Consuming Religion 9780226482125

Citation preview

Consuming Religion

Edited by  Kathryn Lofton and John Lardas Modern

Consuming Religion

Kathryn Lofton

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­48193-­7 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­48209-­5 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­48212-­5 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226482125.001.0001 Published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Lofton, Kathryn, author. Title: Consuming religion / Kathryn Lofton. Other titles: Class 200, new studies in religion. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Series: Class 200: new studies in religion Identifiers: LCCN 2016057343 | ISBN 9780226481937 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226482095 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226482125 (e-­book) Subjects: LCSH: Religion and culture—­United States. | Popular culture—­United States. | Popular culture—­Religious aspects. | Consumption (Economics)—­ United States. | Consumption (Economics)—­Religious aspects. Classification: LCC BL65.C8 L64 2017 | DDC 306.60973—­dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057343 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For NKL

A society can neither create itself nor recreate itself without at the same time creating the ideal.

Émile Durkheim

Contents Preface Introduction

ix 1

P R A C T I C ING C OMMO D I T Y 1 2

Binge Religion: Social Life in Extremity The Spirit in the Cubicle: A Religious History of the American Office

17

34

R E V ISING R I T U A L 3 4

Ritualism Revived: From Scientia Ritus to Consumer Rites Purifying America: Rites of Salvation in the Soap Campaign

61 82

IM A GINING C ELE B R I T Y 5 6

Sacrificing Britney: Celebrity and Religion in America The Celebrification of Religion in the Age of Infotainment

105 122

VA LUING FA MILY 7 8

Religion and the Authority in American Parenting Kardashian Nation: Work in America’s Klan

141 164

R E T H IN K ING C O R P O R AT E F R EE D OM

Corporation as Sect 10 On the Origins of Corporate Culture 11 Do Not Tamper with the Clues: Notes on Goldman Sachs 9

Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Index

197 220 243 283 289 295 345

Preface This is a book about how we organize our consumer life and how con­ sumer practice organizes us. What am I free to consume? What do I become through consumption? Consider a single page in an airline magazine. The two articles on the page will be familiar to any traveler who has been desperate enough to reach for seat-­back literature. Familiar with the way the magazine deploys cartoon sketches and a perky vernacular to enjoin the reader to take other trips. And the articles are recognizable, too, in their strategic whimsy, how they want to ensure that nothing too serious enters your head when you are stuck at twenty thousand feet. Your mood is being managed, but what do you care? You are the one who grabbed for the airline magazine. Already you’re a demographic, somebody targeted for certain credit card offers and pop-­up ads. The two articles on this exemplary page gush about their advertised destinations through the voices of two eager people named Avi Yossef and Scott Michaels. Even if you have not read this issue of the magazine, you can already imagine who they are. You know they will be entrepreneurs or adventurers; you know that they will be highly productive and keen to see new horizons; you know that they will be (as they will tell you) in love with life. These simulacra are like Saturday morning cartoon characters or the smell of coffee, nearly cozy in their familiarity. You return to them, reading this magazine even though you know nothing revelatory will be found on its pages. You read maybe because you’re caught between one thing and the next, vulnerable to any distraction. Or maybe because you wonder if by the end of this reading something different might happen than happened so many times. “I shop therefore I am,” reads a 1987 work by the American artist Barbara Kruger.1 Kruger doesn’t quite have it. Shopping is strategic and

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agential. High in the sky, waiting through the flight time, I am, therefore I consume. The jetliner journalist quickly relates details of our businessmen’s am­ bitions. Scott is the director of a Los Angeles tour company, Dearly Departed Tours, through which paying guests explore what his company website calls the “spectacular exits” of Hollywood celebrities.2 He is worried about the current location of Marilyn Monroe’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and he wants people to join him in his hoped-­for relocation of the star to a spot with less fast food traffic and the related condiment spillage. “She’s the symbol of Hollywood around the world,” he says. “Her star deserves to be outside the Chinese Theatre, not a McDonald’s.”3 Lower down on the page, we learn about Avi, an Israeli music promoter who will host an epic rave in an unusual disco location. “The area is best known for its proximity to the cave complex where, in 1947, a young Bedouin stumbled across the Dead Sea Scrolls,” the three-­hundred-­word article relates. “Also close by is Masada, the mesa-­top fortress that was once the vast, fortified holiday home of King Herod.”4 The articles are determinedly good-­natured and foxily democratic. We are told that Avi has a trucker hat and Scott has a goatee. Reading these thumbnail sketches of their fixations, we are struck by how similar they are, these two lightly sporty men who have an odd tiger by the tail. “Nobody has ever danced at the lowest point on Earth before,” Avi says. “There’s a historic story here.”5 Meanwhile, Scott is lobbying the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which oversees the Walk of Fame, and aims to get Hugh Hefner to support his cause. Marilyn’s symbolic memory is too important to be sullied. And, “if movies are a religion, then Grauman’s is its church.”6 Suddenly we’ve gotten to some specific words. Could this person really mean them? Reading a corporate periodical suggests we shouldn’t press too hard on any of its particulars. Commercial products don’t want to disturb their consumers with anything that upsets the shushing lull of their cloaked commerce. Stopping on those particular words raps against the compulsory concordance of the enterprise. But what if you decided to resist the anti-­seriousness of this text and ask whether it means precisely what it says? If movies are our religion, Grauman’s is a church, what does that mean? Bored on the plane, locked into a transitory relationship with the free magazine, you might start to wonder: what religion is this? Maybe you look around in the cabin to see if anyone else got so sidelined. Maybe you see someone turn their airline magazine pages quickly, barely registering the details; maybe you see someone else

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xi

ripping out an article about ballpark food. And suddenly you decide that all of us have a relationship to consumer culture and its religion even if we claim no relationship to it at all. Religion isn’t only something you volunteer to join, open-­hearted and confessing. It is not only something you inherit, enjoined by your parents. Religion is also the thing into which you become ensnared despite yourself. Religion is one way to describe how we organize ourselves in the salesperson’s world. Avi might say that his dancing public is nothing like the pious Israeli Jews who climb up to Masada before dawn so when the sun rises they can daven Shacharit (practice daily morning prayer). Scott could say his endorsement of Marilyn’s iconic face is nothing like the figurines enshrined at the nearby Tahl Mah Sah Buddhist Temple on West Olympic Boulevard or the icons at Christ the King Roman Catholic Church on North Rossmore Avenue. And I would agree: there are differences between people dancing and people praying; there are differences between celebrities and deities. But I will argue that emphasizing these differences eclipses the possible hermeneutic territory opened by observing their commonalities. A scriptural law and a dance beat are not the same kind of thing, but they are both reminders of a certain authority. A scripture and an airline periodical are not the same thing, but they both present themselves as resolved about the world and who we might be in it. Much of the literature addressing religion in the modern period frets about whether we live in a time with fewer religious laws and too many dance beats, or too much tourism and too little pilgrimage (or vice versa). But one of the key assumptions of this book is that religion is a word that has captured our sociality. (Here the many valences of capture are intended.) Religion is a name for social organization. It doesn’t matter if you have not seen the inside of a cathedral, a temple, or a seminary offering theological education. I claim that no matter what you think you are relative to some abstract notion of religion, you are, as a social actor, as a political actor, and as an economic actor, being determined by it.7 Masada has become, after all, way more than a cliff side. It has forged a mythical narrative in which the defense of Masada, a fortress on a remote mountain near the Dead Sea, is a metonym for the defense of the modern-­ day state of Israel. The storytellers recount that at this site in the first century AD a small group of  Jewish warriors (sometimes labeled freedom fighters, sometimes labeled Zealots) fought overwhelming odds against a much larger Roman army. Such a story ultimately exists in and through a myth that serves ideological ends. In his study The Masada Myth, Nachman Ben-­ Yehuda considers how the contemporary Masada myth is quite different

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from the account provided by its first-­century recorder, Joseph Flavius.8 The myth is not a loyal recapitulation of historical knowledge. Rather, it is a strategic composition forged in service to certain shifting worries about territory and occupation. This belief system about Masada (Ben-­Yehuda explains) didn’t emerge thousands of years ago. Instead, it only began to take shape in the late 1920s. From the point of  view of early Zionism, the moral entrepreneurship leading to this myth was harnessed to help create a new strong national identity, one that affirmed a specifically Jewish connection to land repeatedly argued as their Israel. Suddenly, organizing all-­night dancing at this place has new implications. No longer just a bit of irreligious hedonism or a component of a promoter’s clever hustle, the idea of an epic dance party at Masada is an invitation perhaps to a new ritual, one that might reframe, reiterate, or even forget altogether Israeli nationalism. Under a night sky atop a plateau, the disco beats could forge new kinds of sectarian affinity and new forms of obedience. High in the air, pulling out the page of the magazine, I decide to keep the stories of these two small-business men. I want to archive their stories and remember the specific communities that each of them temporarily forge. Through the sociability they concoct through rites of collective enthusiasm and rites of pilgrimage; through their unconscious politics and overt economics; through claiming the authority of history and believing in the preservation of the sui generis; through the thinly veiled solicitation in a corporate magazine provided to take me, the reader, away from wherever I am, they have shown their religion. This religion is in the consumer interests they protect, the social possibilities they promote, the hierarchies they reiterate, and the commodities they sell. We can’t get away from it, not even at twenty thousand feet. We have been, and continue to be, consumed by its dances, smeared by its sweat and its condiments, and interrupted by its unending effort to find us in our quiet and tug us into its dreams.

Introduction Being Consumed

Consumption is loss. After consumption, something is gone: gone because of use, because of decay, or because it was destroyed. In economic terms, consumption describes the using up of goods or services having an exchangeable value. In pathology, consumption describes the progressive wasting of the body. Either way, nobody is feeling great, since the gasoline is running low or the lungs are swelling up. Consumption generates greater need to fill in the gap for its losses. Inevitably, we need more things, more services, and more measures to counteract unrelenting consumption. We can imagine consumption wholly otherwise, of course. It is a mea­ surement, not a commentary on measurement. Consumption describes something that is constantly happening. How much air are you consuming now as you breathe? How much energy do you consume as you read? The nature of consumption can be something less tendentious and more flatly perceived. Watch what you use, what you lose, what you need to proceed. Be­ ing is consuming. Or we could get very bright-­eyed about it all. We choose to consume some things rather than others, and there is a creative power attached to such selection. Individuals represent identity through the purchase of certain goods, the wearing of particular brands, or the use of specific services. Access to consumer options creates contexts for education, empowerment, and progress. Whatever the costs of consumption, consumers could be seen to recoup through material and immaterial gains of knowledge and territory, calories and muscle.1

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introduction

Describing religion presents us with a similar trifecta of descriptive opportunities. We could talk critically of religions, thinking in particular of how they restrict human action or distort human reason. We could speak neutrally about religion, suggesting that it (like race, sex, or class) is a given of social life. Or we could write with optimism about the ways religions shape human experience. In the history of religion as a subject of academic interest and political concern, you can find every one of these accounts: those worried about what religions were doing, those who tried to describe what religion did, and those who thought that religions offered some sort of structures for the betterment of the world. The essays in Consuming Religion offer a profile of religion and its relationship to consumption in the modern period. This work braids each of these analytical registers—­lamentation, chronicle, and panegyric—­to con­ vey the many aspects of our receiving and perceiving of religion and consumption. These essays show that the term religion may still have some crit­ical life, especially as a way to think about social modes of encounter, interaction, and development. I want to crack open the value of religion as a word that captures certain outlines for human framing: How is activity organized? What makes something people decide to do, to like, or to watch? Why do we commit to organizing socially in one way rather than another? Consuming Religion demonstrates how religion manifests in efforts to mass-­produce relations of value. Religion in this book is a word deployed in some moments by certain actors as something controlling and disciplining, but in other moments it refers to something pliable and enfranchising. I move between these two poles of commentary in my effort to represent how religion appears as a term that organizes distinctions between control and freedom. If you listen to popular discussions of religion, you might think you have to decide about it. Are you inside it or outside it? Are you for it or against it? Standing on the fulcrum of such dichotomies is the work of the scholar. Not because she can claim a reasoned account of all views but because it is her responsibility to represent the multiple perspectives that exist, simultaneously, in the very evocation of the term. And so in this volume you will find that at times I name what religion is and point to what it inhibits or allows. Other times, I demur on the point, and suggest religion is a category that produces the prompt for these explorations. This is in part due to the content of discussions about religion in the archives of popular culture that predominate my research. In this vast repository, religion is deployed in one of two ways: religion describes ideas about life, or it describes a distinct social body. These two ways of talking about

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religion—­as an abstract set of metaphysical inquiries or as a sociological unit structuring community—­can be reconciled with each other (the social group agrees with certain ideas, the ideas produce certain kinds of social order). But what matters for my purposes are not the kinds of definitions circulating about religion, but the circulating confidence about religion as something definable by us, and about us. Within departments of religious studies, defining religion has become almost absurdly impossible, resulting in undergraduate program descriptions and doctoral mission statements that look more like the result of a game of Exquisite Corpse than reasoned roundtable deduction. Yet, on cable news and on Twitter, everyone seems to know what religion is. The Amazing Spider-­Man star Andrew Garfield tells a journalist that celebrity is the new religion; a protester proclaims that the Black Lives Matter movement is a religion of peace; a Goldman Sachs employee confidently tells me that the company’s culture is its religion. A disconnect between scholarly work and public life couldn’t be more starkly drawn: what academics struggle to agree to define collectively everyone else seems cheerfully ready to settle individually. This book seeks to demonstrate why defining religion can be so difficult but also how we do it, constantly, to complicated organizational ends. I seek to press readers to think about who they are relative to the sociality that determines their individuality, and what their social practices explain about their view of humanity. Sociality and its practices are universal to human behavior no matter the presence or absence of sectarian affiliation.2 Whenever we see dreams of and for the world articulated, whenever we see those dreams organized into legible rituals, schematics, and habits, we glimpse the domain that the word religion contributes to describe. Whenever we see the real ways we organize ourselves to survive our impossible distance from those dreams, we grasp why religion exists. Not because the religious is that dreaming or those realities. Because religion has been a word used to summarize the habits by which we demarcate ourselves as certain kinds of dreamers and makers. Those who occupy the study of religion reckon regularly with the discomfiture of those who reject the assignment of that category, as well as the overeager clutch of those who claim religion’s proper occupation. In almost any conversation about the term religion, the reactions it produces can seem to exceed the definitions we apply to render it comprehensible. This should not dissuade us from definitional projects as much as it should encourage us to ask what other projects of discernment might be available for us in pursuit of understanding what religion is and how it still organizes social

4

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experience. One of the central terms of this analysis is that verb, organizes. Time and again, the examples that I pursue unfold initially as spirited ideas or hypotheses but then become legalistic or recurring within regulating structures. I resist descriptions of religion that deny the organizational aspect of the category, of its history as an imperial activity, of its expression as a doctrinal mandate. This is one way to explain why religion is an inherently political and economic category: because religion—­as a category of law and learning, as a description for social movements, and as a summary of identity or claim of belief—­is always organizing. Some scholars of religion have hardened this feature of religion—­its organizational compulsion—­into a sharp-­eyed critique of its constitutive political ends. For those thinkers, religion is nothing but a strategic tool of distinction. Even as I have gained a great deal from these writings, it will be quickly clear that I seek something more activist than discursive critique. I want scholars, thinkers, students, and citizens to imagine what work they might make religion do for them to organize the world other than how it has been organized.3 I turn to popular and consumer culture as my archives because I want to explore especially the ways that cultural activities or products offer common sites for encounter and judgment. Things that are popular are intended for the general public rather than specialists; they are things that are enjoyed by a larger number of people than a narrow few. Popular culture supplies a terrain where individuals come together to participate in, support, or criticize an object, principle, or subject. And liking something is a serious act of distinction. “If consumption was once a site of more or less unilateral decisions, it is today a space of interaction where producers and senders no longer simply seduce their audiences; they also have to justify themselves rationally,” Néstor García Canclini has written. “To consume is to participate in an arena of competing claims for what society produces and the ways of using it.”4 The seemingly inconsequential preference of one superhero over another, the quick flip of the radio station from something you can’t stand to something you can tolerate, or the decision to record this program over something else on your DVR—­these discernments may be rendered as minor matters in the given traversal of daily life, yet represent our decisions to connect with (or not) circulating objects. These small decisions are where we organize ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, as political and economic actors, in alignment with certain demographics and social wholes and implicitly or explicitly in dissent from others. This is how we draw the lines of what a family should be and how a woman can appear; this is how we know what a working day ought to include and what racial and gendered freedoms

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are possible. When I connect popular culture to religion, I am trying to think about these selections, or shrugging acts of acquiescence, or passionate com­ mitments to particular sounds or scenes, as distinctions of greater  signif­ icance than might be comfortable at first to acknowledge. Whatever else re­ ligion might be, it is a way of describing structures by which we are bound or connected to one another. Religion is therefore also a way of describing structures by which we distinguish ourselves from others, often by uniting around things that claim universal interest. We distinguish ourselves from others the minute we decide to join others in their liking. Even more, I want to demonstrate strength of popular culture to form an apparent common space of commentary in an increasingly personalized world of consumption. No matter your relationship to specific ideas of congregation or concerts, zines or scripture, gardening or prayer, you have likely heard of Kim Kardashian or Procter & Gamble, and this having heard is one of the premises of the work in front of you. Why have you heard of these things? What do they do to become so dominant, occupying, bothering, or determining? I want to be clear that knowing something is out there isn’t the same as enjoying or having access to it. One theme of this volume is the way objects of popular culture can be omnipresent while still being quite remote, even estranged, from everyday experience. Thinking about religion through the popular invites us to reflect again on the relationship between universalism and exclusivity, on how, for examples, celebrities are quotidian and unreachable, financial freedom is a much-­repeated individual goal and an absolute contradiction in terms. Scholars of religion know that myth reconciles contradiction and that ritual unites disparate bodies into ideological assent with those myths. Religion is a word that helps identify the necessary simultaneity of feasible and implausible claims of consumerism, since the history of religion has long recorded the ways religions work, not despite their conjunctions of opposites but because of them. This, too, is the brilliance of consumer culture, in which so much imprisonment is labeled as your deliverance. I am not the first scholar to consider the archives of popular culture or present-­day social life as useful resources for thinking about what religion is. One strand of this bibliography uses history to discern the uses of popular culture by organized religion and the ways popular religions counter and engage broader religious traditions. This scholarship questions the sec­ ularization thesis and resists descriptions of religion that rely overmuch on doctrine or institutional authority.5 In such works we might find out how Hindu deities become piled high with rupees at a shrine, how the

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evangelist Joel Osteen’s smile is a commodity all its own, and how Islamic economics and Islamic theology are indistinguishable.6 Another line of this bibliography uses sociology to explore how modern communities understand their relationship to public life in an apparent vacuum of formal religious authority. These works focus especially on the line between the sacred and the secular and how something called spirituality might toggle between the two.7 In Consuming Religion, I seek to use history to think about how we come to the specific patterns of sociality we possess and to what extent this sociality is usefully understood alongside religion. In this, too, I do not stand alone; the sociologist Peter Berger, as well as the philosophers Hans Blumenberg and Charles Taylor, has deployed large-­scale epochal thinking to account for the place of religion in the modern world.8 These scholars have consistently sought to identify how individuals come to understand themselves in light of shifting historical experience. I argue that consumption is the anthropological phenomenon to watch: what we consume, how we consume, and how we organize ourselves in order to facilitate ongoing consumption. Schol­ars of religion need to reconceive their notion of what it means to study religion to include consumer activity, and sociologists need to realize the ritual modalities of social life. I seek to describe how much of consumer life is itself a religious enterprise, religious in the sense of enshrining certain commitments stronger than almost any other acts of social participation. Whereas earlier authors took as a given the perpetuity of  denominated, sectarian religions, I turn my gaze to those things seemingly unhooked from denominational life, such as the universal labor of parenting or the practice of binge viewing, and observe the kinds of social concession and sectarian resistance these practices convey. Scholars previously have engaged religion in the marketplace of culture, looking at the way pilgrimage sites develop local commercial infrastructure such as cheap and luxury lodgings, sightseeing attractions, and shops selling goods associated with the shrine. Commercial engagement has, at times, been dismissed as antithetical to pilgrimage’s “true” essence, but in practice the dynamics of the marketplace have been proved time and again to be integral to the whole practice of pilgrimage. A recent report by Catholic authorities stated that more visitors to Lourdes could be considered tourists than pilgrims. The question this book takes up is what it means to divide the tourist from the pilgrim, or the celebrity from the god, or the corporation from the sect.9 Consuming Religion thinks about the marketplace as the primary archive of religion. To study any contemporary subject—­person, place, or thing—­is

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to study one dancing amid tropes messily occupying economic and spiritual metaphor, despite the illusion that the regulations managing each may be separated by legal code and stock portfolio. In several chapters of this book, I pursue the history and present life of specific corporations (Herman Miller, Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble). This research underlines the way that the terms corporation and religion frame very similar enterprises. Corporations inscribe practices and promote worldviews beyond the applied scope of their product. Organizations denoted as religions possess marketing strategies and consumer interests. There have been legal and political reasons to distinguish between these two words. But there are substantive reasons to understand the ways that companies organize themselves as religious—­ whether in their workplace culture, or in their humanitarian efforts and advertised commodities.10 In the conclusion, I will pursue another communal image that reappears in these pages, namely that of the family. It is no coincidence that each of the three companies mentioned—­Herman Miller, Goldman Sachs, and Procter & Gamble—­began as family enterprises. The story of emergent corporate power ought not to be imagined as so far flung from more natal genealogical dreams. Such a communal language for the way markets shape our experience—­ and, therefore, our obligation to participate in, and reply to, these shapes—­ derives from a contemporary context in which the distinction between what is the market and what is not seems wholly impossible to determine. The rev­ olutions that overthrew the communist states in various Central and Eastern European countries during the late 1980s indicated a failure of certain critical ideology as well as a triumph of market logic. Those decrying the end of communist rule mourned the loss of its potential as a critique of the social effects of modern economic life. Those celebrating its demise celebrated on behalf of a confidence in the social order brought about by capitalist rule. One term for this era of the inescapable logic of markets is neoliberal. What is religion within a world of such market determinism? Scholarship on religion and the market increasingly proves that religion and economics are inextricable in the United States, with one producing the other. This is, on the one hand, nothing new in the historical annals. Religions have always been reflective of economic ideas. Consider, for example, the profound historical relationship between scriptural writings, whether the Vedas or the New Testament, and classificatory systems of race, caste, and class. More pointedly, recall the figure of Saint Nicholas. Once the patron saint of sailors and merchants, he gained fame under the name of Santa

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Claus, a character who would travel to distribute gifts to children worldwide at Christmastime. The plot of Nicholas indicates a persistent commiseration between religion and economy. Although there have, of course, been movements resistant to material acquisitiveness, and many of those movements have taken certain religious forms such as monasticism, it is difficult to find many significant examples in the modern period in which religion and economy produce any substantive conflict with each other.11 Although it is clear that religious thinkers struggle to reconcile certain market emphases with their preferred practices, and that certain religious critics may indict other religious actors for being overly acceding to the marketplace, this stunning consistency in recent history is the way that religious aspirations and economic practices seem more collaborative than contradictory. Consumerism, the theory that a progressively greater consumption of goods is economically beneficial, has become the organizing value of social life. Currently the average grocery store carries roughly fifty times as many products as eighty years ago.12 And this is how we cease to live in the world of Saint Nicholas, or even Santa Claus, but not that of Amazon.com. A recent Pew Research study shows that the way Americans celebrate Christmas is changing: fewer people are attending a gathering with family or friends around the holiday; fewer people are putting up a Christmas tree; fewer people are sending cards.13 These statistics signal that the surveyor imagines those activities (attending a gathering, putting up a tree, sending cards) comprise right engagement with a historically Christian holiday. Yet another set of statistics shows that Christmas has only increased in personal cost and exertion. The average American spent $830 on Christmas gifts in 2015, a near recovery of the pre-­crash all-­time high of $866 in 2007.14 If Americans spend increasing amounts of money on gifts given at Christmas, does this suggest a diminishment of the holiday? In this book, I argue that such statistics hint not at a secularization story but at a reallocation of interests. Many scholars have worked to account for (as Saba Mahmood has written) the ways that “modern religiosity (whether as belief in transcendence, political identity, or state ideology) is enabled and spawned by the secular institutions that have become more, rather than less, enmeshed in its formulation and praxis.”15 I want to draw our eye to those systems of social organization that claim to supersede political borders, such as commodities and corporations, as well as the units of social experience (family and community) often imagined to be universal in form. In these structures of  human sociality we find new kinds of orthodoxy.

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Where our social and ritual interests are placed now is not in denominational tradition but workplace culture; not in inherited objects but recently purchased goods; not archaic icons but an endlessly rotating cast of minor and major celebrities. At the heart of each of these realignments of religious interest is the explicit monetization of value. The economy isn’t understood just as an operational good but actually as an entity capable of the highest spiritual accomplishment, hence the increased diagnoses of the neoliberal economy as a spiritual economy.16 We give spiritual meaning to goods in order to express how much commodities mean to us, and also to reiterate that these goods distinguish us from others. They are ours, not yours. Neoliberalism might therefore be understood as a form of religious occupation of the economy: a way of seeing the self in the world as a calculatingly sovereign person enfolded in systems of power, class, and experience through the selection of particular goods and services. The product is a material way to access something ineffable. Historians of capitalism suggest this is a new era in our relationship to commodities. “We drifted from having a market economy to being a market society,” writes Michael J. Sandel.17 Throughout this book, I offer a series of historical case studies that suggest what preceded this thing we call neoliberalism, and begin to hint at what persists from before this neologism, and what is also different from before. It is difficult to say how and why the shift from “producerist” identities to “consumerist” identities has happened in the West, but economists point to the rapid growth of  trade in the late 1970s as a critical moment. Consumers began to be heavily exposed to the prices and qualities of imported goods, an exposure accelerated by increased global advertising, which, in turn, produced a new demand structure rooted in higher consumer expectations.18 As people learned about a wider array of goods, they began to want those goods, and expect they would arrive quickly and cheaply at their doorstep. Consumers direct an economy about which they have diminished material understanding but expanded relation. Why does this shift matter? I recently discussed the phenomenon of ambient advertising with an undergraduate student. Ambient advertising refers to the placement of ads in unusual public places. With the cost of  traditional media advertising skyrocketing, marketers are aggressively seeking out new advertising vehicles. Cars, bicycles, taxis, and buses have become moving commercials. Ambient ads appear on store floors, at gas pumps, in washroom stalls, on elevator walls, park benches, telephones, and fruit, and

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pressed into the sand on beaches. I described how disquieting I found it to sit in a public restroom and see an advertisement for a scanner. The student shrugged. “We’re all selling something.” For this student, there is no such thing as intrusive advertisement. He has grown up in a world of targeted advertising on his Facebook page and cross merchandizing in every video game he plays. A shrugging attitude toward the bathroom promotion is also an acknowledgment of market inevitability. The geographer Michael Storper has argued that we shouldn’t understand consumption as something “pushed” on people. Rather, consumerism “ultimately sustains itself by becoming an intimate part of the action frameworks of individuals, how they see themselves and define their interests, how they approach the world, and how they present themselves to others.”20 Commodification has become axiomatic to any activity. It is easy to feel as if consumer life isn’t just a feature of existence but the only shared term of our existence. We might not share race, gender, politics, bloodline, or nation, but we share the marketplace. I hope I show, however, that the marketplace itself privileges certain racial identities, gender experiences, and family structures over others. Just because something sells itself to you as an all-­access pass does not make it meant for all. Indeed, the very notion underlines the particularity of the product: access to you, of a certain kind, for a particular produced purpose of exhibition. I return, time and again, to religion as I think about the consequences of this marketed world because within its naming we find, often, words of critique. Consider, for example, the following quotations, both of which ex­ press a certain critical regard for religion: 19

If I know religion to be man’s alienated self-­consciousness, then what I know to be confirmed in it as religion is not my self-­consciousness but my alienated self-­consciousness.21 The monk belongs to the world, but the world belongs to him insofar as he has dedicated himself totally to liberation from it in order to liberate it.22

The conjunction of these quotations intends to establish the complexities found in the concept of religion. If we focus on the first quotation, we find ourselves in a critical worry, namely that religion is an illusion. In his writings, the author of this quotation, Karl Marx (1818–­1883), explained how people came to believe certain confused ideas about themselves in the world,

introduction

11

and how those ideas were successful precisely because they seemed liberating, and not oppressing. This critique remains powerful, sometimes breathtakingly so. This is how ideology works in a capitalist society: not as boldfaced barking propaganda but as cheerful reminders to be joyful in the light of Jesus, or to be improved by wearing the right slim-­fitting jeans. Whether it is to talk about a divinity or a consumer good, the seduction of such an ideology results in you (as worker, believer, or consumer) being alienated from the real material facts of things, and, consequently, from real awareness. You may feel conscious, but you are not. You are alienated from your wakefulness by competing claims to your consciousness. Individuals might be seen, then, as designers of their own hegemony, styling a prosperity consciousness through consumer practice rather than through orthodox obedience to elites. In such a landscape, participants imagine they are the ultimate agents of their religious life and their economic life. Believers see restrictions of markets as illusory and oppressive, and preachers promise liberation from relations of consumption by exceeding the false consciousness of market logic. Markets produce poverty, and the illusion that poverty is inevitable. One word for such a proxy consciousness is religion. For Marx, religion is “opium” insofar as a wrongheaded fix for a true experience. It is the wrong way of protesting something that deserves to be protested.23 In the early twentieth century, Antonio Gramsci argued that religion need not only be understood as an ideology for the elites to suppress those that materially support their power.24 He suggested that popular forms of religion could function as subaltern protests against hegemony: against the hegemony of clergy, of industrialists, of the structures that seem to determine consciousness through delimiting freedom. In the second quotation transcribed above, we see another speaker reaching for the same conceptual point, as he suggests that whatever religions exist—­ wherever and however they exist—­they may contain the possibility of real consciousness. The speaker in the second quotation, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915–­1968), wrote about Marxism during his travels in Asia, where he encountered communists, as well as Buddhist monks living within communism. In his reflections on the relationship between monasticism and Marxism, he cited student Marxists who had claimed, “We are the true monks.” How could the ardently atheistic Marxist claim any association with the most committed Christian? “The monk is essentially someone who takes up a critical attitude toward the world and its structures,” wrote Merton.

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He was one of a number of religious figures who encountered the writings of Karl Marx and considered them more kin than nemesis. Those believers found that within religion there may be the possibility of ridding oneself of ideological illusions. The criticisms of the monk and the Marxist are different, Merton conceded, as are the ultimate ends of their critique. But they share a common recognition that the claims of the world are fraudulent.25 And they each work for the revolution of real consciousness to begin. Religion has been complicit in producing the status quo. It also has provided a critique of the status quo. Religious critiques of the market—­ like many other visions of liberation—­have struggled to exceed the market. Even more devastatingly, they often appear only as options for people to choose from within a “free” marketplace. To compete, these visions of liberation have so consistently defined the end of freedom in relationship to consumption that we must wonder what other options are possible. Or differently: the religious imagination is constantly, perhaps increasingly and inevitably, offering us dreams of the world based on our relationships with commodities. To be sure, these are variable relationships in which religion alternately celebrates, or describes and accepts, or critiques in an effort to escape. But whatever their aspirations, these dreams are constrained by the logic of neoliberal life, packaged and processed for the market. Recall, for a moment, the pulled-­out magazine page that was described in this volume’s preface. The articles on that page promoted several different goods: they sold celebrity tours and dance parties, and they sold tourism in Los Angeles and Israel. But they also sold the profitable independence of their entrepreneurial stars, Avi and Scott, based on the commodification of very particular settler colonies. Promotional magazines subsume product advertisement in first-­person accounts of devotion to craft or activity, devotions invariably organized through a commercial enterprise. Airline magazines don’t tell you to go to Cancun. Instead, they provide an account of a very old man who carves door handles in the shape of Aztec gods in a charming side street of Cancun that he has occupied ever since he had a dream about a doorway to heaven. Cancun becomes, then, not a place you have paid to visit. It is a place where you, the creative adventurer, might get lost and encounter a memorable character with a specific folk art. A piece of which, if you can find him, buy. This is not a neat indictment of the commodity fetish. It is an inquiry into how we came to make our world as it is. Even though you may not think you are of it, there it is: making you, with or without you. If this book persuades you of anything, I hope it is that your decision to find this door

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handle is not a simply asocial or ideologically neutral activity. It is an articulation of social value that includes some and excludes others, that relies on the labor of certain persons on behalf of others, and that inscribes certain pathways and makes others less accessible. Scholars have tended to press us to decide if this is a good value or bad value, to decide if shopping is something good for the world or bad for the soul, right for humanity or wrong for it. What I want to dwell on is the fact of purchase as a social act. Within this act there can be revelatory moments and condemnatory debts. Most commodities contain with them the possibility that you could deconstruct them: the door handle could be on the desk of a stock trader or on the gate to a library; the old carver could dig you deeper into circuits of colonial tourism or he could compel you to join him in his radical overthrow of local governance. Or nothing could happen: you could just stay within a cycle of encounter and purchase with which you have a diffident relationship. Whatever your spirit, whatever your ritual, you are in it. You are being consumed by the social inevitability of consumer decision. Religion is a word to intensify what we do when we name authority, practice interactions, and interpret life itself. Consumer culture, like religion, could be merely another emblem of alienated self-­consciousness. Or, it could incite the beginning of a new self-­consciousness to liberate us from the very obsessions it compels.

Practicing Commodity

0 1 Binge Religion Social Life in Extremity

How often do scholars of religion—­o r, better put, scholars associated with the term religion—­experience moments of interdepartmental wincing, wariness, or sweet-­faced condescension? I don’t mean to confess outright abuse. I seek to capture that moment when a colleague who works in the same geographic region as you do says that she tries to “pretend there are no religious people” when she visits a common archive, or that moment when a high-­level administrator visits your Department of Religious Studies and finds it necessary to say, “Well, I don’t know anything about religion. I am just a nice Jewish boy.” The history of the complex interpolation between scholars of religion and the rest of their university colleagues is a lengthy and circuitous one, including the eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century seminary origins of many private American colleges and universities, and the significance of nineteenth-­ century appointments in Bible at many land-­grant research universities, and the twentieth-­century emergence of religious studies concurrently with other interdisciplinary fields such as African American studies. Religion as an object of academic concern has never been a modest or quiet one. It has always been a gauntlet thrown, a reason for intellectual gathering, and a reason for intellectual discrimination. Whenever I try to explain my own relationship to the study of religion, I often fumble through a series of pop examples, pointing to my own particular interest in the reasons that individuals cohere in collectivities like stadium sports, Occupy protests, or within the Beyhive. Invariably, if I yammer on long enough, the person whom I’m trying to advert my scholarly

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interests will reply, “I get it. It’s like Durkheim. Collective effervescence.” Suddenly, with the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–­1917) as endorsement, we can proceed: the intellectual kingdom of this person’s ideological demystification is understood to be the same as my own. Because of this Durkheimian commiseration, I can now be understood to be neither religious myself nor an evaluator of her religiousness. Instead, I am understood to be someone who watches other people do things, and observes those actions with a proper sociological distance. I lean into the privilege of  this translation even as I am in strong dissent from its regimental posture. To be clear: I think Durkheim is the reason the study of religion belongs in the research university and within liberal arts curricula. Yet what I learn from Durkheim is not that religion is distinct from what scholars do. The classic way this proposition has been articulated in the study of religion has been to distinguish between religious studies and theology, or between religious studies as a subspecies of the liberal arts and religion as a missionary ambition of theological education. However comforting this distinction might be, it does nothing to assist our proactive efforts to interpret the world and continue creating within it. What we do, as scholars of religion, is deeply imbricated with what Durkheim said about what we study; what we can see, in our sociologies of religion, is deeply bound up in the failure or success of certain overt institutionalizations of religion. What both Durkheim and theological education have in common is precisely the identification of a social common as the inevitable documentary field and propositional result of religion. Which is just a fancy way to think about what Durkheim spent a lot of pages proving, namely that our socialization is our humanization, and religion is the primary social form by which our socialization takes place. “The general conclusion of the book which the reader has before him is that religion is something eminently social,” Durkheim explained, referring to his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912).1 Recognizing the social origin of religion, Durkheim argued that religion acts as a source of solidarity and identification for the individuals within a society. Religion provides a meaning for life, it provides authority figures, and most important for Durkheim, it reinforces the morals and social norms held collectively by all within a society. Far from dismissing religion as mere fantasy, despite its natural origin, Durkheim saw it as a critical part of the social system. Religion provides social control, cohesion, and purpose for people, as well as another means of communication and gathering for individuals to interact and reaffirm social norms. In case it isn’t

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clear, for Durkheim, religion isn’t just one means of social control within society; it is the means. In his words: “The idea of society is the soul of religion.”2 Many of us have never seen the inside of a cathedral, a temple, or a seminary offering theological education, but don’t worry. “Religion seems destined to transform itself rather than disappear,” he said toward the end, suggesting that no matter what you think you are relative to some abstract notion of religion, you are, as a social actor, being determined by it.3 That is, if you’re socialized. Which we are, perhaps, increasingly not? Before running headlong into some store-­bought Durkheim, we might wonder at the present sociological truth of his long-­ago sociological assessment. If we take Durkheim as our guide, we need to ask whether we think we live in a social world he could have conceivably recognized as socialization. How now would we describe the nature of socialization in the West? How now those souls, that noble idea of society? From whence does it come? And where does it direct us to go? These are lofty abstractions. Let me bring you to earth, to a particular problem with a particular person, and see what sociality we may find.

