miracle occurs when the unbelievable becomes reality. Cancers vomited onto the floor of a rural Colombian church. Surviving repeated assassination attempts. Having the capital to rent a kitchen with a few tables and become an entrepreneur. Becoming the pastor of millions of people, owning property in Florida, Peru, and Colombia. The different sites of ethnographic engagement of this book

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have illustrated a broad social spectrum of the forms of becoming. All based in credit, all in emerging Colombia. From believing we move to becoming. Believing, ultimately, is a set of practices intended to bring something about, to produce something. It is a fragmented eschatology that only partly fulfills its conclusion. For a robust reading of practices and social acts of believing, one must seek the legible practices of becoming—the arrival that will, perhaps, never come, an infinite journey of deferment of the future. When the Nu Skin Distributors finally opened the floor to the crowd for folks to put to work their belief in their potential, credit cards were pulled out, one million pesos was financed on credit, and the act of faith was conflated with a financial act. To put it simply, credit cards monetized becoming. Finance profits from the machinations of unknown outcomes. Financialized capitalism motivates the production of becoming itself for itself. Indeed, today, the financial system has ridden on the tails of this logic to the point of “trading in futures.” The future has appropriated a monetary value, is now a financial product. As Randy Martin stated: “Not only does the use value of money facilitate the circulation of commodities, but the future of each enters into the present instantaneously and relentlessly. How the future and present interpenetrate is what future trading is all about.”46 Deleuze was very concerned about “becoming.” Placing desire over power, Deleuze articulates a turn in critical theory to considering possibility as the motivating factor in human action. Deleuze suggests that there is no more belief, only desire in the service of capital. Human lives are no longer subject to values; they have become the value.47 Believing in the self, believing in the God that can alter the self, and the processes of becoming, are the most productive activities in the economy of financialized capitalism.

th e neW eCon o My : p r oD u Cin g t h e S e lf “Together, we own what’s now. And we own what’s next.” This phrase from Nu Skin’s promotional material illustrates an interpenetration of present and future time. Financialization’s intersection with belief comes into clearest relief in the trope of “believing in the self.” Whereas the Nu

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Skin program purports that a “real” economy is oppressive and limiting to wage-earners, finance claims modes of enrichment through credit and credit cards. Whereas wages are stubbornly kept low and pensions weak, stock options and consumer credit relieve the burden on employers. There may be no right to housing, but housing loans proliferate. There is no right to education, but banks are brimming with student loan options.48 Austerity is the face of the belief structure that allows only a belief in the self and continual demonstration that this self should be believed in. The forced performance of debt-worthiness in financializing economies of both the Global North and South play to a common tune of privatization and credit-wielding believers. Whereas finance has employed the Christian trope of infinity, introducing the possibility of endless growth and unstoppable wealth accumulation, it is the card-carrying Christians that put into practice the rites of debt creation in the service of neoliberalism’s financiers. “Owing it to yourself ” is the refrain of financialization. Producing the self is the secret of salvation in the new economy. Salvation, as Foucault states, is “the subject’s constant action on himself, which finds its reward in a certain relationship of the subject to himself when he has become inaccessible to external disorders and finds a satisfaction in himself, needing nothing but himself. In a word, let’s say that salvation is the vigilant, continuous, and completed form of the relationship to self closed in on itself.”49 This is an appropriate form in which to understand being in debt to oneself, in other words, “owing it to yourself.” Constant action on the self is what the cruel optimism of direct sales deals in. The internalized technologies of belief in oneself and the power of prayer, the discipline of keeping the faith in financial success, while demonstrating one’s fidelity through recruiting others to your business, is the secret of multilevel marketing’s success in a rapidly neoliberalizing country. Being one’s own boss in a context of high unemployment, minimal job security, and increasingly inaccessible benefits makes sense, particularly if your vision of an imagined economy is shared by thousands in the pews, and in the streets. And as was stated in the first recruitment meeting I attended, the overriding message becomes: The only limit to your success is your own mind. This business is about vision and about faith. You are your own worst enemy, but you can also be your own boss.

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The subjectivity of prosperity is entirely internalized, privatized, and spiritualized; however, it is also more than that. This subjectivity is unfinished, malleable, bending, and contradictory. It is the subject that operates between all systems. She is a subject of aspiration. She is a subject constantly becoming, because the present is never enough. Paul Zane Pilzer, author of The Next Trillion, gives us a theological explanation for success. He states: Once you realize that the amount of wealth we can create is limited only by how many people we’re willing to trade with, and that in order to trade with more people, we have to be willing to understand and trust more people, you start to cross the line from economics into theology. Because you start to realize that only some higher intelligence, some kind of benign, beneficent being or force, could have created such an unlimited economy based on such a simple yet powerful and loving concept: our wealth is rewarded directly in proportion to the number of people with whom we are willing to share.50

Indeed, according to Pilzer, trade is the antidote to war. This “economic alchemy” is what creates an economics of abundance. It is how we can all become millionaires. It is the way on the path toward the New Kingdom— the streets lined with gold and “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:4). Sofia does not make a living from Nu Skin. A few months after the meetings we had regularly attended for a number of weeks, I stopped seeing her or hearing from her. When I asked if I could accompany her to some of her client meetings, she responded, “Oh, I’m not really selling at the moment. I’ve had to take a break in order to focus on my cell group.” Sofia has the advantage of being married to someone who has regular contract work. When he is out of work, Sofia returns to Nu Skin. Her enthusiasm for sales ebbs and flows, as need for extra income emerges. The process of becoming is halted, is ever incomplete, and is constantly in flux.

th e b anal ity of f ina n Ce At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that deregulated Christianity, and its sales branch of multilevel marketing, provides a window into understanding the politics of financialization and the political acts of believing

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and becoming of those who are refusing to be “left behind.” It is a political act to claim prosperity as the prophets of globalized credit promise it, as Sofia does in her conviction in her vision for her Nu Skin business and her MCI ministry. These acts of prosperity are political because in Colombia, naming and claiming a right to well-being defiantly challenges the status quo. Through Ursula’s efforts to bring her family together and offer them the elusive promise of “more free time” by purchasing a car for vacations, she subverts the economy and society that question her “creditworthiness” because she spends more than she has. She protests against the strictures of lower-classness, because she is doctor, and her family deserves a vacation just as the family of any doctor in more “advanced” economies does. The endless process of becoming, the eternal unfinishedness of her financial freedom is what Fernanda consistently reminded me she was a part of, and her ceaseless covenanting, like Abraham, will perhaps one day force the hand of God in her favor. This is her conviction. All of these women have mortgaged the present in the risk of the future. This is the risk that day traders thrive on, and it is the risk that moving from believing to becoming embodies. From the edges and underbellies of financial capitalism arise the millions of voices that insist that they too are meritorious. Debt is not a signal of immorality or irresponsibility. Debt becomes a marker of faith and a conviction in the future. Debt, not credit, is the moral measure of the subject of finance. What ties all this together is aspiration. The future is mortgaged through prosperous aspirations. Direct sales rely on this Christian mode of becoming, as does the very “spirit” of financial capitalism. Just as the spirit of capitalism merges contradictions inherent within it to the believing practices that maintain it, the process of becoming serves the miraculous work of constructing the “new,” the utopias, perhaps, of believing subjects.

Conclusion neCrofinanCe Aspiro: To breathe; to breathe upon I can’t breathe. —Eric Garner

I can’t breathe. —George Floyd

Ursula released a deep sigh. The breath rushed out of her lungs. Her body relaxed. She had paid off a debt. We were at the bank, in 2017, after having waited in line for forty-five minutes (not bad for an average bank errand). Ursula had consolidated her debts, and just paid one of her cards off entirely. Aspiring to become prosperous had constricted Ursula’s breath. She hadn’t been able to breathe easily for years. Her breath would catch in her throat, her aspirations squeezed through the narrow outlet of a compressed airway. She had been suffocating under the weight of her debts for so long. “Thank God, and the Holy Spirit. I have been saved from my debts. God has saved me.” Ursula exhaled smoke as she celebrated her progress 183

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with me in the noisy downtown Bogotá streets with a Belmont cigarette. She took another deep drag. “It has taken a lot of work, but I have become disciplined, and learned how to budget. I am always getting better,” she confessed. Ursula had sold the car that had put her into significant debt, prioritized monthly payments, and limited her spending on what she considered frivolous or unnecessary items. Yet her aspirations for prosperity, for becoming prosperous, for a new and brighter future, always remained. At the same time that Ursula and I visited, Colombia’s fragile peace seemed increasingly brittle with every passing day. A new government had been elected on a platform that put the future of peace in Colombia into question. The agreements with the former FARC combatants weren’t being recognized or fulfilled and former militants were being assassinated.1 Latin America is the most dangerous region in the world to be a defender of the land or the water, and Colombia leads the way with the most assassinations of environmental activists.2 The horror of forced displacement, when individuals or entire communities are forced to flee their land and homes as a result of public acts of torture and homicide, escalated in 2019. Indeed, the largest displacement in Colombia since 2011, of over two thousand people, occurred in 2019.3 Then, in late 2019, a rebel faction of the demobilized FARC announced their rearmament and their return to warfare.4 Colombia’s violence has never been a problem that the government alone can solve. The economic interests that have been driving the ongoing assassinations of land rights defenders, environmental justice campaigners, and demobilized combatants are transhemispheric and transnational. Foreign hydrocarbon corporations, mining conglomerates, petroleum producers, and mega-agro-industry interests continue to drive legal economies of violence in Colombia, at times doing more damage than the illicit narcoeconomies that pulse throughout the nation. For example, over 70 percent of all mining activities are owned by foreign multinational corporations and the regions that are rich in natural resources also produce the highest number of forced displacements in the country.5 The financing of paramilitary death squads by multinational corporations has been well documented, and prosecuted, as are the cases of Chiquita Banana and Drummond Coal, who were both found guilty of collusion with paramilitary mercenaries.6

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Transnational criminal networks have strengthened their relationships with splinter factions of paramilitary groups or guerrilla insurgencies. The dismantling of the cartels in the 1990s and the consequent deregulation of the narco-markets ushered in transnational crime syndicates from Mexico, which have increased their influence and presence in the country since the early 2000s.7 The vacuum of power left after the 2017 exit of the FARC from their former strongholds in regions of the country that produce cocaine has also generated spikes in violence between competing armed groups. The spirits of finance prowl throughout Colombia. This is necrofinance. Necrofinance operates in the long shadows of formal economies as well as through licit flows of capital. Necrofinance launders not only money but consciences. For example, HSBC, the premier British bank, laundered millions of narco-dollars for Mexican cartels through ghost accounts in the Cayman Islands, financing violence throughout Latin America, but mostly concentrated in Mexico and Colombia.8 In Colombia, the transnationalization of the economy has meant the transnationalization of the conflict, and the questions that are generated by this book require transnational, deterritorialized responses. The spirits of finance know no borders, yet continue to profit off of them, as is especially legible on the US-Mexico borderlands where for-profit detention centers swell with migrants from all over the Americas, including Colombia, who are digitally branded with GPStracking ankle cuffs while stock prices rise. For example, CoreCivic and GEO Group, two of the biggest private prison corporations in the United States, are recipients of roughly half of all private prison industry contracts. According to the Center for American Progress, of every “100 immigrant detainees, 32 are in GEO Group facilities and 21 are in CoreCivic facilities”; approximately 70 percent of all migrants in detention are in forprofit detention centers.9 In the wake of a crackdown on immigration in the United States since 2016, GEO Group saw its stock rise by 80 percent and CoreCivic celebrated an increase of 120 percent in their stock value.10 Investors buzzed with pleasure at the brutal repression of migrants and the distribution of such largesse to stockholders. For another example, billionaire Paul Singer’s firm, Elliott Management, invested an aspirational $100 million USD in stocks in GEO Group and CoreCivic after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Elliott Management bet well, and Singer’s holdings in the prison profiteers were worth more than $150 million USD in

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November 2016—“a profit of more than $42 million USD and a return of almost 40% in less than two months.”11 Since 2016, growing numbers of migrants have died in detention, including children, despite the Department of Homeland Security earmarking $3 billion USD in migrant detention operations.12 Report after report from human rights advocacy groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, in addition to the many hundreds of smaller organizations working directly with migrants on the US-Mexico border, detail the inhumane conditions in the detention centers, the use of solitary confinement to punish detainees, many of whom are refugees and asylum seekers, and the widespread claims of physical and sexual abuse in the centers.13 The very concept of for-profit detention of migrants who are applying for asylum should be understood as an example of the quintessential urges of necrofinance. What the designed cruelty and weaponization of the US-Mexico border illustrates so well is not only the darkest recesses of the necrofinancial modus operandi of debasing human life for financial gain, but also the nature of the materiality, the physical effects, of financialization’s supposedly immaterial nature. As Gloria Anzaldúa stated many years ago, the border is where “the third world grates against the first and bleeds.”14 Today this border teems with migrants and refugees from around the world, many of whom traversed Colombia on their way from Ecuador, Brazil, and Venezuela to Panama and on northward, imagining the United States or Canada as their final destination. Colombia has become a site for transnational movement, a country of transit and traffic, for African, Haitian, and Cuban migrants.15 Economic and political crises drive individuals from places around the globe to the Americas. Migrant movement through Colombia crosses the traitorous Darien Gap on the ColombiaPanama border, where hundreds die every year, and northward through Central America, which is rife with violence of its own thanks to failed peace agreements and aggressive deportations from the United States. The Americas are a regional corridor of determined movement, violent threat, and precarious aspirational regimes for new life. Most often, this newness is rooted to faith in the myth of the “American Dream,” a dream as mythical as the promise of prosperity promoted through logics of capital.

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Considering this transnational migratory movement helps to frame the very deterritorialized nature of finance, a deterritorialization that operates in symphonic ways with religious flows. Over 85 percent of the migrants arriving to the United States from Latin America identify as Christian, and many of those are Pentecostal, leading to a “browning of American evangelicalism.”16 Prosperity Christianity, especially, is deterritorialized, deregulated, and transnationalized. In a way, Christianity has always held this character. However, in this time of late capitalism, new dimensions of Christianity’s transnational appetites have appeared. For example, the Misión Carismática Internacional has franchised the G12 brand, including podcasts, Bible study DVDs, books, Generación 12 worship CDs, devotionals, and their “Destiny Training” and “University of Life” curricula. Now G12 has church plants in over thirty countries around the world, including Canada and the United States—Miami, Honolulu, San Diego, Toronto, and Los Angeles—where these materials are translated, marketed, and required to stay “on brand.” As discussed in the introduction, the evangelizing strategy of G12 rests on four pillars: Winning (bringing people to Jesus), Consolidating (people commit to the church), Discipling (preparing people to be leaders themselves), and Sending (those disciples begin their own program of evangelizing and disciple training). This strategy operates in a similar way to the Nu Skin strategy of multilevel marketing. Take, for example, this instruction from the English translation of the “Destiny Training” manual for pastors: Imagine for a moment that an angel of God visited you tonight and said God was going to give you the anointing of a great evangelist. Every day that you preached the Gospel, you would be guaranteed to win a thousand people. Do you know how long it would take you on your own to win the world for Christ? It would take you 15,000 years! However, imagine that this year you won just one person and spent all your time consolidating and training that one disciple. Then next year both of you won someone each and spent the rest of the year training and discipling them. Then the next year all four of you did the same and so on. How many years would it take you to reach the current world population? The amazing answer is less than 33 years!17

The key here is multiplication, as discussed in chapters 4 and 5. Finance seeks multiplication at any cost and Christian corporate marketing strategies bring an evangelical, Spirit-filled flare to the global extension of their

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God’s reign. The global reach of microfinance corporations peddling cheap credit to impoverished communities while charging predatory interest rates (not all, but many) is the method of accumulation through dispossession, while credit card companies, like MasterCard, continue to push toward massive cultural shifts like making societies “cashless.” Central to all of the stories shared here is the aspiration to something better, something new, to become someone or something different. These aspirations are driven by hopes: for surviving and for enduring the conditions of necrofinancial capitalism. Remedios has been a casualty of necrofinance. Her illness has driven her to give up her business and return to selling empanadas on the street, but it will most likely eventually kill her. She needs a miracle. Her belief in the Spirits of finance might move her forward, but she remains susceptible to the movement of the markets, and the constant threat of extinction that the millions of individuals who live in the shadows of financial capitalism also inhabit. That threat of elimination is the logic of necrofinance, as Achille Mbembe establishes. The links between “modernity and terror spring from multiple sources,” Mbembe reminds us.18 “Some are political practices, some are cultural, and still others are related to the unfettered belief in human reason and . . . narratives of mastery and emancipation,” as is the case in so much of the financial education and inclusion literature and practice as we saw in chapter 5.19 In this sense of rationalization, racialization is embedded within forms of financial colonialism that put to work the necropolitics of financial capitalism. This can be understood as a kind of “benevolent” form of necrofinance—“the result of which is the destruction of a culture in order to ‘save the people’ from themselves.”20

S pi r itS Movements of ideas, money, beliefs, debts, and people can be tied together through aspiration. To aspirate, to breath, and to “breath upon,” all share the same essence in the Latin root, aspiro, as well as the Greek pneuma meaning “spirit” or “soul.” The breath of life, the heaving sighs of spirit, the fleeting sensations of soul, all contribute to the aspirational affect of deregulation. Throughout these pages I have considered the affects, modes,

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and modalities of being in financializing capitalism through considering deregulation—of Christianity, of finance, and of violence in Colombia. This book is an effort to think through the relationship between political economy and Christianity as they operate in contrapuntal relation within a society embroiled in ongoing armed violence, despite a recently signed peace agreement and economic emergence. Ultimately, the undercurrent that flows beneath all the prose is a deep concern for peace in Colombia. Political economies and religious institutions have long been entangled partners in the proliferation of violence, from the time of La Conquista to Colombian independence to the current manifestations of violence, both structural and political. The many analyses of violence in Colombia have established myriad proposals for policy changes, structural changes, cultural changes, and spiritual changes that would be necessary for “true” peace, with justice for all, to reign in the country. What has kept Colombia from finding such peace, when other countries with similar economies and geographic forms have emerged from the wars of the twentieth century? These concerns have driven the narrative, even when they are only implicit. Ultimately, I end wondering if any of it is real. Does believing work? Believing in peace? Believing in prosperity? Is there a difference between who believes and how they believe? Must some believe more than others? Or have we, in the Western, Northern third of the world, lost the recognition of our own believing? The more pressing question, the ethnographic question, as I introduced in the introduction of this book is not why people believe, but rather how they believe, and what relation that believing has to the regulatory practices of finance. Free market spiritualities are sustained through aspirational mistrals that are persistently moving subjectivities toward phantasmagorias of becoming. The paradox lies in the contradiction of debt, which forecloses access to such material equivalence between classes. In other words, the aspirational drive toward becoming prosperous runs up against the structural limits that obviate access to prosperity. Such is the contradiction of capitalism, and the contradiction of deregulated Christianity. To be sure, there will always be exceptions. There will be those who covenant their last bits of savings to their church and miraculously receive a check in the mail from an inspired stranger for exactly the same amount they sacrificed— or more. There will be those whose untreatable disease will cure itself to

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the bafflement of doctors. There will be those who find themselves heavy with child after a devastating infertility prognosis. There will be those who experience justice and peace in breaths and whispers as these movements work to become winds of change. However, the exception is not the rule. There is a reason that spontaneous prosperity is referred to as “miraculous.” The social relationship of class, structured by race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and so on, is maintained through necessary inequality and violence.21 This is evidenced clearly in Colombia. Aspirational breath is always cut off, but it remains necessary to maintain the struggles for survival supporting powers of accumulation through forms of dispossession, in particular debt. How devastatingly illustrative were the last words of Eric Garner, the Black man killed by New York City police in 2014 for illegally selling cigarettes, one can assume, in order to survive: “I can’t breathe.”22 Or the last words of George Floyd, killed in Minneapolis in 2020 for using a forged banknote, his last words also being: “I can’t breathe.” Financial capitalism takes our breath away. Necrofinance kills off the most vulnerable. Necrofinance is also racialized. This is racial capitalism.23 This last vignette, on the Magdalena River in Colombia, further illustrates the spirits of deterritorialization, the soul of financialization, and the powers that have been at work and play since before the dawn of capitalist modes of relations, and will be hereafter.

Deterr it or ia l ization We sat in the long, wooden boat puttering down the Magdalena River. Great white egrets lazily launched into the air as we passed by. The traveling preacher and self-proclaimed miracle worker, Pastor Fredy, paused our conversation to declare that I was under attack from the spirit of a powerful witch, Maria Lionza. “At this very moment?” I asked. “Yes” the pastor nodded, “I can tell she is breathing in you. Her spirit is on you.” The skin on the back of my neck bristled.

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“Have you not felt difficulties in your life? I can tell from the way you are sweating that she is on you.” I was indeed sweating. We were in the Magdalena Medio river basin, the jungle lands of equatorial Colombia. The air is thick and damp with humidity and temperatures average 30–35°C (85–95°F). Was I was being possessed by a witch? Did Pastor Fredy really believe that? Did it matter if I did? The spirit of Maria Lionza is known to inhabit the river regions along the borderlands between Colombia and Venezuela. Legend has it that Maria Lionza was born an Indigenous priestess in the territories now known as Venezuela. She is guardian of the rivers and forests, and is considered a high divinity by those who follow her. Millions of Venezuelans practice the religion of Maria Lionza, most closely associated with Candomblé as practiced in Brazil. Of course, these religious traditions, demarcated by colonial political geographies (Santería and Palo Mayombe in Cuba, Candomblé and Umbanda in Brazil, Vodou in Haiti, Shango in Trinidad and Tobago, María Lionza in Venezuela, Palenquero Catholicism in Colombia) all share common roots in the disparate moments and narratives of La Conquista and slavery. These traditions were born in the dank bellies of slave ships where African women, men, and children were enslaved and trafficked, dragged across the Atlantic; the Spirits of Yorubaland accompanied them.24 These are the spirits that accompanied the foundations of racialized capitalism, that inhabited the shadows of colonialism. These traditions arose in the struggles of resistance to violent processes of stripping the Indigenous, then the African slaves, of their humanity through enforcing the class and racial hierarchies that served the development of savage capitalism in the colonized world.25 Religious traditions in the Americas emerged as expressions of resistance to totalitarian regimes of dehumanization while participating in these very same regimes.26 Four centuries of the slave trade generated religious forms that framed regimes of practice that directly challenged not only the destructive forces of colonialism and conquest, but also Christianity. Deities that represented competing spiritual origins were demonized by the colonizers, particularly those that recognized a feminine sovereignty in their being. The encroachment of early capitalist

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regimes of power differentials, cut along lines of gender, race, and class, relegating local manifestations of spiritual power to the margins in the face of the religion of the conquistadores. Witches were one representation of such demonization. And in 2015, witches, it would seem, still crossed borders. Holding the wooden sides of the chalupa, I laughed nervously at the thought that a witch was “breathing through me.” I was lost for words. I had been having troubles in life, in fact my personal life seemed quite rocky at that moment, and I considered the veracity of Pastor Fredy’s insight. Like so many anthropologists before me, I experienced the ethnographic tables being flipped. The subject of study was now studying me. But believing in the force of Maria Lionza did more than simply put me in an awkward situation. The perfection of the situation, that Maria Lionza, a spirit produced through histories and legacies of colonialism, from another land, had crossed a border and was breathing through the white, North American anthropologist, was not lost on me. Nor was the fact that believing in Maria Lionza helped translate me, culturally and historically, into the cultural vernacular of the Pentecostal community of Garzal. Believing in Maria Lionza transgressed borders, cultures, and histories. But did I believe? Would it matter if I did? Once we arrived at El Garzal, after our arduous journey under a merciless equatorial sun, we were settled into family homes where we would stay during our visit. Usually the small group of researchers would stay in the pastor’s large house. We often shared the space with the pastor and his wife and their daughters and families. If there were some extra students tagging along, we would disperse throughout the community. This evening we were a small team, and we settled into the pastor’s house. Frida, his wife, brought us strong, sweet coffee and oranges while we unpacked and visited. Pastor Miguel, Pastor Fredy, my partner, and I watched the news on the cracked TV powered by the generator under the fan, while children ran around; neighbors came by with greetings, and women in the kitchen prepared the evening meal. During the commercials we would chat. I slipped in questions about the economic development project that the local Pentecostal community participated in. Some of the participants were Catholic, and others were members of a competing Pentecostal church. Some of my most revealing

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Figure 18. Evening worship at the Four-Square Pentecostal Church in Garzal. Photo by Javier Núñez.

conversations in El Garzal occurred in this setting, with chickens sneaking into the house only to be shooed out with a squawk, and neighbors coming by to share greetings and a cool glass of water. Pastor Fredy continued to test out his diagnosis of my spiritual state during the evening. After dinner, during the evening miracle service, Pastor Fredy called forth any members in the community who sensed they were burdened with a spiritual maldición (hex or spell). Most of the community stepped forward, and the miracle work began. In the wood-slatted church, the electric piano plunked, and the choristers—all two of them—cast their song into the dark river valley. Nothing but the church was illuminated for miles. The wails of the repentant, the victimized, and the hurting filled the air. Pastor Fredy reminded the community that the only one who had not abandoned them was God. A comforting thought. Pastor Fredy came up to me directly, in the middle of the healing frenzy, as he sweated and heaved, casting out demons and illness in everyone he passed. He grabbed my arm and told me he could

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cast out Maria Lionza. I extracted my arm from his hand, and thanked him for the offer. Wouldn’t it be enough for me to simply not believe in the spirit, and therefor extricate myself from her grasp? The pastor went back to the circle of women, praying over them, yelling, jumping up and down, conducting a symphony of spirits. They convulsed, they wept, they vomited. It went on for another hour. Or two? Then the pastor invited children to move toward their parents who had fallen on the ground, exhausted from the emotional journey they had just endured. They lay on the ground, with their heads on their young children’s laps. The elder children and teenagers mingled at the back of the church, and wandered in and out, flirting with each other, playing games quietly, making sure not to get caught. After the healing was done, the individuals who had been the focus of the ritual began to emerge, spent and tired, praying and singing. The music that had died down to a quiet whine picked up again as Pastor Fredy called on his assistant, armed with a flashlight, to help him verify the miracles that had been performed. Fredy lined up the individuals who had received healing, and his assistant shone the flashlight into their open mouths. Most of the miracles performed had occurred in the mouths of the believers, and Fredy shouted out “silver” or even more jubilantly, “gold!” announcing the material of the fillings that had miraculously healed broken teeth–even if the desire had been for fertility or the healing of some other variety of affliction. “Praise the Lord! This one’s a gold one!” A murmured response of “alleluyas” and “amens” drifted from the congregants. I wondered if those upon whom miracles had been performed would go home and verify the truth of the miracle, have their own family members shine flashlights into their mouths to confirm the placement of silver or gold fillings. I wondered how much believing might lead to illusion. I wondered if, indeed, it mattered at all. Then I wondered again if I was truly being attacked by a witch. A few months after the visit to El Garzal when Pastor Fredy declared my soul under attack from the Venezuelan witch, our research team returned to the community. Once again, I was watching the news with the pastor. In a lull during commercials, Pastor Miguel let me know that the itinerant Pastor Fredy continued to pray for me, and my spiritual health. I asked Pastor Miguel if he really believed that I was under attack from a witch. The pastor turned to me, and shrugged.

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“El pastor Fredy vea cosas” (Pastor Fredy sees things). Seeing and believing were entwined in Pastor Miguel’s response. The power of believing, that social act, made seeing possible. Belief made the witch real. Believing Pastor Fredy made sense of me to Pastor Miguel— liberating oneself from demons, spirits, curses, or other calamity is central to the work of the spirit in Pentecostal Christianity. My need for liberation made me understandable. Maria Lionza gave agentive power to my interlocutors and placed me squarely in their cultural frame. Similar to finance, Maria Lionza’s deterritorialized dimensions had power beyond strictures of political or geographic boundaries, especially given the economic factors for her deterritorialization—slavery and colonial domination. Deterritorialization frees labor from site-specific means of production (the mine, the factory, the plot of land) and reterritorialization sees labor redirected and confined anew in the microfinance sector, in the affective labor of guilt-riddled debt payments, in the punishing optimism of multilevel marketing, and the financialization of salvation through credit-based covenants with God.27 Indeed, one of Pentecostalism’s defining characteristics is the transnational dynamics of the Spirit. The movement across borders and cultures of this religious movement speaks as much to globalization as to movement of financial capital. Unseen and charged with possibility, finance capital flits around the world on screens and in stock markets. The power of capitalism itself is always a power being made. As Pentecostalism is never satisfied with a closed definition, and is always a multiplicity, so too is capitalism. This is not to say that the two systems are somehow equivalent. It is to say, however, that the modes of being and the modes of becoming, central to both concepts, are cooperative. In other words, the subjectivities that late capitalism designs in order to exploit—those subjectivities unfinished and under threat of elimination—are subjectivities that cooperate with a Pentecostal ethic of unfinished becoming that are actively defending themselves from threats of spiritual darkness. Late capitalism does not generate a kind of Christian ethic, nor does a particularly Pentecostal, or prosperityfocused set of Christian practices prop up a specific regime of economic activity. Throughout this book I have worked to trouble this rather linear and causal reading of the relationship between capitalism and Christianity. I insist, rather, that the concept of Christianity, when approached

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anthropologically, must be interpreted within the matrices of power, specific to time and place, in which it orders social, political, and economic practice. By that same stroke, the concept of capitalism, when approached anthropologically, relies on localized patterns of subject formation specific to time and place; capitalism and religion are always entangled, because both concepts are shaped in relation to each other. Systems of finance are sustained by schemas of faith.

r eli gio n in the a M er iCaS To continue our consideration of the flows of financial power and religious repertoires in Colombia we must zoom out to consider the transnational, deterritorialized nature of ideas like “cashlessness” alongside the microphysics of power that affect moving bodies and spirits throughout the hemisphere. We must think transnationally in order to understand more fully the entanglements of the economic, the political, and the cultural in Latin America, and to respond appropriately to realities of violent inequality. Diverse emergences of Pentecostal, Charismatic, and neo-Pentecostal movements continue to grow throughout the region of the Americas, some in deepening political alliance with conservative branches of the Catholic Church, others as completely independent movements. Yet others are joined with denominational structures specific to the Global South. The religious landscapes of Latin America continuously diverge, multiply, and proliferate as Afro-Caribbean and African-descendent religiosities, as well as Indigenous movements reclaiming spiritual and political terrain, grow in recognition and number. Religion in the Americas, as discipline and as object of study, operates and arises in the interstices of colonial histories and racialized hierarchies of power entangled with “diasporic assemblages,” as Aisha Beliso-De Jesús has suggested, and within configurations of free market spiritualities that refuse discrete lines of denominational taxonomies or linear histories of origin and rupture.28 To think “Christianity” in Colombia or Latin America is to think alongside transgressive acts of border crossings, blurring lines between “here” and “there”; troubling ideas of “prosperity,” “blessing,” or even “Pentecostalism” as they might be recognized in the North; and

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dismissing walls, both cultural and political, in a persistent movement toward an imagined idea of Americas. Plural. To think Christianity, or religion, in Latin America today is to recognize that the tired historical timelines (Indigenous, Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal) do not form a coherent linear chronology; rather, they rip at the seams when analytical pressure is applied. The movement of ideas and bodies across borders and religio-scapes has been a constant throughout the history of the Americas. That North and South America are radically detached from each other is a fiction of exceptionalism belied by the interconnected realities that racialized formations of hemispheric power differentials entrench. Embodied and emboldened, blackened and browned religiosities (again, to incorporate Beliso-de Jesus’s helpful language in considering the racializing power of religion in the Americas) are becoming recognized by scholarship and society, as they incrementally increase their presence and visibility. Santeria, Candomblé, María Lionza, Vodou, and all other manner of Afrodescended and Indigenous religiosities have always been entwined with Christianity in Latin America. Indeed, to consider “Christianity” in Latin America is to contemplate a matrix of power upon which relations, connections, and disruptions occur across and within contested spaces of the transhistorical and the transnational, in concert with the political and economic structures that generate the lived realities of religious expression. For example, the “Prosperity Christians” we have considered in the present study, who conflate prosperity with survival, not ostentation, show us that prosperity looks quite different on the peripheries of Bogotá than it does in the suburbs of Dallas. The configuration of diasporic assemblage is helpful in thinking through religion in the Americas all the way down, as it were. Religion, as diagnostic, helps us navigate these contested, uneven, and always dynamic webs of relations and urges us toward the development of a critical analytic that considers the politics of affect, such as the heady pulse of spirit-possessed dancing at a Pentecostal revival or a drum ceremony for Erzuli in Port-auPrince. Additionally, attention to diasporic webs aids a better understanding of the degrees of embodiment in transnational relations of power, such as fervent prayers by young women in El Salvador to Jesús Malverde that they won’t be impregnated when they are raped during their journey north to meet family in San Diego, or the offerings to Maria Lionza beside

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Maria Virgen Santísima by Venezuelan refugees as they attempt to flee to Colombia with everything they own on their backs. Diasporic assemblages and free market spiritualities invite a consideration of Christianity in the Americas as polemic, as concept rather than object. There is no “Christianity” in the Americas, there are only objectifications that must be understood in contingent terms as they arise in dynamic matrices of power and knowledge. Religion is often organized through violent political repressions, just as religion both shapes and is shaped by socioeconomic realities that generate wildly distinct productions of ritual, belief, and salvation. Another way to approach the question of the religious situation in the Americas is to invoke the organizing principle of nepantla—a Nahuatl term meaning “in-betweenness”—as theoretical framework. The idea was introduced by Chicana, feminist, queer theorist Gloria Anzaldúa in the 1980s to articulate a way out of Western-Northern binaries and either-or equations of nationality, religiosity, sexuality, gender, and culture. Life on the borderlands (a symbolic metaphor that holds for all of the Americas) requires such a decolonizing diagnostic. Nepantla clears an analytical space that opens a wider network of symbolic relationships and meanings. Much as dreams do this work for Amira Mittermeier’s insistence on the ethico-political wagers that in-betweenness as analytical category can open, nepantla disrupts the illusion of the autonomous, self-possessed subject as it destabilizes “Christianity” or religion, in the Americas, as closed, autonomous, culturally and dogmatically discrete faith traditions—Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, and so on.29 Nepantla understands the subject—and the webs of symbolic relationships and meaning that exist on the transnational grid—within the colonial, historical moment of the present. The religious subject is considered between forces of domination and colonization, as in between discrete borders of religious identity and cultural representation. Nepantla as critical analytic forges a site for meaning making from the middle rather than the periphery. I have proposed a layered understanding of religion in Colombia, and the Americas, emerging in forms of assemblage and in-betweenness, of Christianity as polemical concept, and the geontological considerations of the historical present of colonial inheritances and immediate crises. These

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configurations create new space, and this new geographical space makes way for new critical terrain in which a relevant Study of American Religion becomes, rather, the Study of Religion in the Americas. I suggest a project of space-making that celebrates absence and presence, inspired again by Beliso-de Jesús—absent ancestors, absent parents after an ICE raid, absent children who have been disappeared, absent State apparatuses—and the lingering presences that these absences create, as they are shared by the always-dynamic diasporic assemblages, emerging and dispersing, contesting and acting in the nepantla of our times. These actors and religious trends should be recognized for and by their in-betweenness, firmly at the center and not at the margins of our analysis. These embodied realities generate an evocatively transhemispheric incitation for analysis. At the same time, they make a struggle for a new social order hauntingly relevant.

po Wer , De Sir e, a nD b el iev in g The neoclassical economists maintain that economics begins with exchange. This antiquation erases power from any calculation that might consider the origins of trade, and the (im)possibility of such a thing being “free.” In the introduction of the concept of “free market spiritualities,” I explained that the relations of power at work in the process of financialization are revealed in the private and public realms of deregulated personhood—at once free yet confined by threats of physical elimination. Disembedded from territory, deregulated personhood is fluid, dissipated, and yet utterly controlled by and around the logics of capital. Understanding economic practices such as measurement, evaluation, and appraisal as necessarily entangled in a web of power relations extricates the equation of exchange from inevitability and refutes the possibility of a natural progression of economic development toward equality or equivalence. The project of this book has been to denaturalize the inevitability of the power of capital and the chimeric promises of prosperity through demonstrating the ways that debt is the handmaid to credit. This book has also highlighted the ontological threat that necrofinance poses to the world’s most vulnerable populations: in Colombia, poverty will get you killed, and debt might get you killed faster.

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Money expresses power flows. Financing (as opposed to simple purchasing power, which is limited to means of payment for consumption of goods) is a power for “prescribing, ordering, that is, a set of possibilities for choices and decisions with regard to the future, which anticipate what the production, power relations, and forms of subjection will be.”30 Indeed, money as capital—such as initial seed money deposited in order to open a bank account, the activation of a credit card, a microloan, or money gifted to God— has creative and destructive powers, linking the economy once again with the metaphysical realm of the religious. In this sense, money, as it is derived from debt in financialized capitalism, has its “infinite nature” defined, and the concept of “free market spiritualities” pulls our discussion back to Christian ideals of infinite debt and the deterritorialization of finance. Ursula’s social relations and commitment to perform her prosperity for family members demonstrates the power of believing in forging an infinite debt with banks. In a conversation with Ursula only a few months after finishing my fieldwork, she assured me that she was becoming “more responsible” with her financial situation, paying her credit card debt monthly, saving money better, and taking much more care in her purchasing habits. The conversation I had with her demonstrates how the disciplinary power of debt continues to affect the ways that she was paying back her debts. But she also understands her fiscal responsibility as a sign of good faith, expectantly aspiring toward becoming more prosperous. In our most recent conversation, she stated it thus: “God gives you a certain amount of wealth. If you mismanage it, He won’t give you anymore. I’m learning to be more responsible so that He’ll entrust me with more.” The intention is not to move out of debt and never return. Rather, the power of debt disciplines Ursula’s conduct, her attitude, her plans, and her work on herself in order to newly enter into a negotiated power relation with finance. Prosperity Christianity in Colombia operates within the regime of power relations between individual and public. Such is the internalization of the precarious subjectivity that financial capitalism promotes. In southern Bogotá, Remedios remains a reluctant Christian and a participant in the microcredit program run by the Christian NGO. As mentioned, Remedios had to sell her restaurant. She now sells empanadas out of her house with her husband. Dreams of opening a second restaurant downtown remain unrealized, and Remedios resents her debt that will not be forgiven. Her life becomes increasingly precarious, and perilous.

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Fernanda and Sofia’s aspirational practices of indebted tithing in the MCI illuminate a different relation between power and belief. Fernanda’s story animates the move in financialized capitalism toward the financialization of nonfinancial economies. Introducing financial capital into the bank accounts of the church represents a shift in the relation between the supposedly secular realm of the economy and the sacred space of the house of worship. The machinations of banking in the megachurch further muddle any distinction between the sacred and the profane—if there ever was one. The MCI also introduced to us the ways that financial capitalism is reordering gendered ideals of family, patriarchy, and womanhood. A new subject begins to emerge, one charged with infinite multiplication and endless attempts to conform to an increasingly violent context for womanhood. Financialization’s intersection with believing comes into clearest relief when the trope of “believing in the self ” is deployed. Where a “real” economy is understood as oppressive and limiting to wage-earners, as the Nu Skin program described in chapter 6 purports, finance claims modes of enrichment through consuming on credit. Whereas wages are stubbornly kept low and pensions weak, stock options and consumer credit relieve the burden on employers. There may be no right to housing, but housing loans proliferate. There is no right to education, but banks are replete with student loan options. Austerity is the face of the belief structure that allows only a belief in the self and the continual demonstration that this self should be believed in. The forced performance of debt-worthiness in financializing economies of both the North and the South, plays to a common tune of privatization and credit-wielding believers. Whereas finance has employed the Christian trope of infinite becoming, introducing the possibility of endless growth and unstoppable wealth accumulation, it is the card-carrying Christians that put into practice the believing rites of debt creation in the service of a free market. By focusing on distinct forms of deregulated Christianity in relation to finance capitalism, a fresh methodological and theoretical window opens through which we can approach new paths of understanding what financialization is, and a deeper understanding of Christianity in relation to it. This book has problematized and queried, under the light of an ethnography of everyday econo-religious practices, both financialization

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and Prosperity Christianity in the prime site of an emerging nation as it works to pull itself out of an armed conflict through the only recipe financialized capitalism has offered: increasing economic growth tied to increasing consumer debt. Neoliberal economics is far more than an economic program, as many have already elucidated , and this book further demonstrates.31 The precarity, unpredictability, and violence created by neoliberalism becomes a requirement for financialized capitalism. Adaptation to the financializing world, the cashless world, and the emergence of new economies, rests upon the endless potential of credit. The emergence of financialization as a form of producing the self, as well as making the self productive, is the central metaphysics of the financial system. The sheer mystery and seeming endless abundance of the financial system points to an emerging rationality not yet fully revealed. Neoliberalism and financialization require the deep enchantments that modernity was thought to have done away with. When finance is understood as concept and disciplinary regime, we may move toward reconsidering its qualities of “disenchantment” and rationality in order to unmake its doctrine. Through recognizing our own free market spiritualities acting within a prescribed domain, through understanding our attachment to consumption as a regime of practice, and by naming our rituals of exchange and our indentured optimism as components of a program that is transnational and transcendent in reach and scope we arrive at the conclusion that believing in the structures that bind us re-creates those structures as they re-create us in their image. Ursula, Fernanda, Sofia, and Remedios, and all the other voices that have been foregrounded throughout these pages, challenge the inevitability of the reign of savage, colonial, racialized financial structures. The debt with which they live their lives points to a crack in the edifice of finance capital. Their prosperity has been revealed as a program of survival within the dominion of profit margins, their believing practices operating as forces resistance even as they so often acquiesce. Witches, angels, demons, and God continue to frame a messy campaign of integration and absorption into a global unevenness of debt and power. In the end, the voices of those who are so often unheard and rendered disposable can lead us towards new ways of thinking from the underside of modernity, rising out of the shadows of capital.