In 2014, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal reported on his own struggle with a twenty-­first-­century addiction: Binge-­watching television shows—­viewing episodes back-­to-­back for hours on end—­may be America’s new favorite pastime, but it’s brought me to some pretty dark places. At 3 a.m., bleary-­eyed and faced with the choice of watching another episode or going to bed so I could be ready for work and family the next day, I’ve often found myself opting for “just one more” hit. I’ve struggled with this habit intermittently for more than a decade (my first all-­nighter was season 1 of 24 on DVD). I would hit the Netflix hard and reach rock bottom, then go cold turkey by canceling my membership—­only to start the cycle again when I thought I had the wherewithal to watch responsibly.4

The confessor, Michael Hsu, here describes himself as stuck in a vortex fostered by the allure of cultural programming and the technology used to access it. The process that brings such programming (such as season 1 of 24)

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to your personal device (laptop computer, television monitor, smartphone) is generally referred to as streaming media. Certain providers—­like Ne­t­ flix, to which Hsu refers—­specifically exist to provide (and profit from the provision of) on-­demand Internet streaming media. With his references to rock bottom, cycles, and cold turkey, Hsu’s struggle has pre-­streaming language, but it is very much of the technology of his specific epoch. The majority of definitions for technology emphasize its physicality. Dictionaries and encyclopedias tend to describe technology as the physical result of cognitive work done elsewhere, defining technology as the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. Advances in computer technology lead you to possess a device that can track your cat’s movements at home in Cleveland while you travel to China. Whatever those “advances” might be, the technology is the material capacity to track the cat. More esoteric definitions of technology consider it a way of thinking itself. In such definitions, technology is a form of thinking about technical means to negotiate the self in society. This underlines how often technology connects scientific laboratories to home economics, engineering schools to industrial arts, pure science to applied science. In recent years, technology has also been increasingly used to describe a process or a method, that is, the technology by which you resolve a problem. Technology thus can refer to the physical manifestation of thought; it can be thought itself; it can refer to the sum of the ways in which social groups provide themselves with the material objects of their civilization. The technological context in which Hsu can be a so-­called binge viewer is one in which every person is in possession of low-­cost computers on integrated circuits that connect users to networks that transfer information at increasingly higher rates of speed. The hardware that makes possible Hsu’s binging includes everything from the cables that carry terabits of data to the microprocessor in your computer sitting in front of you. The protocols that organize how information passes through the Internet include the transmission control protocol (TCP), the Internet protocol (IP), and the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), each of which route and organize packets of data through these cables and to your laptop screen. The information carried in accordance with this protocol is in streams of binary digits, 1s and 0s. These digits are mathematical entities, but they are also tangible ones: they are embodied and manipulated as voltages in electronic circuits. Therefore, every bit of data must have some mass, albeit minuscule. A science reporter for Discover magazine calculated that the weight of the Internet adds up to just about 0.2 millionths of an ounce, roughly the same as

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the smallest possible sand grain. It is as immaterial a material can be while still being material. The historical precedent to streaming media can be found in 1922, when an American Army Signal Corps officer named Major General George Owen Squier (1865–­1934) created “Wired Radio,” a service that delivered music to businesses and subscribers over wires. This innovation depended on Squier’s longtime effort to improve the transmission of information signals, including a system for the transmission and distribution of signals over electrical lines, which he called “wired wireless.” Squier would sell the rights to his information transmission patents to the North American Company utility conglomerate, which created a company named Wired  Ra­dio Inc. with the plan to use the technique to deliver music subscriptions to private customers of the utility company’s power service. This service, which provided music by cable to subscribers, was known by the name Squier gave it shortly before his death: Muzak.6 Although Muzak has been supplanted by other more interactive commercial music streaming services like Pandora and Spotify, for years it was the music heard overhead at shopping malls and the inevitable accompaniment to dental procedures. Squier was, like so many tinkers, scientists, and practical reformers of  his Progressive Era moment, a person who didn’t think technology was merely material. He thought it served intangible ends. “It seems to me,” he said in a 1911 interview, “that one of the great troubles of all modern civilization . . . is that men . . . have too little time for contemplation. It must be through contemplation that crude thoughts find their evolution into the finished thoughts which mean development. Americans especially rush through life at such a speed that thought-­seed planting is too rare and the development of thought into completion is still rarer.”7 Every time you rolled your eyes at a Muzak rendition of an alternative rock song, you avoided the meditative frame Squier had set for your contemplation. Slow down, the music suggests. Use this elevator ride to think. Is Hsu’s binge viewing an addictive act or a meditative one? Binge viewing gives viewers the ability to watch a TV show as it fits their schedule, allowing them to have a customized viewing experience that’s not dictated by a broadcaster. It’s not an entirely new concept—­TV marathons (which were first programmed in the 1980s), renting series on DVDs (first available in the 1990s), and watching multiple episodes on TiVos facilitated binge viewing before the advent of sites like Netflix and Hulu. However, new technology, consumers’ desire to watch TV on their own terms, and an increase in quality TV content have brought binge viewing to a new level. “Binge” 5

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Figure 1. Binge-­watching spelled out in Scrabble tiles in Schwerin, Germany, November 5, 2015. The expression, describing continuous television viewing, was named word of the year by the British Collins English Dictionary. Photograph: Jens Büttner/picture-­alliance/dpa/AP Images.

is increasingly the normal way media content is consumed; that is, individuals increasingly watch at least three episodes of the same show in one sitting (fig. 1). As one student remarked to me, “If I’ve decided to watch TV, I am going to watch a lot of TV.” Emma Montgomery, global product director for the Human Experience Center at Starcom MediaVest Group, discourages criticism of this new practice: “Bingeing connotes excessive indulgence, and while the back to back viewing occasion may be long, millennials’ actual behavior is neither excessive nor indulgent. It is a deliberate and ongoing shift toward how they prefer to view and stay on top efficiently in a world of far greater, and far better quality programming.”8 Yet Hsu felt that the deliberative quality of his viewing had long passed. Instead, he found the relationship he had with this technology was increasingly like that between an addict and heroin or a bulimic and food. Indeed, the symptoms he describes are not unlike those associated with binge-­ eating episodes. Doctors describe binge-­eating episodes as when someone eats much more rapidly than normal; when someone eats until feeling uncomfortably full; when someone eats large amounts of food when not feeling physically hungry; when someone feels unable to stop eating or control

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how much is eaten; when someone eats alone because of  being embarrassed about how much is being eaten; and when someone feels disgusted, depressed, or very guilty after overeating.9 These are the feelings Hsu suggests he began to experience in relation to consuming media online. These are feelings of shame, self-­repudiation, and chaos. It is tempting to think about grand-­scale analogies to binge viewing within religious culture: the way that many churches have all-­night worship services, or extreme forms of monastic discipline such as fasting. Extremity in general is something religions can offer, a feeling of removing yourself from the world so as to feel something about the cosmos more purely. It is tempting, too, to think about how many religious groups have chosen to develop elaborate rules around the use of technology in order to keep at bay the very kind of addictive, possessive frenzy Hsu relates. When tens of thousands of ultra-­Orthodox Jewish men gathered in 2012 at a New York City baseball stadium, they did so not to celebrate a particular holiday or support a new leader but to discuss the potential problems that can stem from access to pornography and other explicit content on the Internet. “Desires are out there,” one attendee said, adding that men could be particularly susceptible. “We have to learn how to control ourselves.”10 I want to pause here, and note that we haven’t landed somewhere surprising. No, when we talk about technology in the history of religions, we often find ourselves talking about more conservative religious actors than liberal ones. If you search the words technology and religion, you will often come up with the Amish, but within monographs on the subject, you find yourself among the haredi, the Muslim Brotherhood, among what we have called the fundamentalist.11 Time and again, the expanded role of technology in the public sphere invites a posture of its opposition clad in religious vestments. In their signal work on fundamentalism, Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan write, “If we are to describe fundamentalists as defenders of ‘traditional religion’ against the encroachments of ‘secularization,’ we must also recognize both their ambivalent attitude toward modern science and their simultaneous selective adoption of its meth­ ods.”12 Who are these fundamentalists relative to Hsu, to binge viewers, and online porn addicts? The title of this chapter points to this moment as an age of extremity, one in which we seem divided between reports on beheadings and reports about the social effects of such technological excess. In such an age, who or what is the fundamentalist as a figure? At the most general level, fundamentalism emerged in European and North American scholarship as a shorthand referent for any movement in

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which beleaguered believers attempt to preserve their distinctive identity as adherents through articulate opposition to modernity. Fundamentalism is thus a rhetorical act of corporate self-­preservation. In this vein the American sociologists Jeffrey Hadden and Anson Shupe designate fundamentalism as “a proclamation of reclaimed authority over a sacred tradition which is to be reinstated as an antidote for a society that has strayed from its cultural moorings.”13 Yet the multiplicity of religious contexts to which the term fundamentalism has been applied makes it a bit of a satire to consolidate it into something so simply rendered. The word has been applied to minority movements in nearly every global religious tradition, although it was first used within American Protestantism as a category of  theological self-­designation. What I want to do is use the documentary record of that origin—­of fundamentalism as a designation within American Protestantism—­to say something about how technology functions as a specific subject in the historiography of fundamentalism. Much of what fills the annals of fundamentalist diagnosis is the figuration of an enemy. If someone points to a fundamentalist, or offers an archive of something called fundamentalism, invariably a feature of that figure or text is a description of an encroaching enemy. Sometimes the enemy is the perceived secularization of an increasingly decadent society; at other times it is the expanding involvement of women in the public sphere. Regardless of the indicating symptom, a necessary component of a discourse we have come to call fundamentalist is the perception of societal transition from bad to worse. This includes a historicist plot from a romanticized remembrance of order to a prediction of future disaster.14 The prerequisite for fundamentalism is thus not a certain level of modernity but a certain psychology of chaos. In a purported maelstrom of economic change, colonial occupation, shifting gender roles, and political upheaval, fundamentalism offers a resilient clarity; it is a claim of reinstated order after a named destabilization.15 “Religious beliefs are the representations which express the nature of sacred things and the relations which they sustain, either with each other or with profane things,” Durkheim famously explained in 1912, setting the stage for the modern study of religion as one devoted to the analysis of  the perpetuation of that binary.16 There is no profane without the maintenance of the sacred; the sacred is established through its labored separation from the profane. Binaries are not static opposition as much as they are descriptive of a tense purlieu of their differentiation. In the case of the sacred and the profane, Durkheim described that space as religion itself.

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It is tempting to connect that historical advent (the 1912 publication of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life) with the coincident unfolding of the “modernist-­fundamentalist” controversies in the United States. I especially want to note the proximity between the publication of Durkheim’s signal study of religion and the publication in the United States of The Fundamentals (1910–­15), the twelve-­volume series of books published to codify the conservative Protestant position. Within those twelve volumes were ninety articles by sixty-­four authors reinscribing “the fundamentals of the Christian faith.” Approximately a third of the essays included in those volumes guarded the Bible against the new criticism, arguing that the Old and New Testaments were without inconsistency. Another third of the essays discussed foundational theological questions, such as the meaning of the Trinity and the role of sin. The remaining pamphlets were a diverse smattering, addressing modern “heresies” (such as Christian Science, Roman Ca­ tholicism in the United States, and Mormonism) and articulating renewed missionary ambitions. Any definition of fundamentalism that relies on The Fundamentals would overwhelmingly emphasize the scholastic bent of the movement, since the consistent affective register of those pamphlets is a scholarly one seeking to reconcile Christianity with new criticism. I want to point to the chronological simultaneity of these publications—­to think about how the naming of one scholastic binary in France might connect to, and even inform, the denominational and cultural experience of another dramatic dualism under way in the early twentieth-­century United States. I want to situate the intense denominational squabbles of American Protestants within a broader epochal story about naming the religious. After all, nineteenth-­century archaeological discovery, colonial encounter, biblical criticism, positivism, and evolutionism informed both the emergence of the social sciences and the topics of theological argument in the early twentieth century. In both contexts (the European social scientific and the American theological), certain binary formulae emerged as central to the right description of religion and descriptions of right religion. I am not seeking to force a literal transatlantic dynamic where sociological exposition effects fundamentalist vitriol or modernist theology inspires Continental social thought. Rather, I want to hold these two artifacts together as indicative of a common context of the modern in which religion became a diagnosable object, one observable especially through an imperial archive of texts. Fundamentalism emerged as a kind of lay religious studies: a way of naming proper tactics of religion in a world of wrong figurations, wrong on religious grounds and wrong on social scientific ones.17

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Scholars who have taken up the study of fundamentalism consistently observe how oppositional and dualistic are its language games, using sharp dichotomies to suggest they can order the world against instability through a rigorous rhetoric of morality.18 Scriptural texts (or a set of scriptural interpretations) serve as the main authoritative fortification against the imagined enemy. The Islamic studies scholar Bruce Lawrence focused on the incontrovertible strength of this authority in his definition of  fundamentalism as “the affirmation of religious authority as holistic and absolute, admitting of neither criticism nor reduction.”19 This authority is manifest in a cohort of designated leaders, almost always male, who offer a closed interpretation of scripture. Although many fundamentalisms experience success as populist movements, they almost always source their authority in some form of textual interpretation that licenses their dissent from other sectarian operations. For there to be a fundamentalism, there must be a scholarly designation of “the fundamentals.” Those fundamentals are described as eternal and unchanging even as they are also articulated through practices that often use contemporary technologies or rely on modern concepts of self, nation, identity, or society. From that scholastic genesis fundamentalist ideas generate fundamentalist movements in which self-­styled true believers cohere around the rhetorical repetition of fundamentals. Religious studies scholars have argued that the fortification of this recast religious community is the primary practice of fundamentalists. “Novelty is frowned upon in principle, yet monotheistic radicals have proven themselves quite ingenious in accommodating modern realities whenever they deem it vital for the survival of the enclave.”20 Separation from encroaching modernity can force fundamentalists into an enclave; or, at the very least, to carve out a counterpublic that mirrors, yet seeks to subvert, the given principles of nation-­state organization or territorial occupation. Because of their discursive antagonism to the dominant culture, fundamentalists often have been described as antimodern.21 Newer scholarship has countered that ascription by emphasizing the consistent use of popular media, new technologies, and academic platforms to refine fundamentalist thought and propagate fundamentalist action. Fundamentalism cannot be wholly antimodern, this scholarship suggests, if it incorporates the most modern devices to televise and disseminate the fundamentals. Perhaps no figure better represents such an intersection than that of Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker and one of the ringleaders of the September 11 attacks who served as the pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, crashing the plane

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into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. On Mohamed Atta’s last full day of life, he seemed utterly immersed in a familiar consumer circuit, shopping at Walmart and eating dinner at Pizza Hut. In his work Holy Terrors (2003), Bruce Lincoln takes up Atta as a particularly acute technological actor and interpreter. First, he explains the actions of Atta and Al Qaeda generally as a result of American incursion into Muslim territories. Because of the way America has acted in predominantly Islamic countries, “America becomes the Great Satan, a monstrous entity responsible for a global flood of impiety and profanation,” Lincoln explains, suggesting that any Muslim seeking evidence for America’s impiety could easily find it “in the blatant sexuality and random violence of the popular culture it so happily (and prof­ itably) exports.”22 Lincoln believes that Mohamed Atta and his colleagues not only understood America as a source of profanity, but also selected the Pentagon and the World Trade Center towers as targets because they together represented the intertwining military and economic interests that drove US imperialism. Lincoln writes, “I also think the minimal armaments they carried—­a few knives and box cutters—­have more than technical significance. Indeed, the assailants’ technological impoverishment constitutes a sign to be read and may well have been meant to be so.” In effect, these men drew a stark contrast between themselves and those they attacked, dramatizing the differences between two ideal-­types of society and culture. As men of unshakable faith, armed only with the most humble tools, they presented themselves as metonymic images of a people whose strength lies in their religion, to which all other concerns—­ economy, politics, technology, and the rest—­are distinctly subordinated. The buildings against which they hurled themselves are likewise tropes for a people preoccupied with money, machines, and armies, but shockingly unconcerned with religion.23

There have been other scholars (Talal Asad and Ivan Strenski among them) who have specified how we ought to understand terrorism as religious action.24 To be clear, Bruce Lincoln eschews talk of fundamentalism, choosing instead to identify terrorists like Atta as practitioners of religious maximalism as opposed to a religious minimalism. Lincoln’s language of maximalism allows us to figure it as a kind of binge religion, that is, the maximal materialization of an ideology that could have (and does have) far more minimalist practical effects. As Mark Juergensmeyer has long labored to prove, “Acts

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of religious terror serve not only as tactics in a political strategy but also as evocations of a much larger spiritual confrontation.”25 But what are they confronting? While I find the language of maximalism helpful in Lincoln’s rendering, I want to correct Lincoln’s sense that for the organizers of the 9/11 attack the Twin Towers represented an absence of religion and that the buildings represented a people “shockingly unconcerned with religion.” Rather, I argue that they identified in those towers the wrong religion. Lincoln sees the West as having a minimalist religious life in which religious behaviors are sequestered within a broader secularism. The last ten years of scholarship on secularism, however, has worked to show that secularism is not the least bit minimal in its engagements, clas­sifications, bureaucracies, or habits.26 Indeed, as Hsu himself exposes, a great deal of ritual energy and obsessive doctrinal obedience can be expended in the devotional territory of secular consumption. When Atta and his comrades interpreted the towers as emblems of the infidel West, this was not an irreligious designate. The history of religions teaches us that the infidel or heathen is never a classification devoid of religious content; it is, simply and powerfully, a comparative claim about the absence of right religious content. (In Islam, for example, the word infidel describes someone who does not believe in a god called Allah or his messenger, Muhammad. Infidel in this sense describes an unbeliever not in a general sense but in the specific sense: an infidel is a person who does not believe in a religion that someone regards as the true religion.) The confrontation between Atta and the North Tower is a confrontation of value in which porn, Victoria’s Secret advertisements, and Showtime programming constitute subjects of intense consumer practice equal to the maximal absorption Lincoln assigns to the terrorist. These are two extremities, facing off with each other.27 To be sure, each side diagnoses the other’s extremity as disorder. In their analysis of fundamentalism, Almond, Appleby, and Sivan describe how often fundamentalist groups use the language of addiction and obsession to describe those transfixed by secular habits: “Images of addiction and infatuation crop up incessantly in the fundamentalist diagnosis. Nathan Birnbaum wrote of the ‘assimilation mania’ from which fellow Jews, especially the enlightened intelligentsia suffered. The Iranian Jalal Al-­e Ahmad coined the term West-­mania, or rather, Westoxication, to explain the predicament of intellectual elites drawn to modern culture.”28 CNN watches ISIS and calls its members madmen, saying they are disordered minds abus­ ing a rational religion. ISIS watches the West and says we, the Westerners, are the sick ones, addicted to instant gratification and worshipful of false

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idols. The mutuality established by the accusation is the territory of religion, of religious studies, of students naming our sociality.29 Recall Durkheim: There is no profane without the maintenance of the sacred; the sacred is established through its labored separation from the profane. Binaries are not static opposition as much as they are descriptive of a tense purlieu of their differentiation. In the contemporary ecology of reportage regarding Islamic terrorism, that tense purlieu is maintained by the specter of the Internet. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) spread its message online through a diffused, unregulated group of individuals with popular Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media accounts that promote, even glamorize, the lifestyle and violence of living in the Islamic State. Again, the sense is that mastery of technology is a surprise (how can these people be so good with our machines?) and a terrifying capacity (now that they have them, what terrible ends might occur?). Reporters recount how ISIS aligns itself with the pirates of network culture, like outside hacker groups and lone wolves, and liberally deploys open source materials to be even more efficient online. Rather than providing static materials from the top down, ISIS encourages young supporters to tweet, blog, and share their views, to articulate their view of jihad as the one worth representing.30 This sense that the laity run the story, and that traditional concepts of congregation or doctrine are irrelevant, abounds. “Typical recruitment patterns in Europe and the West tell us that it helps if that person doesn’t have a religious background,” Masjid Nawaz, a former Islamist recruiter who now runs a counter-­extremism think tank in London, reports. Converts and the newly devout, “dislocated from the traditional hierarchies” of Islam, are less likely to challenge a purported authority on religious matters.31 ISIS organizes its obedience through a network of democratic access rather than ecclesiastical elitism: any lonely heart with a WiFi connection can join. I am intentional in the lonely heart designation, since Western media coverage of ISIS media usage suggests that the group preys especially on a culture lost in screens and rendered alienated by them. “Jihadist propaganda had had a history measured in decades, but it had long been obscure and limited to an audience of mostly true believers,” Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger write in their book, ISIS (2015). “Suddenly, the stuff was everywhere, intruding on the phones, tablets, and computers of ordinary people who were just trying to go about their daily business online.”32 Intruding here is an interesting verb, since it seems from the limited evidence that there is a desire to be intruded on. Does Netflix intrude on its subscribers? Does

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Buzzfeed intrude on its browsers? A June 2015 article in the New York Times profiles the experience of a twenty-­three-­year-­old Sunday school teacher and babysitter called Alex. The article, “ISIS and the Lonely Young American,” suggests that the appeal of ISIS to Western converts is its wholly absorbing relational dialectic. “Alex’s online circle—­involving several dozen accounts, some operated by people who directly identified themselves as members of the Islamic State or whom terrorism analysts believe to be directly linked to the group—­collectively spent thousands of hours engaging her over more than six months.” The reporter continues: “If before [Alex] waited hours to hear back from friends, now her iPhone was vibrating all day with status updates, notifications, emoticons and Skype voice mail messages.” Alex would testify in the video accompanying the article: “With my friends on the Internet, I have more community with them than my people in my own community.”33 When Alex told her online interlocutors that she found a mosque five miles from the home she shared with her grandparents in Washington State, they encouraged her to keep herself online: it was safer there, away from government surveillance and (unstated) where their voices were the ones defining right Islam. The article on Alex and her Internet engagement with ISIS reads like a tale of sexual entrapment: the young, economically drifting girl without significant human networks on which to rely becomes captivated by lavishly attentive invisible figures, figures that register only in streams of short messages, emoticon-­filled text exchanges, and seven-­hour conversations. Even after her family intervenes in Alex’s online relationship, even after federal authorities are called into the case, Alex still can’t stop: “Alex found she could not stay away from her online friend for long, though. Even though she had come to feel she couldn’t trust him, she still missed his companionship.” Whatever the dark costs might be to her relationship, it was, still, a relationship: immersive, total, involving, devout. What could everyday life have that could possibly compare to this intimate set of replies to her social dislocation and existential despair? In his Wall Street Journal confession, Hsu explains that the solution to his addiction required a mechanical solution and a psychological one. Mechanically he could alter his relationship to the machinery if he disabled autoplay (the feature that automatically starts the next episode in a series when the one you’re watching ends) or the Wi-­Fi router. Psychologically he could alter his relationship to his habit if he exercised self-­restraint. The latter is helped through nutritional intervention (“A lot of evidence has shown that getting some food into you can restore your self-­control when

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you’re depleted,” Hsu reports), but is finally a discipline of the mind. Indeed, comments to Hsu’s column emphasize the mind-­body problem in the consumption of media. “Binge-­watching is but one of an endless number of addictions we use to keep ourselves mindless,” one commentator remarks, continuing with a critique of Hsu’s recommendations. “The techniques of this article, or the admonition of some commentators to ‘go to bed’ can work, but they don’t correct the cause, which is a mistaken choice in the mind.” Squier would be shocked and pleased: shocked that his technology produced the very dullness he sought to save humans from; pleased to hear that people still rallied for meditative calm. The work of the religious studies scholar Jeremy Stolow has encouraged us to think of religion itself as technology. “Religion,” he writes, “is in­ herently and necessarily technological.” What he means by this is several things: first, the use of technology in religious activities; second, the embod­ ied techniques of ritual observance; third, the representational technologies of language and iconography; fourth and finally, the ways in which all experiences are “materialized, rendered tangible and palpable, communicated publicly, recorded, and reproduced—­in short, mediated—­in and through its given range of technological manifestations and techniques.”34 With Stol­ ow’s observation about the technological nature of religion, we could look upon Hsu’s relationship to 24 and perhaps one with more meditative possibilities. The one existing study of binge viewing, conducted by Raj Devasagayam, a scholar at Siena College, found that students who binge viewed in excess said that they often did so because they became particularly attached to a certain character.35 In one commentary on binge viewing published in 2011 on Grantland, the blogger agrees: “Binging on an entire season of a television show without commercial interruption allows you to completely ‘immerse’ yourself in the world of your new favorite show.”36 Immersion in a world that is not this one, and aligning yourself with someone imaginary, is a longstanding pleasure for readers of fictions or fans of film. When do the pleasures of such immersion become something problematic? For the Orthodox Jews, it is when you become distracted from right-­mindedness. For Hsu, it’s when he can’t function by the standards of daylight productivity. The engagement with porn or 24 on the Internet isn’t a problem because it’s irreligious. It is a problem because it is a competing ritual relation, one with attachments and detachments, worldviews and cosmologies. Religion describes what humans do when they harness—­or talk about harnessing—­material means to access immaterial power. Those who binge

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view deploy material goods (nearly—­recall that sand grain) to gain immaterial power. There are not yet enough studies on the practice to determine the concepts of community at work in binge consumption practices, or to discern what kinds of ethics emerge from such an altered state. The term immersive has increasingly become synonymous with immersive media to describe digital technology or images that deeply involve our senses and may create an altered mental state. Future scholars of religion may find that meditation retreats and worship centers no longer represent the most exigent religious technology. Instead, they may find that the sharpest sectarian divides are formed between how you binge, on what, and when, and the commentary produced by those who decide something meaningful happens as they watch their glowing screens. Writing for Slate magazine, the television critic Jim Pagels has agitated against binge-­viewing TV, writing a series of imperatives in praise of solo-­episode viewing. “Cliffhangers and suspense need time to breathe,” he writes. “TV characters should be a regular part of our lives, not someone we hang out with 24/7 for a few days and then never see again.”37 In the annals of religion, such a voice has a Counter-­Reformation familiarity, as the sacramental observer suggests something deep has been flattened in the name of all this spiritual immediacy and aniconism. Studying technology in concert with religion requires that we pay attention not merely when the latter prohibits the former, but also when the former engenders new ways to occupy life, ways for which there is no vocabulary more provoking, or more incendiary, than that of religion. I want us to think further, though, than merely about religion. I want us to press ourselves in order to explain its present forms of sociality or antisociality in modern life. For a long time, fundamentalism was understood as antimodern. We know now not to speak this way, to say something more subtle about fundamentalists’ engagement with technologies in order to con­ vey a particular moral outrage about present conditions, outrage drawn from a tense engagement with the very present-­day conditions that they also eschew. What draws my eye is the sociality of their protests, of the ways that radical religious movements draw people into certain concert at the same time that those same technologies are accused in other quarters of facilitating profound discombobulation. (Consider, for example, these headlines: “Is Social Media Making Us Antisocial?,” “Is Facebook Making Us Antisocial?,” “Is the Facebook Generation Anti-­social?”)38 Rather than seeing radicalism as a form of antimodernism, it might be understood as a form

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of pro-­sociality. I emphasize this because if you read addiction literature—­ rather, the literature seeking to cure addiction—­the number one sign that you are in trouble, that your daily drinking has become a major problem, is not a medical assessment but a social one. You know you’re in trouble if it’s affecting your relationships with other people. You’re using too much porn if you can’t have a real sexual interaction without it; you’re drinking too much if your loved ones can’t trust your voice or person to be a sober one. You know you’re an addict if your idea of society has become one driven by your hungers rather than by your society.39 In her extraordinary ethnography of machine gambling in casinos, Natasha Dow Schüll suggests that machines play a very intimate role in our seduction from society into such a primal consumer state. She writes, “In a historical moment when transactions between humans and machines unfold ‘at an ever greater level of intimacy and on an ever greater scale,’ computers, video games, mobile phones, iPods, and the like have become a means through which individuals can manage their affective states and create a personal buffer zone against the uncertainties and worries of their world.”40 In the scholarship on fundamentalism, time and again we are told that fundamentalist reactions to society occur in moments of political and economic uncertainty, in moments when the society seems illegible without overt acts of naming the fundamentals for them. Why should we not see ourselves, in these consumer contexts of binging and streaming, fingering and uploading, spending and screening, as sorts of fundamentalist secu­ lars, choosing the dialectic of mechanized intimacy over and above one of interpersonal encounter and intimacy? Binge consumption is its own market rationality.41 The idea of the study of religion was founded in a simple description of the religious not as something out there but as something in here, among us. When Durkheim said, “the idea of society is the soul of religion,” he was speaking merely to the Aborigines that comprised his primary physical evidence. He was also asking us implicitly to name ours: to name our society by naming the soul that we thought guided it. We can divide the work of the humanities from that of theology, and we can imagine the study of religion is of them and not us. But then we may miss the very tools of our distinctions: the technologies by which we divide and hide, by which we commiserate and conjoin. If we are to understand what religion is, we must understand who we are in relation to it, in relation to what we define as our social life in this time we call secular.

0 2 The Spirit in the Cubicle A Religious History of the American Office

At Herman Miller good design is a shibboleth. Herman Miller news release, 25 January 1965

In December 2009, Rich Sheridan, CEO of the Ann Arbor, Michigan, software firm Menlo Innovations, posted a blog entry to his company’s website, declaring that office cubicles “kill.” He wrote that cubicles “kill mo­ rale, communication, productivity, creativity, teamwork, camaraderie, en­ ergy, spirit, and results.” When the local news website AnnArbor.com ran an article about his post under the title “Death to Cubicles,” thousands re­ sponded with concurring accounts of soul-­crushing discomfort within cubicle walls.1 In reply to this skirmish of posts, a leading producer of cubicles, Herman Miller Inc., waded into the fray. In his original post, Sheridan had alluded to Herman Miller, pointing to Ann Arbor as the birthplace of the cubicle death trap. Indeed, under the auspices of the Ann Arbor–­based Herman Miller Research Corporation, the designer Robert Propst had developed the cubicle design in the early 1960s, calling his innovation the Action Office (fig. 2). Fifty years later, Herman Miller public relations officials were answering Sheridan’s screed with corporate care and certainty. First, they extended sympathies to those who had testified to their unhappiness with this product; second, they supplied a reasoned defense of their design, emphasizing the critical consumer agency that everyone ought to possess. “For us, the best places to work give people a choice of where to work and

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Figure 2. An advertisement for the Action Office, ca. 1978–­80. Photograph: Courtesy of Herman Miller, Inc. Archive (Zeeland, MI).

how to work,” they reminded Herman Miller’s buyers. “If wide-­open spaces suit the kind of work you do, go for them.” The cubicle is a business’s de­ sign choice on behalf of a worker’s privacy: “People will always need privacy, and organizations around the world have found the good old cubicle a wonderful way to organize heads-­down work and minimize distractions.”2 This chapter tackles the simultaneity of suffering and freedom occurring within that infamously generic space: the office cubicle. Through his blog post, Rich Sheridan gave voice to the pervasive feeling that the banal cubicle conveys malignant ontological consequences. The thousands who replied to Sheridan’s post shared an opinion so common it is a cultural jeremiad: the cubicle degrades the spirit. In its containment of individuals, the cubicle divests humans of their humanity: their connections to others, and their embodied connection to themselves. The cubicle might then be understood as a place that denies sensorial experience, limiting the physical freedom and interactive opportunities of its confined occupants. But in the original propositions on behalf of the Action Office, Robert Propst focused on this disconnection as precisely his problem to solve. “The mind is no better than what the five senses convey or divert from it,” he wrote in 1965. “We knew that the ability to concentrate depends on a delicate balance between the escape from distraction and the pulse-­beat of bustle and

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involvement.” Propst sought to create a careful sensorial equilibrium for office workers, a space where they could be disciplined in their work while also mobile to whatever new innovation or connection that work might spark. “The maximum use of our senses is the most compelling reason for grouping people together in offices, grouping offices together in single large buildings, and putting many large buildings together in compact commu­ nities,” he wrote.3 His job, as he understood it, was to maximize this maximal context: to design spaces for the human mind to flourish alongside and with other minds. This was a democratic proposition offered in an era of counterculture, a dream in which every worker occupied a kingdom equal in form to that occupied by everyone else. If earlier office layouts reiterated status hierarchy among workers, Propst proposed instead that there be a “hierarchy of values in the organization of interior spaces.” The space of the Action Office would be a space in which individuals could flourish on the premise that they possess equal possibility to everyone else. How, exactly, did Propst imagine that his Action Office offered such possible flourishing? And why did it fail to occur? The purpose of the Action Office was, in the words of its designers and producers, “serious and profound,” directed toward the single goal of making an office “the best possible environment for thinking.”4 It is tempting to make ironic hay of such sentiment, assuming that any claims on behalf of your best self are advertisements seeking to sell you a product. How could a product enlighten or enliven its purchaser—­or her mind—­when the facts of commodification invariably entrap the purchaser into the supplicating role of consumer? In its missionary claims for the mind of the masses, the Action Office could be the apotheosis of capitalism, a mountebank selling talk of the mind’s salvation for the price of your physical freedom.5 A review of documents from the Herman Miller archives suggests, however, that such a conclusion occludes the phenomenal intensity of Propst’s millennial ambition, and its relationship to this particular company and its aesthetic and regional history. Herman Miller argued that the of­fi ce cubicle was a space for the denial of sensory experience, but also that it would provide a new sensory landscape, one in which the mind would be focused and the body at ease. I would like to pause on Herman Miller’s seriousness in this task, to consider the aspirational outset of the Action Office as an object in the history of religion. While there have been studies of basic objects of specifically sectarian designation (like Mormon undergarments and Puritan gravestones), few studies have tackled modern premises (electric power, for example, or

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the automobile) as potentially laden with religious ambitions and religious consequences. For some observers, it might seem as if there is nothing less religious than a cubicle; the cubicle is, by such reckoning, a fascist containment of bodies, not a frame for spiritual experience. In reply, I propose three ways in which the cubicle invites analysis by scholars of religion: first, its history includes a specific denominational origin revealing the moral community Herman Miller Inc. sought to be and create; second, its design includes propositions for, and manifestations of, spiritual rejuvenation for the laboring body; third, the space created by the cubicle offers territory for personal ritual expression and religious identity within the broader matrix of modern capitalism. These three aspects of the cubicle do not make it a religious object. Rather, they make the cubicle a critical object in the sensorium of modern religious experience. My research into Herman Miller echoes ongoing scholarly efforts to analyze the conjunction of American religious history and American business life.6 In this exploration of the Action Office at Herman Miller, I will focus more on product development within a given corporation than those studies do. The majority of current scholarship emphasizes the ways that self-­identified religious groups engage and reply to capitalist experience through their own corporate developments, alternative economic practices, or communitarian associations. In this chapter I emphasize product development in an effort to spotlight the interactive concomitance between technological innovation, aesthetic prescription, and religious ideation. Although my case study here is narrowed to a particular product line offered by a specific company in the mid-­twentieth century, I argue that it is impossible to observe an example of technological innovation in the modern period that does not also include an aesthetic prescription and religious sentiment; likewise, the aesthetic mandate almost always includes the deployment of innovative technology and recommendation of some kind of communal revision relevant to religious studies. The case of  Herman Miller makes this conjunction powerfully apparent. The story of the Action Office includes ample invocations of technological innovation and aesthetic cool. This conjunction has stalwart genealogical roots in European modernism, where designers had sought to convert the abstractions of that movement into new architectures and home decor for the common people. Religious thought simmered beneath the surfaces of these innovators and their propositions, as in the case of the Dutch artistic movement known as De Stijl, in which participants like Piet Mondrian produced canvases and furniture that exhibited their commitments to pure

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abstraction, mathematical precision, and a form of visual harmony that they described as spiritual, with deference to the Theosophical readings many of them had done. Religion appeared also in European modernism as a sort of reclaimed iconography, as with the April 1919 Bauhaus manifesto written by Walter Gropius; its cover was illustrated with a woodcut by Lyonel Feininger of a Gothic cathedral rendered in a Cubist style.7 In the cultures of modernism, religion may not have been practiced in ways recognizable to Renaissance or Baroque forbears; nevertheless, those iconoclastic modernists repurposed religion as a potent repository of symbols, as well as a set of important metaphysical provocations, in their effort to provide a universal aesthetic for the social revolutions of modernity. For many, modernism itself—­in its simple lines, democratic optimism, and creative hauteur—­became a kind of spiritual ideal, a religion of pure abstraction, unmoored from archaic authority or ecclesiastical rule. Herman Miller would play a central role in the popularization of Eu­ro­ pean modernism in America, a popularization that transpired amid over­ whelming suburbanization and the expansion of the post–­World War II military-­industrial complex. Town planners, developers, and builders—­like William Jaird Levitt and his building company, Levitt & Sons—­plotted uto­ pic microcosms in new suburbs, like that of Levittown, Pennsylvania, which reached completion in August 1957 and became synonymous with the phenomenon of high-­volume tract house development for moderate-­income families on the urban periphery.8 Modernist design became in the United States the language of the new social mobility, corporate power, and populist prosperity. “Harnessed firmly to the American dreams of home ownership, consumerism, and democratic freedom, modernism’s utopian promise came closest to being realized not in Europe but in the United States,” the curator Judith A. Barter has observed, “not at the hands of Gropius’s million socialist workers, but through the workings of the marketplace and the hopes and desires of countless consumers.”9 Through the fusion of technological advances, machine manufacture, aesthetic revisions, and millennial ambition, Herman Miller brought the concept of “good design” into every home as a material and spiritual possibility. The look of this so-­called midcentury modern that emerged continues to be the dominant idiom of corporate aesthetics in the twenty-­first century. Its promoters intended that this aesthetic would have spiritual con­ sequences. Despite the lofty ambitions of its creator—­despite the balanced sensorium posited as possible through its design—­the cubicle  is  con­sis­

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tently invoked as the opposite to the holy shrine, the opposite to the home, the intimate, and the sacred. The cubicle has become an icon of absent feeling, as an end to the senses and a profanation of humanity. Cubicles kill, says Sheridan, and thousands concurred. Rather than imagine such an object as an obviously secular one, I would like to invite us into the hermeneutic abundance attached to it. Herman Miller proposed the cubicle as en­ lightenment. It did so through a mass production. I want to illuminate this ubiquitous thing as an arena for scholarly work in the study of religion, in­sofar as the very naming of its un-­specialness (its neutrality, simplicity, ubiquity) included arguments on behalf of communities, their best practices, and their best minds.10 Herman Miller became an evangel for modernism, and the Action Office was, as we shall see, its most significant missionary tool.

T h e S e tt i n g

Promotional materials for the Action Office consistently invoked the reputational specter of its producer, “an unorthodox furniture company in Zeeland, Michigan.” Company publicists argued that the Action Office was “typical of Herman Miller design, but Herman Miller, Inc. is probably typical of no other furniture manufacturer in the world.” What made Herman Miller so different? “Few corporations its size open important meetings with readings from the Bible, yet build their sales on a shining reputation for iconoclastic modern design.”11 Through its own promotional work and mar­ket success, Herman Miller circulated as a company that tied experimen­tal form with pious utilitarianism. Contributing to its appeal was its rural Midwestern ties; rather than a headquarters in the modernist meccas of Los Angeles or New York, Herman Miller originated in southwestern Mich­igan. As one 1965 news release rhapsodized: Yet Zeeland (population 4,000) is still home, and the parent plant, a handsome new building set down literally in the middle of a pasture surrounded by a herd of cattle, is staffed by descendants of the solid Dutch burghers who once matched the waterfall flitches on the suites of furniture. At noon the lunchpails come out, full of mama’s cooking, and 3:30 o’clock (having been there since 7 o’clock), they all go home to get

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in some fishing or swimming or to tend the chickens and fields before the sun sets.12

For buyers hesitant about newfangled design and technological change, this pastoral image endorsed the product as one born of common folk with nostalgic values, not modernist aesthetes designing for absinthe and free love. The marketed portrait of Zeeland conformed to its own self-­understanding. Located just outside Grand Rapids, the town was a main settlement for the second wave of Dutch immigrants to the United States during the antebellum era. In 1847, two groups emigrated to this country after they had been prevented in the Netherlands from worshipping in a Reformed church free from state domination. As their churches expanded in Michigan, the battles they fled continued in the Netherlands largely under the leadership of Abraham Kuyper (1837–­1920), a Dutch theologian and political leader who opposed the liberalizing tendencies within the Dutch Reformed Church.13 Kuyper authored theological tenets associated with a movement called Neo­Calvinism. Three elements of Kuyper’s theology connected to economic developments within the Dutch Reformed diaspora. First, his followers possessed an aversion to experimental or mystical forms of religion, preferring instead to restrict their interests to the doctrinal and practical aspects of religion. Second, Kuyper’s Neo-­Calvinism included Hyper-­Covenantism, an elaboration of the historic Calvinist doctrine of God’s covenant with humanity. For Kuyper’s followers, this Hyper-­Covenantism interpreted the covenant as not a primarily soteriological but rather a primarily cultural obligation. Kuyper understood the covenant established between God and human beings as one that obligated followers to manifest their faith in the material world. Third—­and related to the second and first elements—­Kuyper made significant contributions to the formulation of the principle of common grace, focusing on the role of God in everyday life. He wrote, “Oh, no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine’!”14 The theology espoused by Kuyper heavily influenced Dutch immigrants in Mich­ igan, offering justification for the development of intensely cohesive communities, as well as a disproportionately large share of the American home furnishings industry.15 As critics of Gilded Age material excess, the Dutch Reformed encouraged plain living; even wealthy Reformed parishioners lived in homes distinguished by their frugality and austerity. The furnishings

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produced in southeastern Michigan provided a hand-­hewn earnestness that coordinated with Kuyper’s theological perspective. In 1923, D. J. De Pree, the grandson of Dutch émigrés, purchased his employer, the eighteen-­year-­old Michigan Star Furniture Company. He renamed it Herman Miller in honor of his father-­in-­law and financial backer. Within a short period of time, De Pree began to look for new talent to develop an aesthetic more salable to the expanding middle-­class marketplace. He hired the New York–­based designer Gilbert Rohde (1894–­1944) to serve as his initial adviser on new product development. Like those trained at the Bauhaus school (1919–­33) in Germany, Rohde asserted that manufacturers had a responsibility to offer the public well-­considered designs to meet their needs, rather than continuing to mass-­produce established styles which were, he argued, no longer relevant to a changing way of life.16 Not long after Rohde’s death, De Pree read a Life magazine article that promoted a storage unit designed by the architect George Nelson (1908–­1986) which appeared, when closed, to be merely a flat wall with small circular hardware to open its multiple rectangular units.17 By the time Herman Miller issued its 1948 catalog, Nelson had already imprinted the company with his vision, articulating five principles that he said guided its work: • • • • •

What you make is important. Design is an integral part of your business. The product must be honest. You decide what you will make. There is a market for good design.18

Through Nelson’s stewardship, Herman Miller produced iconic home fur­ nish­ings designed by Ray and Charles Eames, Harry Bertoia, Richard Schultz, Donald Knorr, and Isamu Noguchi. Despite the seeming diversity of this contributing roster, the company sustained a coherent aesthetic because of Nelson’s insistence on his principles of material honesty and domestic usability along with the marketability of thoughtful design.19 Likewise, even as D. J. De Pree transferred management of the firm to his sons Max and Hugh in 1960, he would remain “the spiritual head of the firm.” Although a descendant of Kuyper’s Reformed theology, De Pree himself was a lay Bap­tist minister, and quoted biblical passages to describe the importance of shared work, democratic decision making, and well-­made goods. A 1965 press release emphasized the material effects of this biblical management: “Religion is not only a way of life for the De Prees but a way of business.

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Honesty in the use of materials is as natural to them as is fairness in dealing with people.”20 To be clear, then: it would not be correct to describe Herman Miller in 1960 as a Dutch Reformed outfit. It possessed an interdenominational staff from the outset. What I seek to emphasize is the community context in which Herman Miller developed an egalitarian managerial ethos and com­mitment to the particularities of ergonomic comfort in every facet of human performance. “Herman Miller employees take pride in their work and their plant,” a press release raved. “Their communication with management is direct, and frequently by first name, and management shares the increased earnings obtained through those increased efficiencies suggested by its workers.”21 Working at Herman Miller was, always, a job, but the firm’s leadership also suggested that employees gleaned social meaning from this particular employment. “Over the years, the De Prees have been a strongly religious family, and old virtues survive in the corporate culture,” wrote one reporter for a 1981 profile in Fortune magazine. George Nelson, always a relative outsider to this Midwestern enclave, described his Herman Miller bosses as “thoughtful, socially conscious, good to employees, hardworking.” He concluded, “They embody all the Boy Scout virtues.” Herman Miller annual meetings began with a prayer. Alcohol was neither served at company functions nor allowed on expense accounts. Top executives referred to their “stewardship” of their products, their “covenant” with their employees. Head salesman Joe Schwartz elaborated this profile of corporate culture, invoking its religious past: “Herman Miller’s financial strategies were heavily influenced by their Calvinist traditions; by moral values they were very frugal. Up until we went public, Herman Miller never built a building unless we had the cash to pay for it.”22 These common rites and practices contributed to Herman Miller’s public profile as a communitarian company open to innovation—­if that innovation coordinated with its principles of de­ sign and social well-­being.

The Problem

By the late 1950s, De Pree decided that Herman Miller ought to enter more actively into the market for office furnishings. Until the 1960s, the design of large-­scale offices depended on the labor management theories of Frederick

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Winslow Taylor (1856–­1915). Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, sub­mitted to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for approval in 1910 and subsequently published in 1911, was immediately applied in every center of industrial labor in the world. The resultant “Taylorism” had two essential aspects: first, the careful breakdown of each work activity into its smallest constitutive units; second, the precise study of the time it took to complete each unit. The workstation for any employee was optimally located within an open-­plan configuration of desks arranged in a square formation, with higher-­level management occupying private offices that framed the edge of that square. “Transferred to architecture, Taylorism was seen as legitimizing functionalism as a theory and practice linked to industrialism,” explain the twenty-­first-­century designers Iñaki Ábalos and Juan Herreros.23 In the years prior to World War II, the Taylorist office began to diminish as more participatory styles of management became fashionable. The development of comprehensive HVAC systems, fluorescent lighting, and the suspended ceiling made the physical workplace a more malleable one. And the popularization of psychology influenced many managers to begin to conceive of the workplace as not only a site of productivity but also a social ecology. It was in this vein that Herman Miller invited Robert Propst, an independent business consultant from Colorado, to work for it under the auspices of the Herman Miller Research Corporation. “By 1959, the company’s management had concluded that the company should assume a greater responsibility for the total environment in which men work and live,” he would later recount. To that end, Propst began to study the office as a space of “working, learning, living and healing.”24 After several years of interviews and site visits, he reported his findings with dismay: Today’s office is a wasteland. It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed efforts. A place of fantasy and conjecture rather than accomplishment. It fosters physical and mental decline and depresses capacity to perform. It is the equivalent of doing business on clay tablets in an age of the computer and instant communication.25

The problems with the contemporary office connected to the changes in the work done by offices. “In the last fifty years, activity has moved from tasks of the hand to tasks of the mind in a dramatic contrast of ratios,” Propst wrote. Now, “life in an office rarely deals with the actual object, actual money or,

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often, even people in the flesh.” Offices transact information, not things, Propst explained, such that “thinking is the primary role of the human being in today’s office.”27 However, offices did not engender thought. Workers were, he ranted, “surrounded by papers they never read and people they never really influence, and they frequently live in a blizzard of involvement well beyond their ability to relate and implement.”28 If the office was a place for thinking, it failed to foster productive thought; it was a confused sector of bothersome interaction and overabundant information. Propst narrowed the problems facing office design to two sensorial aspects: sight and posture. “There is a direct relation between seeing objects and taking action on them,” he argued, pointing to piled papers and the ex­ cess of reference material in offices as tell-­tale signs of a disarrayed mind. What a desk looks like to the worker affects how the worker can think.29 Like­ wise, the working position of office employees affects their performance. “Existing office environments can be criticized for providing only one pri­ mary work posture,” Propst wrote, suggesting that this limited physicality had two problematic consequences.30 First, this singular posture was deleterious to health. “Being seated in multi-­hour stretches results in a noticeable drop off in mental capacities because of the resulting imbalance in physical activities,” he noted. “Sedentary living is hazardous to health, damp­ens creativity and results in minimum work performance.”31 Second, a seated posture presupposed seated conversations “with natural inclinations toward relaxation and diversion.” Propst argued that standing conversations had more “economy and dispatch than seated ones.”32 The office required some level of social engagement. “Involvement is an essential need, a good idea . . . to be part of, visible, wanted, needed, recognized, part of the family of ac­tivity.”33 Yet that involvement needed to be precisely right: neither too lingering nor too abbreviated; neither too restful nor too removed from the immediate tasks at hand. The right design would admit the mind-­body con­nection and “produce the highest productivity with minimum fatigue.”34 Rather than rigidity and entrapment, the office systems advocated by Herman Miller were meant to promote variability, flexibility, and substantive sociability. As the history of the cubicle now turns to Robert Propst, it becomes less of an obviously religious story: Propst was neither explicitly reli­gious himself nor comfortable in the Christian atmosphere of Zeeland. Yet departure from denomination does not mean a departure from the imperatives of religion; it merely means that they will be transfigured into new modes of articulation and experience. 26

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T h e S o lu t i o n

In 1960, D. J. De Pree’s son Hugh sent Propst the Herman Miller catalog of George Nelson’s desks and said, “Pick out some furniture for your [Ann Arbor] offices.” Propst took one look and said, “I wouldn’t work in this kind of stuff. This is out of date. Who needs this stuff?” Although Nelson would collaborate with him on the design of the Action Office, Propst’s response to Nelson’s fifties-­era Herman Miller furnishings indicates the new aesthetic direction he would take the company.35 Rather than isolated pieces of furniture, Propst sought to develop office landscapes in which each element functioned in a systematic way. This “allows maximum flexibility for the individual to change instantly, easily and economically his own work arena of multi-­posture work stations, paper-­handling, information retrieval and communications,” promotional materials explained, reiterating that the Action Office is a system by which corporations and the individuals in them might express their particular needs and personality.36 Propst would not use the word desk. Rather, in his office, human performers would work at freestanding units in their workstations. Prior to the Action Office, Nelson had designed furniture. But with Propst he designed extensions of the thought process, systems by which individuals enacted their labors with coherent physicality and sensorial attention. “Every element of the Action Office system is designed with people in mind,” one bro­ chure explained: Edges and corners are rounded. Basic finishes are neutral colors, found to be the most relaxing for your eyes. Accent colors, provided by fabric covers on many components, create visual interest and excitement. Individual work stations can be modified easily, and work surfaces can be adjusted to different heights.37

Central to the sale of the system was its smooth materiality and physical adjustability. To arrive at this ideal Propst auditioned a first Action Office design (AO1), which featured a stand-­up work surface and open-­sided work areas (fig. 3). The AO1 group included a high desk with appropriately level perch, movable shelf units for quick recovery of filed items, low mobile conference tables, and freestanding units specially designed for typing. All the

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Figure 3. A 1964 advertisement for the first Action Office (AO1). Photograph: Courtesy of Herman Miller, Inc. Archive (Zeeland, MI).

AO1 furniture had die-­cast polished aluminum legs with chrome foot rails that acted as additional physical supports and footrests. The molded plastic end panels, available in light and dark blue, olive green, pale yellow, and black, were indexed to take truck for the tambour, bin slots, and top slots. The tambour tops were ash or walnut, and other top surfaces were Micarta high-­pressure laminate. Finally, the AO1 elements had no drawers, except for shallow wells fitted with molded plastic trays for pencils, rubber bands, and paper clips. The overall look of AO1 was a powerful mix of old and new, with aluminum, wood, and laminate materials combining to suggest evocations of old office furnishing formatted for a new efficiency. Propst imagined that the AO1 pieces would never be perfectly clear of paper, and he encouraged a “meaningful clutter of information” that was ostensible

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rather than secreted in drawers or cabinets: “Display becomes part of the furniture system.”38 The Action Office 1 appeared in December 1964. And promptly failed. As Joseph N. Schwartz, Herman Miller marketing manager, told Home Furnishings Daily in 1969: “Quite frankly, Action Office I was a disaster mainly because people did not understand it.” Responses to AO1 suggested that the product was neither familiar enough to be recognizable nor strange enough to intrigue buyers. The furnishings seemed too heavy to be as mobile as promised, and yet seemed recognizable as furnishings and so not up to George Nelson’s expected modernist standards. Propst immediately returned to research, and Herman Miller promoters be­ gan to think about how to sell the innovation that he produced. Later, Joe Schwartz would explain that they were “determined to ensure comprehension by presenting the theory behind the product and showing how it can solve the problems of change in the office.”39 The major difference between AO1 and the resulting Action Office 2 (AO2) was the difference that would define the transformation of the object, namely that freestanding units were replaced by integrated furniture elements. In other words: AO2 included walls (fig. 4).

Figure 4. A photograph from a 1973 brochure shows an Action Office installation at the Banque Hervet offices in Fussy, France. Photograph: Courtesy of Herman Miller, Inc. Archive (Zeeland, MI).

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“The new concept, Action Office II (AOII), is, in the most simplistic terms, a planning tool which provides a coherent system of components utilizing walls, easily connectable panels, wall-­hung, panel-­hung, and free-­ standing furniture,” Herman Miller announced in 1968.40 Like AO1, AO2 was meant to be totally flexible—­the word modular appeared constantly in the promotional materials (fig. 5). Modularity referred to the fact that its shelves, filing units, and all other components were completely interchangeable. Yet this modularity occurred within a grid, the basic component of which was a series of panel-­hung, wall-­hung, and freestanding units. With AO1, Propst began to theorize about singular office spaces but also the relationship of one workstation relative to another one (fig. 6). With AO2, this arrangement of the office as an entire landscape became central to its sale. In 1960, the German-­based Quickborner Team revolutionized the practice of office planning through the concept of Bürolandschaft (office landscape). Rather than straight alleys of identical desks, the Bürolandschaft encouraged the office to be more like an English garden, whose apparently natural order was developed by Capability Brown (1716–­1783) in the late eighteenth century. Similarly, the Quickborner Team developed patterns in office layout that might have been devised by the workers themselves, had they approached the problem with the requisite overview. “Office planning has frequently treated human beings as a hydraulic quantity of sideless, senseless particles,” Propst wrote, invoking the mathe­ matics of  Taylorism.41 In the AO2, individuals occupied working landscapes that recognized their variability and dynamism. The long regimented rows of desks that marked the classical office bullpen were replaced by small groupings in looser arrangements. The separating panels “provide as much or as little ‘territoriality’ or enclosure privacy as a person or task requires” (fig. 7).42 The AO2 was not inhibiting of individual need; it was an articulation of individual need: Inside these spaces—­which can be moved and reformed at will—­each worker is provided with his precise needs through a system of furniture components designed by Herman Miller, Inc. Called Action Office II, the system provides a variety of work surfaces—­file bins, storage units, shelves, carrels, display panels, and chalk boards—­to fill all job demands. Since, to some degree, the worker knows his own requirements best, he can add or subtract from his equipment simply by requisitioning the necessary components.43

Figure 5. A 1978 brochure explains the modularity of the Action Office. Photograph: Courtesy of Herman Miller, Inc. Archive (Zeeland, MI).

Figure 6. A 1966 drawing illustrates the ideal landscape design for the Action Office system. Photograph: Courtesy of Herman Miller, Inc. Archive (Zeeland, MI).

Figure 7. An advertisement for the Action Office 2, ca. 1978–­80. Photograph: Courtesy of Herman Miller, Inc. Archive (Zeeland, MI).

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Herman Miller Inc. distributed catalogs that included images of the “sys­ tem vocabulary,” suggesting that the AO2 was like a set of Legos with which office workers might play. It could be arranged in any number of ways to respond to particular preferences and physical needs. And what if someone found it dispiriting to face a wall, rather than a window or other workers? “People who are facing the Action Office 2 panels are normally facing information, storage and display,” Propst replied. “By facing information and display rather than a blank wall, the age old problem of people facing walls is eliminated because we are really not facing a wall but the day-­to-­day information with which we work.”44 Herman Miller extolled the personalization possible with such panels. The austere quality for which cubicle-­filled offices are now criticized was entirely intentional. “We tried to create a low-­key, unself-­conscious product that was not at all fashionable,” Propst reflected. “We wanted this to be the vehicle to carry other expressions of identity. That’s why we provided tackboards and all kinds of display surfaces.” When a member of the sales staff for the original cubicle design brought a plastic gorilla to decorate his work space,

Figure 8. A 1978 brochure for the Action Office illustrates how this system would accom­ modate computer systems. Photograph: Courtesy of Herman Miller, Inc. Archive (Zee­land, MI).

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management briefly looked askance at such a garish additive to its sleek plainclothes structure. But Propst insisted that this was exactly the kind of thing that had been intended by the design itself.45 The human performer was to be the action of this office. The cubicles were dully colored because the workers are the color; the design was simple because the workers are the drama (fig. 8). The limited territory of quiet was a staging area as they readied their ideas to be born.

T h e Sa l e

The Action Office 2 entered the marketplace in 1968. Its sheer appearance would not be enough for the consumer to make sense of its new components and modular talk. As Schwartz remarked, “We had to educate people about a concept, not just a product.”46 Rather than spending money on large ads or booklets or catalogs, Herman Miller instead hosted seminars for people who worked in, owned, rented, or managed facilities. The Herman Miller Seminar Series occurred first in the Union Bank Building in downtown Grand Rapids, but quickly became a traveling road show to which hundreds of thousands of people came to learn how to build more efficient offices using the latest fusion of technology, aesthetics, and optimism for the human performer. At these seminars, every attendee was presented a copy of The Office, written by Robert Propst and published simultaneously to the release of the AO1 in 1964. The booklet was 8 × 11 inches in size, with a large-­font, sparsely modern graphical layout, and multiple black and white photographs squarely arranged near short, koan-­like utterances about the history of the office, the relationship between the office space and its hu­ man performers, and the challenges confronted in the office space. Most important, the second half of the booklet contained a description of a product that would resolve the quandaries raised in the first half. Colloquially known as the Red Book, it was a booklet for an era in which every tract seemed to offer a new view with a new look for a new world. “The real office consumer is the mind,” Propst preached. “The subject starts there. More than anything else, we are dealing with a mind-­oriented living space.”47 The revolutionary imperative pervaded Propst’s writing and the promotions surrounding the release of the Action Office. The new office wasn’t just a new product in a clogged marketplace; it was a product that would

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unclog the marketplace. “Our buildings, furnishings and services have to be revisualized and revitalized,” Propst said. “The office as an institution will no longer be able to ignore the new master.”48 This naming of the problem and proclamation of necessary reform echoed throughout the history of modernist design. In 1919, Walter Gropius exclaimed, “The old forms are in ruins, the benumbed world is shaken up, the old human spirit is invalidated and in flux towards a new form. We float in space and cannot perceive the new order.”49 Propst then conceived of a new order, a new design for the human spirit to reclaim itself. I am intrigued by this move from condemnation to reformation, and the particular locutions on which it relied. In the history of religions, such grumbling critique and bright-­eyed optimism harken to the discursive patterns surrounding the Reformation, in which reformers constantly insulted Catholicism, developing protests into new doc­ trines that emerged as the sectarian network known as Protestantism. Like­ wise, among the promotions and prescriptions surrounding the Action Of­fi ce, Herman Miller criticized old offices for their “encrusted routine and pro­ cedures,” as well as for their “rigid” hierarchical structures.50 “The traditional office confines the occupant to rigid forms and work formats,” an Action Office workbook impugned, emphasizing that by contrast the AO2 is “simply expedience with a choice.”51 It was, as advertisements repeatedly argued, a new world to work in (see figure 3). The reformation of the office would “upset the inflexible and status seekers,” but Herman Miller expected that the Action Office would “elate a sizeable group of men who want their office to serve their mental effort rather than their egos.”52 This was the good news that Herman Miller spread with an unmitigated certitude akin to the evangelicalism that had begun to resurge in the late 1960s. If the Action Office was to work, everyone in it had to share its principles. Everyone had to want to “come to terms with modularity,” and accept the ferocious persistence of change. If the Action Office was to work, “the whole system has to play; if any element is resistant, adjustment is inhibited.”53 Change was intrinsic to the system, but the system would not work if its star players—­its human performers—­ did not recognize and invest in a daily practice of change. This meant, on the most basic level, that workers had to participate in shifting their panels themselves, moving the entirely movable components of the system vocabulary as often as possible to create new connections, new visual landscapes, and new postures. It also meant on a more ontological level that the work which workers did within the Action Office had to be compatible with such

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a sense of change. “Change as a continuous rather than an occasional force, is recognized in the Action Office concept,” Propst emphasized. “Change in the ebb and flow of assignments. Changes in individual responsibility. And in the organization’s direction.”54 If the human performers in the Action Office were not in action, the Action Office would become a cubicle.

T h e R e s u lt

In Knocking on Heaven’s Door (2003), Mark Oppenheimer identifies 1968 as a critical year to this history. “Sometime between the Summer of Love in 1967 and the Woodstock festival in 1969, or between the death of King and the deaths at Kent State, even the conservatives began to dress down, talk more informally, and listen to different music,” he writes. Just as quickly as it appeared, however, the counterculture changed. “By the mid-­1970s,” Oppenheimer argues, “the counterculture had become the culture.” He suggests that the reason for this quick change from countercultural critique to mainstream culture was in part due to the fact that the counterculture was more successful as an aesthetic effect than as a political or theological revolution. To be sure, “this aesthetic change could, itself, be subversive.”55 But it was also likely that this change could be transfigured into a commodity form devoid of metaphysical dissent, like a peace necklace inlaid with diamonds, or a Kabbalah bracelet worn by someone who has never read the Zohar. The release of the Action Office 2 occurred in 1968. By 1985 it was named Best Design of the Past 24 Years, 1961–­1985 by the Industrial Designers Society of America. In the intervening years, everything changed for Her­man Miller. To fund production of AO2, the De Prees decided that Her­ man Miller would become a publicly owned company. In 1970, they sold 197,000 shares at $13.75 per share and raised $2.5 million. The contract furni­ ture business grew by leaps and bounds, and although Herman Miller’s designs spawned many cheaper imitations from companies like Steelcase, it retained its reputation as the originator of facility management, and funds garnered by Herman Miller from the Action Office allowed it to develop further the field of ergonomics, resulting in its enormously popular Aeron chair. But the wild success of the Aeron chair presumed a worker still huddled in a singular location, stuck in a certain posture in front of his or her computer monitor. The dream of multiple postures was replaced by the dream of a comfortable support system for the seated back.

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The Action Office itself did not live up to its modular dream—­or, rather, its occupants did not experience its prescribed possibilities. High real estate costs led to companies cramming cubicles into office buildings without the English garden effect of the hoped-­for AO2 landscaping. The AO2 had hinged connectors that could form any angle, yet by the mid-­1970s those had been replaced by permanent brackets that lacked such inherent variability. Herman Miller research found that workplaces had not been using the hinges to change office spaces (citing, among other reasons, that computer and phone cable setups were too complex to shift easily). We see, here, how social life shapes material existence and how cultural processes are shaped by the agency of material things. “It is as if we might call technology the moment when social assemblages gain stability by aligning actors and observers,” Bruno Latour has written. “Society and technology are not two ontologically distinct entities but more like phases of the same essential action.”56 For a piece of technology to fulfill its hoped-­for function, it must be consistently engaged by its human user. Technology that endures is technology that is used. The parts that do not get used are no longer technology; they are detritus. In general, Propst’s forms became more replicated than his prescribed functions. Companies crammed more workers into smaller spaces, and took advantage of the Action Office system’s huge potential for savings and tax breaks, since tax laws permit businesses to write off the depreciation of cubicles much more quickly than that of traditional office furniture. “The dark side of this is that not all organizations are intelligent and progressive,” Propst reflected toward the end of  his life. “Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. Barren, rat-­hole places.”57 According to data compiled by the International Facility Management Association, the average work space has dwindled by fifteen square feet in sixteen years, a diminishment of one foot of personal space per year between 1994 and 2010.58 If you think of the traditional cubicle work space, you probably think of gray, high-­walled work spaces. But any modern cubicle systems have lower walls and feature bright colors, serving as work spaces for two or more people so as to aid in collaboration. And many offices don’t even speak of “cubicles” at all anymore, speaking exclusively of landscaping. And new office landscaping ideas, proposing new notions of collectivity, mobility, and interactivity, abound in the twenty-­first century. Still, the cubicle—­in concept or in practice—­won’t die. Sales of cubicles in the United States have held steady, comprising approximately 35 per­cent of the US office furniture business.59

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The history of the cubicle—­like the histories of the prison and the asylum offered by Michel Foucault—­began as a Christian proposition for bodily asceticism and became a contribution to the carceral network. “The carceral texture of society assures both the real capture of the body and its perpetual observation,” Foucault described. “It is, by its very nature, the apparatus of punishment that conforms most completely to the new economy of power and the instrument for the formation of knowledge that this very economy needs.”60 The most alternative office spaces still emphasize your ability to be seen by your team, and used by your team, as an instrument of their mission. The walls may be lower, the colors may be brighter, and the chairs ever more ergonomic, but the territory is still organized for your physical submission. Propst carried no guilt for the disaster borne of his dream. Speaking from his Redmond, Washington, home in 1998, he said, “I don’t even feel faintly guilty about Dilbert. The things expressed in that comic are the very things we were trying to relieve and move beyond. It was a Dilbert world even back then. Everything we worked toward tries to express something more interesting.”61 That “something more interesting” was a commodity promoting a new sensorial world, but it also was a circulating ideology against a desensitizing sterility. There are many cynical views of the perpetuation of this sterility in office life, such as those offered in Scott Adams’s comic strip Dilbert (1989–­present) or the 1999 film Office Space. But there are also cultural works that present its sensory stultification as its possibility for meditative revelation, as depicted in David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published novel, The Pale King (2011). Today perhaps the strongest survival of Propst’s original vision is the way that cubicles function as spaces of individual expression. Workers do add personal touches to their cubicles, specifying themselves within the spatial map through accessory and object, pinning to the bulletin-­board panels their family photos and inspirational or comic sayings. In the cubicle, then, we could find a space of inordinate individuality, where someone—­be they Hindu, Buddhist, or Roman Catholic—­could build a shrine to someone someplace else, a possible private sensorium of religion within the hum and sheen of the modern office. Such desktop acts of individual religious identity indicate the limits of the cubicle to define the self within as mere office performer, and hypothetically remind workers of spaces they occupy—­and conceive—­beyond the cubicle. The office possesses them; it is also a source of dispossession. But it is also where workers do sit day after ritual day, making these

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hours of their lives the rungs of a ladder nobody seems able to escape with ease. After all, that cubicle is also signifying of ambition—­of dreams to move from other forms of anonymous labor to slightly more marked ones, to sit in dignity and earn benefits to propel you and your family into better futures, to offices with corner windows and distinguishable furniture, purchased for a higher price from the same Herman Miller company (an Eames chair, perhaps, with an accompanying Noguchi table). The cubicle is a shuttering, spiritless trap; the cubicle is also an opportunity to pursue a spirited rise. “What is most relevant here is that mass culture cannot be entirely located at either end of the authenticity spectrum,” Celeste Olalquiaga has written. “It neither fully supports authenticity nor wholly abolishes it, but rather maintains an intermediate, fluctuating position in which certain aspects of authenticity adapt to modernity.”62 Accounts of religion invariably demonstrate the strange emergence of authenticity as a metric of meaning in the modern period. In such a vein, the story of the Action Office and Herman Miller Inc. includes genera­tional shifts familiar to the early years of new religious movements. The religious history of America is littered with upstart operations that went bankrupt, and there are documents galore of utopian communities that became ghost towns, such as the Moravians of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, or the believers in the Amana Colonies of Iowa or the Oneida community of Upstate New York. These self-­sufficient towns of egalitarian labor underwent constraint, over time, to limited manifestations as consumer packaged goods like Oneida flatware, Amana refrigerators, and Moravian cookies.63 The story of the Action Office, however, is not a story of utopian socialists seeking alternative refuge from nineteenth-­century industrialization. It is the story of a spiritually conscious capitalist body seeking incorporation in the post­industrial twentieth. As a result, the history of Robert Propst and his Action Office is more about the religious valences in corporate practice than it is about the denominational facts of the southwestern Michigan community that gave birth to Herman Miller Inc. It is the fusion of a Neo-­Calvinist civility with De Pree’s dissenting Baptist pugnacity that created a community of producers equally complicit in the products they mass-­produced to create equal access to more humane working environments. And although Herman Miller has a singular story in the ranks of modernism, what has been observed here about its fusion of populist aesthetics, revamped technology, and practical religion can be quickly discerned in any number of companies, as recent

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studies of Apple, IKEA, and Wal-­Mart have suggested. Corporation is just another word for sect. And sects produce any number of creeds, codes, and ideas about committed community. The story of the Action Office is just another example of the incorporation of the self into corporate narratives of sensorial freedom, sold to you, for a cost only you can discern. 64

Revising Ritual

0 3 Ritualism Revived From Scientia Ritus to Consumer Rites

The evening begins with a worship dance by the Regal Daughters Ballet Company. After a three-­course dinner, the hosts circulate oversize paper covenants to be signed by fathers vowing to protect their daughters’ purity through their committed chivalry. “I will be pure in my own life as a man of integrity and accountability as I lead, guide, and pray over my daughter and my family as the high priest in my home,” the pledge reads. During the subsequent ballroom dancing, the fathers provide an additional public blessing. Standing in the middle of the ballroom, the fathers circle their daughters and place their hands on their shoulders. Together they pray for promises of the covenant, for “purity of mind, body, and soul for generations to come.” Every aspect of the evening’s process conveys ceremonial stature and formal certitude. First, we watch the daughters dance; next, we eat; then, we witness the signing of the covenant; after that, we dance; finally, we bless. Each move suggests a meaning inscribed by a legitimating tradition, one that testifies to purity’s possible protection, and yet no specific tradition, church, or liturgy is ever specifically invoked. In this ritual reiteration, there is a focus on a future on guard against the corruption of the past. There are promises of endurance: enduring virginity, enduring masculinity, enduring relational care, and enduring covenantal power. Evocative of bat mitzvah and quinceañera, the Purity Ball is a minor trend in contemporary evangelicalism with green historical roots.1 With balls recorded in forty-­eight states since 1998, the Purity Ball movement is

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the invention of Randy and Lisa Wilson, a Colorado Springs couple who founded Generations of Light Ministry, which focuses on building healthy father-­daughter relationships. “What we wanted to do was create an event where they could walk into everything that their femininity is about, their beauty, their dress, their makeup and give them a place to dwell on all of that,” says Randy Wilson, who works in the policy department at the evangelical think tank Focus on the Family. “We want to create a place in this culture where purity is exalted and valued.”2 For the Wilsons, the creation of an event requires the recasting of a place into a barricaded feminine idyll, where daughters might dwell in their father’s gendered love. Conjuring a holy place from a ballroom space, the Wilsons actively instantiate new ritual for a discursive religious tradition—­evangelicalism—­ with a two-­hundred-­year ambivalence about sacramental acts. To explain any incongruence between this new ritual and their spirit-­filled Arminianism, Randy emphasizes that this isn’t about forms but about heartfelt faith: “We believe that the identity of our daughters is tied to the father’s heart.” Daughters reply with equal cardiac fervor. “As all the dads stood to read the covenant over their daughters, I felt the power of those words sink right into my heart,” one daughter would later testify. “He signed his name and I signed as a witness to his words. And as he escorted me to the dance floor I felt empowered by his promise to war for my heart through his life of purity.”3 The Wilsons repeatedly frame the Purity Ball as an intentional incantation of sacred bonds in a world of dissolute profanity. Abusive men and out-­of-­wedlock pregnancies exist outside this ritual. Inside it, a spiritually clear Christian self may be consecrated. “[Daughters are] going to get their identity,” Randy remarks, “but if fathers aren’t around, they’re going to go outside the home to get that identity.”4 On their website, the Wilsons sell a “Father Daughter Purity Ball Packet,” which offers “everything you need to start a Father Daughter Purity Ball in your area!” It retails for ninety dollars. Consider the Wilsons and their Purity Ball packages as documents in the invention of a tradition. Through the prescription of routes, gestures, and utterances, the Wilsons formulate value through ritual performance. While survey results argue that the contemporary United States is a nation of transient believers dabbling with denominations and switching doctrines, there is also a significant strand of liturgical entrepreneurship within American religious life. Just as evangelical fathers sign lordly cove­nants at Purity Balls, Roman Catholic dioceses open confessionals in shopping malls. This is a matter of not just ritual prescription by pastoral authority but the cooptation of ritual authority by lay practitioners seeking rein­vig­

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orated ceremony. Liberal Jews compile homemade haggadot. Devotees of the Emergent Church cite ritual theorists to debate the substance of their conversions. And the Mevlevi Order of America offers instruction on how to whirl precisely like a dervish. On the one hand, this ritual refashioning is not surprising to students of American religion, since sectarian creativity has formatted nearly every twist and turn in that history. But histories of American religion do not emphasize ritual. Rather, they tend to focus on the purportedly antiritualist effects of Protestant evangelicalism. Talk of ritual may appear when introducing a new immigrant community or a dissenting new religious community, yet by and large histories of American religion underline the democratizing and decentralizing impulses of a religious landscape determined by disestablishment and motivated, almost exclusively, by belief. In the study of American religion, Ritualism as a form of activist traditionalism takes a backseat to the more foamy narrative shores of individual revelation and disordered spiritual revivals. And in the study of religion more generally, Ritualism as a category of religious studies takes a backseat to phenomenological descriptions of  belief. However profitable anthropologists and religionists may have found ritual or ritualism as analytical terms, in the American study of religion (and the study of American religion) ritual is an archaic invocation, one now replaced by studies of piety, practice, or performance. Any history of post-­Reformation Christianity ought to seek to explain how Protestantism invented ritual while constantly decrying it. To revive Ritualism as a trope in the modern history of American religions is to argue that the compulsive sectarianism of US religion may be read instead as a twisty tale of ritual rebuttal, whereby old structures are revamped with not merely the enthusiastic fires of transient revival but also the established forms of perpetual tradition. This process is a complex one, in which it seems that anyone may possess the authority to conjure tradition and, in so doing, develop new hierarchies of authority. If historians of revivalism have emphasized the embodied experience of the revival participant, historians of ritual necessarily emphasize the location of authority in this ritual setting. “The prominence of embodied action as the locus of meaning in the cult explains why its performers tend not to have an exegetical explanation of it,” Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart have written. “They refer such meanings to the ritual experts. The chief ritual experts . . . deliberately withhold part of their knowledge from the performers since this knowledge constitutes their own power.”5 Within the history of Protestantism that suffuses the Anglophone world, disputes about ritual are disputes about the

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proper location and appropriate secret knowledge of authority. If Purity Balls reenchant the father, so in the nineteenth century many Christians fought to reinvigorate the priest. This is and was no easy assertion, as Protestantism also included an enshrinement of dissent: dissent through spiritual revelation, and dissent through differential readings of scripture. Both of which—­revelation and scripture—­were available to all believers. This chapter will focus on squabbles about British and American Ritualism as a way to understand how ritual circulated in the modern Anglo-­ American context as a discursive problem in geographies of expanding par­ ticipatory democracy. This story begins with terms and tropes familiar to students of the post-­Reformation world, including invocations of the relationship between the spirit and ceremony, sacraments and the Word, rituals and revivals. Yet what differentiates this particular story is its final triumph in the marketplace. This is not to suggest that rituals vacated their content to become commodities; rather, it is to argue that the debates about ritual became articulated through the marketplace. As theological dis­putes became increasingly less significant within the Anglo-­American world, con­sumer distinctions became more ferocious. The sale of a Purity Ball kit is not the emptying of religion but its articulation in the modern period: in the secular world, consumption is our ritualization.6 As twenty-­first-­century sociologists and political scientists debate the particular valences of secularism in late-­modern nation-­states, and as religionists continue to try to diagnose exactly what kinds of religion thrive in this religious now, a look at this Ritualism controversy may illuminate precisely what is at stake in the naming of the religious against the secular, and in finding the secular in certain forms of religion.