Notes

prefaCe 1. Gabriel García Márquez, The Solitude of Latin America, Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech, 1982 (Stockholm: The Nobel Foundation, 1982). 2. For a marvelous analysis of Marquez’s One Hundred Years, and the entanglements of colonial formations of power, patriarchy, and paramilitarism in Colombia’s Caribbean region, see José Antonio Figueroa, Realismo Mágico, vallenato, y violencia política en la Costa Colombiana (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiana de Antropología e Historia, 2009) 3. Before the current peace accord was achieved, numerous attempts had been made to bring the FARC, and the other, smaller, guerrilla factions to the negotiating table. The governments of Belisario Betancur (1982–1986), Virgilio Barco (1986–1990), César Gaviria (1990–1994), Ernesto Samper (1994–1998), and Andrés Pastrana (1998–2002) all initiated peace negotiations with the FARC and other guerrilla groups. Some were successful. In 1990, the government signed a peace accord with the guerrilla group M-19. In the early 1990s, peace accords were negotiated and signed with smaller guerrilla groups like Ejército Popular de Liberación (Popular Liberation Army, EPL), the group Quentín Lame, and the group Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (The Revolutionary Workers Party, RTP). Before the peace accord signed with the FARC in 2017, the guerrilla and the government of Andrés Pastrana had made grand efforts at achieving an agreement. Those talks ultimately failed, and the 203

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early 2000s ushered in a time of heightened violence and military engagement under the tutelage of the US “War on Terror” and the US foreign policy “Plan Colombia,” which dedicated billions of dollars in military aid to the Colombian state. This, together with the proliferation and legitimation of right-wing paramilitary militias and the government policies of Alvaro Uribe Vélez, meant the FARC would not be invited back to the negotiating table until 2012 under the government of Juan Manuel Santos. 4. Camila Restrepo, Santiago Ramírez, and Luis Murcia, “Líderes sociales en Colombia: Quién podrá defederlos?” Semana, January 13, 2019. https:// especiales.semana .com/lideres-sociales-asesinados/index.html. 5. Nicholas Casey and Lara Jakes, “Former Leader of Guerilla Fighters in Colombia Calls for Return to War,” New York Times, August 29, 2019, sec. A. 6. Economically driven violence is endemic to capitalist formation. The dispossession of land for capital accumulation began with the arrival of the conquistadores to the Americas in the fifteenth century. Marx referred to the process of dispossessing indigenous peoples from their lands in the New World as a form of “primitive accumulation” necessary to establishing the capital of land title and severing the bond between individual and soil. Only through this process of “divorcing the producer from the means of production” could the economic structure of capitalist society grow out of the structure of feudal, or precolonial, society. Marx makes mention that these foundational economic acts, “this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. B. Fowkes (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1976), 875.

introDuCtion 1. In many neo-Pentecostal megachurches, a difference is marked between these three forms of exchange with God. The “pact,” or covenant, refers to committing money with a specific promise made to God, and a particular expectation of return upon investment. For example, one might pact for growth of one’s cell group. The pact is usually a larger sum of money, and it is spoken of in terms of a contract with God. The offering is often a smaller sum of money and is usually made in thanks to God for a particular blessing or good fortune that the devout have benefited from. The tithe is specifically 10 percent of one’s income given monthly or yearly. Another form of exchange is that of the primicia, which has its roots in feudal economic structures in which the feudal lord would demand the first crops of a new harvest. The primicia would imply handing over the first paycheck of a new job, or first rental payment on a purchased property, or first incomes of the like.

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2. I follow Michel de Certeau’s project of considering “everyday life,” making “explicit the systems of operational combination which also compose a ‘culture,’ and to bring to light the models of action characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element in society . . . is concealed by the euphemistic term ‘consumers’ ” Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 19841984), xi. An analysis of everyday life provides an examination of ways that individuals make culture, produce society, and develop tactics to reclaim autonomy. 3. For a comprehensive history of finance, see Marieke de Goede, Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 4. Michel Feher explores the design of a “Speculative Age,” in his book Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age (New York: Zone Books, 2018). 5. William Mauricio Beltrán and Sonia Patricia Larotta Silva, Diversidad Religiosa valores y participación política en Colombia (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2019). See also by, Del monopolio católico a la explosión pentecostal: Pluralización, secularización, y cambio social en Colombia (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2013). 6. Carlos Arturo Garcia M., “Colombianos gastaron $61.5 billones en ‘tarjetazos’ el año pasado,” El Tiempo, February 27, 2018, sec. Economia y Finanzas. 7. Beltrán, Del monopolio católico. See also Banca de las Oportunidades, Bancoldex, Reporte de inclusión financiera 2016(Bogotá: Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia, July 2017). 8. See for example Naomi Haynes, Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Ruth Marshall, Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Simon Coleman, The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). One of the most thorough analyses of the links between Prosperity Christianity and neoliberal capitalism is by Jean and John Comaroff who demonstrate the ways “millennial” capitalism and the prosperity gospel operate in concert in postcolonial Africa. See Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming,” Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 291–343; and Jean Comaroff, “Pentecostalism, ‘Post- Secularism,’ and the Politics of Affect,” in Pentecostalism in Africa: Presence and Impact of Pneumatic Christianity in Postcolonial Societies. Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies (New York: Brill, 2014). 9. See for example Eric Kramer, Possessing Faith, 2001; William Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Thindandavha Mashau and Mookgo Kgatle, “Prosperity Gospel and the Culture of Greed in Post- Colonial Africa: Constructing an Alternative

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African Christian Theology of Ubuntu.” Verbum et Ecclesia 40, no. 1 (2019): 1–8; Mary V. Wrenn, “Consecrating Capitalism: The United States Prosperity Gospel and Neoliberalism.” Journal of Economic Issues 53, no. 2 (2019): 425–32. 10. Comaroff, and Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism,” 315. 11. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 2019. 12. Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 66. 13. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 179. 14. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 67. 15. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 16. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 92. 17. For detailed analysis of massacres in Colombia, see Gary Leech, Beyond Bogotá: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009); Michael Taussig, Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a “Limpieza” in Colombia (New York: New Press, 2003); Winifred Tate, Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 18. For further reading on the political economy of war in Colombia, see Nazih Richani, Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia, 2nd ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013); Thad Dunning and Leslie Wirpsa, “Oil and Political Economy of Conflict in Colombia and Beyond: A Linkages Approach,” Geopolitics 9, no. 1 (2009): 81–10; Sara Meger, “Militarized Peace: Understanding the Post- conflict Violence in the Wake of the Peace Deal in Colombia,” Globalizations 17, no. 6 (2020): 953–73. 19. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011). See also Adam Kostko, Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). 20. Boris Miranda, “Qué son los prestamos “gota a gota que grupos criminals de Colombia exportan al resto de América Latina?” BBC World, October 21, 2016. https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-37708989. 21. Jorge A. Obando-Bastidas, Gloria I. Herrera- Sarmiento, and José J. Rodríguez-Ladino, “Los microempresarios y los cuentagotas en Villavicencio, Orinoquia 20, no. 2 (2016): 102–11. Obando-Bastidas et. al find that individuals turn to these loan sharks because formal lines of credit take too long to access, involve too much paperwork, require inordinate expectations for monitoring, and there is mistrust of the banks. 22. Cynthia Vargas Castillo, “Prestamos gota a gota aumentaron en cuarentena,” RCN Radio, June 25, 2020. https:// www.rcnradio .com /economia /prestamos-gota-gota-aumentaron-en-cuarentena (Accessed July 3, 2020). 23. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

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24. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Picador, 2004). 25. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 12; my emphasis. 26. João Biehl and Peter Locke, Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 27. Biehl and Locke, Unfinished, 9. 28. Matthew Engelke, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 29. Engelke, A Problem of Presence, 28. 30. All biblical references from New Revised Standard Version. 31. The word renacer could alternatively be translated as “reborn.” 32. Michel Feher, “The Political Ascendency of Creditworthiness,” Public Books, January 9, 2019. 33. Randy Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 5. 34. Libardo Sarmiento Anzola, “Canasta Básica Familiar (CBF) y pauperismo en Colombia, 1998–2019,” Desde Abajo, April 2019. 35. “Colombia’s Household Debt: % of GDP,” CIEC Data, 2019. 36. Peckham, “Colombia’s GDP Grew at 2.2% Rate in 1Q 2018,” Medellin Herald, May 15, 2018. 37. On a macro scale, the turn to financialization in the 1970s that accompanied processes of neoliberalization dealt with the surplus liquidity that piled up in the Gulf States as a result of rising oil prices. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). This excess was then, “recycled into the global economy via the New York investment banks which lent big time to developing countries, setting the stage for the developing debt crisis of the 1980s,” David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 28. The dogma of neoliberalization prescribed the only possible route for the surplus capital to be invested in privately run institutions, leading to a wave of privatization of public assets (health care, education, transportation, etc.) throughout the world. Increased surplus capital during the 1980s resulted in dropping prices, and profits began to stagnate. Because of this, more money was funneled to speculation on asset values because more money was to be made there. All of this resulted in the debt explosion of the 1990s and the new derivatives markets that set the stage for a full financialization of capitalism toward the 2000s. Alongside this shift toward financialization, banking began to change. Aspiration and debt became central to banking and fundamental for financialization as the progeny of neoliberalization and deregulation. 38. The Mont Pelerin Society was an elite group of economists and theorists led by political philosopher, Friedrich von Hayek. The group had begun to

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consider the necessity of an economic program that pushed the “invisible hand of the market” to a privileged place in global economic structuring. Hayek, known for greatly influencing Milton Friedman of the Chicago School of economics and being one of, if not the most influential of the theorists of neoliberal theory, proposed an economic structure which would see state intervention roll back and gradually hand over the “Commanding Heights” of national economies to privatized systems of organization and ownership. This process, he and the Mont Pelerin Society claimed, would prevent economic decisions from being made under the influence of political agendas, which were interpreted to inevitably skew true market signals of supply and demand, purportedly the root of the financial hardships that had brought on the Great Depression. The underlying doxic truth, extended from the neoliberal theorizing that had already begun to take shape in the mid-nineteenth century by free market economists such as Alfred Marshall, William Stanley Jevons, and Leon Walrus, was freedom. 39. Michel Feher, Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age (New York: Zone Books, 2018), 14. Economic security has long been sustained through military might. Just one example of this was the U.S. aid program designed for Colombia to combat, and defeat, the communist threat of the guerilla insurrection and narcotrafficking, Plan Colombia (2000–2010). The plan was a multibilliondollar military and humanitarian (mostly military) effort to strengthen the Colombian military’s capacity to eradicate the guerrilla threat and combat narcotrafficking. Among other things, the plan devoted tens of millions of dollars to protecting oil pipelines and open-pit mining, securing terrain for ongoing speculation on the prices of an ounce of gold or barrel of oil without the problem of resistance or sabotage. Much of the protection was “supported” by right-wing paramilitary militias in collaboration with the Colombian military. See (Winifred Tate, Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats: U.S. Policymaking in Colombia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 40. Carlos Enrique Londoño Rendón, “La apertura económica en Colombia,” Pensamiento Humanista 4 (1998): 40–51. 41. José Jaime Rojas, “La política de comercio exterior y las exportaciones colombianas,” Revista de Economía Institucional 21, no. 41 (2019): 51–70; DANE (Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística), “Producto Interno Bruto (PIB): II trimestre de 2019 preliminar,” Boletín Técnico (Bogotá: Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística, August 15, 2019). 42. According to the National Audit Office (Contraloría de la Nación), “80% of human rights violations in Colombia occur in territories where there is mining or petroleum extraction; 87% of forced displacements come from those same municipalities and those that receive royalties for mining or energy production (coal, natural gas, hydroelectricity, etc.); 78% of crimes against unions, 89% of crimes against Indigenous communities, and 90% of crimes against

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Afro- Colombian populations are committed in mining- energy regions,” Luis Jorge Garay Salmanca, Minería en Colombia: Derechos, políticas públicas y gobernanza (Madrid: Contraloría General de la Nación, 2013), 63. 43. Massive displacements began to significantly rise toward the end of the 1990s and early 2000s with the consolidation of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC, the paramilitary army that was led by the Castaño brothers, Vicente, Fidel, and Carlos, and Salvatore Mancuso, as well as the disintegration of the peace talks between the Pastrana government (1998–2002) and the FARC, and the entrance of President Alvaro Uribe (2002–2010) and his mano dura, or hard-line approach to attacking the FARC militarily. See Jorge Orjuela Cubides, “Despojo y desplazamiento campesino en Colombia,” Agencia Prensa Rural, November 30, 2018; Ana María Ibáñez Londoño, El desplazamiento forzoso en Colombia: Un camino sin retorno hacia la pobreza (Bogotá: Universidad de Los Andes 2008); Martha Nubía Bello, Desplazamiento forzado: Dinámicas de guerra, exclusió y desarraigo (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2004). 44. The influx of foreign direct investment with loosened regulations coupled with a campaign to crush unionizing made Colombia one of the most dangerous countries to be a trade unionist for most of the last thirty years. Lesley Gill offers an in-depth analysis of the case of Coca- Cola in Colombia, one of the most egregious. See Lesley Gill, “ ‘Right There with You: Coca- Cola, Labor Restructuring and Political Violence in Colombia,” Critique of Anthropology 27, no. 3 (2007): 235–60. Other well- documented cases of foreign corporations and human rights violations in Colombia include the case of Chiquita Banana (Aviva Chomsky, “Globalization, Labor, and Violence in Colombia’s Banana Zone,” International Labor and Working- Class History 72, no. 1 [2007]: 90–115), the exploits of Cerrejón Coal (Aviva Chomsky, “Empire, Nature, and the Labor of Coal: Colombia in the Twenty-First Century,” Labor 13, nos. 3–4 [2016]: 197–222), the accusations against Drummond Coal (Juan David Velasco, “Negotiating Land: Foreign Firms, Large Scale Mining and Human Rights in Colombia,” Revista Estudios Socio- Jurídicos 16, no. 1 [2014]: 285–310), conflict around large-scale open-pit gold mining and Anglo- Gold Ashanti (Aida Quiñones Torres, “Geopolítica de los conflictos socioambientales: Resistencia a la expansión minera,” Memoria y Sociedad 19, no. 39 [2015]: 73–92), and the role of oil companies in perpetrating human rights violations (Shannon Curry, “U’Wa Threaten Suicide in Fight against Oil Exploration,” Alternatives Journal 24, no. 4 [1998]: 3–4). 45. Silvia Mantilla Valbuena, “Economía y conflicto armado en Colombia: Los efectos de la globalización en la transformación de la guerra,” Latinoamérica: Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos 55 (2012): 35–73. 46. Narcopolitics have been a feature of the Colombian political establishment since the launch of the drug economy. In the 1990s, the clearest evidence of the power of the narco-industry was the “Proceso 8000,” which saw the election

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campaign of Ernesto Samper financed by narcodollars. Samper became president in 1994. While Samper was absolved by Congress, over fifty people who were part of his campaign were investigated and found responsible on corruption charges. Samper’s US visa was revoked, and the country’s trust in its government weakened to the point of crisis. See Jorge Cardona Alzate, “El 8000: Así Fue El Narcoescándalo Que Avergonzó a Colombia,” El Espectador, November 3, 2017, sec. Judicial. 47. Colombia’s humanitarian catastrophe of over six million internally displaced persons is one of the clearest indicators of the state’s ongoing strongarm approach to securing a political and physical atmosphere suitable to the interests of capital. Colombia’s massive displacements, of course, have myriad causes and factors that exacerbate the situation of the displaced populations. However, the highest rates of displacement are from regions of the country that are richest in natural resources. Drug trafficking and land disputes between insurgency groups are also important elements of displacement, and of course, drug trafficking very much operates according to the logics of the flows of capital. See Beatriz Eugenia, and Sánchez and René Urueña, “Colombian Development-Induced Displacement: Considering the Impact of International Law on Domestic Policy.” Groningen Journal of International Law 5, no. 1 (2017): 73–95; Ibañez Londoño, El desplazamiento forzoso en Colombia; Anastasia Moloney, “Displaced in Colombia,” NACLA Report on the Americas, September 25, 2007. 48. Gastón Espinosa, Latino Pentecostals in America: Faith and Politics in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), xi. 49. Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 39. Cited in Matthew Engelke and Matt Tomlinson, eds. The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 8. 50. William Garriott and Kevin Lewis O’Neill, “Who Is a Christian? Towards a Dialogic Approach in the Anthropology of Christianity,” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 4 (2008): 381–98. 51. Simon Coleman, and Rosalind I. J. Hackett, eds., The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 8. 52. Espinosa, Latino Pentecostals, 1. 53. Comaroff, “Pentecostalism, ‘Post- Secularism,’ and the Politics of Affect,” 2014. 54. Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 55. See Steve Brouwer, Paul Gifford, and Susan D. Rose. Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism (New York: Routledge, 1996);

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and Steven Hunt, “ ‘Winning Ways’: Globalisation and the Impact of the Health and Wealth Gospel,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 15, no. 3 (2000): 331–47. 56. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, “Neo-Pentecostalism and Prosperity Theology in Latin America: A Religion for Late Capitalist Society,” Iberoamericana: Nordic Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 62, nos. 1–2 (2012): 23. 57. Garrard-Burnett, “Neo-Pentecostalism,” 21. 58. See, among others, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstractions: Notes from the South African Postcolony,” American Ethnologist 26, no. 2 (1999): 279–303; Coleman, Globalisation, 2000; Katharine Attanasi and Amos Young, Pentecostalism and Prosperity: The SocioEconomics of the Global Charismatic Movement (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012); Birgit Meyer, “Pentecostalism and Neo-Liberal Capitalism: Faith, Prosperity, and Vision in African Pentecostal- Charismatic Churches,” Journal for the Study of Religion 20, no. 2 (2006): 5–27; Marshall, Political Spiritualities; Kevin O’Neill, City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 59. Simon Coleman, “Prosperity Unbound? Debating the ‘Sacrificial Economy,’ ” Research in Economic Anthropology 31 (2011): 42. 60. Daromir Rudnyckyj, Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010, 132). 61. Coleman, “Prosperity Unbound?,” 41. Here I insist that Christianity is one religious form of many, as hegemonic as it may be, that operates upon distinct matrices of power in the particular location of Colombia. Rudnyckyj’s work on Islam in the neoliberal workplace in Indonesia; Andrea Jain’s work on the commodification of yoga in the United States in Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (New York: Oxford University Press 2015); and Meera Nanda’s The God Market: How Globalization Is Making India More Hindu (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), on the expansion of economic globalization and deepening “Hinduism” in India, among others, all suggest that the category “religion” is problematic inasmuch as it can serve as shorthand for “Christianity”—a claim I work hard to write against—and capitalism’s assumed, special relation to Christianity has eclipsed the more complicated reality that capitalism operates parasitically, attaching itself, its values, and its valences upon the particular power structures, religion included, that dominate in any given time or place. 62. This is a particularity of the expansion of Pentecostal Christianity in Colombia, given the historical moment in which Pentecostalism begins to expand in the country. In 1948, the Liberal candidate to the Presidency, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, was assassinated. This assassination launched the country into the bloody decade known as La Violencia. It was during these tumultuous years that Pentecostal missionaries expanded their reach throughout the country. The missionaries, in a way, had an advantage, given the bipartisan violence

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that rampaged through the countryside, cut down lines of Conservative and Liberal and associated with religious affiliation, Roman Catholic and Protestant, respectively. To be clear, there were Liberal Catholics. However, as Clemencia Sarmiento states, “The hostile terrain in which the nascent Pentecostal communities found themselves . . . strengthened the internal commitment of their adherents, who found examples in Scripture of persecution that were interpreted as occasions for strengthening and sublimation of the faith.” Clemencia Tejeiro Sarmiento, ed., El pentecostalismo en Colombia: Prácticas religiosas, liderazgo, y participatión pública (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2010), 44. 63. Beltrán, Del monopolio católico, 139; translation by author. 64. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1995). 65. By “giving account of the self” I am referring at once to the interiorized bodily practices that render the poor and the marginalized as “more human”— practices imposed by government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and churches, such as personal hygiene, civic education, and financial literacy. The phrase echoes Judith Butler’s deployment of accounting for the self. Butler follows Nietzsche by elaborating a “controversial account” from On the Genealogy of Morals that the morality deployed in the development of the subject is predicated on punishment and fear. The justice system renders individuals accountable and over time, the subject is produced through reducing the “consciousness of individuals to their weakest and most fallible organ.” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1989 [1887]), 84). Butler states, “I start to give an account, if Nietzsche is right, because someone has asked me to, and that someone has power delegated from an established system of justice.” Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 11. This justice system, in the emergence of financialization as the moral marker of human worth, now resides in debt, schuld, guilt—the financial system has become a para-system of justice, producing financialized subjects who are cultivated and reformed in accordance to the governance structures of the market. 66. For the first time in a decade, Colombia’s credit rating was given an investment-grade rating in 2011, marking the country as an increasingly stable and newly desirable destination for foreign investment. 67. Aisha M. Beliso- de Jesús, Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 68. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Democracia y Transformación Social (Bogotá: Siglo de Hombres Editores, 2017). 69. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 trans. B. Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976 [1867]).

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70. Rebecca Bartel and Lucia Hulsether, “Classifying Capital: An Introduction,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 87, no. 3 (2019): 581–96; Harvey, The Enigma of Capital; Marx, Capital. 71. Martha Nubia Bello, dir., Basta ya! Colombia: Memorias de Guerra y Dignidad (Bogotá: Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2013). 72. Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” 25. 73. See Alex L. Fattal, Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), for a brilliant analysis of the role of marketing and branding in the Colombian government’s peace negotiation processes between 2010 and 2016. 74. César Castellanos, La escalera del exito: Ganar, consolidar, discipular, envier (Bogotá: G12 Editors, 2007). 75. Andrea Tunarosa, “Spreading the Word—Fast: A New System Makes Church Membership Grow Exponentially,” Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2006.

Chapter 1. CreDit 1. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 2. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 178. 3. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Hall (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002 [1925]), 14. 4. Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010 [1980]), 37. 5. Mary Douglas, “foreword.” In Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Hall (New York: Norton, 1990), ix. 6. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1976 [1867]), 256. 7. Mauss, The Gift, 3. 8. Douglas, “foreword,” vii. 9. Douglas, foreword, ix. 10. Douglas, foreword, x. 11. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 6. 12. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 6. 13. Michel de Certeau, “What We Do When We Believe,” in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 193. 14. de Certeau, The Practice, 193. 15. de Certeau, The Practice, 194.