R i t u a l a n d Sc i e n t i a R i t u s

In this chapter, I will unfold a case well known to historians of British politics, Anglican ecclesiology, and modern church architecture in an effort to reintroduce this episode as a critical moment in the study of religion, in which an emerging concept of ritual influenced how people went about ritualizing.7 Jack Goody has rightfully warned scholars about indiscriminate applications of the term ritual, and has argued the importance of careful translation of that term.8 One strategy in this vein has been efforts by postcolonial thinkers to focus on the production of genealogical histories that

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acknowledge the interstices of  humanist classification and human practices.9 In other words, scholars have increasingly sought to observe the way that there is no anthropological field that we interpret which is not affected by that interpretation; likewise, that there are few spaces in human activity in which the participants themselves have not also developed accounts of what they’re doing, and why. Ritual practitioners are also ritual theorists. In the mid-­nineteenth-­century moment that serves as the focus of this chapter, the category of Ritualism emerged as both a label for a ritual prescription and an epithet for wrong ritual. For the British and American subjects that follow, ritual and Ritualism were understood to be terms capable equally of insult and affirmation. Ritualism produced a plethora of tracts that argued what right ritual was, and was not; what made something preferably Christian rather than problematically Catholic; how history justified or invalidated certain ceremonial revisions; and what was, at root, right ma­ terial relation to God. In all these treatises, the authors debating Ritualism described their moment as a “crisis” in which the fate of Christendom would be decided. These sermons, tracts, and mock debates supplied an elaborate vocabulary for ritual conscription as well as for ritual critique. “The priestly function we defend, and find it intimately woven with the texture of catholic Christian faith, and it must be regarded as highly determinative of ritualistic procedure,” argued one Ritualist, exhibiting the liturgical and an­ thropological vantage of the literature.10 For a brief moment in nineteenth-­ century history, a concentrated group of leading Christians debated vociferously the appropriate persistence of traditional forms. By doing so they also created arguments for the kinds of religion that would survive in the modern period. I coin scientia ritus to describe the way in which the literature produced in this crisis offered a certain exacting technology for right ritual behavior and ritual analysis. Scientia ritus is a direct chronological and analytical parallel to the scientia sexualis described by Michel Foucault. For Foucault, scientia sexualis named the procedures by which the modern West came to produce ideas about the “truth” about sexuality through an “economy of discourses.”11 Foucault located the development of scientia sexualis in the wake of the popularization of confession as a ritual of extraction in which individuals culled from themselves secrets to be cataloged and diagnosed by a priestly specialist. The subsequent bourgeois society translated this confessional mode into a purportedly medical form. Scientia sexualis was an “entire machinery for producing true discourses” about sex. Because of the permeating success of scientia sexualis in juridical, scientific,

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and popular communities, “we demand that sex speak the truth . . . and we demand that it tell us our truth.” Scientia sexualis was not merely a calculating procedure, however. Foucault concluded that it supplied a new form of pleasure, “a pleasure in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing that truth, of discovering and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of captivating and capturing others by it, of confiding it in secret, of luring it out in the open—­the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure.”12 The pleasure of such scientific production explains in part why people return time and again to these diagnoses even as their classifications could feel limiting, reducing, or entrapping to the complexity of experience. For Foucault, discovering scientia sexualis meant that scholars of sexuality had to focus on the relationship between the body and its terming. It was in this classificatory space that Foucault believed the history of sexuality was found: the space where the body’s concept, movement, and transformation were formatted to service ritual prescription, social schematics, and institu­ tional power. Tracking the scientia ritus of the nineteenth-­century Ritualism crisis will reveal an analogous mechanism in which ritual was tamed. In an era in which there was an explosion of new Protestant sects, a variety of leaders—­ theologians, priests, historians, artists, and statesmen—­tried to redact what ritual ought to be, to cull from the complexity of ritual experience and the diversity of ritual participation an ideal set of principles for ritual. This discourse emphasized appropriateness, reasonableness, and scriptural accountability, providing an abundance of data to support claims about why one way of ritualizing was preferable to another. Scientia ritus describes the near-­ obsessive definitional precision by which ritual became a subject for lay appropriation and for social scientific study. This precision was produced and reproduced in polemical tracts, prescriptive literatures, institutional alter­ ations, and social classifications in a historic level of analytical productivity in the definition of religion. These treatises, and the political controversies they fostered, illustrate simultaneously a kind of ferocious specificity as well as a profound joie de vivre about the diagnostic venture. In the hands of mul­ tiple critics and diagnosticians, the naming of right ritual seems to have been an ecstatic experimental exercise of religious freedom. The science of ritual, like the intersecting science of sex described by Foucault, had a governing element. Through the production of scientia ritus, critics and defendants created ritual and defined ecclesiology, suggesting that through its bodily prescriptions and limitations, Ritualism manifested hierarchies of authority in church and state. “Ritualism is commonly sup-

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posed to be the rationale of forms of worship; the theory and rules of di­ vine service in particular churches, or the discussion of the degree of con­ fidence to be placed in them,” wrote one American critic of Ritualism in 1867. “The Law of Ritualism implies such a discussion as anciently would have followed the title de Ritibus ecclesiasticis.”13 Ritualism was conceived within the structures of the ecclesiastical authority that produced it and the state authority that confronted it. Making sense of ritual required that rituals be defined by some (and decried by others). Even as ritual was an instrument used by self-­proclaimed moderns, it became a barometer of the immemorial tradition that inspired it; even as it was prescribed to be immediately relevant, it became a mark of the perpetual. Naming ritual as necessary made it clear that it was, at this point, not something ostensibly necessary for ev­ery­one. Naming ritual made it clear that this might be a world in which traditions had declined, or had even disappeared. In this very process of definition, ritual gained a defiant potency as a classificatory tool for the imagined secular. To observe scientia ritus through the lens of this crisis is to observe the way the study of religion was produced in part by defining religion in response to cultural, economic, and governmental efforts to limit its effects.

R i t u a l i s m C r i s i s a n d M o d e r n i ty

In the nineteenth century, the Anglophone world seemed briefly trapped in a crisis that was repeatedly described by contemporaneous observers as one driven by “secular” forces. In this elite squabble, the label Ritualist was deployed as an epithet to describe an emphasis on church rituals. Although the focus of this analysis will be on Anglican and Episcopal discussion, Ritualism appeared as a controversial question in Baptist, Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches throughout the Anglophone world, from Scotland to California. “Every Christian sect has found it necessary to have some form and order—­or in other words, some Ritualism—­which they will not suffer to be invaded,” wrote one mid-­nineteenth-­century observer. “The controversy, therefore, at last, resolves itself into the same inquiry, which meets us in every thing else belonging to humanity, namely, what is the best system of form and order?”14 Anglican and Episcopalian Ritualists advocated “High Church” ceremonialism to counter what they perceived as secularization. This secularization was not an irreligious force

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as much as it was—­to them—­a diminished ritual force, one embodied in their accusation by the encroaching “Low Church” evangelicals. To be sure, the empiricist unbelievers emerging from the new middle class bothered Ritualism advocates as well, yet the freight of their criticism focused on alternative ritual landscapes and not on altogether atheist communities. Ritualists argued for the revival of selected ancient forms and theologi­ cal applications like apostolic succession and baptismal regeneration to com­ bat what they perceived to be the diluting ideologies of evangelical exposi­ tors and the degrading rational assaults of historical critiques. In England, this seemingly minor argument about the appropriate use of vestments, candles, and church furnishings hit a mad climax around the problem of church involvement with state governance, pressing the British Empire to determine where its godhead lay: in Parliament, in Canterbury, or at Buckingham Palace. In America, Ritualist priests encountered less federal intervention than popular dissent. On both sides of the Atlantic, the Ritualism crisis invited lengthy debates about the ongoing Reformation.15 What deeds were best embodiments of spiritual belief? “Ritualism is not mere ceremony or formalism or mummery,” one anonymous polemicist explained. “The best comment on the works of God are His works.”16 Evangelicals in Britain and America in­creasingly mirrored populist discourses about the deconstruction of institutionalized governance, both church and state. In such a milieu, the High Church Ritualists appeared not merely as foppish lovers of smells and bells, but also as carriers of “Romish” values that might, if left unchecked, infect nascent democracy with monarchic spirit. The Ritualists were therefore seen as backsliders in the process of modernity by which religions became more individual, and the sacramental miracles seemed increasingly suspect under the scrutiny of science and the laissez-­faire of Low Church conversions. By this figuration, the Ritualists were figured as sensualists in an era of rationalism. Since the sixteenth century, material manifestation and its possible con­ tradictory meanings drove much Reformed protest. As a variety of Christian critics considered the restoration of primitive churches, the substance of sola scriptura, and the best polity for communal practice, there seemed to be no single answer about the best forms for true faith. “Our own Church has had, since the era of the Reformation, two parties, more distinct in feeling, and sometimes, unhappily, more bitter in hostility, than the Jews and the Gentiles in Jerusalem and Antioch,” wrote one observer of the crisis.17 But to see the Ritualism crisis as merely another incident in the conflict between

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popery and the puritanical, or High and Low Church, affect, is to miss the intervention of the “secular” into the overt stakes of the argument. For the primary result of this crisis was not a verdict on right ritual but, rather, the right tolerance toward ritual innovation by state authority. Every treatise on the controversy considered the problem of religious toleration central to the resolution of the Ritualism crisis: “Surely, then, if ever there was a case of difference in lesser things which called for kindly toleration, the claim of liberty for our brethren who desire to restore the ancient Ritual would seem to have the strongest right of allowance.”18 Although religious tolerance and revitalization had been a premise of multiple European conflicts and American rebellions, the Ritualism crisis articulated the final acquiescence of establishment religious authorities to the freedom practiced by, and new ideas advocated from, church pews. As one Episcopal priest grudgingly explained, “If our Church professes to be built on a more popular basis, it is plain that we cannot evade the necessary conclusion, that whether a man be called Low Churchman, High Churchman, or Ritualist, there is comprehensiveness enough in our Church to embrace him, and there ought to be charity enough to make use of his Zeal and piety, though as to the means he makes use of to promote the glory of God and the salvation of souls, our conclusions may widely differ.”19 The Ritualism crisis indicated capacity of lay revision to church authority—­even those church authorities aligned with state authority. And this concluded with church leaders scrambling to meet believers wherever they were, so long as they were, in fact, within the pews. At the beginning of a new consumer culture, the Ritualism crisis evinced the primacy of the “Zeal and piety” of the parishioner. Subsequent decades would find the Anglican Communion in ongoing discord about right ritual for right Anglicans. The Ritualism crisis articulated, merely and mightily, that whatever this right ritual might be, it would never again be explicitly incorporated into a singular source of authority, be it governmental, ecclesiastical, or philosophical. These nineteenth-­century public debates about proper ritual illustrated how religion had become a category of consumer agency and secular identity. In early centuries such debates might have involved accusations of heresy; now the language of accusation oriented around questions of toleration and proper citizenship. Precisely because it was about the public consequences of enclosed church rituals, the Ritualism crisis offers a prime demonstration of the ways that religion was itself a categorization of identity within the modern world. And

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in that history, rituals offered a diorama of the religions, right and wrong, this new world could conceive.

Reclaiming Apostolic Ritual

The chronologic attribution for this description of ritual as “modern” or “post-­Reformation” has been well established. In his history of early modern ritual, Edward Muir points his readers to the early modern period as the most crucial moment in the history of ritual theory precisely because it was then that ritual as a distinct category came into being. “The invention of the idea of ‘ritual’ belongs in the sixteenth century,” he writes, explaining that it was then that ritual became commonly understood as a social activity which is repetitive, standardized, and ambiguous. Muir offers such descriptors with hesitancy, since, he explains, theories devoted to defining a ritual “almost always harbor an assumption that rituals are supposed to function in a certain way—­to evoke an emotion, build consensus, provide the rules of conduct, model or mirror society.”20 What separates Muir’s historicism from those he criticizes is that he specifies the location of this ritual theory in the early modern moment in which contestations about sac­ rament forced a theoretical perspective on what had been presumed about ritual logic.21 The Reformation fixed ritual to a particular epoch in which sacraments became an official contestation, and not an imagined certitude.22 As a consequence of the Reformation, the “traditional” system of Chris­tian­ ity splintered into divergent languages defined largely through differ­ences in ritual hermeneutics.23 This is how Muir explains the “modern  mud­dle about ritual” as “a legacy of the ritual revolution of the sixteenth century.” Nothing may be assumed in the conveyance of rites. In any contested sectarian public sphere, “ritual must be interpreted, its hidden meanings ferreted out.”24 Nineteenth-­century Ritualists actively engaged this hermeneutical pro­ cess. One Ritualist defined Ritualism as precisely “the study or practice of ritual.” This study and practice included carefully reconstructed histories of the church to account for the recourse to medieval iconography within the modern Anglican Protestant context. “The Romanist, Methodist, Churchman, and Quaker, like all other openly professed Christians, are all truly ritualists because they all study and practice a ritual in connection with their religion,” an author inscribed. “And so in the true and absolute sense

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every religious body is ritualistic.” Here the Ritualist names the religious through the ritualistic, modeling the very accounting that, for Muir and other critics of modernity, signals the external observance requisite for the production of “religion” as an exchangeable, malleable category. “It was not the object of that movement to introduce or even directly encourage radical change of ritual,” one reporter explained, offering a history of Ritualism for American readers, “but it laid down principles and inculcated doctrines reminiscent of the historic Church of the Middle Ages, and thus exaggerates the importance of the outward forms of worship.”26 In the “exaggeration of importance,” Ritualists established a baseline of what was not exaggeration. It established what ritual was, and what Ritualism was; what were proper religions, and what were not. Ritualism became the belief that rit­ual practice is the most reliable way to “exclude heterodox practices” through a clarifying of right practice.27 When Ritualism first appeared in England, its meaning focused almost exclusively on a perceived Anglican exaggeration. Ritualism referred to a practice of ritual that exceeded an implicit baseline of religious appropriateness. Ritualists believed that the Reformation opposed not the rituals of Rome but the false and corrupt doctrines that had been grossly innovated upon a pure Gospel. Real reformation, according to Ritualists, would make the church more scriptural, apostolic, and unified. Reformation in this de­ finition would make the church ultimately more Catholic. English Ritualism (a category affiliated with, among other terms, Tractarianism, Anglo-­ Catholicism, and the Oxford movement) was a Counter-­Reformation based on the conviction that “ ‘Protestantism,’ by drawing Anglicans away from that sure foundation of apostolic succession and apostolic tradition on which the English church had stood firm through all the storms of the Re­ formation, had exposed the Church to the onslaughts of ‘Erastianism’ and ‘Liberalism.’ ”28 Uniting the Anglo-­Catholic revisions was the pursuit of a greater formal richness to motivate new spiritual growth in an age of accused secularization. Ritualism in England manifested in many minor and major aspects, including publications such as the Hierurgia Anglicana, published from 1843 until 1849 by the Cambridge Camden Society; new movements in missionary activity, including the reforms of Charles Lowder, founder of a secular order of priests in the Church of England; material culture, like the wearing of the surplice at the Anglican pulpit; and, finally but perhaps most fa­mously, architectural history. Oxford movement intellectuals propelled the liturgical program of Anglo-­Catholicism while the Cambridge Camden Society 25

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(later the Ecclesiological Society) put into architectural program the ideas of the Oxford reformers as the Gothic Revival. Anglican Ritualism and the Gothic architectural revival were “coeval phenomena rising from common sources.”29 Much in the aesthetic of Anglo-­Catholic proposals remains ostensible in Anglican and Episcopal parish edifices on either side of the Atlantic. As an attempt by High Church priests to recoup ecclesiastical control from the increasingly state-­run Anglican Church, Ritualism was less ostensibly successful. It was a failed political rebuttal protest, as marked by the intervening condemnation of the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874.30 The act was a direct response by Archbishop of Canterbury Archibald Camp­ bell Tait to the Ritualism he and other church leaders observed within the Church of England. It was a crackdown on certain forms of religious revitalization in favor of a broader program of religious reconciliation with the modern modes of state governance. Because of its timing within the histories of evangelicalism, shifts in industrial labor, and the rise of empirical arguments against religious belief, the Ritualism crisis seemed usefully emblematic to every key figure of British governance, most of whom endorsed the squelching of Ritualist excess. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli endorsed the Public Worship Regulation Act because he believed Ritualism signaled a resurgence of Catholicism that would be insubordinate to British governing interests. Queen Victoria signaled support for the act as one that leavened the pomposity of a minority faction within the state church. But Liberal leader William Gladstone adamantly dissented from what he saw as inappropriate state involvement in what ought to be separate church matters. Highly publicized imprisonments of priests in violation of the act diminished the popularity of its enforcement, but the act stayed law until its 1965 repeal. By then, however, the sociology of religion had dramatically changed, with fewer vestiges of High Church commitment and more divergent believers conjuring rituals without history on behalf of a new traditionalism. Even as the act temporarily regulated Ritualist excess, it did not, in the long haul, retard religious innovation, or return to Catholic forms by some churchgoers. The course of Ritualism is, however, in the British historiography a disappointed one, as the almost triumphant High Churchmen were beaten back by evangelical plain-­cloth preaching and liberal democratic anxieties about “popish” forms. As one London correspondent wrote, “It is evident that Ritualism looks to a great career, probably not without reason. Others, also, see that this country is being divided into two camps—­Ritualism and

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Rationalism.” If England suffered from “Ritualistic Rows,” American church­ men were engaged in a different sort of anxiety about “Romish” reverberation. Ritualism is a hiccup in this story of American religious retention, one that places instead a powerful emphasis on revivalism. Revivalism is to Ritualism as fast food is to bouillabaisse: revivalism solves a problem, quickly, whereas Ritualism takes its sacramental time. Revivalism is the ritual subject of nineteenth-­century Americans, as its critics worried about the falsity of its awakenings. Ritualist sacrament and High Church artifice were, in mid-­nineteenth-­century America, problematic to be sure but less pervasive than the revival as a pattern of religious behavior. And revivalism was, in the end, understood to be preferable as a ritual form. In 1896, a Methodist bishop in America gave a sermon distinguishing “religion versus ritualism” in which heroic frontier images of the revival circuit rebutted decadent idolatry. “It is just as much of a sin to worship the altar of a church as any other form of idolatry,” he explained, arguing that “Christ made a decided effort to divest religion of all its ritualism.”32 But anxieties about Ritualism were far fewer in mid-­nineteenth-­century America. What hit England like a political hurricane only affected churches in America as a shift in style.33 Some Episcopal priests were ousted from their US parishes, some angry letters to the editor were written, and some churches—­such as Church of the Ascension in Chicago, Saint Mary the Virgin and Saint Alban’s Chapels in New York—­amplified their decorative aspect under the watchful eye of wary bishops. On the whole, however, American Ritualists have been enfolded, historically and denominationally, into the exuberant, generative religious iconoclasm of a free marketplace. Their protests marked no break with the American state, since their state had already established its role relative to their liberties. 31

Sp e ctac u l ar St o r i e s o f R i t u a l i s m

Recommending Ritualism as a category for American religious studies is a proposal to identify the ways individuals promoted a precisely mapped liturgical vivacity. If revivalism argued for material subtraction to create a spiritual multiplication, Ritualism argued for a material addition to create a spiritual multiplication. “We may ask, how much increase of such Ritualism is desirable in a country like ours,” posed American observers on the subject of Ritualism. As in England, antagonists to Ritualism in America posed

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it as a problematic irrationality in the face of the world’s increasing analytic options. “The ritual is a real intellectual bondage,” Charles William Eliot announced in a speech entitled “Ecclesiasticism, Ritualism, and Creeds.” Real Americans, according to such evangelical accounts, would resist the seductions of this materialism. “Shall we fear them? Never. If we cannot conquer Romanism, by a free press, a free ballot, and a free pulpit, then Truth is not great and cannot ensure the final victory.”34 American scientia ritus iterated, again and again, the optimism of liberty and its media against the seductive wiles of High Church smoke and mirrors. “If they have anything good to offer, there are honest and churchly ways, by which they can gain their ends,” declared the anti-­Ritualist Charles Hall. He continued: Let them pray and become departed, until the people shall feel the majesty of their ardent piety, and become reverential. Let them meet us like men, in debate upon our rubrics and laws, and reform them. Let them convince us, that there is a Corporeal Presence, that there is a sacredness in the priesthood, which must blend with thuribula and chrism, which can carry the Gospel more potently by aid of albs and copes, and we will yield the sway to them.35

Hall here demonstrated the sense of debate that was central to the Ameri­can receipt of Ritualism. Religious liberty offered the argumentative grounds for US Ritualism and anti-­Ritualism. In this dynamic, anti-­Ritualists certainly formed the baseline against which Ritualists had to argue, proving again the aptness of Tracy Fessenden’s description of the secular as grounded in a presumptive Protestantism.36 If anti-­Ritualists believed Ritualism would be thwarted by better options, American Ritualists proposed that liberty allow their ongoing ceremonial alterations. “Ritual is at present in a formative and transitional state,” one advocate claimed. “I am willing to tolerate a very large liberty, but I am not willing to take any one church as the real and ultimate standard of our worship.”37 Ritualists suggested that limits on ritual behavior were incursions into American religious liberty. “Our Church in the United States . . . is perfectly free from all those parts of the English law wherein the secular government was directly concerned,” wrote one American priest, “while all that belonged to the doctrines, discipline, and worship of the Church herself considered as a spiritual society, remained in force, until a change should be made by our own independent legislation.”38 This priest underscored a common certainty that American religion was free of the American state. US churches deemed themselves free, however,

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through the forces of the very governmentalism that framed their spiritual liberty, namely that of state disestablishment.39 Back and forth the commentary went, propelling a scientia ritus that survived precisely because in the United States there was no obvious legal limitation or autocratic mandate. The reportage of  Ritualism coincided with that of revivalism, as journalists saw them as two sides of a sensationalist coin.40 In the modern period, the publicity of religion is religion, insofar as reports on religious activity form as consequential a part of its definition as any experiential or sociological account of it. The Ritualism crisis is just one of any number of nineteenth-­century religious stories that found success in newspapers that solicited opinions from religious and journalistic authorities to explain what transpired.41 The antagonists to Ritualism were often blithe in their reportage, as if remarking on an entertainment more than a political crisis: “The Ritualistic brethren of the Protestant Episcopal church in this country, though not demonstrative of  late and apparently making but little headway, are by no means idle,” the Washington Post reported in 1881. Such anti-­Ritualist commentary inferred that Ritualists were mesmerized by nostalgic opiates. “There is something peculiarly captivating to certain minds in the showiness of the innovations which Ritualism proposes, and it is not at all surprising that many, here and there, devoutly religious people no doubt, permit themselves to drift away from an old conservative anchorage into more alluring but chartless seas.”42 As US Protestant sects faced the challenges of scientific evidence regarding biblical assertion and theological discord ripping asunder denominations, Anglo-­Catholicism offered an easy nemesis to unite the disparate, degraded parties of American Christianity. Yet an 1869 observer summarized the practical results with confidence: “The prospects of Ritualism are not very bright. . . . After awhile, the whole revolution will cease, and while many will become Catholics, others will return to indifference, and to greater torpidity than at the beginning.”43 Such assurances about Ritualism’s limited prospects within the American popular ranks did not accurately represent the specific context of religious competition in which Ritualism made its minor inroads. The nineteenth century included a tyranny of anti-­Catholic nativism, and it was in this antagonistic milieu that some Protestant congregations began to add elements derived from Roman Catholic motifs. “Beyond an enthusiasm for Gothic Architecture, one Protestant congregation after another broke with tradition to employ symbolic crosses, to decorate sanctuaries with flowers and candles, to worship with robed choirs, and to celebrate regular feasts and festivals.”44 As the historian Ryan K. Smith has explained, this adoption

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of new church styles has been understood as separate from nativism in practice—­the nativists were not the Ritualists. But Ritualist flair and nativist ire occurred in concert. The leading Protestant clergyman Lyman Beecher erected a medieval-­inflected sanctuary in 1831, including “rows of pointed, colored windows and a musical program that ventured movements from traditional Catholic masses.” Beecher did this right before he gained national fame for his heated anti-­Catholic sermons.45 This dynamic of ambivalence—­ the push and pull of Protestant-­Catholic relations—­determined the form the Ritualism “crisis” took in America. In Detroit, Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church faced a minor debacle when its rector, a Mr. Tillinghost, was asked to resign “on account of his Romish proclivities.” Parishioners published a protest complaining of this tendency. “Their language,” a journalist reported, “is very bitter, and the accusations of bad faith are sweeping.”46 Ritualists divided congregants against one another within certain parishes, but in the pages of newspapers, Ritualists supplied a tempting spectacle of ceremony, a narrative slumming amid a Protestant version of the Catholic menace. Reportage betrayed an unmistakable voyeurism at the unfolding Romish style. “In administering the sacrament to his flock, he does not allow anyone to touch the bread and wine,” a journalist offered about the Episcopal rector at Saint Alban’s: but holding them as he walks, elevated above his head, makes a dab with bread and cup at each individual’s mouth, as the Roman priests put wafers on the tongue of their communicants. When the sacramental cere­ mony is finished, he drinks every attainable drop of the consecrated wine, and then, rinsing the cup with unconsecrated wine, drinks that, in order that not even the vapor of the first shall be lost.47

Touching mouths and reaching for alcoholic vapors, the priest becomes a sensual purveyor, a man guiding a room into and out of pleasures in the di­ vine name. Another description, also of Saint Alban’s, explained how at the close of the service, when the benediction is sung, the priest blessed the congregation by “describing a huge cross in the air.” The observer continued: All form in process with hands clasped and head bent, the congregation bow devoutly, the organ peals, the boys sing as sweetly as they have cer­ tainly learned how to do, and the singular exhibition has vanished, leav­ ing us wondering if this oriental, sensuous religion, appealing to aesthetics instead of righteousness, and depending more on timely genuflections

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than upon a pure heart, is destined to make head way in the midst of modern enlightenment. They have the advantage of being earnestly devoted to ritualism.48

The basic anti-­Ritualist suppositions of such an account are clear. According to this journalist, these Ritualists are corrosive of the modern, insofar as the modern is understood in opposition to aesthetics and gestural sacrament. The anti-­Ritualist wants righteousness and purity, which are only discernible in a certain context of ritual. “Rather than ritual as the vehicle for the expression of authority,” explains Catherine Bell, “practice theorists tend to explore how ritual is a vehicle for the construction of relationships of authority and submission.”49 The reportage on Ritualism in the United States reveals the ways that it served to explain new forms of tradition in an anti-­ecclesiastical world. Reporters inferred that the surge in ceremony suggested “sensuous religion” would overtake “modern enlightenment.” At the same time, they reported on these new ritualist tendencies with the vivid language of an advertisement, describing especially long Methodist church services or vested Lutheran choirs with the mountebank’s detail. But the ritual wasn’t a mandated oppression of Americans by priestly authorities; it was one option among many for consuming parishioners seeking the service that fit them. And it was entertainment for newspaper readers, Christian or otherwise, to hear about, explore on their own, or dismiss.

From Ritualism to Consumer Rites

The scientia ritus of Ritualism produced a theory in which ritual emerged as an option for individuals beyond church walls. Through comparative examples, historical exonerations, and ceremonial descriptions, Ritualist advocates, critical reporters, and evangelical antagonists produced an account of ritual as a way for groups to master individuals. Both Ritualists and anti-­Ritualists agreed on this power of ritual; they simply disagreed on the consequences of that power. Ritualists embraced connections between their promotions and Jewish Mosaic law, distinguishing themselves from accusations of Romanism by claiming that Jews, Greek Orthodox, and even Lutherans stood well on the side of Reformation while still making grandly manifest Eucharistic devotions. A “rich, glorious, and symbolic Rit­ ual” could be found throughout the genealogy of Christendom. As with

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every reformed battle before and after, the exchange of epithets included each side imagining the other as less textually legitimate: “How entirely unscriptural then is this Puritanical spirit against which we have to struggle in the Church.”50 Those siding with the “Puritans” suggested the decadents tempted falsely. Proper profiles in ritual needed to be produced so that those incomplete in their modernity might find right, final transition. “How can we most easily get a . . . country clown to understand that there is a Mighty Being Whom he should adore, that there is a brighter and better world than this for which he should strive?” So asked one Ritualist commentator, suggesting that Ritualism might be the way by which the unconverted connect to God. “Is it by putting him into a dark corner of a large, bare, and shabby room, to hear a gentleman read something carelessly out of one or two books for half an hour, and then roar something else excitedly for double that time? Will that get the unlettered peasant or artisan down on his knees in awe and prayer?”51 Ritualism inspires through its drama, the advocates said, pulling in those most in need of wonder. This sumptuous temptation supplied the grounds for the affirmation and insult of Ritualism—­in its precise advocacies were its nemeses’ artillery. This is why histories of Ritualism emphasize its historical location in the revolutionary transition from an industrial to a consumer economy. Whatever anti-­Catholic nativism simmered still within Protestant Ritualism and its reception, the ascent of the Gilded Age meant that everyone, Romish or not, might be swaddled in decadence. One could easily describe the Victorian era as a pervasively Ritualist one: propositions of beautiful cities, parlors, civic institutions, and public venues constructed elaborate connections between aesthetic philosophies, domestic mores, and the prospects of Anglo-­Saxon civilization. Even the Protestants who found Catholic sacraments suspect participated in an embourgeoisement that possessed formal flair to rival any confessional.52 Churches with ritualistic touches reflected and refracted a consumer ethos that expected gilt corners and ornate trimmings.53 For critics of Ritualism, the elitism of this affect, as well as its obvious affirmation of  the emergent middle class, added to their grounds of complaint. Ritualism, which had been in England partly a missionary ap­ proach to the poor, served an even finer customer in the United States, even as its critics insulted it as a primitive holdover. The anti-­Ritualists who criticized such class distinctions did so for more than aesthetic reasons. Hidden beneath the ritualistic excess was, by their reckoning, an incursion into family order. Shifts in labor relations re­ ified a gender dichotomy in which fatherly patriarchs, and not priests, were

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to rule the Victorian domestic sphere. Above all, anti-­Ritualist evangelicals expressed anxieties about “prying curiosity” toward women. Women had been sanctified in this moment as embodiments of a “true womanhood” inviolable by nonhusbandly hands. “Victorian men treated their wives in a fashion they preferred to keep to themselves rather than have revealed to a clergyman,” the historian James Bentley argued.54 The fact that, in England, the suspect Ritualist priests possessed an excessively homosocial aura only elaborated the sense that these priests sought not only to regress Protestantism but also to insurrect normal gender relations.55 Ritualists looked to be everything worrisome about urban consumerism, forcing women into confessionals of self-­disclosure and encouraging sumptuous appearances. Worst of all, Ritualism was itself an option in the marketplace. It circulated in an epoch of final heresies, when the last choke of ecclesiastical authority barked at biblical critics, and when evangelicals sought to name the entire modernity as theirs. None of these religious competitors would be neatly victorious: ritualism became marked as a kind of bourgeois antiquarianism, and evangelicalism would be exiled as unacceptably intolerant of the new diversity.56 And as orthodoxy faded, consumerism alone emerged truly triumphant, producing along the way its own alternative rituals and sacramental vestments. Along the way, certain artifacts of the nineteenth-­ century Ritualist era, like the white wedding dresses and college graduation regalia, became universal tropes of ritual transition. The Ritualism crisis presented in this chapter is an instance of ritual drama rendered in discursive form. There were social and material products of this discourse, including the founding of Protestant monastic orders like the Order of the Holy Cross and the American Cowley Fathers; the Protestant adaptation of sacramental Catholic ritual in certain elite, urban parishes; an overall increase of Catholic tendencies within the American Episcopal Church; and the many church facades influenced by Gothic Revival. Ritualism promised spiritual clarity aroused by increased ceremonial action, an action built to mirror a historical precursor from the ancient age. “The new enthusiasm for the decorative and theatrical was an effort, half-­conscious and rarely articulated, to ease modern anxieties by reviving public rituals,” Jackson Lears would summarize. For Lears, this “religious aestheticism may have signified a murmur of protest, a demand for meaning in a darkening universe.”57 Here I resist Lears’s suggestion that a taste for Ritualism was a “demand for meaning.” To be sure, some churchgoers reported profound stirrings as they witnessed the lengthened sacramental rite or saw the elaborate

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vestments. Yet this is just a minor experiential effect of the Ritualist crisis. Much more significant to the history of religion is the fact that nineteenth-­ century Ritualists participated in—­and signified—­the now-­optional landscape for religious ideation and debate. The world wasn’t darkening as much as it seemed to be relentlessly expanding with different beliefs and new reasons for skepticism. For Lears and other cultural historians of Ritualism, Anglo-­Catholicism was a vestigial bauble, an additive to religious worlds that also might be simultaneously toying with socialism, deism, royalism, and worship at the altar of Lady Isis (to steal just one Anglo-­Catholic profile, that of the architect Ralph Adams Cram). Ritualism was more than a component to Victorian romanticism or another antimodern hobby. It was also a strategy by which the religious was named through the ritualistic. “We know that there is a poetic element in human nature which instinctively regards light in all its forms as the type of instruction and knowledge,” a Ritualist described. “We have heard somewhere that there is a dim religious light, and that the spectacle of a hundred candles seen through such a light disposes the soul to good works. We devoutly hope this may be so.”59 Arguing for and against ritual was a practice of religion. Put more precisely, it was a common labor to discern and to value the best ways to propel individuals toward their best selves. This mid-­nineteenth-­century moment is taken as a turning point in the historical processing of Protestantism, the beginning of an interpretation of purity that depended less on social worship and instead advocated the power of individual transformation exercises. In the future, the definition of the rightly religious was not to be determined by ecclesiology or governmentalism. Rather, naming the rightly religious would be conducted in and through the scientia ritus that reports, diagnoses, and instantiates every move and accessory, from Eucharistic poses to father-­daughter circle dances, from vestments to purity rings. In this landscape of ritual invention and theorization, the only limits are those of consumer tolerance and media appeal. In the modern Anglophone world, any ritual can be yours for the making if you can find some people to join you and a camera to record. You can, for instance, decide that your daughter needs a plotted public moment with her father, spinning in a circle, to reiterate his relationship to the protection of her virginal self. You can quickly build a seeming empire from the ritual you imagine, creating informational kits rather than doctrinal imperatives and paying hotel rental fees rather than church memberships. Indeed, in the wake of the Ritualist crisis, rituals for the instantiation of normative family relations, like the 58

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Purity Ball, only increased, perhaps in part because the diminishing value of church as an organizing unit led to the ascent of the natal family as the primary organizing social unit of morality. In their advocacy of your right to develop tradition for your—­and your family’s—­sanctification, the Ritualists argued for nothing more, and nothing less, than religious freedom. By doing so, they initiated the process in which our freedom is still possible, if framed and formatted by our individual anxieties, our place in the consumer matrix, and our conception of, and participation in, the network of informational distribution that defines our mediated reality.

0 4 Purifying America Rites of Salvation in the Soap Campaign

In 2008, owners of a Nashville, Tennessee, hotel announced that they would no longer place a Gideon Bible on the bedside tables of its rooms, breaking with a missionary product placement that had spanned nearly one hundred years. Instead, Hotel Preston visitors would there discover a laminated “Spiritual Menu.” After dialing room service, they could then use that menu to order one or more of the following scriptural selections: the King James Version of the Bible, the New American Bible, the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the Book of  Mormon, works by the Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, or the Qur’an. “Our guests come from different places and they definitely come from different cultures, backgrounds, ethnicities, so we want everyone to feel welcomed and comfortable,” explained Dina Nishioka, public relations director for the hotel.1 Organized by a team of managers at the Oregon-­ based Provenance Hotels, which owns the Hotel Preston, this menu has received near-­universal acclaim from industry observers. Joe McInerney, president and CEO of the American Hotel and Lodging Association, said that this was the first time he had heard of a spiritual menu, but that it sounded like a good business decision: If they want to be ecumenical, that’s a great way to do it. It’s taking a positive look at a thing that has been commonplace. What could be wrong

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with it if they’re providing an opportunity for all religions to read their scripture?2

What, indeed? Hotel Preston here maps itself into the pleasant hum of contemporary retail religious pluralism. Such pluralism distills—­one might say it purifies—­the diversity of religious practice into redacted palatability: “What could be wrong with it if they’re providing an opportunity for all religions to read their scripture?” Finding a prehistory of this ritual assignment is the goal of this chapter, since this pattern of usable diversity reaches well beyond the business of boardinghouses. Consider RitualWell.org, which advertises itself as the online provider of “ceremonies for Jewish living.”3 On RitualWell you can “browse thousands of rituals, listen to music, download a ritual, or cut and paste your own.” A project of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Pennsylvania, the website blends academic insight, real-­ world dilemma, and Internet dissemination, offering a place where you can “build personalized rituals for your life.”4 Elsewhere, just down the road from Hotel Preston in Nashville, the Bible division of Thomas Nelson Publishers sells over one hundred different Bibles, including ones tailored to student leadership, marriage, cowboys, skaters, converts, and surfers. There is the UltraSlim Bible for women, the Maximized Living Bible targeted for men, the New Spirit-­Filled Life Daily Bible, and the Princess Bible, covered in pink to appeal to the inner princess of every little girl.5 These three examples share an investment in the marketing of multiple choices for the ritual occasion. This is no revelatory comparison, since to describe contemporary religious life is necessarily to engage market motifs and cornucopias of practice possibility. Demography colludes with this description, as the opening months of 2008 also included the release of data from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life summarized by the headline “Americans Change Faiths at Rising Rate.” Americans were, the data explained, switching religions, combining religions, and pursuing personal religions.6 Religion in twenty-­first-­century America is by sociological definition an identity in array and not a singular sectarian location. A May 2008 article in O, The Oprah Magazine supplied an immediate exhibit of Pew’s research: Spirituality is our focus this month. We’re not asking for much. Just a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. A higher level of awareness. A feeling of being linked to something greater than ourselves. And how about a side order of uplift and joy?7

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Such a statement contains the signatures of American religious assimilation, emphasizing as it does a vague dispositional result, an undifferentiated higher something, and an image of spirituality as a platter you might order from a chain restaurant. Buffet isn’t just a metaphor for American religion, it is its practice. Individuals pick and choose, cut and paste, select and deposit side orders into online shopping baskets which then become their in­ dividuated religious amalgam. Guided by personal concern and informed by the process of social formation, individuals make what they want from a world of texts and practices.8 So much choice, so much self-­invention: what’s not to celebrate? After many years of worry over the fundamentalist menace or the secularization threat, religionists can rest easy. Our subject-­ agents are alive, kicking, and contradictorily practicing. Who could ask for anything more? Before memorializing the pleasures of pastiche, it might be productive to reflect on the spot where we’ve landed and how we got here. Marketing, and the marketing of possibility, began this chapter. The questions then driving its subsequent research are simple: Is the veneer of option a triumph of the marketplace of religions? Or is it a merely the manipulation of the mercantile? Keep in mind that the arrival of spiritual menus in Hotel Preston occurred alongside a corporate overhaul of  that Nashville resting place, including several hipster touches like complimentary pet fish, rubber ducks for bath time, lava lamps, a pillow menu, and the entire Aveda family of products in lodgers’ choice of scent (rosemary mint and sap moss, chamomile and clove, blue malva and madder root). More recently, as a part of a living art display, the hotel began hiring young women to take turns wearing pink lingerie and living in a glass-­plated mock hotel room in a corner of the establishment’s cocktail lounge. Hotel Preston is a menagerie of haute exhibition, with the Qur’an and goldfish and scantily clad ladies ar­riv­ing with equal ordering ease. These details of its overhaul indicate the way pillow menus and scripture menus go hand-­in-­hand as marketing simultaneously spotlights the quirky peculiar and reproduces that idiosyncrasy in every room. Incorporation (be it in the form of a hotel chain, a website, or a publishing house) assimilates inchoate diversity into the distribution of trademarked similarity. Yes, the menu offers an array, but that array was formatted for you, preselected for you, and offered to you as a menu. The process of purchase, of consumer choice, is embedded in the commodity function. To understand how we got here, we must wrestle not only with the sociology of contemporary religious practice but also with the roots of con-