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16. Arjun Appadurai, “Welcome to the Faith-Based Economy,” The Immanent Frame (blog), October 14, 2008, https://tif.ssrc.org/2008/10/14/welcome-to-the -faith-based-economy/. 17. The works I am referring to here include Bell’s published articles and chapters, including Catherine Bell, “The Chinese Believe in Spirits: Belief and Believing in the Study of Religion,” in Radical Interpretation, ed. Nancy Frankenberry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); “Paradigms Behind (and Before) the Study of Religion,” Theory and History 45, no. 4 (2006): 1–20; The Catherine Bell Papers MSS.2013.06.16 (Santa Clara: Santa Clara University Library Archives & Special Collections, 2019). 18. Mauss, The Gift; Claude Levi-Strauss The Elementary Forms of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969); Bourdieu, Outline; de Certeau, The Practice. 19. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995 [1912]), 62. It should be noted that belief as central to “religion” was a trope employed long before Durkheim. The literature is thick. Evolutionary anthropologists of the Victorian era defined beliefs as central to rituals, indeed, as central to religion itself. As Talal Asad deftly explains, the trope of “beliefs” as central to religion relies on an exclusively “Christian” historical narrative that has problematically, and Eurocentrically, imposed “the problem of belief” onto all scholarship of religion. Asad’s critique is most famously found in his dismantling of Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion as cultural system, found in Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Asad further teases out his critique in Talal Asad, “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, ed. Robert A. Orsi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 36–57. Manuel A. Vásquez, More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Vásquez carefully treats the legacy of immateriality in the study of religion, and the role that the discipline’s concern with “belief” has played. Vásquez calls for a “materialist theory of religion” through moving past the colonial inheritance of religion being considered equivalent to belief. Robert Orsi offers a discussion of the problems with “religion-as-belief” from his perspective of the conceptual frame of lived religion. The article “Belief,” Material Religion 7, no. 1 (2011): 10–17, reviews the history of the term belief, the colonial legacies that a Christo- centric worldview imposed upon different religions around the world. Orsi indeed warns that the overwhelming dismissal of belief, for a focus on the body and materiality, has only served to place the debate back at the problematic risk that empties the minds of “ordinary religious people” and does not allow for a consideration of the “inevitably relational nature of these operations of mind and body in religious contexts” (15). The debate has

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most recently been taken up by Kathryn Lofton and the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University in 2012. The Yale Roundtable on Belief is documented in “Introduction to the Yale Roundtable on Belief,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 24, no. 1(2012): 51–54, in which she concludes that while belief remains a theme of interest in the discipline, it cannot be detached from the “strange social politics of its invocation” (p. 54). 20. Catherine Bell, “Belief: A Classificatory Lacuna and Disciplinary Problem,” in Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, ed. Willie Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (London: Equinox Publishing, 2008), 88. 21. See E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), Rodney Needham, Belief, Language, and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), Matthew Engelke “The Problem of Belief: Evans-Pritchard and Victor Turner on the ‘Inner Life.’ ” Anthropology Today 18, no. 6 (2002): 3–8; and Galina Lindquist and Simon Coleman, “Against Belief? Introduction,” Social Analysis 52, no. 1 (2008): v–vi. 22. See for example David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London: Penguin Books, 1986); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Beliefs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Slavoj Žižek, On Belief: Thinking in Action (New York: Routledge, 2001). 23. See for example Ara Norenzayan, “Why We Believe: Religion as a Human Universal,” in Human Morality and Sociality: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Henrik Høgh- Olesen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Justin L. Barrett, Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief (New York: Atria Books, 2004); Aiyana K. Willard and Ara Norenzayan, “Cognitive Biases Explain Religious Belief, Paranormal Belief, and Belief in Life’s Purpose,” Cognition 129 (2013): 379–91. 24. See for example Marian Hillar, From Logos to Trinity: The Evolution of Religious Beliefs from Pythagoras to Tertullian (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), John M. Frame, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2013), and H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper Collins, 1956). 25. Bell, “Belief,” 89, The insistence on distinguishing between “belief” and “practice” as distinct conceptual arenas can also be traced back to the materialist turn in the study of religion, and the welcome emphasis on the body, on embodiment, and subjectivity, as Constance M. Furey outlines in her provocative article, “Bodies, Society, and Subjectivity in Religious Studies,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 80, no. 1 (2012): 7–3. As Furey helpfully explains, the turn to the body and materiality has upset the Protestant bias toward the “religion as belief” concept. She warns, however, that the new focus has maintained the religious subject in a world to herself. Furey suggests moving toward

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emphasizing the relationality inherent in subject formation along with the consideration of embodiment and praxis. 26. See Durkheim, Elementary Forms; Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1987); J. Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 27. Kevin O’Neill, “Beyond Broken: Affective Spaces and the Study of American Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81, no. 4 (2013): 1095. 28. El Tiempo, “En Bogotá, la Navidad se iluminará con bombillos Led,” November 6, 2013. 29. “Invitamos a todos los colombianos a Bogotá, queremos que sean testigos que la capital vive una navidad desarmada. Sin armas se puede vivir un nuevo tiempo. Esta Navidad debe tener un mensaje muy fuerte en seguridad para contrarrestar lo que ocurría en anteriores celebraciones en donde se incrementaron los homicidios en Bogotá” (El Espectador, translation by author). According to Bogotá police chief, Edgar Sánchez Morales, homicides indeed decreased from twenty-four cases in 2012 to thirteen cases during Christmas celebrations in 2013. See RCN Radio 2013. 30. Semana, “Hoy se enciende la Navidad en la Capital,” November 28, 2013 31. Semana, “Bogotá, con ‘millonario’ alumbrado navideño,” November 1, 2013. 32. El Espectador, “Petro invitó a los colombianos a disfrutar la magia de la navidad en Bogotá.” October 31, 2013. The “Barometer of Happiness and Hope,” managed by the WIN/Gallup International Association, consistently rates Colombia as one of the “happiest” countries in the world. According to the Barometer, 86 percent of Colombians self-identify as “happy.” See http://www .wingia .com/en/news/colombia _is _the _happiest _country_in _the _world/46/, accessed January 12, 2015. 33. Presidencia de Colombia, Press Statement, December 26, 2013. https:// www.parainmigrantes .info/mensaje - de -navidad - del -presidente - de - colombia -juan-manuel-santos-938/ 34. Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer (Coral Gables: University of Florida Press, 2016 [1969]), 284. 35. Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, 286. 36. de Certeau, “What We Do When We Believe,” 198. 37. de Certeau, “What We Do When We Believe,” 196. 38. MasterCard, https://www.mastercard.ca/en- ca/about-mastercard/what -we-do/payment-processing.html 39. de Certeau, “What We Do When We Believe,” 201. 40. “En Bogotá, la Navidad se iluminará con bombillas LED,” Portafolio, November 5, 2013, https://www.portafolio.co/negocios/empresas/bogota

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-navidad-iluminara-bombillas-led-83258; “Iluminar a Bogotá . . . será un regalo para los Bogotános, porque será gratuito y estimamos que lo van a disfrutar . . . millones de personas, tanto de la Capital como procedentes de otras zonas del país” (translation by author). 41. La Republica, “Codensa abre centro de control con inversion de $8.8 millones,” July 10, 2013, https://www.larepublica .co/empresas/codensa-abre-centro -de-control-con-inversion-de-us88-millones-2042411 42. Ingrid Mabel Mora, “Empleo e ingresos condicionan la compra,” El Tiempo, May 13, 2006, https:// www.eltiempo .com /amp /archivo /documento /MAM -2021901 43. César Castellanos, Sueña y ganarás el mundo (Bogotá: G12 Editores 2006), 16. 44. Castellanos, Sueña y ganarás el mundo, 37. 45. Castellanos, Sueña y ganarás el mundo, 37. 46. CODENSA’s marketing campaign for Christmas spending includes the offer of not paying anything until February. See http://www.creditofacilcodensa .com/beneficios.html (accessed January 19, 2015). 47. Transcript of sermon given by Pastor Castellanos, December 5, 2013. 48. Primicia Diario, December 25, 2013, http://primiciadiario.com/archivo /2013/saludo - de -navidad -a -los -habitantes - de -Bogotá/ (accessed January 10, 2015) 49. Transcript of presidential address, Marcha por la paz: Mi aporte es creer, yo creo en la paz (March for peace: My contribution is to believe, I believe in peace), April 9, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2lPsUdNOog. 50. de Certeau, The Practice, 201. 51. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 191. 52. “Mi Aporte es Creer. Yo Creo en la Paz.” Luis Eduardo Garzón, former mayor of Bogotá and later minister and advisor for national dialogue and citizen mobilization, launched the campaign in 2012 and invited Colombians to do more than simply be observers of the peace negotiations, but rather Colombians “should act, believe, and mobilize for peace.” Importantly, Garzón reminded the country that “resolving the conflict would give us additional points for growth in our economy and would raise the quality of life for all citizens.” (Equipo Ecos de Combeima, “Ministro Garzón lanza campaña ciudadana por la paz,” Ecos del Combeima, http://ecosdelcombeima .com/regionales/nota -21318 -ministro -garzon-lanza-campana-ciudadana-la-paz (accessed January 16, 2015). 53. Some recent studies of neoliberalism and its relation to religion deserve to be highlighted here. Bethany Moreton offers a detailed and sensitive telling of the “quiet backstory” of neoliberal expansion in the Americas. Moreton deftly explicates that parallel to the debt crises of the 1980s in Latin America, in the

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United States, “faith in God and faith in the market grew in tandem, aided by a generous government and an organized, corporate-funded grassroots movement for Christian free enterprise. Ultimately, they helped shape American-led globalization itself.” See Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 5. The broader context of free market spiritualities across the hemisphere illustrates the thicker analytical threads that hold together religion in the Americas and acute experiences of neoliberal restructuring, of countries, institutions, and individuals. Other works that further this conversation include Andrea Muehlebach, The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Jason Hackworth, Faith Based: Religious Neoliberalism and the Politics of Welfare in the United States (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013); and Wendy Brown Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2105). 54. The trafficking in Colombian women for sex work in Japan has been well documented. See Fanny Polanía Molina, “Japan: The Mecca for Trafficking in Colombian Women, Global Alliance against Traffic in Women,1999, https:// childhub.org/en/system/tdf/library/attachments/polania _molina _2001 _japan _ _0.pdf ?file =1 & type =node & id=16325; Kay B. Warren, “The Illusiveness of Counting ‘Victims’ and the Concreteness of Ranking Countries: Trafficking in Persons from Colombia to Japan,” in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict, ed. Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Diana María Peña et al., “Human Trafficking and the Sex Industry in Japan,” Trans-Pasando Fronteras 5 (2014): 61–73.

Chapter 2. the Soul 1. Martha Nubia Bello, dir., Basta Ya! Memorias de Guerra y Dignidad (Bogotá: CNMH, 2012). 2. Carol Malavar, “Un día siguiendo el rastro de la muerte en Bogotá, Semana August 17, 2017, https://www.eltiempo.com/bogota/cronica-sobre -un- dia- en- el -trabajo-de-levantamiento-de-muertos-del-cti-120654. 3. Opportunity International, “About Us,” https:// w w w .opportunity international .ca /about - us /mission -vision -motivation/ (accessed March 21, 2017). 4. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 10. 5. Michael Feher, Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age (New York: Zone Books, 2018).

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6. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Penguin Books, [1930] 2002), 84. 7. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 85. 8. See Arjun Appadurai, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) 9. CitiBank Foundation runs an “Inclusive Finance” branch that funds the Center for Financial Inclusion, Accion International, and is centrally involved in the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, housed at the World Bank. MasterCard Foundation is one of the leading funders of financial inclusion and microfinance around the world. The MasterCard Foundation has a microfinance scholarship program that funds high school and university education in microfinance for “academically talented young people” who are committed to giving back to their community. These scholars are funded in their training at programs in Canada, the United States, Germany, and Kenya. MasterCard Foundation also dedicates millions of dollars to microfinance organizations around the world every year. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the biggest supporters of microfinance and advertises that it is possible to “fighting poverty profitably.” The Gates Foundation dedicates $700,000 to research the impact of microfinance, on top of the almost $30 million it already has dedicated to microfinance, together with UNCDF. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “Fighting Poverty, Profitably: Transforming the Economics of Payments to Build Sustainable, Inclusive Financial Systems,” Special Report, September 2013, https://docs .gatesfoundation .org /Documents/Fighting %20Poverty %20Profitably%20Report%20Highlights.pdf. 10. I consciously employ the idea of “endurance” here, following the work of Elizabeth A. Povinelli, who seeks to understand what happens “after Foucault.” Povinelli engages with Foucault’s lectures at the College de France and finds endurance in late liberalism. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 11. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 456. 12. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1995). 13. See Antoine van Agtmael, The Emerging Markets Century: How a New Breed of World- Class Companies Is Overtaking the World (New York: Free Press, 2007). 14. Ruth Marshall, Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 36. 15. Mariana Valverde, “Police, Sovereignty, and Law: Foucaultian Ref lections,” in Police and the Liberal State, ed. Markus D. Dubber and Mariana Valverde (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

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16. Milford Bateman, Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism (London: Zed Books, 2010) 17. Ananya Roy, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2010), 41. These organizations include Food for the Hungry International, World Concern, World Relief, World Vision International, KIVA, and MEDA. 18. Brian Fikkert, “Christian Microfinance: Which Way Now?” Working Paper (Lookout Mountain: Chalmers Center for Economic Development, Covenant College, 2003), 9. 19. James Bielo, “The Mind of Christ: Financial Success, Born-Again Personhood, and the Anthropology of Christianity,” Ethnos 72, no. 3 (2007): 315–87; Stephanie Mitchem, Name It and Claim It? Prosperity Preaching in the Black Church (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2007). 20. Marla Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 21. Appadurai, Banking, 2016. 22. Werner Sombart, Economic Life in the Modern Age, ed. Nico Stehr and Reiner Grundmann (New York: Routledge, 2017), 30. 23. Appadurai, Banking, 2016 24. For more on this body of scholarship, see Branko Milanovic, Capitalism Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019); James A. Piazza, “Rooted in Poverty? Terrorism, Poor Economic Development and Social Cleavages,” Terrorism and Political Violence 18, no. 1 (2006): 159–77; Alexander Cotte Poveda, “Crecimiento, Desigualdad y Pobreza: Un Análisis de la Violencia en Colombia,” Revista de Investigación, July–December 6, no. 2 (2006): 209–22; Nazih Richani, Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia (New York: State University of New York Press, 2013); Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” Oxford Economic Papers 64 (2004): 563–95. 25. Corporate sponsors of Opportunity International include LazBoy, Credit Suisse, John Deere, Caterpillar, MasterCard Foundation, MetLife Foundation, Visa, Bancoldex, Citi Foundation, Google Inc., Microsoft, and USAID, among others. 26. Banca de las Oportunidades, Bancoldex, “Reporte de inclusión financiera 2016,” Bogotá: Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia, 2017. 27. “El microcredito reina en las regiones del pais,” Portafolio, October 20, 2015. 28. Banca de las Oportunidades, Bancoldex, “Reporte de inclusión.” 29. Randy Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 9 30. Gilles Deleuze “Postscript on Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 5.

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31. Michel Foucault “Philosophy and the Death of God,” in Religion and Culture, sel. and ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999). 32. Butler, Accounting, 2005. 33. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (New York: Routledge, 1990). 34. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House [1887] 1989), 64. 35. Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Amsterdam: Semiotext(e), 2011). 36. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Martin Milligan (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2007), 32. 37. Marx, Economic and Philosophic, 32. 38. Marx, Economic and Philosophic, 5. 39. Interview, Gustavo Obregon, Banca de las Oportunidades, March 2013. 40. Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, 2011.

Chapter 3. Deregulating ChriStianity 1. D. Kilcullen and G. Mills, “Colombia: A Political Economy of War to an Inclusive Peace,” Prism, 5, no. 3 (2015): 106–21. 2. Mao Tse-Tung, On Guerilla Warfare, trans. Samuel B. Griffith (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1961), 3. 3. Carlos J. L. Gómez, Luis Sánchez-Ayala, and Gonzalo A. Vargas, “Armed Conf lict, Land Grabs, and Primitive Accumulation in Colombia,” Journal of Peasant Studies 42, no. 2 (2015): 255–74; José Antonio Ocampo, Entre las reformas y el conflicto: Economía y política en Colombia (Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2004). 4. Manuel Giraldo Magil, Crónica oculta del conflicto: Antecedentes, estrategias de paz, y opiniones de los protagonistas (Bogotá: Ediciones Desde Abajo, 2004); Ricardo Vargas Meza, Drogas, conflict armado, y desarrollo alternativo en Colombia (Bogotá: TM Editores, 1999). 5. Alejandro Quiñoa Casteleiro, et al. Construyendo paz y ciudadanía: Diagnóstico de las violencias urbanas y su proceso de naturalización en las comunas 2 y 4 de Medellín (Medellín: Fundación Forjando Futuros, 2019). 6. Frances Thomson, “The Agrarian Question and Violence in Colombia: Conflict and Development,” Journal of Agrarian Change 11, no. 3 (2011): 321–56. 7. Andrés Lopez Restrepo, “El cambio de modelo de desarrollo de la economía colombiana,” Análisis Político 21 (1996): 14–36.

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8. Lopez Restrepo, “El cambio de modelo.” 9. Carlos Enrique Londoño Rendón, “La apertura económica en Colombia,” Pensamiento Humanista 4 (1998): 40–51. 10. M. E. Salamarca and D. Castillo Brieva, Complejidad y conflicto armado (Bogotá: Fundación Seguridad y Democracia, 2005); Astrid Martínez, ed., Economía, crímen y conflict (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2001). 11. Alfredo Molano, A lomo de mula: Viajes al corazón de las FARC (Bogotá: Editoriales Aguilar, 2016). 12. Michael J. LaRosa and Germán R. Mejía, Colombia: A Concise History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 91. 13. Eduardo Luna, Germán Campos, Orlando Fals Borda. La violencia en Colombia: Estudio de un proceso social (Bogotá: Ediciones Tercer Mundo, 1964), 4. 14. Charles Bergquist, R. Peñaranda, and G. Sánchez, Violence in Colombia: The Contemporary Crisis in Historical Perspective (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1992). 15. Alejo Vargas Velásquez, Colonización y conflicto armado en el Magdalena Medio Santandereana (Bogotá: Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular [CINEP], 1992). 16. The Magdalena River served as the entryway for the first Spanish conquistadores to enter what would become “Colombian” territory. In 1536, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada led a military expedition into the f latlands of the central Colombian plateau, by way of the river that runs from Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast, to Onda, only a few kilometers from what is today the capital of the country, Bogotá. The journey introduced the Spanish conquistadores to the advanced civilization of the Muisca people, the “dense population, rich agricultural lands, pleasant climate, splendid public architecture, and, perhaps most important, evidence of nearby sources of gold and emeralds.” J. Michael Francis, Invading Colombia: Spanish Accounts of the Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada Expedition of Conquest (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007, xiv). This journey led to the establishment of the first interior cities of Santa Fe (de Bogotá), Tunja, and Vélez. 17. Alfredo Molano, Aguas arriba: Entre la coca y el oro (Bogotá: El Ancora Editores, 1990). 18. Chalupas are river taxis that carry roughly fifteen to twenty people at a time. These are the primary modes of civilian transportation up and down the Magdalena River. See preface for context on the research done in Garzal. 19. As a point of interest, it should also be noted that El Señor is also a frequently used term to reference God. 20. The land in Magdalena is renowned for its fertility, due to the proximity to the riverbed and wetlands bordering the river basin, as well as deposits of gold,

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silver, and thick crude petroleum. The capital of the region, Barrancabermeja, is home to the first oil refinery in the country and the largest union of public employees, Union Sindical Obrero (USO). The wealth of natural resources had been a cause of great violence already in the 1920s when the first public strike was organized by refinery workers and the beginning of para- state violence to suppress unionized work and social movements (Vargas Velásquez, Colonización y conf licto armado). The region eventually became an important site for coca cultivation and transport of coca paste (the base material for making cocaine), drug running, and transportation of weapons, along with licit commodities like petroleum and, more recently, palm oil. See also Luis van Isschot, The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital 1919-2010 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2015). 21. According to the National Center for Historical Memory, between 1958 and 2012, almost two thousand massacres took place throughout the country. See Martha Nubía Bello, dir., Basta Ya! Colombia, Memorias de guerra y dignidad (Bogotá: Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2013). 22. William Mauricio Beltrán, Del monopolio católico a la explosión Pentecostal: Pluralización, secularización, y cambio social en Colombia (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2013); Eugenio Restrepo Uribe, El Protestantismo en Colombia (Bogotá: Creset, 1944). 23. Beltrán, Del monopolio, 37; Centro de Investigación e Educación Popular, Iglesia en conflicto (Bogotá: CINEP, 1976). 24. Orlando Fals Borda, Subversión y cambio social (Bogotá: Ediciones Tercer Mundo, 1969), 104. Fals Borda declares that Catholicism in Colombia was a source of deep divide and conflict itself, despite its presentation as a unifying force in documents like the constitution. Catholicism, says Fals Borda, created “conflict and bloody divide in the Colombian people” (102). 25. Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 62. 26. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, 62. 27. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, 69. 28. Beltrán, Del monopolio católico, 2013. Beltrán uses the phrase, “religious marketplace.” I hesitate to use this phrase because I am unconvinced of the rational choice model for analyzing religious change and shift. See note 42 in the introduction. 29. This saying is attributed to various individuals, including Richard Shaull, a Presbyterian missionary who was deployed in Colombia from 1942 to 1950. Richard Shaull and Waldo Cesar, Pentecostalism and the Future of the Christian Churches (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2000). Shaull was also a professor of theology at Princeton Theological seminary for over forty years and was recognized as an early liberation theologian by some. It seems this might