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sumer rites. This will lead to no easy correlates, as the historian Gary Cross indicates when he writes, “The secret success of consumerism is that [its] messages to self and others are so layered, complex, and hidden.”9 To remake a world that seems so do-­it-­yourself requires invented variety. This chapter relates one thread of that remaking, focusing on the transformation of American bathers in the ritual imagination. Or, rather, this chapter focuses on the invention of the bather through ritual prescription. Here we observe how one industry capitalized on ritual idiom in an overt effort to teach the public how to use new products, and also how to enjoy those products. This use and enjoyment connected intimately and commercially to the value assigned to the user as an enjoyer. In other words, to study how people learned to buy a product, and to believe its import, is to learn how modernity transformed religion into a market experience. Few commodities encapsulate the prescriptive tenor of this American modernity better than soap. Historians of modern advertising consistently point to soap as a landmark trial balloon in print advertisements. With the development of vegetable oils in the mid-­nineteenth century, and the concomitant founding of the titanic Procter & Gamble in 1837, soap gained promotional footing alongside the processes that define modern objectification. Soap production doubled between 1870 and 1890, as large operations such as Colgate and Co. and P&G grew into major industrial enterprises. The history of this pitch, the sale of soap, is the subject of a healthy historiography. From it, we learn how a land of soap makers was converted to soap buying; how a single cake of sludge mutated and diversified into body-­part-­ specific soaps; how irregular patterns of national cleanliness were assimilated into one single wail for uplifted citizenry: If you are to be good, you will be clean. If you are to be American, you will be clean. “Americans are the apostles of personal cleanliness,” assigned one editorial observer. “Ours is primarily a character building, Americanizing enterprise for all people and we continue strong in our belief that cleanliness is akin to godliness.”10 The history of soap is a history made not by incident or activism but by the persistent repetition, representation, and distribution of a ritual result. This idea did not arrive without context. Clergy of the antebellum period invoked cleanliness to promote not piety but Christian respectability and, eventually, health. People did not ordinarily consider themselves godly if they kept clean or ungodly if they remained dirty. Instead, commonly used words such as neat and tidy described orderly and polite individuals who were comfortably well-­off. Cleanliness might have been next to godliness (an axiom popularized through the sermons of John Wesley), but

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cleanliness was not accessorized by God-­sanctioned soap. In the 1870s, soap was seen as an optional accessory to daily life. Yet by the 1930s, soap ranked second to food as the most important product in people’s homes. How, in a sixty-­year period, did a single industry transform the bathing imagination of an entire nation? In order to sell soap, manufacturers had to compel consumers to a certain definition of cleanliness. Today hyper-­ hygienic standards frame our advertising culture, making us a country Cal­ ifornia Closeted and Clorox Bleached into a blanched and orderly submission. Or, as Claudia and Richard Bushman observed, “now the wish to be clean feels more like a natural instinct than like a cultural overlay.”12 How did this occur? This chapter is an analysis of the religious idioms embedded within the early sale of American soap, the ways Christian moral imperatives guided soap into the stratosphere of modern business. It is, therefore, a religious history of culture (the ways that Christian professionals and Christian discourses suffused the soap campaigns), but also a cultural history of religion, proposing that the date of the Ivory soap trademark registration (1879) shares equal space with the founding of the Student Volunteer Movement (1888), which helmed the so-­called golden age of American missions. I am interested in, and will dwell on, the specific ways businesses deployed religious imagery to freight their product with Protestant rectitude. I am also interested in the ways a menagerie of sects contributed to the readiness for soap in the late nineteenth century. But I am probably most compelled by the development, begun here only in outline, of a religious history beyond denomination. As we wrestle with descriptions of our plural modernity, of the abundance and diversity of religions available, of our menus and buffets, we struggle equally with the sneaking suspicion that we have been mass-­converted to new icon array, to a common cult of capitalism that purifies us in order to pawn further our pursuit of that purification. But this rushes us into abstractions before we know the rituals under survey. So let us now linger in the brilliance of Ivorydale. By 1875, only 25 percent of the profits earned by Procter & Gamble came from soap. These profits were derived largely from sales of that product to the military, home missions, and upper-­class residences. The yellow object that James Gamble produced and William Procter distributed through their front office came in a limited array of “harsh” and “gentle” cakes with names like Town Talk and Mottled German. These indelicate chunks sank to the bottom of the wash barrel and turned quickly to mush if ignored, but they were individ­ ually wrapped and distributed without loss of shapely integrity. As a result, 11

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they were useful in institutional contexts and among the servant class of washerwomen accustomed to large quantities of linen. Then the second gen­eration of Procters and Gambles went East for their education, returning with knowledge of chemistry and aspirations to discover the “lost grail of soap making”: the legendary bar of “castile,” a pristine white soap made of pure olive oil, at that time only imported from Europe in tiny quantities for the Continental echelons of  New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. In 1878, the one-­room Gamble laboratory invented what it called the “P&G White Soap.” A flaw in the process whipped the fats and alkalis to such an extent that tiny bubbles were trapped in the bar, causing the White Soap to pop up to the water’s surface. It was “The Soap That Floats.” A slogan was born.13 P&G’s subsequent campaign has been splintered and studied by gen­ erations of marketers and cultural historians. “Up until Procter and Gamble,” wrote the historians Charles Goodrum and Helen Dalrymple, “you glorified the product as an institution, a public entity, standing high on a hilltop, not something produced just for your very own benefit.”14 Through a simultaneous invocation of scientific discourses (ads described Ivory as “99 and 44/100 per cent pure”) and moral imaginaries, Procter & Gamble brought soap to the people. “Who wants pure soap?” asked one ad. “Pretty nearly everybody. Why do they want it? Because it’s pure. Where can they get it? At any grocery store.”15 P&G remains a staple of business school curricula and cultural history, as it convinced people of a product they didn’t think they needed. In a world where advertising was not yet as ubiquitously cajoling as it is today, P&G made soap mandatory. Through its strategies of call-­and-­response, scientific proof, and embrace of the politics of whiteness, P&G did not just sell soap, it inaugurated the history of advertising and thereby a new epoch of consumption. A religious history of this soap ascendancy would take several factors into account. First, leading US Protestant clergymen increasingly came un­der the rhetorical sway of print advertising culture, incorporating the popular iconographic lexicon for Pears or Lifebuoy soap bars into their weekly exegesis. “If Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” Henry Ward Beecher announced in an advertisement for Pears soap, “soap must be considered as a means of grace and a clergyman who recommends moral things should be willing to recommend soap.”16 Likewise, advertisers borrowed from Chris­ tian idiom, using the presumed Protestant mores of the American public sphere to effective indoctrinating advantage. In the same moment as Christian hygiene and Social Purity reformers scourged prostitution and

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recommended birth control strategies, manufacturers capitalized on the American hunger for a certain sort of clean. Ivory, for example, took its name from a spring 1879 Episcopal sermon on the Forty-­Fifth Psalm heard by Harley Procter at the Church of Our Savior in Cincinnati: “All thy garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of ivory palaces whereby they have made thee glad.” Procter & Gamble’s first ad for this new product was subsequently printed in a Christian weekly, the Independent, on December 21, 1882. By 1890, thirty million cakes of Ivory were bought annually.17 In its in­ dustrial management, Procter & Gamble also embraced Progressive Era Prot­estantism as an important endorsement. In 1896, the leading Social Gospel theologian Washington Gladden (1836–­1918) was invited to speak at its seventeenth semiannual dividend meeting. As he presented “The Relations of Capital and Labor,” Gladden cooed, “The relations which subsist between employer and employees in Ivorydale, between the directing minds and helping hands, are the kind of relations that I wish to see everywhere between these classes.”18 Ivorydale epitomized for Gladden the harmony possible within modern industry between employer and employees. Soap did not just clean bodies; it was produced by clean practices. Even in their efforts to solicit consumer interest, soap companies walked a holy high road. John H. Woodbury Company’s “Facial Purity League,” for example, developed a sale campaign that described in vivid Christian language the connection between soap and virtue. Cleansers supplied a purifying baptism in sin-­and soot-­soaked cities. B. T. Babbitt, hawking Babbitt’s Best Soap, mimicked this tactic, ascribing a Christian collector’s value to soap wrappers. Any consumer who submitted twenty-­five wrappers received a panel picture, often a biblical scene. Editions of some illustrations ran into the hundreds of thousands. Wool Soap inaugurated the practice of rebates in 1898, donating a penny apiece to the Chicago temple of the Women’s Chris­ tian Temperance Union every time someone remitted a wrapper to the firm.19 These data represent the ways specific soap companies connected product promotions with Christian social reform in an epoch ripe with new mar­ kets like settlement houses, cities, and missionary fields, yet lacking consumers who knew they needed to be clean. These competitive ploys to at­tract consumer attention mirrored a moment when Protestants became increasingly cognizant through imperial encounter of religious com­petitors to their Christian majority. The shopper’s emergent buffet, like the array shown at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, enticed ecclesiastical and man­ ufacturing producers to consider their spot on the sectarian and store shelves.

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Soap was an able intermediary between the desire for consumption and the desire for salvation in a modernity that imagined that neither religious nor corporate allegiance would be requisite in the future. The visual culture of Procter & Gamble quelled modernity’s social riot into a signifying calm. Certain groups succeed, as Anne McClintock has explained, in foreclosing the ambivalence that fetishism embodies by successfully imposing their economic and cultural system on others through coercion or hegemony.20 In advertisements illustrated by Sydney Adamson, Jessie Wilcox Smith, and Fanny Y. Cory, the cultural system of Ivory soap offered an iconological symphony of cleanliness. The images used soap as building blocks, suggested soap through the sight of clean fabric, and displayed soap in the hand of a carefully posed white bather. “The nearest thing to water, air, and sun is Ivory soap,” declared one advertisement, “light as the water, bright as the air, white as the sun.”21 White bars of soap constructed buildings of white fame and power. White bars of soap ringing the globe, offering a halo of cleanliness. White women and sailor lads do their white washing. Ivory bars lay truck to anyone, anywhere who desires that which the product assures: “to cleanse without injuring.” The “do no harm” Ivory bar became a symbolic sidekick to the history of Protestant missions, American expansions, and the widespread sanitization of American culture.22 “Wherever there is stainless white cleanliness,” promised one ad, “there you may find Ivory soap.”23 In England, Pears soap advertisements offered more obviously racial tales of black-­to-­white transformation, and the “white man’s burden” of imperial occupation, “brightening the dark corners of the earth.” In the United States, Ivory propagated a milder version of  that intent, suggesting Ivory soap is wherever cleanliness is needed. “Ivory Soap follows the flag,” elaborated one ad. “Wherever America goes, it is ‘among those present.’ ” But Americanism was less frequently iterated than gendered respite and camaraderie. The same ad continued, “Soap is, in fact, the very joy of living to Our Boys when they are relieved from the front lines for rest, recreation, clean clothes, and a bath.” Pictures of men rowing, bathing, showering, and maintaining their physical appearance dominated Ivory’s advertising campaigns of the early twentieth century. Women did appear, but as isolated figures either in the act of cleaning or afterward, when they’re cleansed, standing white and bright before the admiring gaze of a man. When he was not looking upon pure ladies, Ivory profiled the man as a social, watery sort that needed a good bath after hard work, hard war, or a hard game (fig. 9). One ad read: “The mild smooth, copious Ivory lather feels grateful to the sweating skin and tired muscles. It is this

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Figure 9. An Ivory soap advertisement from August 18, 1906, published in the Churchman, vol. 94.

ability to cleanse thoroughly without irritation to the skin that makes Ivory Soap so popular with all athletes.”24 Amid swirls of suds and partially clad male bodies, Ivory readies his reentry from men’s rooms to mixed company. The American eye had been trained to associate the male nude with water, a relationship first identified by Leslie Fiedler in his study of writings by Whitman, Melville, and Twain. Fiedler wrote, “The immensity of water defines a loneliness that demands love . . . its strangeness symbolizes the disavowal of the conventional that makes possible all versions of love.”25 Large regionalist paintings by Thomas Eakins, Duncan Grant, and John Steuart Curry offer portraits of homosocial play in pools and waterways ostensibly hidden away from public view. Men’s bodies, carefully positioned, conquer the outcropping, the dive, and the race while luxuriating in a bathing process that promised purity for the ladies who would, the images suggested,

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receive them on the other side with white towels and pious postures. In his summary study of homoerotic American art, Jonathan Weinberg explains: In the visual arts, water and the water’s edge provide the opportunity to show the male body nude or nearly nude in a modern setting, but one that also transports us to an imagined space of freedom in which restrictions on behavior are relaxed and boys can be boys. . . . Water heightens the eroticism of the male figure, even as it has the potential to cleanse the body of sin.26

As water flowed around pastoral nudes, it also offered urban recourse from grime. Washing and cleanliness were central tenets of the Young Men’s Christian Association, an institution of muscular Christianity that encouraged the embrace of manly friendship and a strengthened body for sport and male fellowship. As Siobhan Somerville has demonstrated, racial and sexual identities were contingent classifications, since late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­ century discourses on race provided a logic through which sexologists and other medical “experts” articulated emerging models of homosexuality in the United States.27 Ivory suds purified individuals of lower-­class markings, their advertisement proposed, suggesting that those who did not use their product were coarse and impure.28 Jacob Riis praised the Children’s Aid Society in New York for washing immigrant children as soon as they came to one of the society’s lodging houses: “It is the settled belief of the men who conduct them that soap and water are as powerful moral agents in their particular field as preaching.”29 The purifications of gender and race transferred so intensely by Ivory ads also proposed spiritual refinement. If advertising is the missionary arm of industrial religion, then the images in the Ivory soap campaign might be seen as bobbling equitably between a culture of sentimental evangelicalism and its vitriolic coconspirator, muscular Christianity. A religious history of soap would not just stop at a preacher’s invocation or an advertising of whiteness. A religious history of soap would also include some demography of the social culture of soap’s production. It is possible, for example, to develop a powerfully ecumenical Protestant picture of the Procter & Gamble clans, with the former attending Episco­pal churches as the latter committed themselves to Methodist ones. Cincinnati obituaries for both William Procter and James Gamble made a point to note

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their loyal tithing of one-­tenth of their income. Several members from each family attended the new Episcopal Kenyon College in nearby Gambier, Ohio, and many offspring married preacher’s daughters, like David Berry Gamble, who married a daughter of the Presbyterian minister William S. Huggins, and William S. Gamble, who married a daughter of the Methodist clergyman William Nash, long-­time editor of the Christian Apologist and forerunner of German Methodism in Ohio. Episcopalian civility genealogically melded to Wesleyan austerity in the American Midwest, where the land was marked by revivals that preached pure hearts, washed sin, and clean souls, and church building that promised institutional constancy. Advertising executives did, historically, descend from the Episcopal ranks, which could begin to explain presumptions of rectitude and imperial order. Yet the flourishes of the ads, their hearty manhood and slinky nymphs, show the way advertising constructed its own nondenominational therapy, one that combined Southern Baptist praise of whiteness and northern Methodist worries over alcohol additives. The most consequential documents for a religious history of soap are, however, far from denominational archives. These documents are those which explained, through free pamphlets and public education, how to use soap, how to need soap, as one Ivory ad encouraged, “for everything and anything.” These texts record the founding and brief “lustrum” of the Cleanliness Institute. Begun the late 1920s, the Cleanliness Institute represents the total marriage of moral didacticism and medical interventionism. Organized by the Association of American Soap and Glycerin Producers, the institute was a trade association formed to protect its members’ market and promote the consumption of  their product. Its flagship publication, The Cleanliness Journal, redacted research and reprinted newspaper evaluations of hygiene culture. Member companies of the Association of American Soap and Glycerin Producers manufactured over 80 percent of the soap used in the United States and created a half-­million-­dollar endowment to fund its educational endeavors. The cause of the institute was framed as a mission to an unclean public, to, in its words, “teach and spread the doctrine of cleanliness.”30 For a brief time, writes the historian Vincent Vinikas, the Clean­ liness Institute became “a center of learning: of learning the need for more soap consumption in America.” Americans had to learn “not just that they were still soiled, but that they could never be sanitary enough.”31 This was a campaign on behalf of a commodity cast in the guise of a moral sanitation. The Cleanliness Institute taught men, women, and children how to ritually purify themselves through teaching strategies of soap usage in multiple

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contexts. If talk of ritual is, as many theorists suggest, requisite to have right ritual, then the Cleanliness Institute carved an astonishing catechism and set of corollary practices. From its offices in New York, the institute distributed incantation after incantation to branch efforts across the country. From the Handbook of Antiseptics (1918) to the Essentials of Healthful Living (1925), from Mouth Hygiene (1927) to Care of the Face (1927), adults were mass-­mediated through a pristine print culture. The Book about Baths (1930) offered twenty-­four pages of recipes for morning baths, after-­work baths, baths to improve looks, baths for children, hot baths, cold baths, and tepid baths. All these baths impressed editorial America. Immediately upon its founding, the institute received lavish press treatment as a sign of the social conscience possessed by big business. The Minneapolis Tribune reported, “Soap can be made one of the preservatives and safeguards of our basic social institutions.” Through its exonerating agency, soap offered not only sanitation but explicit salvation, as one Detroit Free Press writer explained: “As it is with godliness, so with cleanliness, there are many millions without the desire to repent and be laved. We must continue to ‘sell’ the world on cleanliness.” Sale and salvation were easy equals for these reporters, knowing as they did that soap is a product of science, offering secular miracles. “Soap has been a potent factor in civilization, no doubt,” wrote the San Francisco Bulletin. “It has worked many wonders.”32 During a time when scholars of comparative religion like James G. Frazer (1854–­1941) plotted the evolutionary development of  humanity from magic to religion, religion to science, the Cleanliness Institute tracked humans from filth to cleanliness. This was a cleanliness achieved through a theological hygiene and a consumer training. Although cleanliness was an adult duty, children were particular targets. With funds from Procter & Gamble, the Cleanliness Institute employed a stable of writers to author children’s books and curricular manuals. Through the distribution of stories like Mrs. Fly and Mrs. Mos­ quito Decide to Leave Cleanville (1920), Pirate Percy and the Slovenly Sloop: A Playlet for Boys (1922), and Green Duck: Why the Children Left No Rubbish in the Park (1927), the institute embedded messages of clean living into accessible pediatric portholes. There were Songs of Cleanliness (1926) taught by a Procter & Gamble hymnal, as well as a fifteen-­page instruction guide, Modeling Small Sculptures in White Soap (1926). Swimming with images of civilization’s salvations, these juvenilia were not without their multicultural aspirations. In After the Rain: Cleanliness Customs of Children in Many Lands (1927), Grace T. Hallock, a well-­known writer of school health books, offered friendly stories of schooltime mess making and cheering bouts of

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hand washing. National identity was reified through proclamations of clean­ liness, now and then. The story “A Happy Day in Japan” concluded, “Taro and Kiku are proud to belong to a nation which is said to be one of the cleanest in the world.” An Italian history lesson remembered baths past: “The teacher told them that in the glorious days of the Roman Empire the people were very clean.” And all aspirations of uplift were linked to the ultimate peddler, America: “Yanuk knew that the people in America had sent a great deal of soap to Poland to be used in fighting typhus. But never before had he seen any American soap.”33 All such country-­specific fictions were made practicable in the lessons propagated by the Cleanliness Institute’s proposed school reforms. “Is the ad­vancement of cleanliness a conscious goal in your school?” asked the institute’s curriculum. “Do your cleanliness teaching and equipment result in actual essential cleanliness practices?”34 Teaching equipment included “bring­ ing clowns and trains into classrooms, telling soap and water tales, and organizing health plays and toothbrush brigades.”35 Modern psychology was blended with the best of the new progressive educational philosophies, as the Institute constantly asked that practice be linked with empathy, and empathy connected to genuine conversion. “Morning Inspection Should Be a Time of Happiness,” announced the curriculum. “Make it a pe­riod of rejoicing over cleanliness rather than searching for dirt.” The naturalization of cleanliness was processed as a gentle morning ablution, described by the curriculum in three parts: Minimize self-­consciousness and make the practice of the daily cleanliness habits matter-­of-­fact and a natural part of the daily duties. Suggest any action necessary as a matter of course, never as a punishment. Smile in approval at those who are clean and in understanding of those who are not.36

With cleanliness a “matter of course” littered with condescension and smiles, the goal of the curriculum was a recalibration of attitude. “Likes to have face clean at all times,” hoped the Cleanliness Institute for its junior subjects: Enjoys a warm soapy bath. Likes to know that those parts of the body which perspire freely, are involved in discharge of body wastes, and subject to body odors, are clean each day. Likes the feeling of clean, well-­ groomed feet. Enjoys the feeling of being clean.

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Enjoyment and liking took precedence over the medical specifics of hygiene. Although reformers emphasized in their formal literatures the underlying science of clean, the Cleanliness Institute did not pitch medicine but wizened experience. Educated children will know, according to the curriculum, “WHY one should leave the washbowl clean and neat for the next person . . . WHY used towels should be placed in the waste paper basket.” Frederick Houghton, principal of a Buffalo public school and author of First Lessons in English for Foreigners in Evening Schools (1911), supplied a catechism that focused on inculcation and acceptance: “What is this? That is soap. What can you do with soap and water? I wash my hands and face with soap and water. What do you use the basin for? I put the water into the basin.”37 Here the use value is a matter of repeated question and predictable reply. Anthropomorphic parable suffused the curriculum. “Children of this age are much interested in their pets and in how animal friends practice habits of cleanliness,” it explained. “Keep notebooks as to the habits of different animals.” Presumed throughout the curriculum was the contrast between cleanliness and slovenliness, education and ignorance, civilization and savagery. “How do the habits of animals in captivity differ from those in the wild state?” asked one curricular lesson. “Visit a zoo and have the keeper tell about the animals.” The comparison was not presumed: “Compare changes of habits in captivity with changes in habits of men when living in closer contact with each other.”38 Clean captivity is preferred. Students should leave the zoo and know that their tenements and townhouses are safe havens, so long as they bracket themselves in an assimilated aura of clean. As seems to be inevitable in every story of modernity, the divide between primitive subject and the civilized citizen is vast, yet traversable. New habits made modern men. But these habits were not revolutionary; they were related as familiar, previously met, and formerly practiced. Religious rituals of hand washing and bodily purification were persistently invoked and praised, from the baths of Rome to the mikvahs of Jews to the regulatory cleansings of Babylonians, Assyrians, Hindus, and Muslims.39 As one journalist for The Cleanliness Journal suggested: The purificatory ablutions which the Greeks and Romans performed at intervals by way of preparation for communion with their gods is proposed as a part of the daily program of life. . . . The hygienic laws of the Pentateuch . . . gave cleanliness of hands as a figure of speech for those who were innocent of evil and pure in heart.

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Any anxieties or prohibitions about cleanliness were the product of primitive irrationality, not thoughtful faith. “Taboos against the practice of cleanliness . . . usually result from unreasoning superstition, time-­worn custom, and age-­old tradition. They are often but the twisted and grotesque health concepts of a simple-­minded peasant race.”40 Indeed, the strongest language of condemnation was saved not for the indigenous or the immigrant but the problematic priest and his archaic Catholic Church. “The influence of the early Christians on later Christendom was tremendous,” wrote Grace T. Hallock in A Tale of Soap and Water (1928). “Their attitude toward cleanliness colored the thoughts of a thousand years.” Hallock elaborated this profile of the early church and its subsequent proponents: The priests did not encourage bathing. Indeed their teaching that the body is to be despised actually discouraged it. . . . To the early Christians the luxury of baths of Rome was connected with the moral and spiritual decay of the people. When gradually the Christians came to power there was a reaction from the Roman baths. The cleanliness of the body fell out of favor and the cult of uncleanliness began.41

In this historical arc, the early church and its priestly purveyors infected man with a hatred of the body, endorsing a theological favor for filth. The anti-­Catholicism of such a narration mirrored an overarching Protestant nativism sanctioned by popular and pedagogical literatures of the period. For example, in Modern Educators and Their Ideals (1909), Tadasu Misawa pointed to the progressive after-­effects of Protestantism’s triumph: The Reformation really marks the beginning of modern education in the West. . . . [The Reformation] awakened a sense of the worth of the individual; the longing for the perfection of personality in its all-­sidedness, intellectual, moral, and physical, was aroused.42

The “gospel of cleanliness” was the good news of a body-­loving, soul-­salving Christianity, one at odds with the self-­loathing squalor of Rome’s church.43 As with all antagonisms, however, the Cleanliness Institute’s nativism grated against the beneficial iconography of the Catholic subject, as when it appeared in the form of a white-­clad mosaic monk painted by the illustrator J. C. Leyendecker for P&G in 1901. The advertiser was never beneath the use of an enemy’s righteous iconography. Even if the product needed the image,

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the society did not need those sorts of pagan people. The modern life endorsed by the Cleanliness Institute was the antiseptic individual experience, with unseen hands removing the hangnails of human production from the visual landscape, lighting a cleansed and widened way for us to toil. “Cleanliness is something bigger than a cake of soap and a tub of water,” explained Dr. W. W. Peter in a 1927 issue of The Cleanliness Journal.44 This “something bigger” is a version of moral excitement reverberating throughout that moment, when whiteness, civilization, and Protestant activism climaxed in the pitch of facial products and modern loveliness. “Cleanliness!” exclaimed another editorial. “There is a crispness, a fragrance to that word which stirs the imagination almost magically. In cleanliness there is beauty and growth, an immaculateness which seems divine.”45 The Cleanliness Institute’s primary task was to train Americans in new cleansing rituals, to ensure that they knew not only about soap, but that they needed to use soap in order to be good, godly Americans. “Cleanliness is our guardian angel in the material world,” explained Dr. Alice G. Bryant of Gorgas Memorial Institute.46 “We should put those who promote cleanliness on earth next to those who try to promote its godliness,” finalized another.47 In Hallock’s A Tale of Soap and Water, talk of godliness was coupled with an explicit description of  bathing, and cleanliness as ritual (fig. 10): We have seen that at the very beginning a bath was probably an accident. Further on, a bath became an incident, looked upon as unavoidable in the business of fishing or of crossing streams. Last of all a bath became a frequent event. It acquired importance in itself as a means of cleanliness and comfort.48

Creating such new “events” was the hallmark of the advertising era, as Earnest Calkins and Ralph Holden wrote in their 1905 treatise, Modern Advertising: Advertising modifies the course of a people’s daily thoughts, gives them new words and phrases, new ideas, new fashions, new prejudices, and new customs. In the same way it obliterates old sets of words and phrases, fashions and customs.49

Calkins and Holden summarized a procedure that has become axiomatic. In order to make something new, to argue something into your daily process, something else must be altered, exempted, and subtracted. Soap wasn’t soap without more products: washstands and towels, basins and ewers, flesh

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Figure 10. An illustration from Grace T. Hallock’s A Tale of  Soap and Water: The Historical Progress of  Cleanliness (1928).

brushes and tubs, plumbing systems and scents. Products beget products. This is how taking a bath and buying soap became rituals of modernity, rituals inlaid with certitude about the sanctifying role of cleanliness and the purifications of consumer rites. Many years later, you find yourself in a hotel room, selecting from an array of Aveda soap scents and an array of spiritual lessons. To explain how American theologies may have endorsed and encoded consumer practices is to explain how American religion has become industrialized and incorpo­ rated, the way it has learned to provide morsels of “feeling good” through vast institutional structures, missions, and ministries and ceaseless reappraisals of the given moment, objects, peoples, needs. Such an explanation requires a long view of the ways the fantasies of the nineteenth century bore an orgiastic twentieth, how religion mirrored and made department stores, storefront shops, satellite branches of monolithic megabodies, and online shopping. This would be a messy, maddening history, including tales of profit-­seeking Buddhist monks and monomaniacal television evangelists, parables of gender-­busting activist nuns, and jeremiad wails through wartimes and supply sides. In short, such a history of twentieth-­century religion would need to include the splendid profusion that made Dr. Bronner’s

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soap, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and prescriptions of “corporate religion,” as well as little laminated menus sitting in bedside stands. In such a history, ritual would be the transactional emphasis. “Ritual is primarily a matter not of nouns and verbs, but of qualifiers—­of adjectives and adverbs,” writes Jonathan Z. Smith. “Ritual precises ambiguities.”50 Advertising cultures did not merely process obvious cultures of signs like straining male bodies, lithe ladies, and blanching whiteness but also conjured processes to precise the ambiguities of the modern milieu. “The poetics of cleanliness is a poetics of social discipline . . . demarcating boundaries between one community and another,” writes Anne McClintock.51 These boundaries were perpetuated as medical, corporate, and secular while conveyed via individual rituals, Protestant presumptions about the nature of the self, and overt moralizing about the civilization of consumption.52 It is important, too, to note that this ritual training was a privatizing impulse, as public baths were quickly disassembled by class conflict. Upper-­class re­ formers simply could not control the potentially primitive behaviors therein. With a minimum of overt violence, consumption became a means of waging class war, not only at the level of the thing but also in the adjudication of space. Under the lacquer of pleasure and freedom, prettiness and denatured nature, advertisers marketed a world with fewer peculiarities, and narrowed conceptions of public, cheerful, whitened normalcy. The rituals of bathing thus moved inward, deeper into a decorated domestic sphere. Industrialization thus found itself hoisted repeatedly on its own efficiency petard, as Jacqueline Wilkie describes: “While tubs may have helped teach people to be productive, orderly members of society, private bathing also indulged the industrializing individual’s narcissistic impulses.”53 As bathhouses closed, so did the storied public sphere and its discursive opportunities. We left the baths and became not merely better bathers, not simply more clean, but also reconciled to the domestications of modernity. What, then, ritual? Is it the medium or the mode? I conclude with the language of Jonathan Smith, a scholar who has spent no small amount of time examining matters of purity and impurity. Time and again, Smith presses students of religion to the miniature, the seemingly meaningless, and the mundane. He does this in pleading tones: We have not been attendant to the ordinary, recognizable features of religion as negotiation and application but have rather perceived it to be an extraordinary, exotic category of experience which escapes everyday

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modes of thought. But human life—­or, perhaps more pointedly, humane life—­is not a series of burning bushes.54

Smith wrote these words many years ago, rising to the defense of those prim­itive subjects cataloged for their spectacular performances of religious ritual. He prods for students of religion to find the places—­private and public—­beyond the burning bush. As an example, Smith tells of his summer working on a small farm in Upstate New York: I would have to rise at about a quarter to four and fire up the wood burning stove, heat a pan of water and lay out the soap and towels so that my boss could wash when he awoke half an hour later. Each morning, to my growing puzzlement, when the boss would step outside after completing his ablutions, he would pick up a handful of soil and rub it over his hands. After several weeks of watching this activity, I finally, somewhat testily, asked for an explanation: “Why do you start each morning by cleaning yourself and then step outside and immediately make yourself dirty?” “Don’t you city boys understand anything?,” was the scornful reply. “Inside the house it’s dirt; outside, it’s earth. You must take it off inside to eat and be with your family. You must put it on outside to work and be with the animals.” What my boss instinctively knew is what we have only recently discovered . . . that there is nothing that is inherently or essentially clean or unclean, sacred or profane.  .  .  . My boss had achieved power through his skill in compartmentalization. . . . He conferred value upon that place by his cosmology of home and farm and by the dramatization of his respect for the integrity of their borders.55

Here Smith supplies a sober pastoral, marked by the human talent for invention and repetition, compartment and cosmos. Smith himself never named the commercializing compulsions that took over this distilled Durk­ heimian universe. Yet consumer culture already had its foot in the door, as Smith would “lay out the soap” early every morning. To ask just how the soap got there, then, isn’t merely to quest for the subtext to an accessory; it is to inquire after dirt, how it got designated as dirt, and how we came to think there was any ritual, ever, that could remove it from our person. “Purification is driven by the sense that there is something scandalous or threatening about the mixing of humans and things, culture and nature,” writes Webb Keane.56 Like grass stains on a Tide commercial, consumer

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cul­ture makes scandals only it can resolve. The logic of the system is its own prescription. We are now so inside its formats, so devoted to the bar beside the sink, that we cannot recollect when it was we first heard the catechism. What is this? That is soap. What can you do with soap and water? I wash my hands and face with soap and water. What do you use the basin for? I put the water into the basin. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Imagining Celebrity

0 5 Sacrificing Britney Celebrity and Religion in America

The November 19, 2007, issue of the American tabloid US Weekly in­ cludes no fewer than eight specific citations of one woman: Britney Spears. First, there is a financial reminder, the announcement that Britney’s perfumes Curious and Fantasy have earned more than $84 million (a scented sale superior to fragrances by Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Taylor, and Sarah Jessica Parker). Second, there is the intergalactic invocation, wherein one star points to another one. “The paparazzi kind of figured out that we’re quite boring and Britney’s far more interesting, so they go to her house,” remarks Victoria Beckham. Beckham, onetime Spice Girl, ongoing fashion­ ista, and wife to soccer star David Beckham, here indebts her relative domes­ tic privacy to the paparazzi invasion of Spears. Third, the magazine itself honors “Brit Look-­Alike Winners!” Readers of US Weekly had submitted Polaroids and digital photos to demonstrate their costumed imitation of iconic Britney’s famous performances, with photos of American everygirls flaunting Britney “post-­shave” pink wigs and “classic” video getups. Fourth, in a regular column of stalking commentary about which restaurant starlets occasioned, the magazine notifies readers that Britney visited a tanning salon on November 3.1 Consider these four uses of the names Britney and Britney Spears as inaugural examples of the consumption of the celebrity. Britney’s stories—­ the stories of  her life, the stories in her songs, the stories of her Hollywood rise and fall, the stories in her videos and movies and television shows—­ contribute to the consumption of her production. But the abbreviated form of these US Weekly invocations underlines that the stories of Britney are

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only a part of the story. It is her name that is consequential in the marketplace of celebrity consumption. No matter what the content of her stories may be, Britney as a word is more than herself; she is Britney as an economy. According to these citations, she needs in that magazine, in that instant throwaway medium, and in that instant forgotten moment no introduction. She is a solicitation for a cosmetic procedure, a scent, an imagined horde of cameras, and an impersonation. She is background music and iTunes ac­cessory. The issue includes an astrological reminder to Scorpios that they have a “perfect excuse” to clean their apartments, recommending that they “blast Britney’s new CD” as they follow the stars. Later, in a section titled “This Minute You Want to Know About,” editors recommend the “80s-­Music Recycling” of “Britney Spears” paying tribute to the Eurythmics in “Everybody.” She is what you need to know to consume this product, US Weekly. She is also what you need to know—­and what you want to have—­to listen, to clean, to beautify, and to be of the tabloid now.2 She is also, it seems, a problem. That same November 2007 issue—­the one relying on Britney for product endorsement and reader response—­marks a historically low moment in the stories told about Britney. The cover of the magazine declares that her parenting coach had declared her “SICK!” The cover defines sickness with quick exclamatory descriptions, explaining that “mental illness signs worsen” as Britney “leaves boys in car while shopping” and “denies them trick-­or-­treating” and, inexplicably, “swaps clothes with bartender.” Deep inside, the reporter Kevin O’Leary offers a six-­page answer to the headlining question: “Does She Even Care?” The replying ev­idence suggests that she does not, as O’Leary and the US Weekly editorial staff collage pictures of “zombie-­like” Britney “chugging” a Red Bull, shopping for two eighteen-­thousand-­dollar chandeliers, and offering “interactions with her boys . . . that were not child-­centered.” Note here how her consumer success with perfumes, albums, and concerts is replaced by a consumer decay of purported chugging and suggested overspending. In the same issue of a single magazine, Spears is producer and consumer, productive and consumptive, consuming and consumed. O’Leary’s intervention is not an ironic one. Readers are to understand that this is for Britney’s betterment, and that this investigative reporting serves to describe her malady, not merely profit from her maudlin decline. The narrative zigzags between her aesthetic (“deteriorating personal appearance”) and her psychology (her “emotional disconnect,” her “delayed adolescence,” and her “prolonged apathy”). It is hard, though, to know where the sale of experience ends and the intervention begins. It is hard to tell if we are to repudiate or imitate

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the Britney under survey. Readers learn: “She’s Wearing Tops as Dresses!” “Runs Over a Cop’s Foot!” “Parties Till 3 A.M.” These are advertisements of demise, but also advertisements of verve. The collapse of a pop icon accompanies her persistent foist onto our radar as a single-­name brand that readers consume as a producer of the things they want and as a consumer of the things her mediums sell.3 In scholarship on contemporary media cultures, the celebrity is repeatedly described as a commodity. In particular, the celebrity is a media effect reliant on the acquisition and publicity of that individual’s private life.4 The violence of this transformation, from human to celebrity, is worth pausing upon even as it has become axiomatic. Transforming flesh into commodity has a long history, a history that includes far less voluntary formats of commodification than those experienced by Britney Spears. Invoking prior practices of human trade may beg differentiation from the elective auditions and self-­making of modern celebrity. But to make what is human something that is marketable—­to convert from raw material a Louisiana girl, for example, to consumer good (that “SICK!” cover damsel)—­is, undeniably, a procedure of atomization, valuation, and dehumanization. Anatomizing the processes by which this modus operandi transpires should be a focal point of academic research. Such investigations will find that there is always a historic fact or incident that compels this procedure to begin. A celebrity may emerge from a single video, television episode, or performing incident. That celebrity is then confirmed and perpetuated through the parsing of the ineffable of that moment—­the performer’s incomparable talent or her uncanny timing, or both—­into more translatable bits of possibility. A star is born, but then to sustain her celebrity life her gifts (such as they might be) will be chopped and repackaged into capitalizing cover shoots, singular accessories, or transcendent features (a mole, a smile, a dance move, a growl in a song). The overlap here between the characters celebrities play and the characters of their pub­ licized “private” lives is difficult to differentiate. What began as some person becomes a story line in which the character of the per­formance is deployed to interpret the character of the person (and vice versa). Meanwhile, the converted human also becomes a composite sketch, with parts and pieces and accessories easily redacted and packaged, remembered and satirized.5 Celebrities may repeatedly fight to deny that they have undergone such a conversion, that they are—­to borrow from an US Weekly idiom—­“Just like US!” Their repeated construction of that quotidian humanity is a necessary component of their ongoing commodification as objects of glamour,

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of exclusive talent, and of outsized personal drama. Claims of accessibility only underline just how remote they have become. What, then, is the relationship between this process and the terms of religion? Writing about late Roman society, Peter Brown remarked that “the holy man was deliberately not human.”6 In a consumer society, the transformation of men and women into celebrities has inspired some scholars to remark on the divinity of celebrities themselves.7 This suggests that in American culture, the celebrity functions as a component of a pantheon that exists to dramatize social concerns, endorse certain forms of normative behavior, and fulfill narrative fantasies of an inchoate, disconnected, and ostensibly secular public. Drawing such quick lines between the gods of Greece and the stars on Hollywood Boulevard is less rigorous than what the complexity of celebrity and its consumption demand, however. Any connections made between religion and celebrity should first be considered in a specified research territory. Casting Angelina Jolie as the queenly Greek goddess Hera, for example, would fall into the pursuit of celebrity as religion. In such a set of studies, scholars might examine consumer behavior around celebrity consumption—­the reading of tabloids in a particular ritual manner, for ex­ ample, or annual home parties on Oscar night. Observing, too, how celebrities become invocations of certain social problems, or how individuals might identify with (even impersonate) a beloved celebrity could show researchers how celebrity has become a form of ritual practice, moral commentary, and identity development in ways correlate to religious behavior. Studying celebrity as religion is just one piece of the territory necessary in the exploration of these categories. Any study of celebrity as religion must also account for the usages of those terms—­celebrity and religion—­ within the media and the structures of celebrity and religion. Scholars must then also consider the religion of celebrities, like the popular investment in the Church of Scientology by many prominent actors, or the frequently invoked loyalty to Christianity by certain musical genres and individuals. This is to speak generally of something pointedly specified: How has the Church of Scientology come to be understood as a “celebrity religion”? How might the principles of that faith correlate with experiences of celebrity? How has the institutional religion responded to, perhaps engendered, the participation of celebrities in it? Answers to these questions would not merely offer sociological, anthropological, or biographical data useful to the analysis of the religions of celebrities, but also reveal the meaning of celebrity and the meaning of religion in the country and chronology in which we investigate. Because of the way late-­twentieth-­century tabloid culture

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permeates and specifies, nothing about celebrities—­from their choice of dog leash to denominational home—­is insignificant to the interpretation of the culture in which they appear. Similarly, pursuing celebrities of religion would complicate our sense of what celebrity and religion might be in that same cultural location. Remarking that the television evangelist T. D. Jakes and the Unity Church doyenne Marianne Williamson are religious celebrities encourages a comparative approach, wherein we might consider what training, talent, narrative tropes, and social structures concocted their religious celebrity alongside what training, talent, narrative tropes, and social structures concocted Tom Cruise’s or Julia Roberts’s celebrity within the seemingly secular realm of entertainment. Linking how celebrities are consumed in a possibly religious manner, how celebrities worship themselves in a religious manner, and how religions construct and produce leaders in a celebrity stride would, in concert, begin to relay a profile in the religion of American celebrity. This is to underline the interconnectedness of ideas about religious institutions in America with ideas about celebrity success, the links between media of celebrity formation and propulsion and media of religious missions and organizational development. Divisions between religious groups and celebrities exist, yet in the American context the rise of the celebrity as a commodity and the dynamics of modern religion have been inextricable. Examples of this commingling may be found in recent work describing the life and ascent of Mary Baker Eddy, Billy Graham, Aimee Semple McPherson, Ronald Reagan, Martha Stewart, and Oprah Winfrey, all of which indicate that American religious history and charismatic celebrity are deeply collaborative through media, style, and sentiment that comprise the collec­tive American public sphere.8 Celebrity culture informs the religious imaginations of its consumers, and consumption of celebrity increasingly formats expectations of religious leadership and their economies of distribution and communication. Into such a terrain of scholarly pursuit, where do we place Britney? The figures cited immediately above tempt significant scrutiny because they led large movements, helmed nations, or garnered awards from long, notable bodies of work. To this convention of heroes we add Britney Spears to our scrutiny. Britney tempts our interest, not because her body of work garners remark for its musical innovation or choreographic genius, but because by any definition, Britney Jean Spears (born December 2, 1981) is a celebrity. She is a celebrity by her own engine of labor, as a 1992 contestant on Star Search, as a cast member on the Disney Channel’s The New Mickey Mouse

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Figure 11. The pop singer Britney Spears holds one of her four MTV awards at a photo call in Dublin, Ireland, November 11, 1999. The singer from Louisiana won Best Female, Best Breakthrough, Best Pop Act, and Best Single for “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” reflecting the seventeen-­year-­old’s popularity with some 2 million telephone-­voting MTV viewers across Europe. Photograph: Courtesy AP Photo/Christine Nesbitt.