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be a fitting citation. However, in various different documents, the text is also attributed to an anonymous Guatemalan nun (Antonio González, “El pasado de la teología y el future de la liberación,” Seminario Evangélico Unido de Teología Apdo. 7, 2005); a Brazilian Presbyterian pastor, Caio Fabio d’Araujo (Moreno, “Discursos y estrategias de la Iglesia Católica frente a la pluralización religiosa en Colombia,” Revista Científica Guillermo de Ockham 9, no. 2 (2011): 41–51); and vaguely cited as a “theory repeatedly mentioned by pastors and Pentecostal intellectuals [during field work in Mexico]” (Masferrer Kan, “Un análisis crítico del campo religioso: Desde la antropología de las religions,” in Política y religión en América Latina, ed. Katarzyna Krzywicka and Renata Siuda-Ambroziak [Lublin: Editorial Universidad Marie Curie-Skłodowska, 2017], 32). 30. This is the clarion call of liberation theology as detailed by Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation 1988. 31. Personal conversation, October 2016. 32. Álvaro Acevedo Tarazona and Adrián Delgado Díaz, “Teología de la liberación y pastoral de la liberación: Entre la solidaridad y la insurgencia,” Anuario de Historia Regional y de las Fronteras 17, no. 1 (2012): 245–68. 33. CEBs were born in the 1950s and ’60s throughout Latin America as community-based, politically and socially informed biblical studies became centered in homes of individuals. This was due in part to the vernacularization of the Catholic Bible in the reform era post–Vatican II (1962–65), and also the theological imperative of the Liberation Theology movement to bring biblical interpretation down from the echelons of formalized, seminarian, hermeneutical formality allowed only to trained priests to “the people” to whom the Liberation theologians, and radicalized lay persons understood the gospel to be written for—the poor and the oppressed. The CEBs were home based also because of growing political persecution through the Cold War–infused wars on communism and suspicions of “left-wing” sedition throughout the region. CEBs were increasingly seen by US- sponsored dictatorial regimes and conservative reformers as spaces for home-grown communist radicalization, and were rooted out violently in many cases, throughout Central America, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru especially. CEBs still exist today in many different forms, and the connection with Pentecostalism is clear insofar as Pentecostal and Protestant denominations encouraged a more democratic, small- group, home- based biblical study culture. For more on CEBs, see Acevedo Tarazona and Delgado Díaz, “Teología de la liberación y pastoral de la liberación; Alvaro Barreiro, Basic Ecclesial Communities: Evangelizing the Poor, trans. Barbara Campbell (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2011); Andrew Dawson, The Birth and Impact of the Base Ecclesial Community and Liberative Theological Discourse in Brazil (Lanham, MD: International Scholars Publications, 1998); Guillermo Cook, The Expectation of the Poor:

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Latin American Basic Ecclesial Communities in Protestant Perspective (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). 34. Maricel Mena, Biblia y ciudad: Pedagogía del buen vivir en contextos urbanos (Bogotá: Ediciones USTA, 2017). 35. Elsa Támez, Bible of the Oppressed, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006). 36. Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2000); and Liberation Theology and Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 2020). 37. Nancy Cardoso Pereira, “Onde estiver o seu tesouro ali também o seu coração: Mineração, tecnologia e economia em Jó 28,” Caminhos Revista de Ciências da Religião 14, no. 1 (2016): 97–110; “Do mais precioso desta terra: Modelos de agricultura em trânsito e em conflito no Gênesis 43,” Estudos Teológicos 46, no. 1 (2006): 34–51; “The Body as a Hermeneutical Category: Guidelines for a Feminist Hermeneutics of Liberation,” Ecumenical Review 54, no. 3 (2002): 235–39. 38. Ivone Gebara, El rostro oculto del mal: Una teología desde la experiencia de las mujeres (Madrid: Trotta Editoriales, 2002). 39. Maricel Mena, “Teología Negra de la Liberación: A puntes a propósito de los 50 años del Concilio Vaticano 2,” Revista Alberto Magnus 5, no.1 (2014): 87–106. 40. Roberto Tomichá, “Teologías de la liberación indígenas: Balance y tareas pendientes,” Horizonte 11, no. 22 (2013): 1777–800. 41. Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Qui Parle 17, no. 2 (2009): 1–30. 42. William Garriott and Kevin Lewis O’Neill, “Who Is a Christian? Towards a Dialogic Approach in the Anthropology of Christianity,” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 4 (2008): 383. 43. For more in- depth explorations of the nitty-gritty of Pentecostalism as it has been considered in Colombia, see Bedegaín Griesing, Ana Maria and Juan Diego Demera Vargas, Globalización y diversidad religiosa en Colombia (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia 2005). 44. Beltrán, Del monopolio, 139; César Castellanos, Liderazgo y visión (Bogotá: G12 Editors, 2013). 45. See Telma Liliana Chaile, “Promesas y prácticas curativas de devotos ‘a nombre de’ la Virgen María y de Cristo en el Noroeste Argentino en el transcurso del siglo XIX al XX,” Historia 50, no. 2 (2017): 443–70. 46. Cornelia Butler Flora, Pentecostalism in Colombia: Baptism by Fire. Plainsboro, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1976), 57. 47. J. Ravagli, “El Pentecostalismo y su llegada a América Latina y a Colombia,” in El Pentecostalismo en Colombia: Prácticas religiosas, liderazgo y participación política, ed. Clemencia Tejeiro (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2010).

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48. Prudencio Damboriena, Tongues of Fire: Pentecostalism in Contemporary Christianity (Moscow: Corpus Books, 1962), 72. 49. Beltrán, Del monopolio; Clemencia Tejeiro Sarmiento, ed., El pentecostalismo en Colombia: Prácticas religiosas, liderazgo, y participatión pública (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2010). 50. Ravagli, “El Pentecostalismo y su llegada a América Latina,” 45. 51. Garzal’s cacao is sold to a Spanish company that transports the raw chocolate paste to Madrid, where it is sold on the fair-trade markets of ethically conscious consumers in Europe. 52. Jean Comaroff, “The Politics of Conviction: Faith on the Neo-liberal Frontier,” Social Analysis, 53, no. 1 (2009): 20 53. For more on this, see: Nazih Richani, Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia, 2nd ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013); Jennifer Holmes, Sheila Amin Gutierrez de Piñeres, and Kevin M. Curtin, Guns, Drugs, and Development in Colombia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008); Ricardo Rocha García, La economía Colombiana tras 25 años de narcotrafico (Santafé de Bogotá: Programa de Naciones Unidas para la Fiscalización Internacional de Drogas-UNDCP, 2000); Angélika Rettburg, “Global Markets, Local Conflict: Violence in the Colombian Coffee Region after the Breakdown of the International Coffee Agreement,” Latin American Perspectives 37, no. 2 (2010): 111–32. 54. In Goethe’s play, Faust makes a deal with the devil, Mephistopheles, to grant Faust everything he wants in this life and in exchange Faust agrees to serve the Devil in Hell for eternity. 55. Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 14. 56. David Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” Socialist Register 40 (2004): 63–87.

Chapter 4. inCluSion 1. Robert Cull, Asli Demirgüc-Kunt, and Jonathan Morduch, Banking the World: Empirical Foundations of Financial Inclusion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 3. 2. Franklin Allen, Asli Demirgüc-Kunt, Leora Klapper, and Maria Soledad Martinez Peria, “The Foundations of Financial Inclusion: Understanding Ownership and Use of Formal Accounts” (working paper, The World Bank, Development Research Group, Finance and Private Sector Development Team, 2012), 1. 3. Felipe Clavijo, Daniel López, and Santiago Segovia, Inclusión Financiera: Informe Especial (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 2020), 3.

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4. Anke Schwittay, “The Financial Inclusion Assemblage: Subjects, Technics, Rationalities,” Critique of Anthropology 31, no. 4 (2011): 381. Schwittay here follows Tania Li’s consideration of “assemblage,” first introduced in her study of community forest management as a “set of practices that encompass things, subjects, and organization as well as various systems of knowledge, objectives, and regulations” (382). For Li, “assemblage” does the work of connecting “agents who connect disparate elements, accommodate sometimes contradictory knowledges, and render social problems amenable to technical solutions.” See Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 34. 5. United Nations, General Assembly Resolution A/60/L.82: Addis Ababa Action Agenda on the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, DESA, July 27, 2015, https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population /migration/generalassembly/docs/globalcompact/A _RES_69_313.pdf. 6. Schwittay, “The Financial Inclusion Assemblage,” 383. 7. There is a robust and long-standing literature on “development” as concept. For an exploration of the literature, see Myles A. Wickstead, Aid and Development: A Brief Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For a critique of development as Western Imperial complex, from a postcolonial perspective, see I. Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development (New York: Routledge, 2008). 8. Allen et al. “The Foundations of Financial Inclusion,” 3. 9. Again, reminiscent of Li’s “Will to Improve,” the drive to “be better” is a key component to the technique of “inclusion” that finance incorporates in the media and methods of including the population. 10. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (New York: Routledge, 1990), 224. Nikolas Rose makes this point about the realm of psychology and psychotherapy, as a new universal offer to the masses as a recipe of self-regulation, control, and the path to bringing the self to happiness and perfection. As he states, “The Protestant revolution begins a new era in the culture of the self and systems for self-direction. . . . Each individual comes to bear the obligation of doing the will of God without the benefit of learned confessors, directors, and advisors” (12). 11. Li, The Will to Improve. 12. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1995), 29. 13. In part, this financial education and inclusion protocol was in response to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) requirements for nonmember countries to enter the ranks of OECD countries. These countries are the most developed countries in the world, and at the moment OECD membership consists of an elite thirty-four countries. Financial inclusion

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and literacy, indeed, are now components of the PISA exams (Programme for International Student Assessment), which are one of the many requirements for country integration into the OECD. This also explains in part the initiative of the Colombian government to charge both the private commercial bank sector and the Ministry of Education, to develop curricula for financial education. See Margarita Maria Henao Cabrera, Informe de inclusión financiera Colombia 2012 (Bogotá: Asobancaria 2013). 14. Allen et al. “The Foundations of Financial Inclusion.” 15. Banca de las Oportunidades, Bancoldex, Reporte de inclusión financiera 2016 (Bogotá: Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia, 2017). 16. Eduardo Galeano, “Los invisibles,” El Varejón: Publicación por suscripción solidaria y comunitaria 31 (2002): 7. 17. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn, New York: Zone Books), 2015. 18. Since the writing of this book, CYFI has gone bankrupt and closed operations. 19. Child and Youth Financial International, Youth Engagement Country Handbook (Amsterdam: CYFI, 2015). 20. Formal interview, December 2015. 21. Deleuze inspires this idea of the virtual gaze, writing, “We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividiuals” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.” Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold in as a numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies” (Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” October 59 [1992]: 5). 22. Peebles, “The Anthropology of Credit and Debt,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 236. 23. Peebles goes so far as to note that Dante reserved the Fourth Ring of Hell for “hoarders and wasters.” Hoarding was associated with selfishness, greed, and deep irrationality. Even Marx offers his critique of hoarding as a barbaric practice of “people of the East,” a practice he associates with pure ignorance. Peebles furthers this analysis through offering that from Keynes to more recent anthropological evaluations, those who keep their wealth out of circulation of the economy, even in societies far removed from any European or North American context, are regarded as “antisocial” and even “outside the community” (Peebles, “The Anthropology of Credit and Debt,” 238–39. 24. Peebles, The Anthropology of Credit and Debt,” 240. 25. Horne, A History of Savings Banks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 28.

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26. Horne, A History of Savings Banks, 25–26 27. It is important to note the connection here between trust and money circulation in the beginning stages of capitalist forms of production, in which currency and money were both a signifier of value as well as value itself. This central contradiction in capitalism is one that Marx fleshes out in some detail in the first volume of Capital, chapters 3–10. For further reading on the relationship trust and money, see Nigel Dodd, The Sociology of Money: Economics, Reason, and Contemporary Society (New York: Continuum, 1994). 28. Peebles, “Anthropology of Credit and Debt,” 240 (emphasis added). 29. Horne, A History of Savings Banks, 42–43. 30. Peebles, Anthropology of Credit and Debt,” 241. 31. Peebles, Anthropology of Credit and Debt,” 243. 32. Horne, A History of Savings Banks, 84–85. 33. Horne, A History of Savings Banks, 50, cited in Peebles, “The Anthropology of Credit and Debt, 243–44. 34. R. J. Phillips, “An End to Private Banking: Early New Deal Proposals to Alter the Role of the Federal Government in Credit Allocation,” Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 26, no. 3 (1994): 552–68. 35. Clifford Lord, ed., Presidential Executive Orders, Numbered 1–8030, 1862–1938. Prepared by the Historical Records Survey, New York City (New York: Books Inc. 1944), 506. 36. Phillips, “An End to Private Banking.” 37. Colprensa, « ‘Su marranito,’ un dolor de cabeza para el comercio del país,” El Universal, August 28, 2014. https:// www.eluniversal .com .co/economica /su -marranito -un - dolor - de - cabeza -para - el - comercio - del -pais -169179 -DUEU 263642 38. Interview, Banco de la República, May 12, 2014. 39. In the MCI, members who lead consolidated cell groups of twelve or more members and meet regularly with their “disciples” are recognized in the ranks of the MCI as “pastors.” There are dozens of pastors at the MCI. 40. ROSCAS are commonly found throughout the world’s rural and urban poor. Generally, the manner in which these ROSCAS operate is individuals come together in a neighborhood, workplace, church, union, and so on, and everyone contributes a specified sum of money. Often money is contributed to a common pot on a monthly or weekly basis. At the end of an agreed period of time, a name is drawn, and a member of the association takes home the money that has been collected. It is an alternative savings and credit system, operational ostensibly throughout the Global South and postcolonial world. For more, see M. K. Gugerly, “You Can’t Save Alone: Commitment in Rotating Savings and Credit Associations in Kenya,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 55, no. 2 (2007): 251–84.

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41. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1918; Roger S. Mason, Conspicuous Consumption: A Study of Exceptional Consumer Behaviour (Farnborough, UK: Gower, 1981); Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (New York: Basic Books, 1979); Florian Schui, Austerity: The Great Failure (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 42. Susan Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Other examples of studies that place religion in linear, even binary and reactionary, relation to the economy are Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming,” Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 291–343; William Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Jason Hackworth, Faith Based: Religious Neoliberalism and the Politics of Welfare in the United States (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013). 43. Simon Coleman makes a significant argument in The Globalization of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, his ethnography of a Faith Church in Upsala, Sweden. 44. See Naomi Haynes, Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017) on prosperity in the copperbelt of Mozambique. 45. Walter D. Mignolo, “Posoccidentalismo: Las epistemologías Fronterizas y el dilemma de los estudios (Latinoamericanos) del área,” Revista Iberoamericana 68, no. 200 (2002): 847–64. 46. Nicholas V, Bull Romanus Pontifex, 1455, http://caid.ca/Bull _Romanus _Pontifex _1455.pdf, 1455. 47. Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005). 48. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, 11. 49. In the literatures on capitalism outside of Western, Protestant strictures, for example, in Latin America, there is considerable debate around the distinctions between feudal, mercantilist, and capitalist historical moments. For the purposes of this study, we explore the roots of colonialism as they dug themselves into the territories of the Americas through the conquest and thereafter, seeding capitalism and, therefore, the faith in prosperity. For further fascinating historical works on the relationships between Catholicism and Capitalism, see Jay Kinsbruner, The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Alejandro Lugo, Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts, Capitalism, and Conquest at the U.S.-Mexico

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Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008); Sarah K. Croucher and Lindsay Weiss, The Archeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts: Postcolonial Historical Archeologies (New York: Springer, 2011); Nicholas P. Cushner, Farm and Factory: The Jesuits and the Development of Agrarian Capitalism in Colonial Quito, 1600–1767 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). 50. James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality,” American Ethnologist 29, no. 4 (2002): 981–1002. 51. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Penguin Books, [1905], 2002). 52. Weber, Protestant Ethic. 53. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 48–50. 54. This is far from a closed debate. For further reading on the discussion between the so- called “Decolonial” theorists and critical approaches to Latin American studies and liberation philosophy, see Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). For an excellent review of the literature, see F. Coronil, “Elephant in the Americas? Latin American Postcolonial Studies and Global Decolonization,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the PostColonial Debate, ed. M. Morana, E. Dussel, and C. A. Jauregui (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 396–416. 55. David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 56. Ferguson and Gupta, “Spatializing States,” 981. 57. The Monroe Doctrine is generally regarded as the response of the United States to the encroachment of the Napoleonic wars on the Western Hemisphere and was the result of a declaration made by the fifth US president, James Munroe. On December 2, 1823, Munroe declared to the European powers and fellow statesmen, “The government of the United States has been desirous, by this friendly proceeding, of manifesting the great value which they [governments of Russia and Great Britain] have invariably attached to the friendship of the emperor, and their solicitude to cultivate the best understanding with his government. In the discussions to which this interest has given rise and in the arrangements by which they may terminate, the occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers. . . . We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those [European] powers, to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous

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to our peace and safety.” In Daniel C. Gilman, James Monroe: In His Relations to the Public Service during Half a Century, 1776–1826 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1898), 161–64; emphasis in the original. 58. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, La historia económica de América Latina desde la independencia (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998), 66; translation by author. 59. A. F. Morrison, The Monroe Doctrine: An Essay (New York: Trieste Publishing, 2017), 27. 60. Bulmer-Thomas, História económica. 61. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 62. Harvey, A Brief History, 27–29. 63. Harvey, A Brief History; Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 64. Moreton, To Serve, 104. 65. Moreton, To Serve, 104. 66. Bulmer-Thomas, História económica, 1996. 67. Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer, Re- examining Monetary and Fiscal Policy for the 21st Century (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004). 68. For further reading on the parapolitics scandal, see Lorena Pardo Sánchez, La parapolítica en Colombia 2002–2007: El escándalo, epílogo de una vieja Convivencia (Bogotá: Editorial Académica Española, 2012); León Valencia, Parapolítica: La ruta de la expansion paramilitary y los acuerdos politicos (Bogotá: Corporación ArcoIris, 2007).

Chapter 5. MultipliCation 1. This sermon was recorded on May 2, 2013, at the women’s convention of the Misión Carismática Internacional in Bogotá, Colombia. 2. Claudia Castellanos biographical history is registered in her first book, La mujer en el ministerio (Bogotá: G12 Editoriales, 2005). 3. Claudia Castellanos, Dale color a tu vida (Bogotá: G12 Editoriales, 2013), 5. 4. Castellanos Dale color, 35. 5. Castellanos Dale color, 28. 6. In more than one sermon at the MCI, Claudia Castellanos preached about the “spirit of shopping” and being anointed with the spirit of shopping, “la unción del shopping.” 7. Here I intentionally use womanhood as opposed to personhood in an effort to draw attention to the “genderless” concept of “personhood” that works to

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universalize an uncritical notion of subject that is nevertheless suspended within the webs of meaning of a dominantly “masculinist mode of signification.” See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 17. 8. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004). 9. I would like to emphasize just how particular Claudia Castellanos’s emancipatory regime is, especially as she operates within the masculine realm of the public sphere, as politician and business leader, in addition to the title “pastor’s wife.” Indeed, Castellanos has reconfigured the concept of “pastor’s wife” and leads the way toward more egalitarian relations between married “copastors” (who are exclusively married, hetero couples). Castellanos does represent a truly trailblazing model for women in Colombia. In this sense, she occupies a position of power that also relies on the purchasing power of her adherents, both in terms of their tithing power and their material purchase of her line of jewelry, her books, DVDs, perfumes, and other merchandise of G12 Inc. Her performance of power depends upon a constructed set of normative expectations and demands placed on women, many of whom, particularly women who are uneducated, poor, and racialized, are violently forced to fulfill these demands at the risk of being harmed by their partners, armed actors, or random acts of violence in the streets of Colombia’s cities. 10. The term, feminization of poverty was coined by Diane Pearce in 1978 to describe the disparity of poverty between men and women in the United States. Pearce demonstrated that “nearly two out of three of the 15 million poor persons over 16 were women” (Diane Pearce, “The Feminization of Poverty: Women, Work, and Welfare,” Urban and Social Change Review 11 [1978]: 28). It then gained currency in the international development industry, and although there is robust debate with regard to the evidence supporting a widespread wave of poverty “becoming” feminine, the term remains in circulation and the “world’s female poor” remain a target of development as well as emancipation. There exists a vigorous critique from intersectional feminist scholars of the Northern Americas, Europe, and the Global South in response to a totalizing and flattening definitional term to describe women from distinct cultural, ethnic, religious, and historical contexts, not to mention generalizations about sexual orientation (assumed overwhelmingly heterosexual). Consensus exists that women experience poverty uniquely, that women are more vulnerable than men to varying consequences of poverty and its causes (war, structural inequalities, natural disasters, etc.), and that they have been adversely oppressed by systems of hegemonic capitalist domination and patriarchy. However, the differences between the experience of poor white women in America, for example, and poor indigenous women in Bolivia are crucial to recognize and understand in order for the totalizing discourse to be dismantled, alongside the structures that perpetuate

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racialized categories of class. See, for example, Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99; Athena D. Mutua, “Multidimensionality Is to Masculinities What Intersectionality Is to Feminism,” Nevada Law Journal 13 (2013): 341–67; Sylvia Chant and Caroline Sweetman, “Fixing Women or Fixing the World? ‘Smart Economics,’ Efficiency Approaches, and Gender Equality in Development,” Gender and Development 20, no. 3 (2012): 517–29. 11. See a full discussion of this in chapter 2; also: Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins”; Vasuki Nesiah, “Indebted: The Cruel Optimism of Leaning in to Empowerment,” in Governance Feminisms: Notes from the Field, ed. Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Hila Shamir, and Rachel Rebouché (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Ananya Roy, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2010). 12. Federici, Caliban. The devaluation of “women’s work” through processes of capitalist expansion are well documented in Silvia Federici’s outstanding work in Caliban and the Witch. Federici contends that the emergence of capitalism required a simultaneous war on women that constructed the categories of “housewife,” “private vs. public,” and most importantly, the role of women as specifically tied to service of men, through reproduction of the labor force. 13. Estimates suggest that within the first hundred years of European colonization of the Americas, the Native populations declined by some 75 million across South America alone, while in Mexico the population declined from 11 million in 1519 to 6.5 million in 1565 to 2.5 million in 1600. See Federici, Caliban; David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 14. The Doctrine of Discovery refers to the Papal Bull “Inter Caetera” issued in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI. The Bull established that the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors retained the God-given rights to any land in the newly encountered Americas that were not inhabited by Christians. Of course, all of the lands of the Americas were uninhabited by Christians initially. An excerpt from the Bull reads, “Wherefore, as becomes Catholic kings and princes, after earnest consideration of all matters, especially of the rise and spread of the Catholic faith, as was the fashion of your ancestors, kings of renowned memory, you have purposed with the favor of divine clemency to bring under your sway the said mainlands and islands with their residents and inhabitants and to bring them to the Catholic faith.” For further discussion, see Sergio Botta, Manufacturing Otherness: Missions and Indigenous Culture in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013); Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, and Larissa Behrandt, and Tracey Lindberg, eds., Discovering Indigenous Lands: The

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Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2008). 15. Maximiliano Salinas, “Christianity, Colonialism and Women in Latin America in the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries,” Social Compass 39, no. 4 (1992): 525–42; Jonathan Truitt, “Courting Catholicism: Nahua Women and the Catholic Church in Colonial Mexico City,” Ethnohistory 57, no. 3 (2010): 415–44. 16. An extensive literature addresses the emergence of capitalist means of production, labor, and primitive accumulation of labor force, through the establishment of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. See Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Greg Grandin The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2014); Herbert S. Klein and Ben Vinson III, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 17. Cusicanqui , “La noción de ‘derecho’ o las paradojas de la modernidad postcolonial: Indígenas y mujeres en Bolivia,” Aportes Andinos, Aportes sobre diversidad, diferencia e identidad, 11 (1997): 27–52. 18. Federici, Caliban, 14. 19. Federici, Caliban, 14. 20. Randy Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 10. 21. There is a fascinating etymological connection here between encomendar as verb, as gift, and the root of the word, encomienda, the noun, the parcel to be gifted. In the colonial economy of the conquered Americas, encomiendas were parcels of land, and more importantly, the people on that land, granted by the Spanish Crown to encomenderos, or Spanish colonials, and often the Catholic Church. In effect, the encomienda was a “set of property rights . . . whereby the Spaniard could extract tribute from the Indians in the form of goods, metals, money, or direct labor services. In exchange, the encomenderos provided the Indians protection and instruction in the Catholic faith, promised to defend the area, and paid a tax to the Crown” (Timothy J. Yeager, “Encomienda or Slavery? The Spanish Crown’s Choice of Labor Organization in Sixteenth Century Spanish America,” Journal of Economic History 55, no. 4 [1995]: 843). More succinctly, the encomienda was a form of slavery without naming as such, since Spain had officially abolished slavery in 1542 under the New Laws. For further discussion, see Camilo Alexander Zambrano, “Encomienda, mujeres, y patriarcalismo difuso: Las encomiendas de Santafé y Tunja.” Historia Crítica no. 44 (2011): 10–31. 22. Names have been changed for privacy and security.

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23. Butler, Gender Trouble, 52. 24. Butler, Gender Trouble, 50–55. Butler offers up the quote from Claude Levi-Strauss to illustrate the dynamics of structuralism’s phallogocentric economy in which women are indeed objects of exchange, before we become more complexly objects of desire, or more importantly, groom ourselves as such. LeviStrauss said: “The emergence of symbolic thought must have required that women, like words, should be things that were exchanged” (1990, 56). 25. To follow on the previous note, and to expand on the role of capitalism and its connection to the oppression of women, Gayle Rubin offers an essential insight from a Marxist analysis. First, Rubin considers how the reproduction of labour required by the “historical and moral element which determines “wife” is among the necessities of the worker” was a central element in domesticating labour and value of women—as commodity and as the quintessential alienated worker. See Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Note on the “Political Economy” of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 37. This “historical and moral element,” Rubin continues, is the first nod to capitalism as heir to a “long tradition in which women do not inherit, in which women do not lead, and in which women do not talk to God” (38). Now, here in the MCI, women are indeed talking to God. This is yet a further “deviation,” to use Rubin’s terms, and might be construed as a form of emancipation or agentive opening. This is duly noted. On the other hand, Rubin continues with her analysis of capitalism and patriarchy by approaching Mauss’s “gift exchange” and the extrapolation of Levi-Strauss upon the gift exchange in primitive societies. Levi-Strauss identified the gift of woman in marriage as the “supreme gift.” See J. G. Carrier and D. B. Gewertz, eds., The Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Levi- Strauss provides that “the gift of the bride is the answer to the folly of war because the exchange of brides is merely the conclusion to an uninterrupted process of reciprocal gifts, which affects the transition from hostility to alliance, from anxiety to confidence, and from fear to friendship” (Levi-Strauss 1949, 68). Rubin considers this intervention into the anthropology of kinship from Levi-Strauss as constructing an “implicit theory of sex oppression,” as the essence of kinship ties for the anthropologist lie in an exchange of women between men. Men, then, became the only exchangers, while women were trafficked, as wives, as slaves, as chattel, but also, simply as women (45). Importantly, then, Rubin concludes that “if Levi- Strauss is correct in seeing the exchange of women as a fundamental principle of kinship, the subordination of women can be seen as a product of the relationships by which sex and gender are organized and produced” (47). See also chapter 2 of this study for further discussion of the “gift,” and for further reading on the gift and gender, see Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley: University of California Press,1988).

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26. Caracol Radio, “Cada hora cinco mujeres son víctimas de violencia en Colombia,” November 25, 2013, https://caracol .com .co/radio/2013/11 /25 /nacional/1385371680_023794.html. 27. Federici, Caliban; Butler, Gender Trouble. 28. Federici, Caliban, 16. 29. Roy, Poverty Capital; Caroline E. Schuster, Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 30. I make a pointed connection here between my research and the pioneering work of Elizabeth Brusco. Brusco’s work was an important intervention twenty years ago, insofar as she introduced a feminist Marxist interpretation of domestic economies and the work that conversion to Pentecostalism did for the lives of women in Colombia. Brusco’s study sought out relatability insofar as she identified Colombian evangelicalism as a “strategic woman’s movement, similar to Western feminism.” See Elizabeth Brusco, The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 6. However, some questions must be raised concerning the ways in which Brusco presents her arguments. First, Brusco treats Evangelical Christianity as a complete point of rupture and distinction from Catholic forms of popular religiosity. As I discuss below, this is not only a problematic way of understanding “Christianity” (as closed denominational categories), but also a very loose way of interpreting the spectrum of Christian practice in Colombia, which is much more hybridized than the way Brusco introduces it. Second, the assumption that Colombian men who are not converted to Evangelical Christianity (one might assume, remain Catholic) are smokers, unfaithful, gamblers, and regular customers of prostitutes is problematic inasmuch as it represents a racialized and class-blind profile of Colombian men (5–6, 77–91). Machismo as the central thematic of Brusco’s work is treated as a universal characteristic of not only Colombian males, but Latin American men more generally. Brusco spends a chapter deciphering the roots of machismo—what she defines as the “culturally constructed aggressive masculinity characteristic of the male role in Colombia as well as in other parts of Latin America” (6)—and she does carefully identify historical and socioeconomic roots of the phenomenon. However, the connection between a machista culture and the encroachment of capitalism and proletarianism in Colombia and the subsequent breakdown of traditional domestic roles is a problematic critique. It is problematic insofar as the socioeconomic analysis ties capitalist modes of production to a male individualism that she explicitly delinks from patriarchy (79– 80) and, even more problematically, defines against women’s “natural” tendency toward communal thinking. Herein is my third, and last critique. The ways in which Brusco writes her Colombian female interlocutors is emblematic of secondwave, northern feminist efforts at finding a universal womanness recognizable

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to the North American feminist ethnographer. The affirmation that “women in Colombia” operate under such a distinct regime of practice from their male counterparts is as confusing as it is false. It also renders invisible the geontological inequalities of class, race, sexual orientation, and so on. The idea that sobriety, fidelity, family, and fiscal responsibility are essential and universal female concerns belies the diversity of Colombian womanness and risks an essentializing trope of Colombian women, as well as Latin American women more broadly. My collaborators all experienced and lived contradictory realities to what Brusco introduces as a flattened feminine subject. 31. While Indigenous and Afro- Colombian populations are recognized as the most vulnerable ethnic populations (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Annual Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Situation of Human Rights in Colombia,” A/HRC/22/17/Add.3, Geneva, January 7, 2013, https://colombiapeace .org /files/200226_unhchr_co .pdf), impoverished women from these populations, as well as women living in rural and urban poverty are by far the most vulnerable persons in the country vis-à-vis the armed conflict, domestic violence, discrimination, and political and social exclusion. 32. By “gendered limits” I refer to the disciplinary regime of debt on women in Colombia. While the illusion of greater freedom and independence is conflated with greater purchasing power, this capitalist take on feminist values is to be called into question. Secondly, I refer to the limiting work of greater control over women’s bodies and souls, in particular in conservative evangelical churches where female consumption patterns are equalled with virtues of femininity and worthy of not only the male gaze, but God’s approving gaze as well. 33. Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 10. 34. Lofton, Oprah, 20–35. 35. Butler, Gender Trouble, 63. 36. There are two Christian creation myths found in Genesis, the first book of the Christian Bible, as well as the first book of the Torah. In the first creation story, Adam and Eve, man and woman, are created at the same time, and made by God, on the sixth day of the seven days of Creation. In the second story, Adam is created first, and Eve is made from Adam’s rib after Adam requests a companion. God creates Eve, from the rib of Adam. Woman, conservative interpretations state, only exists thanks to man’s a priori existence, and does not exist independently from it. (Genesis, chapter 1–2). The second creation narrative is the most often recited in the MCI, and many other Christian spaces where the emphasis on woman’s subordination and long-standing debt to man for her existence is necessary for the continuation of patriarchal structures of power. From

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this starting point, Butler correctly maps the genealogy of phallogocentric economies and structures of epistemological logics that find the woman to be not only a nonentity, but also only a reflection and reference in relation to the male. In addition, woman’s primordial debt to man, and to God, is furthered by Eve’s primordial sin—the audacious desire for knowledge, the subsequent rebellion of God’s rule, and the temptation of Adam, resulting in the expulsion from the garden of Eden and the fall of humankind. Because of woman’s sin, all humanity existed in a fallen state, a sinful an unredeemed state, until Jesus, the son of God, was sent to serve as the sacrificial lamb and redeem humanity of Eve’s sin. Christian womanhood in these contexts of conservative theological interpretation, begin and end time in a condition of debt. 37. Butler, Gender Trouble, 44. 38. Taken from a personal conversation with interlocutor, September 2013. More detailed discussion on Nu Skin can be found in chapter 6. 39. Castellanos, Dale color, 13 40. Castellanos, Dale color, 38. 41. According to the National Institute for Forensic Medicine (INML), between January and October of 2014, over eight hundred women were assassinated. An average of one thousand women have been assassinated each year in Colombia since 2000. There were over thirty-seven thousand cases of domestic violence reported, and close to thirteen thousand cases of sexual harassment. See Jennifer García and J. A. Franco, “El feminicidio en Bogotá: Una mirada el abordaje medico-legal,” Cuadernos de Medicina Forense 24, nos. 1–2 (2018): 27–34. The People’s Ombudsman reported in 2013 that on average, close to one thousand women are victims of sexual violence every month, roughly eighty-five women are murdered every month, and twenty-five hundred cases of domestic violence are reported each month (See Caracol Radio, “Cada hora cinco mujeres”). 42. Adriana Arroyo Ortega and María Janet Alvarez Yepes, “Violencias cotidianas: Perspectivas situadas desde las experiencias de niñas y mujeres en el municipio de Medellín, Colombia,” Sexualidad, Salud, y Sociedad 29 (2018):123–46. 43. Claudia Gómez López, Rocío Murad, and María Cristina Calderón, Historias de violencia, roles, practicas y discursos legitimadores; Violencia contra las mujeres en Colombia, 2000–2010 (Bogotá: Ministerio de Salud, 2013). The study by López, Murad, and Calderón analyzed data from 1990–2010. They define domestic violence according to the Colombian constitution as: “Any type of violence in the family that is considered destructive to harmony and unity, will be sanctioned in accordance to the law” (15). 44. Femicide is the systemic assassination of women because they are women. These are gender-motivated hate crimes and slowly are being recognized by international organizations as distinct from generic homicide. See: C. Laurent,

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M. Platzer, and M. Idomir, Femicide: A Global Issue That Demands Action (Vienna: Academic Council on the United Nations System, 2013). 45: Rita Laura Segato. La escritura en el cuerpo de las mujeres asesinadas en Ciudad Juárez: Territorio, soberanía, y crímenes de Segundo Estado. (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Tinta Limon, 2013), 11. 46. Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges (New York: Little Brown Spark, 2015). 47. Roy, Poverty Capitalism, 2010 48. Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 6. 49. Haiven, Cultures. 50. In the New Revised Standard Version, the passage reads as such: A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies / Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value / She brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life / She selects wool and flax and works with eager hands / She is like the merchant ships, bringing her food from afar / She gets up while it is still night; she provides food for her family and portions for her female servants / She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard / She sets about her work vigorously; her arms are strong for her tasks / She sees that her trading is profitable, and her lamp does not go out at night / In her hand she holds the distaff and grasps the spindle with her fingers / She opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy / When it snows, she has no fear for her household; for all of them are clothed in scarlet / She makes coverings for her bed; she is clothed in fine linen and purple / Her husband is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land / She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes / She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come / She speaks with wisdom, and faithful instruction is on her tongue / She watches over the affairs of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness / Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: “Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.” Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised / Honor her for all that her hands have done, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate. 51. For feminist interpretations of Proverbs 31, see Madipoane Masenya, How Worthy Is a Woman of Worth? Rereading Proverbs 31:10–31 in African SouthAfrica (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004). The “feminist” interpretation tends to maintain its identity as “subversive.” Herein lies the blockage of equity. 52. Butler, Gender Trouble, 13. 53. Butler, Gender Trouble, 13. 54. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany- Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 130. 55. Butler, Gender Trouble, 13.

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56. Butler , Gender Trouble, 14. 57. An important exception to this is Haynes’s work on Prosperity Christianity in the Zambian Copperbelt. See Naomi Haynes, Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). 58. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Chapter 6. beCoMing 1. Multilevel marketing—also known as “direct sales,” “network marketing,” and “pyramid selling”—is a marketing strategy in which the revenue of the business is generated through a network of salespeople, each generating income from the commission of their sales, as well as percentages of the commissions from their networks, or “distributer down-line.” Distributers rely on recruiting their own networks of salespeople to multiply earnings. The further up the network a distributor is, the greater the multiplication of revenue. The top of the sales receives percentage commissions from the entire network. 2. I am inspired here by the pioneering work of João Biehl and John Locke on the anthropology of becoming, and I lean on this theoretical intervention to a degree. However, I must clarify that I do not apply this theory in order to explain away the complexity of prosperity Christianity’s intimate affiliation with direct sales in Colombia—indeed, I am not convinced that a Deleuzian frame, or a Foucaultian frame, for that matter, can so easily be mapped on to the idiosyncratic intricacies of societies and cultures that are not European. 3. Peter S. Cahn, Direct Sales and Direct Faith in Latin America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 4. Some of the most energetic involvement around the peace accords has come from a conservative faction of Evangelical churches who galvanized their political profile leading up to a 2016 vote put to the population on whether or not the country agreed with the proposed agreement between the government and the FARC. The Christian groups mobilized social media, primarily WhatsApp, YouTube, and Facebook, accusing the government of conceding to communist terrorists, ensuring a culture of impunity, and enforcing policies that reflected a so- called gender ideology. The rejection of the original accord, as it was presented to the Colombian electorate, was based in common disdain for the guerrilla; the frustration that many millions of dollars were being invested into a peace process while the general population remained excluded and unattended by the government; and the deep anxieties mobilized around the threat that if Colombia were to forgive the communist guerrilla, they would take over the government and Colombia’s economy would descend into the socialist nightmare

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that was the hellish situation in both Venezuela and Cuba. Indeed, the antiaccord crusaders, injecting a mangled interpretation of “gender ideology” that included a recognition that the LGBTQ community, and women, had suffered the consequences of the armed conflict in uniquely horrific forms, united their call to reject that peace accord because it championed gay rights and a communist agenda. The movement manifested itself all over social media, throughout the country, with the hashtag, #HomoCastroChavismo. Nothing seemed scarier than gay socialism. 5. I am referencing “moral imaginary” here, in part, as a concept specific to the local, and the particular temporal, historical moment that Colombia is living. I am also referencing the term as developed by John Paul Lederach in his book, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Peacebuilding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Lederach is a scholar and practitioner of conflict resolution, peace building, peace processes, peace accords, and community peace-building efforts in post-conflict regions around the world. The Moral Imagination begins with the assertion, based in decades of peace building in Latin America, Asia, and African countries, that “transcending violence is forged by the capacity to generate, mobilize, and build the moral imagination.” This imagination, Lederach explains, requires the capacity to imagine ourselves in webs of relations that include enemies; the ability to sustain a paradoxical curiosity that embraces complexity; the belief in and pursuit of the creative act (peace building); and the acceptance of the risks of stepping into the unknown that lies beyond the familiar terrain of the known (5). 6. Trailblazing work has been done in the rapprochement between direct sales and forms of evangelical strategies that operate according to similar organizational principles by anthropologists Nathalie Luca, “Multi-Level Marketing: At the Crossroads of Economy and Religion,” Research in Economic Anthropology 31 (2011): 217–39; and Peter S. Cahn, Direct Sales. 7. To become—is a verb that translates differently in Spanish, depending on the context. Volverse is to become by one’s own volition and accord, as it is a pronominal verb (ending in -se), more specifically to grow into something new. Llegar a ser means to arrive to a state of being; this is a more definitive eschatology of being—one has arrived to a new form of being. Convertirse, similar to llegar a ser, is conclusive; it is perhaps translated best as “converting into” or “changing into,” but as a pronominal verb, acts on the self, similarly to volverse. This is the same verb as the English, to convert, implying conversion. Lastly, hacerse, also a pronominal verb, literally translates as “to make oneself.” All these variations might be best captured in the verb devenir, which might be understood as a word meaning “becoming,” “transforming,” “progression,” “to occur.” An anthropology of becoming, then, might be translated as “una antropología del devenir.”

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8. “Llega a Vistahermosa la ‘Feria Colombia Renace,’ ” presidential program on Territorial Renovation (Renovación del Territorio, Presidencia de la República), May 5, 2018. 9. João Biehl and Peter Locke, Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 42. 10. Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 175. 11. Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” 176. 12. Biehl and Locke, Unfinished, 2017. 13. In the Nu Skin hierarchy, sales titles identify levels of advancement in recruitment and sales. The beginning level is “Executive,” followed by “Gold,” “Lapis,” “Ruby,” “Emerald,” “Diamond,” and “Blue Diamond” distributors. 14. Cahn, Direct Sales, 2011; Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 15. Cahn, Direct Sales, 39 16. Cahn, Direct Sales, 41. 17. Cahn, Direct Sales, 43. 18. Cahn, Direct Sales, 49 19. Cahn, Direct Sales, 50. 20. For a full discussion of the entrance of direct sales into the sphere of American domesticity of the 1950s, see Susan L. Williams and Michelle Bemiller, Women at Work: Tupperware, Passion Parties, and Beyond (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Publishers, 2011). 21. Conviction, as believing, and as imagining, is interpreted through the activities and practices, through discourse, deployment of technologies (such as credit cards), and embodied performance. 22. Marie Griffith, God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). 23. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 24. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 25. Brazil is the biggest market for direct sales in Latin America, but Colombia sits third, after Mexico, in its opening markets to direct sales as a strategy for economic development. 26. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Picador, 2004). 27. Robert T. Kiyosaki, Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids That the Poor and Middle Classes Do Not! (New York: Moses and Violet Karma Publishers, 1997). This is a central text for the multilevel/direct sales movement. Although the movement begins at the turn of the twentieth century, as Peter S. Cahn effectively narrates in Direct Sales, the advent of Rich Dad spurred

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a distinct print culture of “wealth literature” that f lourished in the 1990s into the 2000s. While wealth literature launched at the turn of the twentieth century with the text culture of the New Thought movement in the United States and books like The Science of Getting Rich by New Thought guru, Wallace D. Wattles, the neoliberal turn to individual entrepreneurialism as the secret to wealth really galvanized the popularity and proliferation of wealth-generation literature. See Wallace D. Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich: The Proven Mental Program to a Life of Wealth (1910; repr., New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2007). Another notable tome in this genre is the work of Richard DeVos, cofounder of AmWay, called Compassionate Capitalism: People Helping People Help Themselves (New York: Plume, 1994). 28. Cahn, Direct Sales, 2011. 29. Cahn, Direct Sales, 12. 30. Cahn, Direct Sales, 15. 31. Cahn, Direct Sales, 15 32. Cahn, Direct Sales, 15 33. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–78 (New York: Picador, 2007), xxii. 34. Such optimism echoes the cruel optimism that Lauren Berlant details in her book of the same name. Berlant, Cruel Optimism. 35. César Castellanos, A Pastor’s Guide to Destiny Training, trans. Clive Harding (Miami, FL: G12 Editors, 2014). 36. Castellanos, La escalera del exito: Ganar, consolidar, discipular, envier (Bogotá: G12 Editors, 2007). 37. Linette Lopez, “Another Stock with a Similar Business Plan to Herbalife Is Getting Slammed,” Business Insider, December 21, 2012, https:// www .businessinsider.com.au/nu-skin-down-on-herbalife-short-fears-2012-12. 38. For a comprehensive, and fascinating, account of the genealogy of capitalism and the “quest for immortality” or the “fountain of youth” see S. G. Post and R. H. Binstock, The Fountain of Youth: Cultural, Scientific, and Ethical Perspectives on a Biomedical Goal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 39. Nu Skin Brochure, “The Difference. Demonstrated.” Nu Skin Enterprises Australia,, promotional material, 2012. 40. Arendt, The Human Condition, 255. 41. Arendt, The Human Condition, 243. 42. Peter Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). 43. Enrique Dussel, Historia de la filosofía y filosofía de la liberación (Bogotá: Editorial Nueva Era, 1994). 44. Gilles Delueze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7, 1992.