Club (1993–­94), and as a signatory to a Jive recording contract in 1997. She took the steps and sold her wares, accepting corporate cajoling and crafting to produce her debut album, . . . Baby One More Time (1999) (fig. 11). Within a year, she released her second album, Oops! . . . I Did It Again (2000). At the turn of the twenty-­first century, Britney helmed the bubble gum brigade

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that brought back boy bands and teen pop as viable Billboard superstars. According to Zomba Label Group and Sony Music, by 2009 Spears had sold over 85 million records worldwide from her six studio and four compilation albums. On December 11, 2009, Billboard named Spears the second-­best-­ selling act of the 2000s solely based on album sales, as well as the eighth overall best act of the decade based on album sales, chart success, and cultural relativity. By such metrics of profitability and cultural pervasion, Britney Spears is a celebrity. Studying the relationship between her celebrity and American religion would include several stages of research, including, first, a profile of her proclaimed religious identity. Researchers might then gather Spears’s early Christian testimonials, where she connected her pink sweetness to her Bible Belt Southern Baptist youth. One might further examine the ways the Southern Baptist Convention constructed womanly piety, paving the way to Spears’s style of coy dress, wet-­lipped cosmetics, and proclamations of virginity. The religious history of Britney would unfold further once she immersed herself in her Hollywood life and celebrity networks, finding in 2004 a connection to the Kabbalah Centre of Los Angeles through tutelage from her childhood idol and pop predecessor, Madonna. The journey would jag again when, in 2006, she immersed herself in a new form of domestic adulation, stating on her website, “I no longer study Kabbalah, my baby is my religion.”9 Once established, Spears’s chronology (Baptist, kabbalist, baby-­ist) could be usefully deployed to model a classic plot in American religion from denominated faith, to seeker spirituality, to, finally, a religion based entirely on service to self.10 Britney Spears as celebrity, as a subject whose details are sold for our tabloid pleasure, becomes then an icon of an American ideal, the freely wandering consumer of religious possibility. Another related avenue of research would be the religious response to Britney Spears. In such a venture, the emphasis might be on usages of Britney Spears in sermons, or prohibitions on her later, raunchier music by certain parishes. With her early-­career promises to protect her virginity, Spears became an icon for the True Love Waits pro-­chastity movement. Scholarship on this resurgence of evangelical piety in America, especially as it related to the repeated elections of George W. Bush, might then deepen Spears’s in­ vocation as an iconic innocence within a broader project of national sentimentalism in which girlhood was reborn and recast through promise rings, chastity balls, and new international missionary interventions. That the post-­9/11 American evangelical militarism collided, too, with Spears’s personal decay—­her multiple marriages and parenting mishaps—­should not

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be seen as a mere politicizing of her product. Her product would always remain herself. Her collapse heightened the attention she received from religious quarters, as worry about Britney inspired the senior pastor of an eight-­thousand-­member megachurch in Kentucky to collect “letters of love and support” to send to Spears amid her reported custody battles and drug problems. “Take a few minutes and write a note to Britney Spears,” the pastor explained in a September 2007 sermon to parishioners at Southland Christian Church in Lexington. “No preaching. No criticizing. Just love. As a church, let’s love Britney the way Jesus loves her.”11 Pursuing such religious replies to Britney Spears might convey the potency of celebrity iconicity, the accessibility of her domestic struggles, and the activist outreach and cow­ boy capitalism of late-­twentieth-­century evangelicalism.12 Finally, Spears as a subject of religion would return us powerfully to the problems of consumption. Within her arc of American ascent, Spears struggled and staggered, becoming a cautionary tale of corrupted purity. If celebrity functions in part as a form of religion, consuming Britney might be in part a consideration of sexual mores, female ambition, or modern domesticity. Without also weighing the ritual tones of this consumption, scholars miss an opportunity to view the production of celebrity—­and its resultant consumption—­as a large-­scale ritual of its own. The scholar of religion Jonathan Smith speaks of ritual as a “focusing lens” where “everything, at least potentially, is of significance.”13 Ritual is a controlled environment, a ring for spectatorship. While there are many rituals at play in the religions of Britney Spears’s celebrity, perhaps the most tempting is that of sacrifice. To answer the enigma of sacrifice, Georges Bataille explains, “the enigma’s answer must be formulated on a level equal to that of its celebrants’ performance.”14 Whatever Britney is cannot be nearly as important as what she is made to be. The enigma is, always, enigmatic; photographs lacking panties don’t alter the fact that we cannot know Britney. We can only know what they—­her corporate celebrants, her grocery shoppers—­conjure her to be. This conjuring is a feature of the sacrifice. Throughout history, societies have prescribed offerings to divinities. Burnt offerings, accompanied by omens; divinations, spurred by sortition; blood, tapped from children: all extracted to feed the gods. Today such explicit sacrificial rites might be seen in Santeria, among the shamanistic Khanties of western Siberia, in populations (from Mali to Manhattan) violating animal cruelty legislation with subterranean kills. These are the obvious incidents, where an offering is carefully destroyed as an intermediary between the sacrificers (the celebrants, the worshippers, and the congregants) and the deity to whom

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the process is directed. For most theorists of sacrifice, the offering must be transfigured (ruined, shattered, parsed, plundered) to be understood as sacrificed.15 Yet this is as much a metaphoric expectation as a literal one. “Not all ritual killings are sacrifices,” explains one observer, “nor do all sacrifices involve slaughter.”16 Sacrifice is exacting, it is controlled, and it is a strategy of managing something on behalf of something else (as a gift to something else). “The performers are totally immersed in the proper execution of their complex tasks,” writes Frits Staal. “Their primary concern, if not obsession, is with rules.”17 The ironies of our endeavor, then, are made apparent. “To bring ‘sacrifice’ under our control as a perfectly defined object of analysis, to cut out and classify its constituent elements, is more like doing sacrifice than understanding it,” writes Nancy Jay. “The victim has indeed been brought under a kind of analytic control, but in the process it has been killed.”18 Our attentions go, then, to theories of sacrifice to find language for Britney’s sacrifice, cutting and classifying as we go in a manner cracking to construct. What we discover quickly is that many of the theories of sacrifice under discussion are irreconcilable with one another. For example, Jonathan Smith ardently argues against explanations of sacrifice, believing that all we can do is describe the ritual, not account for it. He underlines the “transactional character” of sacrifice, a transaction that accomplishes “not by sacramentalism, but by an etiquette of infinite degrees and baroque complexities.”19 Compare this to Georges Bataille’s summary judgment that sacrifice is the “communication of anguish.”20 For Smith, the feeling of sacrifice is impossible to know; for Bataille, its felt content is the only thing worth discussing. Smith is obviously correct—­sacrifice is, after all, referred to as a “gift,” as an “exchange,” and as an “offering.”21 Yet Bataille gets at the affective keen of sacrificial texts and subjects—­after all, the word sacrifice does imply that something has been lost. To define a grammar of celebrity sacrifice, I will do as the celebrities do, namely grab from all resources, even the ones that disagree with one another. Open to debate is whether this makes a useful quilt or a combustible cybernetic organism. Multiple observers of sacrifice have referred to it as a ritual meal or communion meal. Theorists have suggested that what distinguishes sacrifice from other forms of ritual exchange is that it includes the consumption of a cooked oblation.22 Obvious counterexamples make such a universal impossible to claim; however, across many decades of sacrifice study the metaphor of “cuisine,” and, in its enactment, a “feeding frenzy,” litter the ethnographies.23 Many historians of sacrifice have, therefore, thought to look for

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reasons mealtime might be worth giving so much specific ritual attention. Interpretations of sacrifice take as their argumentative point of origin the late-­nineteenth-­century interest in totemism, ideas that climaxed in Freud’s description of the primal horde and the origin of religion. For Freud, the origin of religion was in a ritual that emerged from what he hypothesized as a particular encounter between sons and their father. The sons, jealous of their father’s closeness with their mother, murdered their father and then ate him to hide the murder. Freud characterized this archaic story in Totem and Taboo (1918): “The ambivalent brothers did not just hate the father; they also longed for him. So they resurrected him as the totem animal and forbade his murder except in ritual repetition of the original murder.” According to Freud, these sons “invented sacrifice,” transforming their crime into a ritual.24 All sacrifice repeats this Ur-­murder, redirecting violent anger into a specific communal moment of remembrance at which the family, clan, or religious group honor their totem by reenacting the cannibalism in symbolic form. Writing against Freud, Claude Lévi-­Strauss sought to see the structural similarities among sacrificial rituals without emphasizing some origin story for their structure. Sacrifice is an “alimentary” ritual in Lévi-­ Strauss’s rendering, one that serves a “means of thinking” over and above a “means of communication.”25 It is nourishing to our social sustenance, not a way of conveying ideas about our sociality. Invoking Freud and Lévi-­Strauss in such quick order gives us the opportunity to identify the underlying libidinal drive of sacrifice. Jay argues that sacrificial ritual enacts patrilineal descent, that it is “birth done better.” Sacrifice is, in her brilliant formulation, the “remedy for having been born of woman.” Sacrifice is organized by men for men because they are possessed by “childbirth envy,” by their desire for access to that which simultaneously made them and alienates them from physical knowledge of  kinship.26 Sacrifice is man’s (gender intended) attempt to transcend his mortality through the integration of himself with the world order—­he is the ordering of the “eternal” social world.27 How does this integration occur? Through ritualization (how the killing is done) and rationalization (how the killing is imagined to be neces­ sary).28 The ritualization of sacrifice is defined by its orderliness. René Gi­ rard gave us sacrifice as a category of scrupulous, necessary repetition, a category that provided cookbook style to ritual killing. Sacrifice is, for Gi­ rard, not only the most “fundamental” of rites but also the “most common­ place.”29 In sacrifice, society seeks “to deflect upon a relatively indifferent

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vic­tim, a ‘sacrificeable’ victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it most desires to protect.”30 Sacrifice is the mode by which a society expresses its aggression against its own members. This is how Girard came to refer to sacrifice as a “booster shot,” as it supplies a small dose of the poison necessary to immunize against the widespread infection that will occur without redirection.31 “When a society fails to address the problem of inherent rivalry by means of apotropaic rituals,” Burton Mack explains, “the phenomenon of the ‘monstrous double’ emerges in the form of ‘sacrificial crisis.’ ”32 Sacrifice prompts the entire community to select victims outside itself for the sake of itself, to kill someone who isn’t them to keep them going. The rationalization of this ritualized expulsion casts the victim as savior and the event of his or her death as a donation, a sacrifice to a cause (often a deity) greater than his or her material self. On the other side, the sacrificer (explained Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss), “by the end of the ceremony, has improved his lot, either because he has eradicated the evil to which he was a prey, or because he has regained a state of grace, or because he has acquired a divine power.”33 This is the “vitalizing power,” or, as Maurice Bloch called it, the “rebounding violence,” of sacrifice.34 The sacrificer community, through consumption and conquest (excision and disembowelment), generated a vitality (the alimentary) requisite for its own perpetuation. For this reason, the cuisine of the sacrifice—­the meal, the gift, the offering—­is usually a domesticated animal, something familiar as food, friendly to the sacrificer, yet also separate in species (alien, nonhuman, external). The “surrogate victim” must look enough like the ritual community to be recognizable as a proximate breed (fig. 12). “In animal sacrifices domesticated animals serves this liminal role nicely,” writes Brian K. Smith. “They are both similar to (being ‘domesticated’) and different from (being animals) those who will sacrifice them.”35 Victims must possess an unmistakable otherness that makes violence against them possible without repercussion. Victims must, to use Girard’s language, be “exposed to violence without risk of vengeance.” The sacrifice must, for present, end the cycle of violence that spawned its necessity. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman makes precise this profile for the sacrificed, noting that “to make the sacrifice effective [this] absence of risk must be carefully hidden or better still emphatically denied.” The lamb could bray, the father might return, the food may spoil: “From the original murder the enemy must have emerged not quite dead, but undead, a zombie ready to

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Figure 12. Britney Spears performs with a snake during the finale of the MTV Video Music Awards in New York, September 6, 2001. Photograph: Courtesy AP Photo/Beth A. Keiser.

rise from the grave at any moment.”36 The rationalization of the sacrifice also requires a slight sense that what is being killed could reverse the tables. It’s near enough to look you in the eye. Before the sacrifice completes, the animal or offering is processed, weak­ ened, carefully altered through a series of events. This is why the ritual is work, it is labor, it is intentionally directed energy (those paparazzi, TV producers, and tabloid editors are hustling) that requires feeding to be replenished.

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Most contemporary invocations of sacrifice linger at labor lost:  war­riors felled while battling, jobs cut because of corporate consolidating, and resignations volunteered on behalf of moralizing. Sacrifice denotes something good given up (like consumption for fiscal wellness, or stem cells for cancer cures), something lost for something gained. But it is not given up with a quick seppuku. These sacrifices, as with all others, must be ritualized and dramatized in order to be sacrifices.37 Such procedure de­limits time and space, highlighting the importance of every gesture, marking the event as “set apart” from ordinary activity, ordinary labor, and ordinary loss. Ritual designates and establishes a controlled environment, a ring for spectatorship. Into this ring we argue, or nominate, the adolescent celebrity as an ideal sacrificial subject, a sacrifice made on behalf of a social body, a sacrifice that centralizes communication with, and thinking about, the legitimate social order (or relationship to divinities, to ideals, to higher prin­ciples).38 The circle of paparazzi creates a fishbowl for us to watch the banal, torturously slow procedure of the kill. Diane Negra, professor of film and television studies at the University of East Anglia, returns us again to the gender paradigms. “When we use female celebrities this way, we see them failing and struggling, they serve as proof that for women the work-­life balance is impossible. Can you have it all? The answer these stories give again and again is ‘absolutely not.’ ” Veteran celebrity publicist Max Clifford disagrees with Negra’s gendered reading: “The media don’t mind whether it’s a male or a female,” he comments. “If they can assassinate them and sell newspapers, they will.”39 Adolescent celebrities are selected for particular attention because of their transitory status. Lynne Spears admitted as much recently, saying it probably wasn’t such a good idea to turn her daughter Britney into an international sex symbol at age fifteen: “It’s kind of like Britney was sent out into the world a little bit prematurely.”40 The World Health Organization defines adolescents as persons between ten and nineteen years of age. Historians of the family are less convinced of that assured placement, suggesting that adolescence itself is a category of modern application and historical emergence concomitant with the (collaborative) emergence of advertising and popular psychology.41 Consistent among theories of the adolescent are three definitional attributes: first, it supplies a liminal space between childhood and adulthood, or, as Britney oozed in her eponymous 2001 release, “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman”; second, it is a problematic life stage in and for modern societies; and third, adolescence is a cloistered posi­tion, halfway exposed to certain elements of socialization while limited in its economic

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engagements. The adolescent is the domesticated animal caged gingerly in between the untamed child and the civilized adult. I linger on the adolescent as an ambiguous designate to point out the exacerbating muddiness of the female celebrity adolescent, the adolescent who has attained acclaim in the liquidity of pop idolatry. Tottering in her body, in her fame, in her family, in her economic independence, such a “fu­ ture girl,” as Anita Harris calls her, is a “fantasy of achievement” that the market needs to be “white, flexible, resilient, resourceful, self-­(re)inventing, strategic, and hyper-­individualist.”43 This is, of course, the profile of these transitioning teenyboppers, the minor princesses of summer concert tours with Nickelodeon origins. Such pop idols propagate—­as the musicologist Diane Railton has explained—­a “self-­conscious ‘mindlessness,’ ” because they “do not make the music in the sense of the instrumental part of the song: they are primarily singers and dancers, and rarely play instruments.”44 Their performance, Railton writes, is defined by its physicality. “Pop music of this type is about losing control” by the fans, even as the performers choreograph every squeal, every lick of the video screen.45 The carnivalesque of the pop world is its very manipulation of the presumed order of things. Magazines and performers “turn the world upside down by placing the needs and desires of young women to the fore in a society that is still geared to the needs and desires of adult men.”46 The “gendered carnival of pop,” as Railton refers to it, is therefore not unlike the gendered spectacle of sacrifice. Celebrity descent can, according to Chris Rojek, take the form of a rit­ ualized status stripping. “[Status stripping] has two forms: auto-­degradation, in which the primary exponent of status-­stripping is the celebrity, and exo-­ degradation, in which external parties, usually situated in the mass-­media, are the architects of the status-­stripping process. In general the ceremonies surrounding both forms interrelate and are mutually reinforcing.”47 The decline of Britney might be traced to many mutually reinforcing moments. But tabloid trackers would offer the expected pop-­psychology diagnosis that it was her second pregnancy (resulting in the birth of Jayden James in September 2006) that pushed Britney’s weary body and mind “over the edge.” The tough times proliferated quickly: she filed for divorce from Jayden’s father, Kevin, less than two months after the birth of their second child; a beloved aunt died of cancer in January 2007. Then, in an madcap seven-­ day spiral, Spears went into an offshore drug rehabilitation facility in Antigua on February 16; shaved her head in Tarzana, California, on February 17; then entered another treatment facility in Malibu, where she’d 42

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stay with occasional interruption until March 2007. In the middle of the revolving door of her voluntary recusal from public life, Kevin called for an emergency hearing regarding the custody of their children, setting off seven months of multimedia legal exposure. Spears would temporarily lose custody of the children, attack a paparazzi vehicle with an umbrella, and be charged with a misdemeanor hit and run (while driving without a license). In the climax of this fifteen-­month arc, Spears (after four sleepless nights) refused to relinquish custody of her children to Kevin’s representatives. Police were called, and on January 3, 2008, Spears was hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation. Restraining orders were placed on shadowy advisers, masculine heroes (father James Spears and attorney Andrew Wallete) were recruited as conservators and asset managers, and, briefly, psychiatric holds were held. Amid this soiled survey, the media observer Leonard Pitts Jr. begged the hungry public to acknowledge a most academic appraisal: “Britney Jean Spears,” he cried, “is not an idea.”48 But of course she is: an idea of a virgin, an idea of the deflowered, an idea of amusement, titillation, uplift, and inevitable decadence. “She’s the canary in the coal mine of our culture,” explained a Rolling Stone reporter, “the most vivid representation of the excess of the past decade.”49 This vivacity (a vitality from which we drink, we consume, we commune) is never quite allowed to quit. Just as we think she’s gone, just when she think she must be dead, diseased, done, we find her again drawing flashbulbs and luring us to whip out (our tired, our poor) credit cards for another swipe of sex. Another swipe at her. Just months after she got out of the hospital, People magazine reported that Elizabeth Arden donated ten thousand dollars to a New York public school music program in Britney’s name. “When you’re ready to take us on the road for an opening act, we’re ready,” the M.S. 142 music director told Spears. And the magazine reporter retorted, “Spears, who plans to tour in 2009, replied: ‘You’ll be the first people I call.’ ”50 Arden won’t release her from its controlled environment; People can’t survive without her fishbowl. Britney Spears rises and falls, time and again, plumped for the slaughter then primed for the comeback. Watching those declines and ascents might be read as a sort of public sacrifice, a Eucharist consumed by a public needful of something as an ironical counterpart to current claims of sacral nationhood and moral family remaking. This is a sacrifice made on behalf of a social body, a sacrifice that centralizes communication with, and thinking about, the legitimate social order (or relationship to divinities, to ideals, to higher principles). The circle of paparazzi creates a fishbowl for viewers

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and readers to watch the banal, torturously slow procedure of the kill. It is, then, a religious violence conducted under the guise of media consumption. This thumbnail sketch of Britney’s sacrificial recipe does not process, precisely, how the media rubbed her in the gravel of her culture’s desire. Desire for celebrities, desire to be celebrities, may be tracked through multiple stacks of evidence. But the pleasure from decline—­an ancient one, that—­and its expected plots is harder to catalog. Psychologists speak of pervasive achievement famine, the desperation bred from garden-­variety encounter with life’s vicissitudes. “Consumers do not simply nourish wants for the com­modity,” Rojek writes, “they routinely construct the façade of embodiment in order to be desired by the abstracted mass.”51 This process of imagined embodiment through mediagenic filters is called celebrification, and it is by this process that consumers (sacrificers, one and all) subsume their alienated personalities into a public face defined by celebrity splendor, and defined against celebrity failure. Why might we need this failure, now? What did Britney foretell? What did we avoid killing (in ourselves, among one another) by killing her? Worry not. This time, this crisis, will pass. Britney, too, will come and go, rising again when we need reminding of her splintering (or when we need reminder of our salvation). Whether or not Britney Spears actually dies of her wounds—­from the stalking photographers, or from her self-­ immolating behavior—­the fact of our consumption of her journey on and off stages comprises the essential subject for religious analysis of celebrity. The stories told about celebrities, the stories that are purchased and circu­ lated about celebrities, are embedded deeply in the mechanisms which prop­ agate them, and the consumer practices which compel the fan to believe, time and again, that there is no obvious harm in their return. The consumption of celebrity as a commodity is never disconnected from the religious practices of the subject, or the celebrity dreams of its believers. Everywhere we find new lambs for ritual slaughter. In September 2008, Entertainment Weekly breathlessly reported the arrival on the scene of one sixteen-­year-­old Camp Rock costar and Jonas Brothers sidekick named Demi Lovato, who had at that point just released her debut album. The EW profile by Leah Greenblatt covers the essential components: “Lovato does indeed seem like the prototypical girl next door, unfailingly sunny and good natured.” Nearby stands her shepherding priest: “It may help that her stepdad, also her co-­manager, keeps a benign but constant watch over the proceedings.” She has the baubles of sexy stardom (a closet with “racks of slinky leather pants, spangled vests, studded high altitude boots,” an album

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that “abandons the usual tinkly teen-­pop tropes for meaty guitars and per­ cussion”—­it’s “far more Benatar than Backstreet”) but the signatures of middle-­American domesticity. The reporter continues, polishing the altar: “Lovato has clearly thought hard about her image, and she’s not interested in abandoning her scruples in public. Though she politely demurs when asked about the purity rings she [and her Disney castmates] all wear to indicate they will wait to have sex until marriage, she does express admiration for onetime Disney idols who’ve managed to keep their noses clean.”52 The sacrifice is plump and primed. Let the killing begin.

0 6 The Celebrification of Religion in the Age of Infotainment A Ritual Demise

On the morning of March 24, 2011, Elizabeth Taylor landed on the front pages for a final time. “Elizabeth Taylor, the actress who dazzled generations of moviegoers with her stunning beauty and whose name was synonymous with Hollywood glamour, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles,” reported the New York Times obituary scribe Mel Gussow.1 Media outlets used her death as an opportunity to saturate their pages with her legendary beauty and to recount the gossip surrounding her serial weddings. Occasionally a clip of her performance in Giant (1956) or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) was included in these memorials. But her afterlife coverage emphasized Elizabeth Taylor as a dreamscape, and did not detail her artistic accomplishment.2 She became a “lustrous pinnacle of Hollywood glamour,” enshrined in an epithet about her near-­perfect facial profile and her penchant for diamonds.3 She would not be remembered for what she did or who she was but for how she permeated popular culture as a replicable idea of doing and being. The media tracked Taylor’s physical processing with the announcement, “Private burial service held for Elizabeth Taylor.” Here star-­watchers would be reminded of Taylor’s specific religious identity, inspiring subsequent stories that sought to make sense of her midlife conversion to Judaism. Journalists offered plots resonant with tabloid arcs: the star grew up in a restrictive denomination (Christian Scientist) and quickly abandoned these sacred structures upon entering her profaning orbit as a celebrity. Trauma (the death of ex-­husband Eddie Fisher) inspired a turn to new spiritual pathways, and the star began studying with a teacher, guru, or adviser

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(in this star’s case, Rabbi Max Nussbaum). In this postmortem account, her conversion included a variety of subsequent controversies. Taylor’s spiritual devotion reduced larger problems to accessibly personal dramas: her 1959 purchase of one-­hundred-­thousand-­dollar Israeli bonds prompted a ban of her films in the United Arab Republic; her financial support of Israel led to the 1962 banning of Cleopatra in Egypt; and in 1976 she offered herself to be exchanged for Israeli hostages held by PLO terrorists. The reader is meant to understand from these details that Taylor’s commitment to Judaism was, like the icon herself and like the characters she played, passionate, extravagant, and a little headstrong. The article concluded: How much Judaism played into Taylor’s life in recent years is unclear. But the Jewish Journal reported in its obituary that Taylor had been a supporter of the Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles. And [Benjamin] Ivry of the Forward suggested that Taylor’s relentless campaigning on behalf of AIDS research and treatment reflected a deep understanding of the Jewish commitment to tzedakah, or charity.4

Focusing on the funerary reportage surrounding Elizabeth Taylor’s death illuminates how celebrities and religion most frequently intersect on the news. Celebrities offer journalists an opportunity to expand religious literacy in the news, using the biographical decisions of the subject to explain foreign concepts or rites, like tzedakah. Celebrities, too, provide portals to complex conflicts, like that between Israelis and Palestinians. Those readers who don’t understand a suicide bomber may relate to the passions of Ms. Taylor, and find some new understanding in their connection. The plots of celebrities offer a focal lens to the ambiguities of religious cultures, structures, and rites. Finally, the news coverage of religion within Elizabeth Taylor’s life allows the opportunity to access a new descriptive vocabulary for Taylor herself, since it is not just Judaism that is explained through this reportage but also Taylor. At the heart of celebrity, iconicity has its own mysteries. Viewers may obsess unrelentingly over the physical features, decorating choices, and romances of individual celebrities. Yet such scrutiny never quite explains the celebrity’s ascent. Why this figure and not that one? Why did this violet-­eyed damsel so transfix the world? And why did AIDS, diamonds, and men transfix her? Deploying religious data to plumb the person, religion inserts itself as a possible clue to her true self, to the woman behind the eyes, behind the diamonds, and behind the men. Naming the religious in

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Taylor begins to explain some of her incommensurability, the very mystery that makes of her life and death something near religious for many.

St u dy i n g C e l e br i ty a n d R e l i g i o n

Studying celebrity and religion in concert requires parsing the multiple ways these terms have become increasingly interactive, overlapping, and co-­ constitutive in modern America. This chapter will explore by what means this has transpired, focusing on both the forms of news reporting that have succeeded in recent years as well as on the changes in the ways religion is discussed in public. In salute to its phenomenal popularity, the national American daily newspaper USA Today will be the documentary focus. With a circulation of nearly two million, USA Today competes with the Wall Street Journal to be the most widely circulated US paper. One of the reasons USA Today provides an excellent archive for the relationship between religion and celebrity in the news is its own oft-­touted (and oft-­satirized) synthetic style, including short articles, cheery cartoon graphics, and an intentionally “easy-­to-­read” rhetorical style. The paper consists of four sections: News, Money, Sports, and Life. Though Life will be the section where most stories concerning religion, celebrity, and combinations of those topics are located, there will also be instances when stories on such subjects slip into the News section, especially when market forces are at a more dra­matic stake. The abundance of celebrity news within the pages of USA Today signals an editorial certitude of the universal appeal of such stories. “Celebrity culture is now ubiquitous, and establishes the main scripts, presentational props, conversational codes and other source materials through which cultural relations are constructed,” Chris Rojek writes. Rojek sees ours as a cul­ ture in which celebrities have become the mythic scrim for our quotidian lives. It seems impossible to avoid celebrities, as they pervade every part of market, print, and artistic cultures. Scholars of celebrity have observed that the importance of celebrities has heightened in an inverse relationship to the importance of religious authority. Or, as Rojek writes, the circulation of celebrity has become “the milieu in which religious recognition and belong­ ing are now enacted.”5 Rojek’s narrative is one that fits that of the secularization thesis in which the role of religion is described as in a process of declination through the many

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philosophical, scientific, and sociological shifts of modernity. In recent years such secularization narratives have been criticized, suggesting that the word secular is a problematic diagnosis for the contemporary con­dition. Given the available anthropological, demographic, and textual evidence, there seems no lack of social forms organizing relationships to superhuman powers. It cannot be useful to say that religion has diminished or been eradicated from the range of human expression. Rather, it seems more useful to specify how religion forms itself in the modern era, especially as it is articulated outside institutionalized forms of religious ideation and practice. Like celebrity, religion is a word that seems to be an encompassing whole, but it is something that actually articulates multiple things at once. A census may ask “what religion are you” and you may have a single-­word answer (i.e., Hindu, atheist, Lutheran). Everyone knows, though, that it’s not so easy to decide what makes someone Hindu, and even if you could, it is even more difficult to name something neatly consistent across all “Hindu” practice. Tracking how religion has been received in the news requires a consciousness of the way it is wielded as such a consolidated concept despite whatever plurality or idiosyncrasy might be felt, seen, or practiced by those espousing it as an institutional or ideational principle. Celebrity and religion are similar words, then, insofar as they each articulate in their very invocation something iconic and singular yet represent vast cultures that are irreducible. Examples of this may be immediately found when observing coverage of religion in the news, which often means finding synonyms for religion more like epithets than neutral descriptors. For instance, in the 1970s, religion often meant “cult.” In the 1980s, religion often meant “scandal.” These caricatures connect to redactions of individual personality gone awry and to the dangerous possibilities for charisma. Descriptions of the cult menace of the seventies resulted from the imagined evil underbelly of the re­ ligious leader; the scandal suspicion of eighties’ lore resulted from the perceived decadence of the same pious figure. In USA Today the whisper of such  con­demnation continues, as the isolated compound cult or the oversexed preacher seems likely to erupt onto the headlines.6 Religion has also meant “simpleminded,” a trope of description familiar to celebrity coverage. “Celebrities have long had an affinity for mystical mishmash,” writes one USA Today reporter in a 2006 article. “Shirley MacLaine, joking about her many lives, is no longer news.”7 It isn’t news because it’s so obviously silly that nobody needs to report it. Yet one of the ways journalists mock religious belief

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is through the fame of figures like MacLaine. Rather than indict local citizens who claim to channel past lives, MacLaine is introduced in part to articulate a critique of faith. Like the adulterous pastor or the megalomaniacal minister, the free-­spirited celebrity stands in for a broader secular suspicion of the power claimed by religious authority. News reporters offer their own rationale for the conjunctions of religion and celebrity that they introduce time and again: The relationship between celebrities and religion can be mutually beneficial. “Religious groups clearly feel having a celebrity endorsement helps give pizzazz and credibility, just like any product that benefits from a celebrity endorsement,” says Steve Waldman, editor of beliefnet.com, a multi-­faith and spiritual web site.8

According to this description, it is helpful for religions to have a celebrity involved. But is it helpful for the celebrity to be religious? “It hurts celebrities,” says the media image consultant Michael Sands. “Celebrities should maintain separation of church and state. These people are not Billy Graham.”9 This language from USA Today offers many of the reasons that religion and celebrity saturate the news in frequent combinations. Celebrities present glamour (that pizzazz) and familiarity (that credibility). But they also present a test of what we want to be sacred (like Billy Graham) and what we want to be profane. Like “church and state,” it seems celebrities should be kept from religion. Yet they cannot be so controlled. Celebrities dramatize basic conceits about proper religion simply by participating in religions themselves, and by provoking religious responses from their fans. Just as religious groups benefit from religious celebrity, so do newspapers benefit from religious celebrity and celebrity religion.10 In media reports about celebrities and religion, it is important to note that the reportage itself is rarely centrally motivated by religious exploration. Almost always, the news reporting that ties these two categories together arrives at religion through some form of celebrity promotion in which the celebrity seeks to connect the journalist, reader, and consumer to his or her new film, CD, or project. That religion appears therefore in a form of press release to the ultimate advantage of the star’s publicity and market circulation should not be overlooked. This genre of  journalism invites the celebrity to open up, intimating that this is no mere product plug, but rather earnest disclosure. Hence, the consumer becomes complicit in a cycle of commodity, gossip, and detective work. “The game itself is the

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source of pleasure, as players scrutinize celebrity appearances and entertainment magazines, sharing their knowledge with one another as they peel away the never-­ending layers of the proverbial onion,” write David Croteau and William Hoynes.11 The cycle begets itself, manifesting more products to satisfy the desire that cannot be sated, since the unpeeling is simultaneous with obfuscation. Just as you think you begin to know the celebrity, he or she must disappear again into their mystery to propel your desire to know them. To maintain celebrity, the celebrity must be known as both accessible and untouchable. Such subjects emerge in certain rote modes. First, religion may be a subject within celebrity productions. Religion may then be mentioned in reviews of films or books, such as a review of a PBS documentary on James Baldwin, or a profile of the outsider artist (and evangelical preacher) Howard Finster, whose art gained prominence through use on Talking Heads and R.E.M. album covers.12 Second, religion may be a devotion or identity of celebrities. Athlete profiles, like those of the Olympic medalist Carl Lewis, the University of Utah quarterback Scott Mitchell, and the Houston Rockets center Hakeem Olajuwon, often include descriptions of the motivational power of faith.13 One might even claim that there are some celebrity religions, chief among them being the Church of Scientology (SCI). Few subjects appear as unrelentingly connected to celebrity as SCI, as illustrated by USA Today headlines like “Cruising with Scientology,” “Celebrities Celebrate Scientology,” “Scientology’s Stars,” “Celebrities Denounce Anti-­ Scientology Stand,” and “Church: A Hold over Travolta?”14 More than any other religion in contemporary America, SCI carries forward the specter of cult accusation, a looming indictment that invites its allies to return to the media for its defense, thus reigniting its accusation through its endless disavowal. Life-­cycle rituals connect celebrity with religion in a different mode of submission and personalization. Whether it is Mick Jagger defending the legitimacy of his Bali union to Jerry Hall (December 4, 1990), celebrities seeking to design remarriage rituals (June 21, 1991), Scientology conducting rituals for baby delivery (the birth of Jett Travolta Preston, reported on April 14, 1992), or celebrities going to midnight masses (December 15, 1993), USA Today tracks these events with an eye to the ritual needs of the famous. Even if burials at sea or expensive christening gowns are not accessible for the common reader, they are possible facets of his or her life, thus linking him or her to the ritualism, however excessive, of the reported celebrity. It isn’t just you who are humbled by doctrine; the icon, too, must supplicate.15

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Third, and finally, religion emerges as a diagnosis for celebrity consumption itself. In USA Today, this appears most frequently in updates about Elvis Presley, his estate, and his continuing celebration as an icon producing relics and worshipful adherents.16 Distinguishing these three different forms of intersection between religion and celebrity may suggest a neat and tidy usage of those terms in USA Today or the broader culture. This is certainly not the case. Perhaps no celebrity appears more often in conjunction with the term religion than Madonna, who seems to partake of every modal relating to that term, displaying the constant amalgamations and shifts of religion and celebrity even within one subject. There is religion in her productions, there are religions in which she is involved, and her celebrity itself forms its own kind of devotion for her fans. Madonna may mark an arc of transitions that celebrity and religion have taken together over the last thirty years, and so she will reappear in this chapter as a metonym for religious invocation, personal pi­ ety, and object of communal adulation. Occluded in the forthcoming treatment will be the ways religions them­ selves deploy the language of celebrity in a positive and negative manner. For instance, the Church of Scientology publishes Celebrity magazine, while the Amish decry tabloids altogether. Likewise, I will not focus on ce­lebrities in religions, such as the evangelists Billy Graham or Rick Warren. This is due to the fact that such subjects scarcely appear in USA Today, un­derlining the emphasis in that publication on celebrities within ostensibly secular media.17 Religions appear as fads (i.e., Tibetan Buddhism) and as nemeses of certain subjects (i.e., Sinead O’Connor and the pope).18 But what transfixes this research is the way that entertainment news deploys religious idiom to express something inexpressibly potent in its subject and to translate democratic moral agency in an increasingly privatized corporate media structure.