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45. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 178. 46. Randy Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 47. 47. Deleuze, “Control and Becoming.” 48. Maurizio Lazzarato, Governing by Debt, trans. Joshua David Jordan (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2015), 110. 49. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1995), 197. 50. Paul Zane Pilzer, The Next Trillion: Why the Wellness Industry Will Exceed the $1 Trillion Healthcare (Sickness) Industry in the Next Ten Years, (N.p: Video Plus, 2006), 32.

ConCluSion 1. “Van 216 excombatientes de las FARC asesinados,” Semana, July 8, 2020, https://www.semana .com/nacion/articulo/216- excombatientes- de -las-farc-han -sido-asesinados/685044. 2. Yvette Sierra Praeli, “América Latina: La región con más asesinatos de defensores ambientales en el 2018,” Mongabay, July 30, 2019. 3. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, https:// w w w .internal -displacement.org/countries/colombia. 4. “Que significa el rearme de las FARC?,” Portafolio, August 30, 2019, https:// www.portafolio.co/tendencias/que-implica-el-rearme-de-las-farc-533093. 5. Nubia Yaneth Ruiz Ruiz, Mercedes Castillo de Herrera, and Karen Forero Niño, Geopolítica del despojo: Minería y violencia en Colombia (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2018). 6. Matt Kennard, “Chiquita Made a Killing from Colombia’s Civil War,” In These Times, January 27, 2017; Alison Frankel, “Chiquita Must Face Jury in Colombia Terror-Funding Case,” Reuters, January 4, 2018; Verna Gates, “Drummond Coal Goes on Trial over Colombia Killings,” Reuters, July 11, 2007; Alex Aubuchon, “Colombia Investigating Drummond Co. Paramilitary Funding,” Alabama Public Radio, October 31, 2018. 7. Boris Miranda, “Cuál es el poder de los narcos en Colombia: ‘Actúan como empresarios que invierten en una franquicia,’ ” BBC World, July 18, 2019. 8. Rebecca Logan, “Historias de narcos, bancos y cuentas fantasma,” BBC World, July 18, 2012. 9. Hauwa Ahmed, “How Private Prisons Are Profiting under the Trump Administration,” Center for American Progress, August 30, 2019, https://www .americanprogress .org /issues/democracy/reports/2019/08/30/473966/private -prisons-profiting-trump-administration/.

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10. Jeff Sommer, “A Nightmare for Immigrants Is Great for Stocks,” New York Times, March 11, 2017, sec. BU. 11. Jen Wieczner, “Billionaire Paul Singer Wins Big on Prison Stock Trump Trade,” Fortune, November 15, 2016. 12. Ahmed, “How Private Prisons.” 13. Zolan Kanno-Youngs, “Squalor Pervasive in Detention Centers,” New York Times, July 2, 2019, Sec. A; Ian Urbina, “The Capricious Use of Solitary Confinement against Detained Immigrants,” Atlantic, September 6, 2019, https:// www.theatlantic .com/politics/archive/2019/09/ice -uses - solitary- confinement -among- detained-immigrants/597433/; Matthew Haag, “Thousands of Immigrant Children Said They Were Sexually Abused in U.S. Detention Centers, Report Says,” New York Times. February 27, 2019. 14. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 25. 15. Nanneke Winters and Franzisca Reiffen, “Haciendo-lugar vía huellas y apegos: Las personas migrantes africanas y sus experiencias de movilidad, inmovilidad e inserción local en América Latina introducción al dossier temático remhu,” Revista Interdisciplinar da Mobilidade Humana 27, no. 56 (2019): 11–33. 16. Gastón Espinosa, Latino Pentecostals in America: Faith and Politics in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 5; Pew Research Center for Religion and Public Life, “The Religious Affiliation of U.S. Immigrants: Majority Christian, Rising Share of Other Faiths,” May 17, 2013. 17. Clive Harding, G12 Destiny Training (Miami: G12 Editorial, 2014), 10. 18. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003):18. 19. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 19. 20. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 22. 21. See Richard C. Seymour, “Mourning and Militancy: An Interview with Richard Seymour.” Monthly Review 68, no. 10 (March 2017). 22. Matt Taibbi, I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street (New York: Speigel & Grau, 2017). 23. The idea of “racialized capitalism” is developed by anthropologist Cedric Robinson, building on the work of Oliver Cox, arguing that Western, Marxist critiques of capitalist forms of production and labor do not account for racism or the very racist structures upon which capitalism was built. These ideas have been expanded to consider capitalist expansion and integration in Latin America and the Caribbean, although more work must be done in revealing the intimately connected natures of racism and capitalism. See Oliver Cox, The Foundations of Capitalism, (New York: Philosophical Libraries, 1954); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); William I. Robinson, Latin America and Global

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Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Peter James Hudson, Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 24. For outstanding analysis and revelation on these transnational spirit movements, see Lorand J. Matory Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Notable is also Matory’s essay, “The Many Who Dance in Me: Afro-Atlantic Ontology and the Problem of ‘Transnationalism,’ ” in Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization, ed. Thomas J. Csordas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). This essay, following Matory’s groundbreaking work in Black Atlantic Religion, problematizes the idea that globalization and transnationalism are recent phenomena, demonstrating that religion is “essentially transnational” and critiquing a progressive stagism in world history, driven uniquely by forces of capitalism and moving ever-consistently toward greater human interaction. 25. Aisha Beliso-de Jesús, Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) expertly illustrates the transnational essence of Santería and the traveling power of Orichas (spirits). 26. Miguel A. De la Torre, Santería: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2004). 27. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 28. Beliso-De Jesús, Electric, 2015. 29. Amira Mittermeier, Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010). See also Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, “In State of Grace: Ideology, Capitalism, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge,” Nepantla: Views from the South 3, no. 1 (2002): 15–38. 30. Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of The Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Amsterdam: Semiotext(e), 2011), 84. 31. Adam Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

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Index

Abraham, 176 accountability, 62, 71, 74, 78–79 accounting, 62–63, 74, 78–79 Acts 2:1-4, 19 Aglow Women, 168 agriculture, industrial, 17, 87–88, 99–100 agriculture, small-scale, 99–100, 101–2 Alfonso, shoemaker, 69 Althaus Reid, Marcella, Indecent Theology, 95 Althaus Reid, Marcella, Liberation Theology and Sexuality, 95 Alto Consejería para el Posconflicto, 160 America, inventing of, 125–26 American Dream, 166, 186 American nationalism, 129 American nature of Prosperity Christianity, 5, 19–20 American Schools, 93 analytical processes, 10. See also research approaches angel protection, 91–92, 98 Angie, financial officer, 63–67, 84 Anti-Hoarding Campaign, 120 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 186 Appadurai, Arjun, 35, 40, 74

Appadurai, Arjun, Banking on Worlds, 74 Arcadio, community member in Garzal, 105–6 Arendt, Hannah, 169, 176, 178 armed conflict:as background of life in Colombia, 3, 9, 23–24, 26; as business, 86; civilians as victims of, 60; collective impact of, 25; as cultural context, 84; economic salvation as response to, 75; insurgency, 86; profits from, 87; resolution of, 160–61, 202; women and, 141. See also violence Asobancaria, 115 aspiration: aspirational classes, 22, 46, 51, 104, 138, 156, 169; aspirational faith, 1–6, 19, 33, 124; for a better life, 9, 26–27, 49, 184; as a common thread, 188–89; in everyday life, 6; in finance, 11, 15–18, 201; narratives of, 7, 182; for peace, 11–12, 24–25, 50, 108; in scriptures, 13–14; toward social and spiritual mobility, 9, 33, 60; of warfare, 26; of women shaped by Christianity, 137–38, 144, 146–47 assassinations of activists, xx, 6, 184 austerity measures, 80 Auto-Defensas de Colombia (AUC), 88

277

278

index

Bakker, Tammy Faye, 74 Banca de la Mujer, 143 Banca de las Oportunidades, 83 bancarización, 160 Banco Agrario, 103 Banco de la República, 104, 114 Bancoldex, 78 Bancolombia, 115, 116, 117 banking: education about, 83; history of, 117–20; moral motivations of, 134–35; the unbanked, 114 banks: accounts, 75–76, 110, 112 (See also financial inclusion); “bank doctors,” 120; charges and fees, 83–84; locations of, 82–83; promise of credit, 33; public trust in, 121; role of, 47; workers and bankers, 119 Barranquilla, 93 Beauvoir, Simone de, 154 becoming: anthropology of, 10–12, 160–63; banked, 4, 111–12, 133–35, 160; Colombia’s economic development as, 75–77; cycles of, 169; as driver of finance, 10, 33, 66; etymology of, 242n7; as fulfillment of desires, 160; indebtedness and, 167; narratives of in Christianity, 13–14; practices of, 32, 60; promise of, 12, 15; revolutionary, 158 belief: acts of, 44–46; central to leadership, 64; in Colombia’s future, 54–56; commodification of, 81; credit and, 36-40; in future peace, 50; giving and, 52–53; risk required for, 178; as a social exchange, 37, 195; systems of, 40–41, 214n19 believers, 46–48, 49 believing: to becoming, 178–79; effectiveness of, 189; as ritual practice, 123, 142–43, 151, 152, 179; as social practice, 41, 46–48 Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha, 196 Bell, Catherine, 40, 41, 46, 53 Beltrán, William Mauricio, 21, 94, 96–97, 98 Bentham, Jeremy, 118 Bentonville Consensus, 131 Benveniste, Emile, 46 Berlant, Lauren, Cruel Optimism, 9, 168 Bible study groups, 2, 99–100, 154, 159, 171 Biehl, João, 11, 162 biopolitics, 6, 143 biopower, 6, 9 bodies, 60, 77, 105, 139, 143 Bogotá: Christmas 2013 in, 42; dangerous for women and children, 143; Misión

Carismática Internacional (MCI), 1; New Year’s and, xvii-xviii, xviiifig, Presbyterian churches in, 93; worry of violence in, 24 bookkeeping, 62, 71fig, 74, 78, 112 born-again conversion experiences, 19, 64 born-again marketing, 14–15 Bourdieu, Pierre, 37, 38, 39, 52 Bowler, Kate, Blessed, 74 Bretton Woods, 75 British Biblical Society, 93 brujería, 141. See also witch-hunts budgeting, 66, 69, 70–71 Bulmer-Thomas, Victor, 129, 131 Bunyan, John, 62 business and evangelism, 170–71. See also Nu Skin business success, 69 Butler, Judith, 62, 79, 142, 154–55 Butler Flora, Cornelia, 97, 98 cacao project, 99–100, 101–2, 102fig caliente, 65. See also violence Camilo, 64, 65 Campos, Germán, 86, 88 Candomblé (religious practice), 191 capitalism: alienation in, 82; belief in, 35; benefiting from inclusion, 135; connection to Christianity, 195–96; connection to colonialism, 126, 128, 135; and control, 143, 178; double-entry bookkeeping, 74; exploitation of women, 140–41, 143; financialization of, 3–4; formation process of, 204n6; Golden Age of in United States, 167; and labor, 107; late, 3, 6, 108, 137, 171, 195; mentality of, 127; millennial, 5; nature of in Colombia, 108; origins of in Latin America, 191; poverty alleviation as frontier of, 112; power in, 6; shifts in, 107–8; as system of relations, 92–93 Carter, James, 130 cashless societies, 82–85, 196 Casitas Bíblicas, 95 Castellanos, César: books of, 123; expansion strategies of, 29, 97; founder of Misión Carismática Internacional (MCI), 2; preaching, 11, 15, 141; relationship to women, 145–48; on belief, 49; doubters, 50; preaching, 44–46 Castellanos, Claudia : books of, 123; comparison to Oprah Winfrey, 145; expansion strategies of, 29; focus on empowerment

index of women, 136–38, 141; preaching, 136, 155–56; relationship to womanhood, 146–48, 233n9; spirit of shopping, 137, 156-157 Castellanos, Lorena, 13, 18 Catholic Church, 223n24; criticism of, 127– 28; history of in Latin America, 93–98; rejection of, 174–75; religious practices of, 62; in rural Colombia, 21 Catholic Social Ministry, 24fig cell groups in MCI, 29, 123, 147, 170–71, 176–77 Center for American Progress, 185 Central Bank, 104 central banking systems, 120 Certeau, Michel de, 37, 39, 46, 53, 162 César, Pastor, 176–77 Charismatic Christianity. See Pentecostalism Chavez D’Angelo, Luella, 76 Chiquita Banana, 184 Child and Youth Financial International (CYFI), 115–16 children, 66, 115 Christian Free Enterprise, 131 Christianity : in the Americas, 198; aspirational, 13–15; changes in Colombia, 89–90, 93–98; connection to capitalism, 195–96; deregulated, 18–23; deregulation of, 159; and economic development; 102–3; extinguishing female sovereignty, 142–43; finance/financialization and, 5, 15-18, 60, 73-75, 177-78; of migrants, 187; morality of, 10; as system of relations, 92–93; values, 73, 79; women and consumption, 145–46 Christian microfinance organizations, 73–75 Christmas: and credere, 35–37, 42–44; debts from, 46; gifts, 39, 50–51; giving on credit during, 52; lights, 43fig, 48; time for hope, 50 class relations, 138, 139 Coca-Cola, 106–7 coca cultivation, 87–88 cocaine, 88–89 CODENSA (energy company), 47, 48–50, 55 coins, 121 Coleman, Simon, 20–21 Colgate, 106 Colombia, new, 24–25, 43–44, 50–52, 160 Colombian Bank of the Republic, 110, 115, 120 Colombian Evangelical Confederation, 97–98 Colombia Renace, 14

279

colonialism, 125–26, 128, 135, 139–40, 191–92 Colpatria (bank), 47 Comaroff, Jean, 5, 20, 100 Comaroff, John, 5, 20 commerce, 100–101 commissions, 172 commodification: of belief, 81, 156–57; of labor, 70, 108, 130, 138–40, 143; of women, 142–45, 236n25 commons, public, 116, 119, 170 compound credit, 112–13 Comunidades Eclesiales de Base, 95 conference, women’s, 150–51 Conquistadores, 126, 140. See also colonialism Constitution of Colombia, 4, 104 consumption: access to through credit, 46, 152; conspicuous, 51, 124–25; debt and, 150; religion and, 5, 123–24, 144–45, 156–57; vs. restraint, 114; satisfaction from, 27; as upward mobility, 124, 169; by women, 138, 146–47; of women, 143–44 contradictions , 52–53, 55, 124, 138, 168–69, 189 control, practices of, 67, 72, 98, 135, 138, 143 control, sense of, 5. See also precarity CoreCivic, 185 corporate social responsibility, 165 cost of living, 16 counterinsurgency warfare, 86 covenanting, 20; Abraham’s, 176; background on, 204n1; on credit, 22, 35, 44–45, 97, 156; financial process of, 47, 122–23 COVID-19 pandemic, 8 creation myths, 238n36 credere , 36–39, 40, 42–44, 48–50, 53. See also belief. credit: belief and, 35–40; creditor-debtor relationship, 81; crisis of 2007-2008, 48; as debt, 16; as exploitation, 152; industry, 168; as institutions of belief, 52–53; as key to upward mobility, 33, 43, 57, 73–74; management, 79; meaning origins, 46; poverty and indebtedness, 152; providing access, 116; reliance on, 57–58, 72; systems, 40. See also debt; financialization credit cards, 1, 2; accessibility of, 49; acquiring, 55; bills, 55–56; companies, 36–37, 47–48, 49, 188; covenanting on, 22, 35, 44–45, 156; and economic growth in Colombia, 104; exclusion from, 116; expanded use of, 5, 10, 46; maxing out, 51; in Nu Skin, 28–29; perceptions of,

280

index

credit cards (continued) 57; Remedios’ use of, 72; role in daily life, 8, 16 Cuddy, Amy, 151 cuentagotas, 8 curses, 21 cycle of becoming, 169 Datacredito (credit reporting agency), 71 David and Goliath, 45 DaviPlata (e-banking system), 133 Davivienda Bank, 109, 110, 113, 134 death, 6, 10. See also necrofinance death threats, 84 debt: conceptually connecting capital and Christianity, 4; conflation with prosperity, 36, 53; consequences of, 8–9; consolidation of, 183; consumer, 49, 55, 75, 157; credit card, 48, 55, 57, 126, 176, 200; crisis of 1980s, 130; as a disciplining practice, 150, 156, 159; as faith, 1, 164, 182; as financial inclusion, 8; foreign, 132–33; happiness and, 55; household, 4, 16; managing, 56, 59, 109, 110, 113, 115; to microfinance organizations, 7; as national inclusion practice, 128–29; nature of, 7–8; to oneself, 180; organized, 135; payments, 55, 79, 102, 129, 132, 195; privatized, 75; as a promise, 176; rates of in Colombia, 5; and violence, 7–9, 108, 199; worth and worthiness, 80–81, 123, 201. See also microfinance industry Decade of the Woman, 139 decentralization, 4, 61, 102, 104 decolonization approaches, 126–28 Deleuze, Gilles, 77, 158, 162, 178, 179 democratization, 112, 117, 119, 128, 144, 168 deregulation: in Christianity, 4, 18–23, 102, 128, 159; effects on women, 138; of financial sector, 15, 17–18, 75, 87, 110, 132; giving power to capital, 162; in narcomarkets, 185; as theme in Colombia, 188–89 detention centers, 185, 186 deterritorialization, 79, 187, 190–96, 200 development, assumptions about, 112, 124. See also economics Devil, The, 90–91, 105–7 direct sales ventures, 166–68, 169–72 discipline: of bodies, 77, 138, 143; of gender, 144, 147; institutions of, 111, 132, 178; through debt, 22, 32, 61, 63, 70, 119, 184; through violence, 52, 67, 149, 150

displacement of peoples from land, 6–7, 17, 30–31, 86–87, 100, 184, 209n43 Doctrine of Discovery, 139, 234n14 double-entry bookkeeping. See bookkeeping Douglas, Mary, 38 drip-account loans, 8. See also loans drug trade: background on, 88; development of, 25; drug barons, 91, 133; drug cartels, 51, 87, 132–33; economics of, 104; violence and, 17–18 Drummond Coal, 184 Duncan, Henry, 119 Durkheim, Émile, 41, 46 Ecclesial Base Communities, 95. See also Casitas Biblicas. economics: economic citizenship, 115–16; economic development, 42, 86–87, 99–100, 114; economic growth, 132; economic reforms in Colombia, 17, 104; economic shifts, 17, 43; and power, 199 Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) (National Liberation Army), 25, 88, 94–95 Ejército Popular de Liberación (Popular Liberation Army), 25 Elliott Management, 185–86 El Señor (drug baron), 91 Engelke, Matthew, 12 Enlightenment, 125–26 entrepreneurs, 57, 58, 158–60 entrepreneurship, 171–72 Escobar, Pablo, 88, 132–33 Esperanza, Doña, 68–69 ethnographic research, 31–32, 40 Evangelical Christianity. See Pentecostalism evangelism: among Nu Skin distributors, 174–75; aspirations of becoming, 33, 159, 160–63; books about, 123–24; and business, 163–65, 170–71; conversion to Christianity, 144, 163; evangelizing strategies, 20, 28, 29, 97, 187; and finance capitalism, 10 exchange, precapitalist systems of, 38 exchange rates, 132 Executive Order 6102, 120 exports, of Colombia, 17 Ezekiel 37:6, 14 Ezekiel 37:9, 14 Fabian, 68, 109, 110 faith: debt as, 1, 8, 76, 164, 179; demonstrations of, 2, 22; journeys, 123; in markets,

index 11; role of in multilevel marketing, 163, 166; in the self, 174 Fals Borda, Orlando, 86, 88, 93 Familias en Acción, 83–84 farmers, small scale, 30, 86–88, 108 fasting as spiritual practice, 98, 100 Faust, legend of, 106 Federici, Silvia, 140–41, 143 fees, bank and credit card, 55–56 Feher, Michel, 15 female bodies, control and discipline of, 138–39, 143, 150 femicide, 150, 239n41, 239n44 feminism, 95–96, 237n30 feminization of poverty, 139, 233n10 Ferguson, James, 121, 128–29 Ferias Colombia Renace, 160 Fernanda: Christmas gift of, 39–40; covenanting, 35, 37, 201; on debt and faith, 1–2; ideas about womanhood, 146, 147; participation in church and banking, 121– 23, 141–42, 151–52; as research focus, 28 Fikkert, Brian, 73 finance, aspirational, 10, 15–18 finance capitalism: aspiration and, 15–18, 53, 81, 171, 200; cultural contexts of, 84; modifying gift relations, 37–38; requiring belief, 39–40, 52; rise of, 175–76; spirit of, 182; uneven power in, 135; women as objects of, 146 financial advisors, 113 financial democratization, 144 financial education, 61, 70, 73–74, 113, 115– 17, 119, 228n13 financial inclusion, 3–4, 61, 74, 110–11, 114, 120, 134 financialization: background on, 207n37; banks and, 84; belief and, 22, 36–37, 47, 179–80, 201; Christian microfinance and, 60; control of women and, 143–44; definitions, 3–4, 77; as domination, 67; financialized souls, 31, 56, 60–67, 76, 113, 146; impacts of, 202; inclusion in, 110; in Latin American, 130; offering direct access, 176; owing it to yourself as motto of, 180; politics of, 181–82; power of, 61, 160; promise of economic independence of, 149; reliance on inequality, 84; understandings of, 52 financial liberalization, 132 financial proselytization, 116 financial sector, 12, 16