I n f o ta i n m e n t a n d C e l e br i f i cat i o n

Infotainment is a hybrid term, a neologism that emerged in the late 1980s to refer to a specific genre of news as well as an overarching shift in the content of news. Specifically, it refers to a genre of news reporting in which the reporters themselves must reflect on celebrity performances and in which those reporters, now cast also as entertainers, provide information about

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other entertainers. More broadly, though, the invocation of infotainment is a category of critique, speaking to the changing patterns of ownership, structuring, and information distribution among current affairs programs and publications. In a similar lexical tone, the terms militainment, chari­ tainment, and politainment have emerged in the last ten years to diagnose an analogous shift to portrayals of  war (i.e., the Iraq War), charity fund-­raising (like the 9/11 telethon), and political candidacy (such as Sarah Palin’s) as formatted to serve an aesthetic more coordinated with the history of entertainment cultures than those of journalism. It would be wrong to imagine that entertainment and such ventures had been in some easy binary, that prior to this particular moment wars weren’t drawn as dramas (see, for example, World War II newsreel footage), that fund-­raising wasn’t made fun (see charity balls), or that politics wasn’t seeking sound-­bite legibility (see Theodore Roosevelt). But media scholars consistently draw our attention to the media proliferation and consolidation over the last twenty years, empirical shifts that have created a different market culture for the news. The proliferation of news outlets has led to increasing competition for audiences. “As television news has been commercialized, the need to make it entertaining has become a crucial priority for broadcasters, as they are forced to borrow and adapt characteristics from entertainment genres and modes of conversation that privilege an informal communicative style, with its emphasis on personalities, style, storytelling, skills and spectacles,” writes Daya Thussu. There are more networks, with more options, specified to a narrower audience share. Meanwhile, this multiplicity has not meant a diversification of ownership. Rather, news networks across the United States are increasingly owned by a small number of conglomerates. Not coincidentally, these conglomerates possess as their primary investment in­ terest the entertainment business; for instance, Viacom-­Paramount owns CBS News, ABC News is now a part of Disney. “This shift in ownership is reflected in the type of stories—­about celebrities from the world of entertainment, for example, that often get prominence on news, thus strengthening corporate synergies,” Thussu concludes.20 Despite its origins in an elaborate corporatism, infotainment articulates itself as a populism designed—­to borrow from their idiom—­to tell you the real stories behind their stories and the real stories that help your life. One scholar has described this as a transition from slogans espousing the “news you need” to networks arguing they offer “news about you.”21 From the news of the CBS anchor Edward R. Murrow (1908–­1965), whose celebrated objectivity led to his eventual appointment as head of the United 19

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States Information Agency, to the news of the Fox journalist Bill O’Reilly (1949–­), who performs a doggedly subjective conservatism, this transition in modern journalism might be witnessed through any number of documentary fronts.22 However, within USA Today, the complexity of this opposition continues as a form of secular surprise, as if every reporter approaching a religious subject is a latter-­day Murrow in an overwhelmingly O’Reilly world. Whenever a religiously intoned object appears materially successful, the editors at USA Today seem temporarily floored, no matter the recurrence of the success. “Holy Bestsellers! Christian Mysteries Are Hot,” headlines announced when Christian-­themed mysteries by Frank Peretti became blockbusters. “Spiritual Thriller Is an Unlikely Success,” read the headline when The Celestine Prophecy became a best seller in 1994.23 Christian novels or hip-­hop gospel, Catholics with Sirius radio stations or Jews using books titled Kosher Sex—­the posture of surprise evinces the secular assumptions of the staring critic.24 None of this is exactly new. Journalists have had a complex relationship to the interpretation of religious materials; religious authorities have always maximized the use of available media; and the journalistic enterprise has never been without its soliciting entertainments. To imagine some neat divide between old news and new news, between the news and infotainment, requires a neat dichotomy in which the news is critical, objective, rational, and investigative, whereas infotainment is amusing, personalized, superficial, and manufactured.25 Obviously, such a divide is as impossible to draw as the attempt to distinguish religion from culture. “From one perspective, this sinking of religious performance into cultural entertainment might be seen as religion’s decline into something more insipid, and thus as evidence of religion’s weakening hold on American life,” Amanda Porterfield has written. “From another perspective, however, this submergence of Christian religiosity into American culture, and its seepage into the land of entertainment, might be said to lend strength and vibrancy to American life.”26 Historians of religion wobble on a pivot of indecision as to which perspective possesses more archival credence. What is clear is that the news participates in a formation of religion that shifts our definition of what right, safe, and democratic religion is. The medium of infotainment has increasingly shaped the message of religion in modern American society. Celebrities become the key characters in these unfolding changes. Chris Rojek describes celebrification as the increased tendency to imagine every social encounter through the filter of media and its emphases on charisma, beauty, and fame. Thinking about the

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representation of religion among celebrities in the news is to think, then, about how religion itself becomes formatted to such media standards. Insofar as celebrities “humanize desire,” observing celebrification cannot be distinct from observing patterns in the history of religion, in which the ef­ fort to mediate human desire and social possibility has been a central feature.27 This is not to say that the religions of celebrities become the religions of ordinary Americans. Rather, it is to say that infotainment regards religion as not merely a usable trope for celebrification but also the stakes for its perpetuation. In the space remaining, a short history of the emergence of infotainment reportage and its corollary celebrification will be offered to illustrate the speed of these changes and the central characters through which the drama of celebrity religion has been played.

R e l i g i o n a n d C e l e br i ty, 1 9 8 9 – 9 ­ 6

The end of the Cold War left a vacuum in the news. For nearly a half century, the Manichean terms of Cold War conflict held rapt a viewing audience uncertain of the outcome. Would they win, or would we? Its conclusion required a new framing of nemeses. Perhaps an enemy could be named again in and through religious authority. In the same year that inaugurated the quick close to the Cold War spectacle, a music video circulated that would not only begin a new stage in a single artist’s celebrity but also become a signifier for the sort of way religion might solve a certain narrative problem. The success of Madonna as an international pop star cannot be disconnected from the religious history she created through her relationship with a series of religious authorities—­Catholic, Hindu, and Jewish—­whom she lashed out at with her ostensible profanations. That these contestations did not take place through ecclesiastical courts but in the entertainment pages shows how religion became a usable post–­Cold War enemy, and also how by diminishing institutional authority, it encouraged the ascent of new forms of moral leadership. Released in February 1989 by Sire Records, “Like a Prayer” was the first single from Madonna’s fourth album by the same title. The single would go on to be one of Madonna’s most successful and, for many, marked the emergence of her artistry from the shallow waters of eighties pop. Yet it is the video that drew the most vitriol. In it, Madonna witnesses the murder of a white girl by white men. When a black man is arrested for the crime, she

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tries to intervene, but then is only accused herself. The crux of the controversy emerges next, as Madonna flees to a church for safety; there she prays to a stature of Saint Martin de Porres. In her worshipful state, she kisses him. He weeps and comes to life. The climax of the video includes Madonna testifying to free the falsely accused and dancing amid a black gospel choir. Interspersed in the video are scenes of a cross burning and of Madonna developing a stigmata. USA Today seized on the potent combination of sensuality and Catholic iconoclasm as a subject newsworthy for the latter and entertaining for the former. “Madonna’s new ‘Like a Prayer’ video, a passion play meld­ing sex and religion, delivers its moral message through an erotic medium,” writes a reporter. “The video is open to interpretation, but Madonna—­who was raised a Catholic—­says her intentions were pure.” The reporter, Edna Gunderson, seeks to design a story in which anyone against the video must themselves be immoral. Madonna says she meant well, and the message of justice and racial redemption in the video fit certain liberal politics. It may bother some, but the article suggests nobody can stop something this popular. “Contrary to recent reports,” it concludes, “ ‘Like a Prayer’ will air in Italy, despite the protests of Catholic groups.”28 The reportage moved from the Life to the News section when religious authorities—­and not, it turned out, Catholic ones—­threatened the economy of a Fortune 500 company, Pepsi, who had been using Madonna in an ad campaign. When Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association called for a Pepsi boycott, he did so because, he said, Madonna was “ridiculing Christianity.” Wildmon was identified by USA Today as the man “who also organized boycotts of the movie The Last Temptation of Christ.” In the necessary battle formats for infotainment reportage, USA Today cast Wildmon as the threat to values while casting Madonna as upholding values. The article on the boycott gives Pepsi’s representative Tod MacKenzie the last defensive word. “Why isn’t [Wildmon] going after the video?” MacKenzie asks. “Why has he targeted really an innocent, wholesome commercial people have responded favorably to?”29 Why, asks MacKenzie, is Wildmon focusing on a wholesome commercial when there is a disturbing music video out there? Wildmon is cast as disconnected from the genre codes of consumer capitalism, as someone too tied to old institutions and ideas to participate productively in the political now. For Madonna, the medium of her productions insulates her from such old-­fashioned final judgment by religious leaders. She isn’t trying to serve them, she winks to her audience. She is just trying to serve you. As she

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does her pop star job, she will invariably incite formal religious replies to her creative religious statements precisely because what we want and what they want are no longer the same thing. In another story placed on the USA Today front page, rabbis accused her in 1991 of insulting Jews in certain versions of “Justify My Love” when she reads from Revelation 2:9.30 Reports on such encounters between Madonna and religious authority emphasized her irrepressible religious individualism and constitutional artistic freedom as the presumed values of the public to whom USA Today reports. Madonna stands in for all of us who may not agree with her positions but believe she has the right to have them, to express herself however she pleases.31 “True to her taboo-­smashing instincts, Madonna turns sexual and religious conventions inside out better to use English, often fusing the two to heighten discomfort,” explains a review of her Blond Ambition Tour. “To the eastern strains of a slowed Like a Virgin, she simulates sex on a velvet-­draped bed, then cries, ‘God?’ In the presence of a priest, she partially disrobes and smashes a crucifix to the ground.”32 The description offers up the sacred to be smashed by Madonna’s profane usage of it; yet, it also enchants Madonna in her particular celebrity as the brazen truth-­teller, the unstoppably free actor. Just as Madonna seemed in her productions intrigued by the commod­ ity her profanations might make, so did USA Today seem intrigued by the inferred contrast between profane celebrity and sacred authority, like when Michael Jackson was kept away from the Wailing Wall. USA Today reporter Jack Kelley frames the Orthodox Jewish rejection of Jackson as ultimately futile in the face of the eighty thousand fans that filled one of his two sold-­ out Israeli concerts. The article concludes on these two notes: “Nobody can excite people like M.J.,” says Tel Aviv University student David Eizenstadt. “Not Rabin, Peres or Arafat. Michael’s so electrifying. We think he may even be the Messiah.” Jackson, 35, has been accused of molesting a 13-­year-­old boy, a charge he denies.33

The article begins with the minor matter of one man’s approach to, and re­ jection from, a sacred site. It finds a way to explode the smallness of this transgression into an incident highlighting not the power of the rabbis but the power of the people. The people here are manifest in two senses: first, the public that chooses Jackson over political leaders; second, the public that makes up the juridical segment is also his potential judgment and downfall.

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Although this era includes the emergence of megachurches as a news story as well as the rise of  Tibetan Buddhism as a popular celebrity practice, it is the celebration of celebrity iconoclasm that distinguishes this media moment.34

R e l i g i o u s C e l e br i ty, 1 9 9 7 – 2 ­ 003

Midway through the Clinton two-­term presidency, many of the established features of celebrity coverage in the news remained the same, and Madonna could still be seen as embodying all of them. There was still talk of Madonna stirring trouble when she wore Hindu facial markings at the MTV Video Music Awards, and there was still the translation of new religions through celebrity support of them. Madonna’s turn to Kabbalah inspired articles emphasizing her new spiritual enthusiasms as well as the faddish success of red bracelets sold through her Kabbalah center.35 Yet the tone of this reportage was not defamatory. It was, increasingly, correlating celebrity spiritual wellness with a broader social turn to health and redemption through individual pursuit. Here again Madonna took the lead, declared by one agency as a positive force for sex education, and declared by herself as on a new trajectory: “I’ve found a way of life I’d like to share. Despite the illusions I’ve been a slave to all my life, I feel a tremendous amount of hope for a life of fulfillment and happiness.”36 Such a sense of hope pervaded accounts of the good role religion played in the life of certain hip-­hop stars, like Mase, or the raunchy comedienne Roseanne, or the activist actor Jane Fonda.37 If once the fourth estate looked upon religion with cynicism, it now began to name it as a force for transformation. This spiritualization of celebrity was always a mutual process, with celebrities and entertainment reporters functioning in a complex dialectic of terms and tones. The late nineties may be seen as some sort of turning point in the history of religion in news reporting, if only because it began to seem requisite to the identification of the subject itself. Was this because a liberal evangelical occupied the White House, legitimating a brand of religious authoritarianism as properly rational and democratic? Or was it because that same leader had so publicly collapsed in a squalid story of failed spirit? Re­ portage on Robert Duvall’s acting and directing in The Apostle (1998) could not seem to avoid invoking evangelicalism as a format for grappling with these immediate political dilemmas.38 After portraying in that film a char-

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ismatic preacher wrestling with the legacies of infidelity, Duvall visited the White House for a screening in the midst of a strangely analogous trauma. On the verge of the millennium, there were no obvious solutions to what ailed the nation. The economy was booming, and the media was exploding. Why, then, were individuals still collapsing under the weight of individual struggle? It is perhaps no surprise that this era would be branded in its spiritualization by the talk show host Oprah Winfrey (1954–­). Unlike her original talk show competitors, Oprah’s show seemed always to be bent on a higher power. This became an explicit program change in the mid-­1990s. When Oprah went to Amarillo, Texas, to testify in her defense against the cattlemen who were suing her for defaming the beef industry, she was asked a series of questions meant to imply that she had sensationalized the news. She explained later that this experience made her realize she must become a tool for good in the world. Her spiritual revelation was converted into a corporate makeover in which her show became “Change Your Life TV.” Initial responses to her programming change were largely negative, with some suggesting that her move to Change Your Life TV was “too evangelical.” At the time, she replied, “It’s a shame that we’ve evolved into the kind of society where evangelical is considered negative. I have come to believe that we are all, or at least most of us, searching for the assurance that good exists in our world, even in the midst of evil and evil abuse.”39 For religious historians, Oprah’s disavowal of critics is a familiar maneuver. Religious leaders often suggest that the words you use to insult them are precisely the terms of their power. Rather than disagree with naysayers, Oprah merely asks why you aren’t on board. Aren’t we all worried about evil? Don’t we all want the good? In an era in which religion was increasingly portrayed as either idiotic or extremist, Oprah plotted a middle way in which her viewers could be both believers and critics, both consumers and missionaries. She criticized religious institutions on her show, but she encouraged spiritual practices. She encouraged everyone to buy her favorite things but also to offer the gift of who they are to the world. Later USA Today reportage would cover Winfrey’s subsequent Live Your Best Life tour­ing workshops. “The workshop’s biggest surprise, however, was the openness with which Winfrey talked about her spiritual beliefs,” the reporter de­scribes, continuing: She ends the show on a guided meditation—­lights are lowered; melodic, instrumental music plays, and Oprah instructs the audience to close

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their eyes, breathe deeply and open their souls as she recites her own personal mantra asking for guidance. Something the audience already feels it has received from Winfrey.40

Her spiritualization organized the expansion of her corporate empire as it also stood in for the spiritualization of a public seeking no longer to be embarrassed by its hunger for spiritualization. Winfrey enshrines an American sensibility of choice and personalism as the form of acceptable religious ideation for the marketplace. Winfrey formed a public counter to spiritual seekers who wanted religion without religion, and spirituality without restriction in a world where some religious authorities still lingered.41 In 1999, USA Today narrated a situation where a Lebanese pop star was the subject of attack for “Muslim fundamentalists” who “decreed she should be put to death for reportedly naming her pet dog after the prophet Mohammed.” Described by USA Today as a young Christian woman, Najwa Karam was known as one of the most popular singers in the Arab world. Now, because rumor suggested she had given her dog the Prophet’s name, she was no longer safe. “In Qatar, Q-­Tel, which controls the country’s television, said it would stop playing her music,” wrote Matthew Kalman, explaining that in Jordan and Lebanon, fun­ damentalist factions said she should be killed.42 As the United States entered a war against terrorists, it was in no small way fighting to protect the right for Karam to live in an Oprah sort of world, a world where she might name her dogs whatever she likes, be good through whatever rites she chooses, and sing for whoever will listen.43

A Mission Emerges, 2004–1 ­ 0

The Cold War concluded, and in its wake new ethnic and religious conflicts emerged around the world, events that ranged from minor skirmishes to major global conflicts. In the United States, the role of the celebrity seemed only to rise. In its democratization of fame, reality television programming expanded the base numbers of potential celebrities. And with twenty-­four-­ hour news coverage including paparazzi outfits focused solely on tracking celebrity movements, cognizance of celebrity lifestyles became increasingly detailed and pervasive. Now not only did we know what diamonds a starlet wore, but also the toilet paper she bought. The reality star and the stalked ce­

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lebrity suggested an increasingly quotidian landscape of celebrity lifestyle. However, the programs and productions of celebrities only seemed to become more elaborate in scope and ambition. At the beginning of this chapter, celebrities were described as needing to be accessible and unknowable. To counter the popularization of celebrity access, there seemed to be an in­ crease in talk of Armageddon and masculine crisis. In 2004, Mel Gibson released The Passion of the Christ, a film that depicts the passion play in vivid, real-­time detail. With an explicitly religious subject, and dialogue entirely reconstructed in Aramaic, Latin, and Hebrew with vernacular subtitles, the film seemed destined, by all market suppositions, to be a spectacular indulgence and an inevitable flop.44 “After mainstream Hollywood studios and distributors spurned The Passion of the Christ because some thought it was too violent and included anti-­Semitic themes, Gibson, who was forced to finance the film on his own, began discussing his fundamentalist views on Catholicism,” reported one USA Today journalist. “The movie would end up raking in more than $370 million in the USA alone, the most successful R-­rated film ever.”45 Gibson claimed, time and again, that the production of this film was a testimony of his faith, a gift to the religion that had given him all that he had. Indeed, as USA Today would track, the passion play of Christ offered a compensatory articulation for a star who could not control his sins. Gibson offered The Passion, and he would also offer his mug shot to several arrests for drunken, disorderly, and violent behavior. Like the much-­reported breakdown of the Scientologist Tom Cruise, Gibson’s fall only established the premises for his eventual resurrection. Gibson’s passionate film offering—­and his struggle to maintain its extreme moral aspirations—­offers a fitting emblem for the opening years of the twenty-­first century. For whatever spiritual sustenance was sought in Oprah Winfrey’s spiritual expansion transformed into an unabashed certitude that things had to change or else things would end. This is how “Change you can believe in” could become such a powerful slogan of political promotion during the 2008 election. In that year, USA Today reported that there was, perhaps, a “theological underpinning” to the enthusiasm espoused by Obama voters.46 Obama could be interpreted as a climax to a patterned emergence of entertainment leaders as unequivocally confident in their abilities to assist, to serve, and to save. His resume was his personhood: his life story, his racial amalgamation, and his embodiment of the American Dream. Just as politics seemed increasingly reflective of celebrity formats, so did celebrities seem increasingly complicit in politics. Two months before Elizabeth Taylor died, the actor George Clooney appeared on the cover of

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Newsweek. Clooney was not promoting a film or television show. Instead, he was promoting an international problem, and himself as a missionary seeking to resolve it on our behalf. While the cover announces, “Mr. Clooney, the President Is on Line 1,” the article headlines with more declarative ascription, calling Clooney “A 21st Century Statesman.” “In January, Clooney was back in South Sudan,” we learn, “directing his star power toward helping its people peacefully achieve independence from the northern government of Khartoum after two decades of civil war.” No mention of religion is made in the article—­no spiritual awakening seems to have brought Clooney here. Instead, the article infers that Clooney possesses a basic decency inherited from his father. Indeed, it was the influence of his father that led Clooney to cowrite and direct Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), a film depiction of Edward R. Murrow’s famed facedown of US senator Eugene McCarthy. Newsweek consistently presents Clooney as a form of responsible rationalism of a pre-­infotainment age. He is the celebrity who wields his celebrity to the good beyond celebrity: “In this new environment—­fueled by social networking—­fame is a potent commodity that can have more influence on public debate than many elected officials and even some nation-­states.”47 As the political necessity of celebrity and the celebrity circulation in politics continue to expand, it will be useful to recall that such missionary projects do not merely have their origin in ideologies of secular reason. The power of celebrity to expand and contract, to fit the image of the given moment, and to belong in the crevice of every crisis is not because that image is denuded of meaningful religious authority. It is precisely because celebrities possess such spectral power that they may direct attention to their causes. “As a rock star, I have two instincts,” said Bono, the lead singer for U2. “I want to have fun, and I want to change the world. I have a chance to do both.”48 Speaking this way, and developing interventionist programs commensurate with this speech, is what transports celebrities from the Life pages to the News pages. Deciding their individual spiritual ambitions deserve missionary effort, celebrities become not merely complicit with neoliberal power, but activist agents of geopolitical domination.

Valuing Family

0 7 Religion and the Authority in American Parenting “Sometime between when we were children and when we had children of our own, parenthood became a religion in America.”1 So begins a widely circulated short essay posted to the online magazine Quartz in September 2014. Written by the husband-­and-­wife authorial team of Danielle and Astro Teller, the piece was intended to induce its readers to purchase their recently published book, Sacred Cows (2014), through a demonstration of their incisive cheekiness on the subject of marital relationships.2 This particular excerpt focused on the ways that parents in the twenty-­first century (especially the parents in the Anglophone world that would be reading that blog) are trapped by a series of impossible expectations for their work. “Nothing in life is allowed to be more important than our children,” the Tellers explain, suggesting that the high devotional and moral stakes of parenting life require a vocabulary that conveys this height and these stakes, namely that of religion. The Tellers write of a domestic landscape filled with anxiety about right decisions and wrong judgments: about breast-­feeding and vaccinations and schooling and food and technology and every other material and institutional thing that the parent applies to the husbandry of a child. An emergent scholarly literature on parenting cultures within anthropology and sociology captures well this epochal intensity. It concludes that we live in a time of  “militant lactivism” (to borrow from Charlotte Faircloth’s work) in which there are few things as imperative in contemporary Western society as right parenting decisions, and that these decisions usually require an increase in attention to the child relative to the attentiveness measured or perceived in generations past.3 For these authors, the word religion does

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not appear, except as an inference. “Lactivism” invokes the militancy of fundamentalism and, in particular, the heightened moral frenzy surrounding parental decision making. This moralization is no longer just the purview of those conservative activists agitating for legislation of  “family values,” but in fact pervades the aspiring and occupied middle class, liberal and conservative, who have made their work as parents something political through the signification of minute particulars (pacifier or no pacifier?). This should not be understood as a dominant demographic in the United States or the United Kingdom. Rather, it is described by its observers as a particularly eco­ nomically powerful one. Its extremity often sets the terms of the broader dis­ course, producing massive amounts of print literature, therapeutic advisers, and voluntary associations to promote its prescriptions. The existence of such an uptick in parenting piety is one of the major provocations for this work by scholars. But even more critical to my interest is to contribute to the ongoing effort to name the present age and its social habits of valuation. Recent scholarship on the secular has sought to discern the particular phenomenological flavor of a modernity in which authority, sociability, and human psychology are understood to be quite different from before: from before the Enlightenment, before the Reformation, before the West, before humanism, before colonialism.4 This scholarly effort of grand historicism and comparative sociology has done a great deal to recount the specific commingled emergence of denominations and theologies with states and societies, explaining the ways that governmental and ecclesiastical authority have co-­constituted each other. Meanwhile, scholars within the study of religion have offered genealogies demonstrating how jurists, legislators, economic agents, and scholars came to denote religion as a requisite concept of political governance.5 As a result of this substantive historiography, it is impossible to consider the subject “religion” in the twenty-­first century without regarding it as a political polemic. With such political descriptions of the history of religion in mind, I want to attend to the specific strategies by which societies “bring forth, give birth to, produce” themselves in the discursive modernity defined by such genealogies of the secular. This description—­bring  forth, give birth to, produce—­ summarizes the present participle of parere. This terming gives rise to our present application of the word parent. It is my wager that parenting may provide us with a way to thread the needle between epistemology, sociology, and history, between how we live and how we conceive of the histories of our living. Accounts of parenting as a historical object invariably point out

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its recent popularity as a terming of a specific interpersonal relation. Prior to the twentieth century, the verb to parent appeared rarely in the English lexicon, and as a noun it referred almost exclusively to a genealogical description, that is, to a person who was a progenitor of a child, and not to a person who actively participates in the developmental process. The parent as an agent of cultivation is a new incarnation, a figure known for what he or she brings forth, and not merely that this person brought forth.

T h e Or i g i n o f Par e n t s

Over the last two hundred years of  US history, arguments about what parenting is (or should be) appeared with increasing frequency, fervor, and social consequence. To be sure, Romans and Vikings parented; parents existed in Ming China and Shakespeare’s England. Yet what I demonstrate in this chapter is how parenting in the United States emerged as an elaborate discursive regime: a scientia parentis that propounded a potent identity for its practitioners and a social politics for everyone to debate. The parent could thus be seen—­like the psychoanalyst, the heavyweight boxer, the balloonist, or the bicyclist—­as an emergent figure of modernity. Indeed, this word, parent, appears with increasing frequency in the United States just as two historical factors came to pass. First, by regulating the minimum ages of employment and hours of work for children, the National Child Labor Committee (founded in 1904) effectively rendered all persons under the age of fifteen as economically dependent, thereby expanding the duration of parental authority. Second, during the 1920s, education reform greatly improved public schooling for children, and school attendance became mandatory for the first time. Both of these changes transformed the child as an economic and political agent. Rather than interpret single-­digit human persons as little adults, early twentieth-­century prescriptive literatures argued that the child is something importantly understood as pre-­adult, as something that is raw material containing future potential. The purpose of the parent is, increasingly, the enclosure of this raw potential from the world so that the child might properly incubate before entering the world as an appropriately domesticated political and economic agent.6 The parent, then, is a political and economic figure: political in relation to the child as a subject the parent governs, economic in the parent’s financial capacity to keep a child from the labor that is used to contribute to the household.

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The parent is also a seemingly genderless subject. A parent could refer to a mother or a father, biological or not. My own hypothesis is that the genderless category of parent became pervasive when it did—­in the 1920s—­as a compromised, and somewhat falsifying, trope of gender equality.7 Social historians describe this moment in the history of marriage and procreative relations as one in which men and women increasingly described marriage as the result of  love and the hope for its continuance. Such a primarily sentimental logic for marital union was an incipient cultural logic.8 In this sense, parent could be seen as a category of commiseration, one produced by an era of romantic marriage between supposed equals. I suggest that the term is more a rhetorical compromise rather than a reflection of some practiced reality, because the historical record demonstrates that women continued to do the lion’s share of work surrounding offspring: nursing, maintenance, cultivation, tutoring, counseling, feeding, cleaning, and even disciplining. Women did this work, even as they also earned the right to vote during this decade, and many began working outside the home for the first time.9 A concept of relative relational equality—­ rendered equal by their affections, if not by their labor—­circulated even as the majority of families in the 1920s consisted of a father who was the wage earner and a mother whose job it was to take care of the house and children.10 The figure of the “parent” is a marker of the unified purpose for their differentiated tasks: both of their efforts (wage earning and home tending) contributed to the common cause of cultivating their offspring. This common cause is parenting. When the parent is invoked in this chapter (and in the broader culture of prescriptive literature on which it draws), the gender of that figure is sometimes obscure, sometimes not—­sometimes the “mother” is the default synonym, sometimes not. But no matter that variability, the practice of parenting is usually quite specific, and often quite politically controversial, in its gender.

T h e Par e n t a s R e l i g i o u s A g e n t

Is this figure of the parent usefully understood as not just ambivalently gendered but also especially religious? I want to keep any neat answer to that question at bay and instead simply underline the ways that religious adherence has emerged as one metric of how successfully the parent affects the child. For the past thirty-­five years, the University of Southern California

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sociologists Norella M. Putney and Susan Harris have studied three thousand subjects and over three hundred multigenerational families in order to determine how religion is (or isn’t) transmitted within families across generations. “Parents have more religious influence than they think,” they conclude. “Fervent faith cannot compensate for a distant dad.”11 The existence of such a study, with such conclusions, indicates the extent to which the par­ enting of children and the perpetuation of religious adherence are understood to be analogous, even interrelated, projects of human cultivation. I return to the question of religion within parenting throughout this chapter in an effort to specify the ways that I see parenting as a metadiscourse of value. I would like to reimagine the history of parenting as a document of religion in the broadest sense, one that emphasizes the question of authority posed by every parent-­child relationship and considers this dynamic as one productively understood through the lens of religious studies. What reappears in the documentary evidence prescribing American parenting practice is authority: descriptions of and disputes over the authority of parents, and the meaning of that authority for the propagation of right children for the imagined body politic.12 Describing the child-­rearing manuals that began to appear in the antebellum period, John and Virginia Demos wrote, “Most of the concern which was evident in these books related to problems of authority. In one form or another they all imparted the same message: the authority of parents must be established early in a child’s life and firmly maintained throughout the years of growth.”13 Due in no small part to the country’s colonial origins and overthrow of them (due, therefore, in no small part to the country’s own relationship to parentage), parenting became a representation of, and debate about, power, authority, and the tempering of the individual will. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed of America in 1840: “When the social state becomes democratic and men adopt as a general principle that it is good and legitimate to judge all things in relation to oneself, taking old beliefs as information and not as rule, the power of opinion that a father exerts over his sons diminishes, as does his legal power.”14 America lacked parents in the same way that it lacked state religion. This was not a total absence of authority, since spectral and manifest forms of hierarchical power pervaded the new and unfolding democracy. But the premise of this conceptual independence was that the most important authority was you.15 To observers of the nascent country, America was a vast frontier that lacked the scaffolding of coherent authority. It is in this context in which certain feudal and ecclesiastical authorities recede that the parent emerges

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as a prescribed type. When authority is diffuse—­even invisible—­it must be constructed to exist. Parenting, and the literatures which emphasized its importance, offered such in-­house scaffolding. Recommendations about parenting were descriptions of proper self-­governance within such an unregulated atmosphere. During the nineteenth century and early twentieth, these recommendations cast the mother as the central agent, although always within the presumptive heterosexual whole of the two-­parent family. As critics of religion and psychologists of the family have suggested, the parental relation could easily be figured analogously to a religious relation. In an indicative 1882 treatise on the moral education of children, the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall would write: The mother’s face and voice are the first conscious objects as the infant soul unfolds, and she soon comes to stand in the very place of God to her child. All the religion of which the child is capable during this by no means brief stage of its development consists of those sentiments—­ gratitude, trust, dependence, love, etc.—­now felt only for her which are later directed toward God. The less these are now cultivated toward the mother, who is now their only fitting if not their only possible object, the more feebly they will later be felt toward God. This, too, adds greatly to the sacredness and the responsibilities of motherhood.16

Hall believed that in infancy individuals developed a relationship to their nurturing adults akin to that of divine care. Inferred from such an observation is an ongoing corollary between the parental relationship and subsequent divine engagement. In the history of psychology, the parent often represents a divine proxy. It was not only critics of religion like G. Stanley Hall or Sigmund Freud that focused on the divine authority ascribed to parental power. A 1916 man­ ual, When Children Err, adjudicated the different disciplinary options avai­l­ able to parents with evocative classifications, including Arbitrary, or Impulsive, Punishment; Retributive, or Revengeful, Punishment; Protective, or Legal, Punishment; Educative, or Wise, Punishment. The writer was clear: “Great and necessary as are law and authority, if human society is to develop its higher possibilities, law and authority are but rounds of the ladder by means of  which mankind climbs to higher levels.”17 A just parent—­like a just God—­would in­ spire individuals to ascend beyond the primitive projections of a retributive authority, and instead pursue the good by their own compass. Until that time,

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“do not use God as a tool for child management,” argued a psychologist in a 1987 column for Parents magazine. “It is important for a child to trust you as a spiritual guide.”18 Here a late twentieth-­century parenting magazine nominates the parent as the primary religious educator, the person who can teach children how to claim their authority once they accept their own. These examples inaugurate this exploration of connections between the religious history of the United States and its cultural ideologies of parenting. By this I do not refer to the specific ways that sectarian groups prescribe certain parenting strategies, such as the Latter-­day Saint recommendation of a Family Home Evening, or the Hindu practice of talking about Vedic precepts during the experience of everyday life (dharma sambhashana). Instead, I will pursue how parenting figured centrally in discussions of Amer­ ican life, especially as Americans struggled with the questions of what kind of individual would be the most successful in its changing religious imperatives and market concerns. This chapter thus seeks to expand the important work begun by Pamela Klassen, whose research into the rituals of home birth provocatively pressed her readers to consider the anthropology of lay obstetrics an important locus of moral, religious, and social thought.19 But of course there are many other scholars who have considered the history of the family within the history of religion.20 There is a lengthy scholarly literature about published child-­care advice, about the changing role of the mother, about the social history of the family, about the cultural meaning of the child.21 I seek to create a strong description of parenting in a particular national context (that of the United States) in an effort to encourage the sense that these studies form a cohering field of interest. There currently exists no broad-­scale historical or anthropological study of the relationship between religion and parenting. In general there seems to be a sense that religion—­particularly Protestant Christianity—­once played a powerful role in the work of parenting, but that religion simply disappeared from homes at the close of the Victorian era.22 According to the majority of historical accounts, religion within the family, like religion within the broader culture, disappeared in a presumptive secularization that included a vast diminishing of participation in social intercourse.23 Such a narrative depends on certain sociologies of religion, including those that emphasize church attendance or creedal adherence, in order to prove a declension in religious commitment. Retelling US religious history as a history of parenting, I seek to identify patterns in an effort to propose a premise for continuing research in the conjoined study of religion and parenting in the United States. What I hope to offer is a series of imperatives

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with which scholars may disagree, but also on which subsequent scholars may find new spaces to argue for how parenting offers a way to access intimate and domestic politics of religion. In this chapter, the majority of the evidence is culled from educational, moral, and scientific literatures. As a result, the imperatives I highlight often convey the fantasy ascriptions of such prescriptive literatures: fantasies often written by white American elites to address other white American elites, or to condescend to those who did not share their racial or scientific profiles. Most of these texts are authored by Christians; some are written by Jews. All seek to provide a declarative, incorporating voice of authority for the best family. Parenting manuals and scientific research about parenting rarely fail to acknowledge human diversity even as their intonations are persistently universalizing about the proper demeanor, and proper ethics, to practice as parents. What, then, can we really know from such texts about how any given American family actually lives? What we know is what was spectral—­spectral to the hundreds of thousands of parents who never cracked open a child-­rearing manual and yet still lived in the world of their commands. What we can know is the assignment of parental authority by scientific, therapeutic, and domestic advisers who believed in the capacity of parents to determine individual and national futures. There are, of course, a much wider variety of parental identities and dynamics at work in American religious history. But the genealogy in this chapter focuses on the way mainstream constructions of the parent are almost always in service to conservative politics of nurture. Henry Jenkins has written provocatively about the figuration of the home as a fort to be defended by its commander parents; his work has emphasized how children in such a fantasy home must always be understood to be blank slates of innocence, and their parents relentlessly laboring to maintain this innocence. “This formulation of family values uses the figure of the innocent child to police boundaries between the family and the outside world,” Jenkins writes.24 As Seth Dowland, Heather Hendershot, Emily Johnson, and W. Bradford Wilcox have explored in their research, this discursive regime of “family values” relies on a tradition of maternal feminism in which women are politically important as voluble mothers and on soft patriarchs whose primary commitment is to their own domestication.25 Simmering just at the surface of such abstract and idealized accounts are the material and economic histories of parenting, histories that are inferred in what follows but not richly considered. If adequately considered, these histories would necessarily include analysis of family relations in the

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context of Native American relocation, slave ownership, and immigrant and refugee migration, as well as specific analysis of differential access to institutional and governmental resources distributed to promote family wellness. Instead, this will be a history that links Catherine Beecher to Ann Romney, G. Stanley Hall to James Dobson, showing a broad genealogy of the Anglo-­Saxon collective will about parenting in America. To be clear, it is my intended implication that these two histories are profoundly intertwined, that the mandates about right parents were and are almost always subterranean critiques of wrong parents, wrong classes, and wrong races. This subterranean critique requires exposure by future research. For now, my ambition is to demonstrate the minority majority in an effort to illuminate the inevitability of the majority minority, of counter-­reformation, and of rebellion against the domineering force of certain messages about ideal societal formation. If the absence of parents defined the beginning of American history, the hope for substantive parental presence defined in various ways the story of America, and its histories of religion.