281

financial services, 111 Floralba, financial officer, 68, 69 Floyd, George, 183, 190 Force for Good initiative, 165, 175 foreign direct investment (FDI), 104, 132, 209n44 Foucault, Michel: on control, 178; on emergence, 67; on ethics, 63; framework of, 9–10; on governance, 172; on neoliberalism, 16; on salvation, 180; on self-transformation, 78 Four-Square Pentecostal Church, 92fig, 99, 99fig, 193fig Frederick, Marla, Between Sundays, 74 Fredy, Pastor, 192–95 free market spiritualities, 3, 8–9, 100–101, 189, 196, 198, 199 free trade agreements, 69 Frugality Banks, 118 future as essential to credit, 48–49. See also credit Gaitan, Jorge Eliécer, 23 Galeano, Eduardo, 109, 114–15 García, Melisa, 123, 142, 147, 153–55, 160-61 176 García Márquez, Gabriel, 154, v, xix Garner, Eric, 183, 190 Garrard, Virginia, 20 Garzal, rural community of, 92fig, 99fig; armed conflict in, 90; avoiding displacement, 31; cacao crop in, 102fig; church in, 193fig; money and banking in, 82–85; Pentecostalism in, 98–102; perceptions of banks in, 121; as a research site, 27–28, 192; school in, 127fig; self-defence strategies of, 103; stories of violence in, 105–8; welcome sign, 89fig Gebara, Ivone, El rostro oculto del mal, 96 gender: construction of, 154–55; relations, 138, 145–46; traditional roles, 166 Generación 12 (G12), 13, 29, 145fig, 173, 176 Genesis 2:7, 13 GEO Group, 185 gifting and giving, 36–41, 45; and belief, 52–53; etymology of, 235n21; as social strategy, 39 global economy, 130, 132. See also economics Gloria, Doña, 68 God: accountability to, 78–79; acquiring debt for, 22, 35, 37–38, 45, 47, 49; as Bookkeeper, 62; breath of, 13–14; business

282

index

God (continued) and, 101–2; faith in, 1–2, 58, 72; ideal relationship with, 146–48; interpretations of, 164; love of and consumption, 74, 122, 123; and multiplication, 141–42; plan for women, 137; prosperity and, 53, 55, 56; worshipping, 151–52, 153 Golconda Group, 94–95 gota a gota loans, 8, 65. See also loans Great Britain, 118 Great Recession, 120 group loan programs, 7, 71. See also loans Grupo Enel (energy company), 48 guerrilla forces: in Bogotá neighborhoods, 58; Camilo Torres in, 94–95; the Devil and, 106, 107; FARC as, 25; land displacement and, 17, 31, 87; in loan groups, 84 Gupta, Akhil, 129 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 95 Haiven, Max, 152 happiness, 42, 44, 51, 55, 113 Harding, Susan, The Book of Jerry Falwell, 124 Harvey, David, 108, 130 healing ceremonies and practices, 141, 193–94 High Office for the Post-conflict, 160 Hinn, Benny, 123 hoarding money, 117–21 home visits from banks, 78 Hoover, Herbert, 120 hope, financialized, 104, 158–60, 188 Horne, Oliver, A History of the Savings Bank, 118 household debt, 4, 16. See also debt HSBC, 185 human rights, 103, 115, 152, 208n42 human rights advocacy groups, 186 “I Am a Girl” campaign, 150 illicit economies, 88. See also economics imagining, 166–69 inclusion. See financial inclusion Indigenous peoples, exploitation of, 126, 139–40, 191, 234n13 Industrial Revolution, 119 Industry Houses, 118 inequality, 27, 84, 114, 161, 169, 190 institutions of control, 178 intellectual property rights (IPR), 132 Inter-American Development Bank, 78, 115

interest: compound, 31, 35, 112–13; credit card, 38–39, 55–56; on microcredit loans, 69, 188; payments, 46, 47, 48, 115; rates, 2, 8, 49, 56, 73, 79–80, 132. See also debt International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 75 International Financing Institutions (IFIs), 87, 131 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 75, 87, 114, 130 International United Pentecostal Church (IPUC), 98 intimacy, 147–48 investment in women, 150 Jaime, Opportunity International group member, 65–66, 67 Japan, 54–55 Jeremiah 31:3, 66, 66fig Jesus, 2, 5, 11, 14, 45 John 20:21-22, 14 Juan Carlos, DaviPlata inventor, 133–35 Juanes (musician), 54 Juan Valdez (coffee chain), 15 Kim, Jim Yong, 114 Kiyosaki, Robert, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, 171 Kremmerer, Edwin Walter, 120 labor, commodification of, 70, 108, 130, 138–40, 143 land defenders, 6–7, 17, 103, 184 land use, 6–7, 27, 86–87, 99–100 late capitalism, 3, 5–7, 11, 13, 23 Latin American history, 125–31 La Violencia, 25, 93, 97–98 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 142 liberation theology, 94–96 lidereza, 58–59 life projects, 115–17 life skills workshops, 65–66, 66fig, 68–69 lines of credit, 51, 57, 58, 79 Lizette, Doña, 84 loans: agricultural, 103; collective, in Garzal, 103; drip account, 8; foreign, 75; group, 71–73; to Latin American countries, 130–31; microloans, 67; officers, 76 Locke, Peter, 11, 162 Lofton, Kathryn, 74, 145 Lofton, Kathryn, Oprah, 74 Lost Decade, 131

index Los Urabeños, 88 Luke 14:28-30, 66 Luna, Eduardo, 86, 88 Magdalena Medio (region), 27–28, 90, 190– 91, 222n16, 222n20 Manuel, Nu Skin distributor, 158 Mao Tse-Tung, 86 Maria Lionza (spirit), 190–92, 195 marijuana cultivation, 87 market liberalization, 17, 43 Martin, Randy, 15, 77, 149 Marx, Karl, 23, 38, 57, 82, 152 Marx, Karl Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844, 81 Mary Kay (company), 166 mass graves, 42 MasterCard, 33, 39, 47 MasterCard Foundation, 78, 115, 150 Mauss, Marcel, 35, 37, 52 Mauss, Marcel, The Gift, 38 Mbembe, Achille, 1, 6, 9, 26, 188 McKinsey M Prize for Management Innovation, 133 Medellin Cartel, 93, 132–33 megachurches, 1, 28. See also Misión Carismática Internacional (MCI) Mena, Maricel, 96 micro-business bookkeeping, 70–71, 71fig microcredit loans: creating violence, 84–85; cycles, 69; increase in, 75; programs, 65 micro-entrepreneurs, 58, 79 microfinance industry: effects of, 188; financial inclusion goals of, 114; first-hand experiences with, 30, 63, 200; marketing of, 72, 143; as micromanagement, 67; organizations, 7, 28, 29–30 (See also Opportunity International); projects, 58, 61 Mignolo, Walter, 125–26 migrants, 185–86, 197–98 Miguel, Pastor, 91, 98–99, 101–2, 105, 121, 194–95 minimum wage, 16, 49 mining companies, 184 miracles, 123, 152–53, 169, 178, 189–90, 193–94 Misión Carismática Internacional (MCI): auditorium, 3fig; cell group meetings of, 147, 159; Commercial Center of, 124; and compounding interest, 52; covenanting in, 22, 35; evangelizing strategies of, 29;

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faith and finance, 11; Fernanda’s inclusion in, 122–23; franchises of, 187; location and size, 1; modeled after Yoido Full Gospel Church, 97; music at, 13; pastors in, 229n39; power to order life, 201; as research site, 27–28; role of Claudia Castellanos, 136–38; service structure, 2; small-group worship at, 36fig; ushers at, 44–45; women and, 141–42, 144, 146, 151–52; worship at, 12fig misogyny, 142 mobility, social, 5, 26–27, 33, 37, 146–47 mondongo (soup), 59 money: burying, 121; creation, 120; debt and, 200; laundering, 185; management, 78, 80–82; paper, 117; perceptions of in capitalism, 127; and power, 200; representation of, 82 Monroe Doctrine, 129, 231n57 Mont Pelerin Society, 16, 207n38 morality: accountability, 74, 120; accounting for, 79; of banking the poor, 120; of economic activity, 73, 78, 113, 115; of finance capitalism, 10, 60; influence of Christianity in Colombia, 16, 61; of multiplícame, 137; tied with economics, 77, 212n63; in trust groups, 76 Moreton, Bethany, 131 Mormonism, 177 Movimiento 19 de Abril, 25, 51 multilevel marketing: definition, 158–59, 241n1; as expression of colonialism, 167– 68; history of, 166–67; lifestyle benefits of, 174; in Nu Skin, 164–65, 173; parallels to evangelizing, 29; secrets of success of, 180; strategies of, 187 multiplícame, 137–38, 141–42, 143, 146–47, 149 multiplication strategies, 29, 136–38, 187–88 music in church, 2, 45, 194 National Council for Political and Social Economy (CONPES), 87 national currencies, 117–18, 119 natural resource exploitation, 6–7, 17, 87, 184, 208n42, 210n47 necrofinance: in detention centers, 186; and the Devil, 107; international aspects, 185; introduction, 6–13; manifestations of in Colombia, 58, 80; racialized, 190; violence and, 77, 84–85, 199 necropolitics, 6

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neoliberalism: as a consequence of structural adjustment policies (SAPs), 170; creation of precarity, 202; cycles of becoming and, 169; direct sales companies and, 171; effects of, 87–88; finance capitalism emerging from, 81, 104, 207n37; Foucault on, 16–17; policy of, 132; Prosperity Christianity and, 5, 20 Nepantla, 198–99 New Deal, 120 New Thought Movement, 19, 29, 166 Nicaragua, 130–31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 80 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 57, 58, 73 Nu Skin: demonstration of products, 165; net worth of, 169; opportunity of, 174–78; recruitment meetings of, 158, 163, 172– 73; Sofía as distributor of, 146, 159; as subject of research, 28 Office for the Postconflict (Oficina del Postconflicto), 14 OPEC crisis of 1973, 130 Opportunity International: financial education provided by, 61, 63–67, 66fig; financial education provided by, 76; financial officers, 68–70, 84; group loans, 71; prosperity as primary goal, 73; Remedios’ microcredit loan from, 58–59; as research subject, 29–30. See also microfinance industry; solidarity banks opportunity meetings. See recruitment meetings organized crime networks, 8 Orjuela Brothers, 88 Orrego, Arturo, 94 Osteen, Joel, 124 pactando, 97. See also covenanting pagando una promesa, 97. See also covenanting paramilitary forces, 6–7, 17, 86–87, 91, 98–99, 184–85 pastoral power, 78 patriarchy, 96, 137, 150 paying a promise, 97. See also covenanting peace: accords of 2017, 159; belief in, 42, 44, 50, 54; collective meaning of, 25; deals, 161fig; fragility of, 184; movement toward, 61, 159, 189; negotiations, 54, 203n3 Peebles, Gustav, 117, 118, 119

peer pressure, 72. See also solidarity banks Pentecostalism: African influences on, 20; in Colombia, 21, 96–98; definitions, 19; deterritorialization of, 195; Four-Square Pentecostal Church, 31, 90, 91–92, 92fig, 99fig; liberation theology and, 94; neoliberalism and, 5; neo-Pentecostalism, 5, 16; practices of, 98–100, 105; roots of, 18, 211n62; women in, 141 Pereira, Nancy Cardoso, 95 performative relationships, 147–48 personhood, financialization of, 111, 115, 146, 170 Petro, Gustavo, 42, 44, 51 photocopies, 78 Pilzer, Paul Zane, The Next Trillion, 181 Plan International, 150 political economy of war, 25, 30; foreign investments and, 104; and land access, 87; in Magdalena Medio region, 90; religion and, 100, 102; violence and, 105 Pope Nicholas V, 125 possibility as a motivator, 161, 164, 169, 175, 179 poverty: aspiration and, 13; connection to violence, 58, 199; feminization of, 139, 233n10; financial inclusion and, 111–12, 114; microfinance industry and, 73, 79, 199 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 63 power: biopower, 9; in capitalism, 6; and economics, 199; exercised through threats, 103; forms of, 100–101; institutions of, 52–53; and money, 200; neoliberal, 170; over bodies, 61; structures in financial system, 114; Western, 10 precapitalist societies, 37–38 precarity, 10, 52–53, 58; driven by neoliberalism, 171; increasing, 168–69; in labor markets, 170; in urban centres, 87 predatory lending, 7, 104–5 Presbyterian churches, 93 Presbyterian Missions Board, 93 prison industry, 185 private insurance, 72 private sphere, women in, 139 privatization, 116, 132, 140 production of the self, 179–81 profit margins, 111 Program for the Modernization of the Colombian Economy, 87 proletarianization, 107, 140

index prosperity: aspirations of, 45, 54, 73–74, 101–2; Christian expectations for, 4, 147; construction of ideas about, 116; credit cards enabling, 49; financial inclusion and, 115; God and, 142–43, 163; gospel teachings, 166; as ideology of finance capitalism, 53; and indebtedness, 9; as marketing message, 167; as miraculous, 189–90; peace and, 44, 159–60; practices of, 124, 125, 127; as a right, 169; through Nu Skin, 164 Prosperity Christianity: characteristics of, 21; covenanting practices in, 97; finance capitalism and, 5, 177–78; illustrations of, 28; necrofinance in, 9; origins in scriptures, 14; personhood and, 111; power relations in, 200; rebirth in, 15; relation to Pentecostal Christianity, 19; shaped by colonialism, 125; women in, 155 Protestants, 93, 97, 127–28 Psalm 33:6, 14 punctuality, 68, 74 punishment for spending, 113–14 pyramid schemes, 158, 166 Quimby, Phineas, 19 racialization: of capitalism, 191, 246n23; in microfinance industry, 72; of necrofinance, 190; of power, 10; of religion, 139–40, 196–97; of women, 140 Reborn Colombia Fairs, 160 recicladores, 64–65 recruitment meetings, 163, 172, 174–75. See also Nu Skin recyclers, 64–65 redemption and accounting, 62–63, 74 Reformed Church, 62 religion: in the Americas, 199; belief and, 215n25; binaries in, 94; and colonialism, 196–97; and consumption, 144, 156–57; definition, 41; emergence of in Latin America, 191–92; and race, 197. See also belief; God; Pentecostalism; Prosperity Christianity religious diversity, 4–5, 96, 104, 128, 196, 197 religious journals, 62 Remedios, 8, 29–30; introduction to, 57–60; as microcredit recipient, 78–80, 123; credit card uses, 72; as example of financialized soul, 75; at her diner, 57–60; illness of, 80; as necrofinance casualty,

285

188; prosperity, working toward, 73–75; as research subject, 29–30; restaurant business of, 200; solidarity bank meetings of, 68–72, 76 reproduction, control over, 140–41 research approaches, 10, 27–31 responsibility, individual fiscal, 115, 200 resurrection, financial, 11–12, 14–15, 18, 19, 146 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 23, 51, 88, 184; formation of, 25, 51, xx; peace accord, 27 risk, 70, 81, 178, 182 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, 140, 143 Roberts, Oral, 19 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 120 rotating savings and credit association (ROSCAS), 123, 229n40 Roy, Ananya, 73, 152 Rudnyckyj, Daromir, 21 Ruta de la Navidad, 42 sacrifice, religious, 2, 20, 22, 28–29, 35 salvation, 171–72, 180 Sandino, Augusto César, 130–31 Santiago, Garzal community leader, 82–83, 90–92, 98, 103 Santos, Juan Manuel, 44, 50, 51 savings, 16, 58, 112, 118, 121 Schmidt, Leigh, 156 schools, 116, 117, 127fig Schwittay, Anke, 111–12 Scotiabank (Canadian bank), 47 scriptures, 13–14 self-cultivation, 60, 77, 78, 112, 171, 175 Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (CONVIVIR), 88 self-employment, 75, 170 self-governance, 113 self-monitoring, 62, 79 self-regulation, 178 self-sufficiency, 75 sexual education, 28 sexualization, female, 148 sexual violence, 60, 140, 218n54 Shakira (musician), 54, 105–6, 107 shopping, spirituality of, 156–57 Singer, Paul, 185 slavery, 6, 140, 191 Soacha, neighborhood of Bogotá, 63, 65 social cohesion and safety, 82 social media campaigns, 54

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social mobility, 146–47 social relations, 37–38 social security, lack of, 72–73 social workers, 78 Sofia, Nu Skin micro-entrepreneur, 28, 159, 170, 172–73, 176, 201 solidarity banks: accountability of, 78; Angie’s leadership in, 64–66; meetings of, 68–72, 76; messages about prosperity, 73–74; Remedios’ participation in, 58–59; research of, 30 Sombart, Werner, 74 Somoza Garcia, Anastasio, 131 South Korean influences on Pentecostalism, 20. See also Yoido Full Gospel Church. sovereignty, 129, 141, 143, 176 Spirit, focus on in Pentecostalism, 19 Stoll, David, 128 structural adjustment policies (SAPs), 170 subsidy programs, 83 Sunday Banks, 118 survival, 82, 163, 188. See also poverty; precarity Támez, Elsa, The Bible of the Oppressed, 95 Taussig, Michael, 37, 94, 107 taxes from war, 87 tax reform, 132 Tejeiro Sarmiento, Clemencia, 98 televangelism, 19 television commercials, 54 theology, 93–98, 124 Thompson, James, 93 Thomson, Francis, 87 Timothy 3:16, 14 tithing. See covenanting Tomichá, Roberto, 96 Torres, Camilo, 94 . See also liberation theology. trade liberalization, 132 trading in futures, 179 Transcendental philosophy, 166 Trump, Donald, 185 trust, essential to finance, 118, 121, 229n27 trust groups. See solidarity banks Tupperware, 166 unbanked, 114, 134. See also financial inclusion underserved. See unbanked unemployment, 87, 169–70 United Nations, 111, 150

United States, 120, 130–31, 185–86 United States Federal Reserve, 87 Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 27, 94, 133 urban/rural divide, 107–8 Uribe, Alvaro, 50, 114 Ursula: Christmas gift of, 50–52; Davivienda Bank and, 109–10; debt payoff, 183–84; disciplinary power of debt, 200; financial inclusion of, 112–15, 142–43; as financialized soul, 31, xvii–xxii; life history, 26–27, 54–56; on sacrifice, 33; use of loans, 8 Usmé neighbourhood of Bogotá, 58, 59fig, 68 utopia, imagining, 168 van Agtmael, Antoine, 67 violence: background on in Colombia, 86–89; caliente, 65; complex solutions for, 184; as discipline, 52; displacement as cause of, 17–18; domestic, 149; driven by microfinance, 84–85; financing, 185; in Magdalena Medio region, 90; necrofinancial, 6–8; new forms of, 104; ongoing, 42, 161; in origins of American colonies, 143; pervasive, 10, 26; in poor Bogotá neighborhoods, 58; as punishment of bodies, 60; resolving, 14–15; role of religion in, 189; in rural areas, 30–31, 100–101; sexually motivated, 143; stories of in Garzal, 105–8 Virgin Mary, 140 Virtuous Woman Proverbs, 152–54 Visa Foundation, 150 von Hayek, Friedrich, 16 Wagner, Roy, 18 Wakefield, Priscilla, 118 war in Colombia, 23–24, 25–27, 30–31, 203n3. See also violence Washington Consensus, 131–32 wealth: accumulation, 167, 171; distribution, 27; maintenance of, 90–91; middle-class, 43; perceptions of, 105–6; sharing of, 181; and violence, 107 Weber, Max, 15–16, 74, 112, 126–28 Weber, Max, “Spirit of Capitalism,” 62 Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 15 Western Union, 80 Western Union Foundation, 76 Winfrey, Oprah, 145 witch-hunts, 140–41

index womanhood, 138; idea of a correct, 146, 153–54; training of, 142 Woman’s Bank, 57, 79 women and womanhood: biblical interpretations of, 152–53; as a commodity, 142–45, 236n25; empowerment of, 136–38; experiences of in capitalist expansion, 139–42; financialized, 147; as majority of direct sales representatives, 170; as microcredit

287

recipients, 72; as objects of biopolitical power, 143, 238n32; social connections of, 141; violence against, 149–50, 238n31; as wives and daughters of God, 154 Women’s Bank, 57 World Bank, 75, 87, 110, 112, 114–15, 130 Yoido Full Gospel Church, 20 Yonggi Cho, David, 97, 123

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