T h e P o l i t i c s o f Par e n t i n g

In seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century America, etiquette manuals and moral treatises defined the relationship between parents and children in hierarchical terms reminiscent of the colonial relationship. In 1712, Benjamin Wadsworth wrote, “Children should patiently wear, and grow better by, the needful chastisements and Corrections their Parents give them.”26 A treatise from 1768 told children, “Grumble not nor be discontented at any thing thy Parents appoint, speak or do.”27 Since the days of the Roman Empire, European families—­as well as European monarchic and ecclesiastical institutions—­functioned under the principle of patricia potestas, in which the male head of household held absolute power over his children. Parents had one job: to break the will of their children so that they would become adults who would sacrifice their personal desires for the good of the larger circles of authority they occupied, including those of family, church, king, and country. British colonists did not interpret individualism or ambition as positive aspects of a child’s disposition. Rather, they believed children were innately sinful, and required the controlling authority of a parent to teach them self-­discipline.28 As Philip Greven has demonstrated, there was enormous religious variability among colonists, as some were more evangelical

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while others remained stoutly Calvinist; some were Quaker and some irreligious gentry; and each imagined parenting practices quite differently.29 Social class and religious denomination contributed to differences of parenting practice; however, throughout the colonial world there was a powerful sense that a child was something to be managed in service to broader economies and in deference to longer patriarchic genealogies. Current historiography on the history of the family agrees that a revolution in parenting transpired simultaneously to the American Revolution of the late eighteenth century. In his landmark The Child and the Republic (1968), Bernard Wishy demonstrated that modern notions of child nurture originated in the early nineteenth century, “when a call went out to citizens to save their children from the sins and errors undermining the republic.”30 Catherine Beecher, one of the foremost theorists of nineteenth-­century female domesticity, dedicated The American Woman’s Home (1869) “To the women of America, in whose hands rest the real destinies of the Republic,” and Lydia Maria Child, another middle-­class reformer who advocated new child-­rearing principles, dedicated The Mother’s Book (1831) “to American Mothers on whose intelligence and discretion the safety and prosperity of our republic so much depend.”31 As these dedications indicate, mothers directed republican parenting as fathers guided republican economic security; each one depended on the other for its perpetuation. Despite this clarity about the natal importance of the American home, the available child-­rearing manuals in the early Republic offered a set of conflicting demands on parents. Christianity and a Christian character seemed important to imprint upon every American child. But the self-­appointed experts on child rearing were equally anxious to advance the claims of the child against all religious traditions and state authority. Putting the matter another way, parents were to strengthen the child’s Christian conscience while instilling in her a “fierce will for success.”32 Americans thus began to abandon what Glen Davis in Childhood and History in America (1976) called “physical” controls in place of more subtle “psychic” tactics that substituted for force.33 Unlike the early colonists, who broke their children’s wills to render them economically useful at a young age, antebellum parents engaged their children in increased dialogue, nurturing their “lovely children, to perpetuate our names.” In this sentimental view, rather than helping to support the family in tangible ways, children now served to warm their parents’ hearts and consume “the fruits of [their parents’] honest industry.”34 What sort of child emerged from such nurture? Republican parenting formatted the family as the training ground for citizenship, but what

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it meant to be an active citizen in a free country remained an amorphous proposition. By what principles would citizens be guided? On what moral authority would they decide right practice? From the standpoint of religious history, this contradictory set of expectations for individual independence and Christian obedience could be seen across the American landscape, as denominations subdivided into contesting sects and nondenominational evangelical benevolent societies increased in number and size. While there no longer was the same “community surveillance” that monitored social practice in early America, a new circulating discourse of Christian conscience became a form of authoritarian speech that inspired institutional and intimate action.35 “The middle-­class family emerged from the industrial revolution as a powerful Protestant symbol,” Margaret Bendroth has written. “Thus, loving actions might be a means of divine grace and child rearing, no longer merely an economic or social responsibility but a godly task with eternal consequences.”36 In their writing on the ideal American home, Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe made explicit the connection between home and heaven, between parental work and godly authority: “The family state then, is the aptest earthly illustration of the heavenly kingdom, and in it woman is its chief minister. Her great mission is self-­denial, in training its members to self-­sacrificing labors for the ignorant and weak: if not her own children, then the neglected children of her Father in heaven.”37 Such a gendered configuration for family life was not met with universal acclaim. Many nineteenth-­century communitarian critiques of existent religious authority—­such as those supplied by the Latter-­day Saints, Oneida Perfectionists, Rappites, Shakers, and Spiritualists—­included indictments of the Christian family and its norms for sexual practice and gender identity.38 Across the country, individuals resisted Christian presumptions about civ­ ilized rectitude. For example, nineteenth-­century genre paintings had a standard cast of characters (farmer, peddler, housewife, frontiersman) that included the “naughty child,” almost always a young boy engaged in a disobedient act like stealing food (usually sweets) or enacting a practical joke. The appearance of the naughty child indicated changes in the popular attitudes toward children, including the redefinition of propriety and shifting notions of equality within the family itself. The naughty child in visual culture represented a tolerable impishness in the postrevolutionary settlement of America.39 Whatever parental authority that Christian observers prescribed to quell indulgent sensibilities, there was an equal cultural tug to encourage rebellion in the republican child. And the results were clear.

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“Parents love their children as dearly and intensely as in Europe, but exercise less control, less authority,” wrote one observer. “American parents are far more forbearing, nay meeker with their children than are those in Europe.”40 According to critical observers, the invention of the nurturing American parent had not, it seemed, produced a child willing to be controlled by such authority. The reality of this figuration is less interesting to me than its colonial implications. The American child was a metonym for its raucous national context: unruly and allergic to authority.

T h e Sc i e n c e o f Par e n t i n g

If republican parenting sought to instantiate a right citizen, parenting during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to construct individuals as the developmental apex of civilization. Parents increasingly felt that they ought to be soldiers of science in the care of their children. Such scientific applications would mold children who would become physically and morally the best of  humanity. In practice, these two forces—­moral and scientific—­were more overlapping than oppositional.41 For example, in The Christian Family (1929), George Walter Fiske argued for a “child-­ centered” home that avoided old-­fashioned Calvinist authoritarianism as well as “new-­fashioned home anarchy.” Run by “constructive discipline,” this home included a regular “family council” as well as routine times for prayer, worship, and instruction. When reaching for a metaphor to describe this ideal community, Fiske wrote that home was a “laboratory,” a place where children could daily observe religion being lived by godly parents.42 The home became a scientific laboratory due in part to the permeating effect of the child-­study movement. Led by the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, the child-­study movement sought “to enlist large numbers of ordinary citizens in a broad effort to deepen both public and scientific understanding of human development.”43 In addition to G. Stanley Hall, others like the pediatrician L. Emmett Holt (author of Care and Feeding of Children in 1894) and the psychologist John Broadus Watson (author of Psychological Care of Infant and Child in 1928) argued for the simultaneity of health and moral vigor. “This practice of regularity in the physical care of children will lay the foundation, not only of  health and contentment, but also of moral discipline,” summarized one popular child-­care manual.44 The child-­study movement offered critical data for the advocacies of the Social

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Purity and Social Hygiene movements, which connected concepts of moral virtue to physical practices. These movements included the distribution of bathing manuals to new immigrant communities, political arguments for birth control, campaigns to outlaw prostitution, and eugenics propositions.45 During the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, scientists be­ came more engaged in the public sphere, and in the wake of  World War I scientific evidence became a critical component of legislative action. The tug-­of-­war between religious authority and resistance to it continued in an increasingly pronounced dialectic about the application of scientific principles in public life. By 1900, abortion was a criminal offense in nearly every American jurisdiction. Those statutes, along with the Comstock Law passed in 1873 (which prohibited the dissemination of  birth control devices through the mail), made it more difficult for individuals to access means by which they might control reproduction.46 Such laws evinced the Christian moralism at work in American jurisprudence, and these laws also indicated the expanded role of social scientists in the definition of the social good. Social scientists redacted scientific knowledge to provide ideal types: of mothers, of fathers, of children, and of education. This is when a scientia parentis became most coherently identifiable. A rash of new child-­rearing manuals began to appear in the United States in the 1920s as parenting increasingly became a recognizable habitus. This is an era of expanded access to birth control and an increase in eugenics, an era in which family planning seemed a biological and social possibility, and an era in which the divestment of difference seemed conceivable through the programming of equality. An emblematic text for this moment was Ellen Key’s best-­selling The Century of the Child (1909).47 As one prominent historian of the American family has argued, the twentieth century, described as the “century of the child,” became “a century of anxiety about the child and about parents’ own inadequacy.”48 The number of agencies and manuals devoted to children and their proper care increased exponentially. The author of Religious Education in the Family (1915) described the scene: “Today parents’ classes are being formed in many churches; Christian Associations, women’s clubs, and institutes are studying the subject; individual parents are becoming more and more interested in the rational performance of their high duties. And there is a general desire for guidance.”49 This organizational development surrounding the subject of parenting reflected the expanding national culture of education, the incursion of therapeutic idiom, and the formation of federal agencies to nurture and monitor human welfare. To be clear, nobody took the recommendations of these

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newly enshrined experts out of  hand. Even the experts reminded their read­ ers that their parental authority reigned supreme: “A good mother  .  .  . is good just because of her prejudices. She knows so much about her child that her testimony is scientifically worthless.”50 While science knows quite a bit, it doesn’t know everything a mother does, and it doesn’t have the tools she does to access those troves. The mother should read scientific recommendations, but should also be reading her particular child as her instinct guides her. This hygienic parenting was a potent discourse: one that identified the child as a primitive subject to be developed into civilized adulthood in a process of recapitulation evocative of the worst excesses of Social Darwinism. Yet these arguments would not persist. Summarizing what she read in interwar child-­rearing manuals, Martha Wolfenstein argued that between 1914 and 1945 there was an “extreme transformation” of the conception of the child. Earlier manuals emphasized the strong impulses of the infant, whereas by the 1940s, she found that the manuals interpreted the baby to be a harmless innocent. “Where formerly the mother was to exercise a ceaseless vigilance, removing the thumb from the child’s mouth as often as he put it in,” now she is told not to make a fuss, Wolfenstein explained, and allow instead the child to act without interruption.51 The research of  Wolfenstein, a Freudian psychologist and occasional collaborator with Margaret Mead, indicated the professionalization of child therapy and the increasing authority its observations would have in the assignment of proper parental devotion. If early nineteenth-­century scientific parenthood required persistent correction and moral devotion, the new iteration of parenting recommended in the child-­rearing manuals mandated that the parents take pleasure in their child, naughty or nice. Parenting became—­in Wolfenstein’s locution—­a practice of  “fun morality”: Where formerly there was felt to be the danger that, in seeking fun, one might be carried away into the depths of wickedness, today there is a recognizable fear that one may not be able to let go sufficiently, that one may not have enough fun. . . . Thus we would have preserved unacknowledged and unrecognized the tradition of puritanism. We do not pride ourselves on being good, and we secretly worry about not having enough fun.52

Parenting became something that made the parent more than it molded a child. The practice of parenting transformed from a development of demo-

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cratic citizens or civilized subjects into a performance of pleasure by the progenitors. The test of your parenting was no longer your child, but whether you lived a life devoted to the enjoyment of your child. The best child was no longer the result of hygiene but the result of shared pleasure.

T h e Mark e t f o r Par e n t i n g

If nineteenth-­century parenting emphasized the creation of able citizens and early twentieth-­century parenting molded specimens derived from equation, parents after World War II seemed to focus their energies on creating a massive population of capitalist consumers who could outnumber (and outspend) any Cold War enemy. Parents in the postwar period used the exponentially increasing array of consumer packaged goods to reply to every part of a child’s physicality and intellectual development. By the sharpest historical assessment, they were handmaidens of the military-­industrial complex, transferring postwar productivity to the home front. In Mothers of Conservatism (2014), Michelle Nickerson describes how this valuation of the nuclear family cemented a “housewife populism” that valorized women for virtues imparted by their political marginality, especially selflessness, anonymity, and militancy on behalf of their families.53 Parenthood now became “an absorbing, creative profession—­a career second to none,” charged one writer in 1946.54 Following World War II, it seemed as if everything in the American landscape existed to foster children and their parents. Tract homes, automobiles, highway infrastructure, in-­home furnishings, public schools: industry worked overtime to supply the material context for the materialization of the definitive baby boom. Countless incentives, from federally financed mortgages to tax deductions, supported the establishment of families. The birthrate rose among all social, occupational, economic, and ethnic groups in a remarkable consensus of reproductive behavior.55 Communities like Levittown, Pennsylvania, earned the nicknames “Fertility Valley” and “the Rabbit Hutch” to describe their natal excess.56 Although the baby boom was fueled, in part, by the postwar economic boom, it also resulted from a profound change in the national political culture: the nation’s security became fused with a vision of the American home. Parenthood provided proof of virile heterosexuality at a time when homosexuals were targets of a homophobic anticommunism.57 And swaddled children offered a sweet reward to

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battle-­weary soldiers now shuttled into drab grey flannel suits. “The ideology of domesticity, focused on the nuclear family with children, came to embody the hope for the future of the nation and the ultimate achievement of happiness and personal fulfillment for its citizens,” the historian Elaine Tyler May explained. “The dual functions of patriotism and personal happiness marked a change in the concept of parenthood and marginalized the childless in unprecedented ways.”58 While child-­rearing manuals had been in circulation for some time, their authorship shifted during this era. When Dr. Benjamin Spock said, “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do,” he effectively concluded the era of hygienic parenting, turning mothers and fathers from scientific source materials to the analysis of their own instincts.59 This did not diminish the role of manuals. Instead, it elaborated the role of the author as a proxy analyst, someone who could in chummy, forgiving language help parents think about their disciplinary and nurturing instincts.60 As families lived in increasingly atomized physical settings, authors of child-­rearing manuals became virtual village elders, boon companions, and confessors to those who bought their texts and considered the application of their recommendations. These authors became a stand-­in for missing social community. The culture of parenting became increasingly oriented toward a her­ meneutics of child behavior. The purpose of parenting was to come to understand your children as they were, not to compel them to formal rules or abstract metrics. For fifty-­two years, sales of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care (1946) were second only to the Bible. Spock repeatedly enjoined mothers and fathers to see their child as particular, and to find practices of discipline that worked with the child’s particular temperament. This engagement with a child was, Spock argued, the highest calling: “Taking care of their children, seeing them grow and develop into fine people, gives most parents—­ despite the hard work—­their greatest satisfaction in life. It is a creative and generative act on every level. Pride in other worldly accomplishments usually pales in comparison.”61 In the world of Dr. Spock, there was no such thing as a willful child; there was only the misunderstood child. His handbook included short recommendations (usually only two to three paragraphs in length) about every conceivable child care question, posed often as a series of questions to the parent. The following passage is drawn from the section “Temper Tantrums.” Note, in particular, the responsibilities of the parent; the sort of interactions recommended between parent and child; and the critical role material goods play in the management of a child’s disposition:

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Frequent tantrums are most often due to the fact that the parents haven’t learned the knack of handling this behavior tactfully. If your child is having frequent temper tantrums ask yourself the following questions: Does she have plenty of chance to play freely outdoors? Are there things for her to push and pull and climb on there? Indoors, has she enough toys and household objects to play with, and is the house childproofed? Do you, without realizing it, arouse balkiness by telling her to come and get her shirt on instead of slipping it on without comment, or asking her if she wants to go to the bathroom instead of leading her there or bringing the potty to her? When you have to interrupt her play to get her indoors or to meals, do you frustrate her directly, or get her mind on something pleasant? When you see a storm brewing, do you meet it head-­on, grimly, or do you distract her to something else?62

Time and again, Spock’s ideas were described as “common sense.” And they quickly pervaded the landscape: parents referred to their children as “Spock babies” with pride. One poll of more than a thousand new mothers found that 64 percent had read Baby and Child Care. Of this group, four of every five referred to the book at least twice a month. Doctors, hospitals, dairies, and insurance agents purchased bundles of the paperback book to give away as a goodwill gesture. “Dr. Spock became a national paterfamilias, whose wisdom emanated from his own set of commandments,” wrote his biographer. He argued that parents could achieve enlightenment through the admirable patience and quiet labor of parenting.63 Spock was the ideal mouthpiece for postwar parenting. His passive parent was the sensitive, endlessly interpreting laborer, possessing an interpretive constancy before a job described as necessary, and necessarily hard, given the political and psychological stakes. During the 1960s, Spock became a lightning rod. In a widely publicized February 1968 sermon to his congregation at the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, Norman Vincent Peale accused him of corrupting an entire generation. A supporter of the Vietnam War, Peale believed the antiwar demonstrators were “a student generation that thinks it can get what it yells for.” To him, these protesting hippies lacked discipline and respect for authority. They were (Peale accused) the result of parental “permissivism.” He summed up his interpretation of Spock’s philosophy: “Feed ’em whatever they want, don’t let them cry, instant gratification of needs.”64 Peale described the parents of these children as providing a consumer-­based parenting in which the child was always right, and the parent was never respected.

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One of America’s best-­known Protestant clergymen, Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), stressed what he called the “sin” of instant gratification.65 Although that phrase is nowhere in Baby and Child Care, Peale believed the sum total of Spock’s advice to parents was to let their children be their guide (when for Peale, authority ought to work the other way). The conservative columnist Stewart Alsop complained that an entire generation was “Spocked when they should have been spanked.”66 Later, the evangelical psychologist James Dobson would author his Dare to Discipline (1970) as a countermeasure to the leniency he identified in Spock. Debates about parental authority were debates about what political arrangement the practitioner preferred. During the late twentieth century, conservative political leaders increasingly aligned themselves with conservative religious leaders, developing an argument about family life that was, they claimed, a metonym for right governance. Meanwhile, an expanding parade of child-­care gurus would offer nurturing descriptions of children for working mothers and fathers trying to cultivate right relations with their child as they sought to survive the changing market world. The baby boom parent had produced a generation of market-­conscious citizens seeking to maximize their experiences in the increasingly consumer-­oriented Republic.

T h e S e rv i c e o f Par e n t i n g

During the 1990s, several critical economic and demographic shifts took place that would affect the practice of parenting, including the rampant expansion in American higher education; the outsourcing of industry and the corresponding transition to an information economy; and profound reapportionments of gender demographics in all occupations.67 With an increase in standards of living and educational access, American children lived lives of profound material plenty when compared to their historical predecessors. This improvement in children’s material lives led to an escalation of the minimal standard for a child’s well-­being. Meanwhile, the ubiquity of mass entertainment brought new anxieties about cultural experience and mental development. Depending on your vantage, “contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world,” or they might be understood as the most pressured young people in the history of the world (or both).68 Certainly parents have been figured as responsible for the result of this excess, and as one child psychologist commented,

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“Never before have parents been so (mistakenly) convinced that their every move has a ripple effect into their child’s future success.”69 Concomitant with these shifts in children’s culture were significant alterations in religious life. More and more Americans identified themselves as “spiritual, not religious,” an incantation that included both freethinking participants in the New Age movement and attendees at nondenominational Christian churches. What united this diverse spectrum of believers was the disavowal of denomination. For more and more Americans, being religious meant something disconnected from institutions and authorities. The practice of religion was a looser concept, comprising reading groups, therapeutic practices, and a combination of sectarian practices. A 1995 article in Parents magazine outlined the spiritual values that every parent should insert into “everyday family activities,” including selecting a congregation that “matches your family’s needs and personality.” In addition, it recommended that you set aside some time every week for sacred family time, teach kids tolerance, introduce your children to different faiths by taking them to interfaith services or activities in your community, answer “big questions” directly, and, finally, “when children ask about good or evil, birth or death, don’t reply with a complicated theological response.”70 These values did not belong to any sin­ gle creed; they were the generally agreed-­upon moral middle of  the presumptively plural society. And so, as the terms of parental success were increasingly narrowed to educational ascendance, the terms of religious articulation became purposefully vaguer, determined by the needs of the believer and the needs of the believer’s family. A 1993 article in Parents pointed out that “the most successful churches and synagogues envision their congregations as a hub for a wider network of families.” Churches would not succeed if they fo­ cused on theology or doctrine; they would succeed if they provided “activities that meet the needs of young families.”71 Within this culture of religious fluidity and parental ambition, a curiously intense subject of parenting practice took center stage: corporal punishment. Since the 1970s, the divide between “parent-­centered” practice and “child-­centered” practice was increasingly determined by religious identity. Child-­centered proselytizers like T. Berry Brazelton and Penelope Leach were avowedly secular advocates of parental practices of listening and loving, whereas the self-­proclaimed “Judeo-­Christian” experts, such as James Dobson and William Damon, loudly condemned the decadent state of American culture, arguing for a disciplining parent in an era of service parenting.72 This dichotomy achieved notoriety in the early 1990s, when the corporal punishment of children was a topic of heated social and political debate.73

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Reminiscent of the era of hygienic parenting, social scientists joined the fray, becoming among the most outspoken critics of corporal punishment in homes and schools.74 Even historians, like Philip Greven, joined the conversation. Greven’s passionate (“I believe that . . . the end of the world begins with the striking of a single child”) treatise Spare the Child (1991) offered a genealogy of  “religious rationales” for corporal punishment. Greven explained that conservative religious beliefs about the right and responsibility of parents to discipline children with physical force commonly begin with the view that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, the ultimate source of authority and guidance regarding every aspect of human life, including child rearing.75 Leading conservative Protestant parenting specialists promoted an “authority-­centered” parenting model and staunchly defended the “rights” of parents to physically “chastise” their children as they carry out the kind of discipline modeled and recommended by the God they iden­ tify as biblical.76 This large scholarly effort replied to data that suggested conservative Protestants were more likely than other parents to value obedience from their children and to support the use of corporal punishment, such as spanking, to discipline youngsters.77 A state of emergency occurred in reply, as scholars scrambled to assemble evidence from research on the physical discipline of children to prove that corporal punishment was an ineffective way to deter misbehavior, that it promoted aggression in children, and that physical punishment may be associated with academic failure, delinquency, and a propensity to practice harsh parenting as an adult.78 Time and again, research indicated that children subjected to corporal punishment tended to be more aggressive with peers than children who experienced alternative forms of discipline.79 What was peculiar about this blip of research was twofold. First, the available empirical evidence did not suggest that Christian parents did, in fact, use corporal punishment, only that some of their child-­care manuals recommended it. Second, the broader demography of American religion made such coverage of conservative Protestant practice somewhat disproportionate. If early twentieth-­century social scientists sought to assure moral programming through scientific recommendations, late twentieth-­century social scientists seemed bent on exiling all forms of religion from cultural practice. However, this would not rid parents of the problem of discipline. There was ample evidence that “ontogenetic factors like self-­control are the primary predictors of unofficial delinquency.”80 And in the late 1990s, parents and experts needed to provide a reply to the increased violence enacted

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by children and teenagers. Talk of spanking Protestants may have been a convenient sacrificial object for a society lacking answers to the reasons be­ hind the expansion of youth pharmacology and the increase in school shoot­ ings, juvenile depression, and diagnoses of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). If religion was the culprit, then the cure was simple: less religion, more parenting.

T h e A u th o r i ty o f Par e n t i n g

There has been a persistent relationship between religious ideation and parental religious practice in the twenty-­first century. In a 1994 study, the sociologist Dean R. Hoge found that 75 percent of Protestants leave the church during late adolescence, but 49 percent return before their late thirties, most frequently to give their children a religious education. “Having children is the number-­one impetus people have for returning or turning to a church or synagogue,” said Hoge, a professor at the Catholic University of America.81 A 2007 survey by Parents magazine agreed, finding that 64 per­ cent of parents interviewed claimed they were “more religious/spiritual” since becoming a parent.82 “Parenthood prompts many people to review their religious commitment (or lack of it), and leads some to redefine it entirely,” wrote another Parents commentator. “What works for us as individuals, or even couples, doesn’t always fill our needs, or desires, for our children’s spiritual upbringing. And so we search.”83 These examples offer a suggestive sociology of American parenting and its spiritual connotations. This is only a part of the story to be told about parents in the history of religion. Looking back from twenty-­first-­century practices of parenting to those that preceded it, it is possible to make some broad claims about the relationship between religion and American parenting. At the same time that there has been a diminishment in creedal orthodoxies, the expectations of what it means to be a parent have become more orthodox. Not that more parents are religious, but that more people treat parenting religiously. Relatedly, there are more areas of imagined perfection within the frame of child development. No parent would claim to be comprehensive or ideal in his or her parenting. Yet all parents would now speak of parenting as an occupational force in their lives; to do otherwise is to commit a social heresy. Being a parent today isn’t a component of existence but an ordering fact of existence, one that seems—­from all available blogs,

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sitcom plots, popular novels, and political speeches—­to press at the limits of sanity, wellness, time, budget, and ability. It should be no surprise that the potency of parenting expands among certain demographics in the West just as there are declining birthrates and an increase in single parenthood within the same demographic. As the decision to be a parent becomes more self-­selecting and aspirational, the meaning of its rightful practice expands. Examples from the electoral disputes of the spring and summer of 2012 illustrate the contradictory positions held within this new landscape of self-­ determining nurture. During that time, it was difficult to avoid the subject of parenting, largely exhibited through the figure of the mother, although ever and always with the ghostly sense of the father and his involvement (or lack thereof). In April of that year, the CNN commentator Hilary Rosen, who was also an adviser to the Democratic National Committee, uttered these words about the Romney campaign using the candidate’s wife, Ann, as a surrogate on economic issues facing working women and working moms: “Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life.”84 Next, the May 21 issue of Time magazine pictured a Los Angeles mother standing upright while her three-­year-­old son, perched on a small chair, nursed. “Are You Mom Enough?” the cover asked, enticing the reader to an article about the practice of attachment parenting. Then on July 16, the tech superstar Melissa Mayer posted two tweets announcing that first, she had been named CEO of Yahoo; and second, she was expecting a baby boy. Each of these events created a pile of editorials and incendiary online commentary, comprising another moment in what has been dubbed the Mommy Wars.85 Originally understood as a battle between who could be a “better” mother (the working mom or the stay-­at-­home mom), the conflict has grown to include the many choices of new parents: natural birth versus medicated birth, hospital birth versus home birth, breast-­feeding versus formula feeding, extended breast-­feeding versus weaning, vaccinating versus refusing, disposable diapers versus cloth, et cetera. In the early twenty-­first century, the elements of infant nurture have gone decidedly public, including entire economies, psychologies, and lobbies dividing the world between good and bad parents, depending on the practices they pursue.86 Amid the din of debate about toddler breast-­feeding and supermothers, about nannies and quality time, about the new slacker dads and the old midwifery, there is a constant hum of one truth: practicing parenting is central to American life, and determinative of the American moral imagination. In the mid-­1990s, Parents magazine surveyed more than 7,700 readers and found that there was universal agreement that teaching children is

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a practical way to make a lasting contribution to society. Debating those teachings is one of the main ways Americans debate their beliefs about right authority. It is how Americans order their capacity for political and moral consequence in the world. “Many Americans believe that the only place they can find true happiness is in private life,” Elaine Tyler May has written. “This belief places an overwhelming burden, as well as an overwhelming sense of expectation, on individual procreative behavior.” In her work, May emphasized the political diffidence that accompanies this emphasis on parenting: “Because the larger society appears out of control and beyond their ability to influence, Americans pursue their reproductive goals with fierce determination.”88 If a moment within the public sphere seems unwieldy and undisciplined, being a parent seems, by May’s account, the only way to change the world. Students of religion investigate how human beings solve problems in communities and how communities create concepts of the human. In its twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century incarnation, parenting has become such a site of problem solving and imagination. A religious history of American parenting shows that there has not been a secularization of the American family in which religion has increasingly absented itself. Instead, this history shows that parenting has provided a mode of religious expression. If religious orthodoxy is understood as a submission of individuals to a comprehensive theological system, parental orthodoxy could be conceived as a submission of individuals to the work of parenting as the determinant of its practitioners’ lives. Scholarship that tackles the embodied, material, and social facts of such contexts would offer not only portraits of the history of the family but also key exhibits in the history of religion. 87

0 8 Kardashian Nation Work in America’s Klan There is a lot of baggage that comes with us. But it’s like Louis Vuitton baggage. You always want it. Kim Kardashian

Scholars of popular culture have long known that being a fan isn’t only about infatuation. It is not just about memorizing every word of a favorite pop star’s catalog or immersing yourself in a fantasy television serial. Pop culture can offer these sweet reprieves, yes: it can give a conduit to credulity, adulation, and wonder. But pop culture is also about hate. Consuming common things, replying to them, ranting about a TV show or a celebrity or a boy band in bars or on message boards gives you a place to sharpen hostilities. To enunciate your differences from the rest of the mob through your capacity to declaim, precisely, what makes something absolutely terrible. Consumption isn’t simply about delight; it is also a hunger to be satiated. And satiation sometimes requires sacrifice. The easiest hit anyone can make to popular culture is that it is shallow. Yet our reactions to it demonstrate time and again how intensely we respond to apparently depthless things. I thought of this as I heard about an odd event in state politics, one that involved government officials, a viral video, student protesters, and a scholar of popular culture. By the time this chapter appears in print, this event will be long forgotten. Something you can still find through a search engine—­but something long ago superseded by other acts of sacrificial violence spread like wildfire through interlinked hypertext documents and a global news industry requiring new data every

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second to stream to you so that you don’t ever stop clicking and watching and retweeting. I recall this incident here, not in some simple act of memorialization, but because this specific event demonstrates how popular culture works as an epithet with specific gendered consequences in the hands of those populists who capitalize the most on its mob benefits. I write about it because this is a chapter about how media invulnerability is hard to achieve. Yet we either achieve it, or get eaten alive by those who do. By those who unflappably commodify the disgust you have for them. The event that I want to recall took place in Missouri, in the argumentative atmosphere between Columbia, where the flagship state university resides, and Jefferson City, where the legislative body funding this state system sits. There were many contexts for this event, but let’s enter where the pop culture rubber hit the road. This was the moment when eighteen Missouri state senators and ninety-­nine Missouri state House of Representatives members decided to comment on the research record of Melissa Click, a scholar who specializes in the analysis of fan cultures. In early January 2016, this group signed letters to top administrators of the University of Missouri System and its campus in Columbia, charging that Click, an assistant professor of communication, “failed to meet the obligations she has to her supervisors, fellow professors, University students, and the taxpayers of Missouri” when she called for “muscle” to help her remove a student journalist from a protest site on the Columbia campus’s main quad. “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here?” Click yelled to the activist crowd behind her after a journalist holding a camera, Mark Schierbecker, refused to leave. “I need some muscle over here.”1 If you use the Internet to learn about this incident, you can read a lot of different words for what Click did, including terms like intimidation, bullying, and assault. The encounter between Click and the journalist, and the viral video comprising that encounter’s depic­ tion deserve a scholarly essay or two (or seven or nineteen) of their own, since how you see Click’s videotaped actions reveals a great deal about what you think about journalism, women, public protest, safety, and mediation in our time. The video itself is not my immediate interest, although I will return to it later in this chapter. Instead, I want to pull our attentions to the assessing language of these petitioning legislators. In their open letter, they wrote, “The fact that, as a professor teaching in the communication department and school of journalism, she displayed such a complete disregard for the First Amendment rights of reporters should be enough to question her competency and aptitude for her job.”2 The sense the lawmakers’ letter

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conveys is that being a scholar of journalism (which it is important to note that Melissa Click is not) requires a certain perspective on journalists. Professors of law, business, or divinity take note: being a scholar of something may also commit you to a state-­mandated protectiveness of it. Scholars of religion should be especially sensitive to this language, since the work of divinity schools, seminaries, and religious studies departments has always been fraught relative to the religious demography that comprises its subject and students. When Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his divinity school address at Harvard on July 15, 1838, he offered a hearty criticism of those dead-­in-­the-­pulpit preachers who failed to give life to their work. “The evils of the church that now is are manifest,” Emerson said to a crowd of aspiring churchmen. “The remedy to their deformity is, first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul.”3 These were not the words of a man with any pat regard for amendments or churches. Emerson saw his job as a scholar of religion was to criticize the religious. I don’t think I overexaggerate the bravery of Melissa Click’s actions when I liken her intervention to that of Emerson’s. No, she says to an encroaching journalist, no. There are limits to your access to us. Whatever Click might be, that she set boundaries for encounter between journalist and subject doesn’t make her in violation of the First Amendment. It means she was working quite critically within the terms it sets for debate. I think this so confidently because Melissa Click is a scholar of the very event in which she became a subject, namely the mediation of women in the public sphere. Unsurprisingly, this ability—­her knowledge of the media thruways that would render her infamy—­was seen as a weakness on which to capitalize. In their letter to Mizzou administrators, the GOP lawmakers also questioned “the ‘research’ she is conducting,” saying they had heard from many constituents who were outraged that taxpayer dollars were funding her work on Lady Gaga, Twilight, and Fifty Shades of Grey.4 These pop subjects are listed in such a manner as to provoke the reader. “While we recognize there may be some value in pop culture studies, her behavior has the public questioning her ‘research’ and her unacceptable actions during the protests,” the lawmakers wrote.5 In other words, Click’s videotaped reactions to a journalist’s request for access indicated that she didn’t practice the First Amendment the right way. And, now that you have us asking about her, we have to ask: what is this woman, with these claimed scholarly subjects, doing here, anyway, on the state’s dime? Disregard, even revulsion, at Click’s subject matters simmers in the legislators’ words. We know that if Click worked on eleventh-­century Chinese

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politics, nineteenth-­century European literature, or contemporary financial modeling, the jab wouldn’t work. You don’t put the word research into quotation marks (“research”) with those subjects. Yet you can with Gaga or young-­ adult fiction. These aren’t subjects; they are “subjects.” Scholars of pop culture know that those quotation marks exist precisely because of the possessive punch those nouns have. The hatred of popular culture is not because it doesn’t mean anything. It is because it seems to be more powerful than most other things. If power is measured by whether you stop the television remote on a documentary about the Song dynasty or on Fifty Shades of Grey, we know where the power is. The remote stops on the sadomasochistic romance. So do the Missouri legislators. And let me agree with them for a second: that power is frightening. Managed well, the deployment of pop power can change the world, igniting crowds to conspire to foment revolution on behalf of equal access and social justice. Managed poorly—­as Theodor Adorno did warn us—­it can create fascism, one piece of propaganda at a time. The difference between managing pop culture well and managing it disastrously has everything to do with whether you are managing fans who use pop culture to articulate love, or those who use it to specify their hate. Everybody knows that violence against women, against trans people, against people of color, against professors barking back at journalists on college campuses, is not because those people—­the people under attack—­are merely weak relative to the legislators or counterprotesters that insult them. Violence against minority subjects has always been a kind of anti-­fandom: a way of articulating hate at something that seems to be getting stronger. In the second decade of the twenty-­first century in which this Missouri debacle transpired, that conflict was one among many indicating that those currently in legislative or financial power worry that those who are not them may be gaining force, that women and queer people and people of color might be threatening the structure of white supremacy that has for so long pervaded intellectual, political, and economic power in the West (what the novelist Tessa Hadley calls “the whole towering, mahogany-­colored, tobacco-­smelling, reasonable edifice of male superiority”).6 It is no coincidence that during the first black American presidency, attention to the number of police shootings of black Americans increases; it is no coincidence that in the era of Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters, the bodies of trans people are in serious danger; and it is no coincidence that in the era of increasing awareness about the potency of pop power, the female scholar of it becomes a campuswide threat. We could say that our moment is epitomized by the voices cast as speaking back to power (protesters on quadrangles, protesters in city streets), and

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the voices of those who circulate as resistant to being emasculated by this resistance. Chief among the latter is a two-­time Emmy Award–­nominated reality TV host (slash real estate tycoon, slash one-­time owner of part or all the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA beauty pageants slash prominent WrestleMania fan) who as of this writing is making a serious bid for the White House. If you read the work of Melissa Click, you’d understand why nobody should be surprised that Donald Trump’s credentials appeal to voters with negative opinions of immigrants even though he has married not one but two immigrants. You’d understand this because you’d know why a certain female body can be the exception to every male political claim so long as he can control that body (in pageants and in Trump Tower). If you study only quantitative political science or economic history, you can’t explain the success of Donald Trump relative to his apparent contradictions, how his many failed investments don’t seem to degrade his appeal as a folk financial hero, or how his 2015–­16 political arguments contradict significantly ones he made during earlier exploratory political forays. To understand Donald Trump, you need to understand how popular media in the United States organizes around certain risk economies and certain gender paradigms, but also around the proud exposure of human self-­deception. Scholars of popular culture know the weird crooked affinities between fan and celebrity. We know that fan worship of a celebrity is not just about admiring the celebrity but also about hating the celebrity, or liking the way that hate makes us feel superior, or how love and hate are tangled up in a mesh of intimate commiseration between one person who nobody knows and somebody who everybody does. We know that you can simultaneously vote for Trump and believe he is an ass. We know, too, that fans can think him a hero simply because everyone else calls him an ass. If you do take popular culture seriously as a critical archive and a research subject, you realize the kinds of things you need to know in order to understand the unfolding civic landscape. Suddenly, understanding the history of game shows seems to be necessary for predicting the United States’ future role in the world economy. Suddenly, studying reality TV seems to be necessary for understanding the United States’ future posture in nuclear negotiations. Suddenly, the political stakes of pop culture seem much bigger than Melissa Click, but also exactly like what happened to her. How she began her day as a professor and a protester and ended her day as a pariah. Click’s current research on anti-­fandom considers how those who hate something contribute to the power of that thing.7 This seems to me an apt

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interpretive line for the Trump moment, one that is also the era of our Kardashian nation. They are related, these two, Trump and the K-­Klan: related in their love of entrepreneurship, love of carefully plucked yet intensely coiffured and vaguely Eastern European women, love of men whose vexed relationship to their own hair suggests stranger waters than cisgender identities might imply. The Kardashians share some Nielsen sociology with The Apprentice, but they raise the gender stakes by turning us to wonder what would happen if the beauty pageant rejects got control of the business. What would happen, in other words, if reality TV became our reality, if you could be someone hoping for fame and got it, all through the sale of what you do in that hope for fame.8 I may seem to have wandered far from the protesters in Columbia, far from Melissa Click and the censure she received from legislators who funded her salary. I am, I admit, leaving that event for a moment, in order to pursue a particular pop culture dynasty. Am I leaving the story of  Melissa Click because it is simply too awful to stay in it any longer? Am I choosing to switch from CNN to E! because the latter helps me forget the former? Or am I, in the switch, suggesting something about the common ground they share in this hypermediated moment? The Kardashians have made their mediation a master class in seeming invulnerability. Observing how they work may help us understand why, exactly, certain people, certain experiences, and certain protests don’t. As you will quickly see, to keep up with the Kardashians you have to have one steely-­eyed commitment, and that is to the production of a self ready for mass distribution. What does this family’s success tell us about the nature of freedom in an age of auto-­artifice? This chapter considers the way work functions in the family Karda­ shian. In particular, I look at how family is their work. On display in their transmedia empire is an endless maintenance of the body, the steady chiseling and recrafting of eyelashes, waists, necklines, and toenails. To begin to understand this family, you have to understand that this cosmetic labor is their labor, it is their work. When the Kardashians are having blush applied, when they’re rubbing in lotion, when they are deciding which tennis shoes to wear to the gym, they are working. But this work is not merely a tool of their own postfeminist reclamation of their objectification. No, these tasks, repeated day after day, are also the requisite practices for participation in the family corporation. The definition of their family is the definition of their bodies, and the relations between them are bound in a continuous

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reproduction of their bodies through the claims of kinship affinity that relate them. Here, religion has a role. A friend of mine, hearing my interest in the Kardashians, suggested that I argue they are the glamorous Duggars. But the religion that transfixes me is less their subcutaneous Christianity than their return to the totem of them. If scholars of religion focus on the Christian Right and its definition of family values, they will be perpetually distracted by the oppositional language of those minority communities, their hatred of gays and their valorization of housewives. The Kardashian family, with its occasional on-­air homophobia and trans-­parent (Khloé recoiling from Malika’s embrace, Scott and Rob mocking each other’s failed masculinity, Bruce becoming Cait), and with its housewife millionaires and once-­upon-­a-­time porn star Twitter queens, are far more representative of the America that wants its Balmain and its crucifixes, its drug addictions and its redemption songs, its men and its mother rule. If the family is a fix America just can’t shake, the Kardashians may be the best view into its ratio­ nalization as a mercantile cult.

How do you begin to explain to someone who has not heard of the Karda­ shians what and who they are? To begin with, you must ask: How have you not heard of them? What enclave of commercial culture have you tucked yourself into so that their hair has not become almost as familiar to you as your own? And this is the first thing that you must say when you want to explain to the world who and what the Kardashians are: They Are Hair. They are also, of course, a family. A family of hair: short suburban mom hair, awkward and shifting suburban dad hair, locks and locks of real and fake hair on daughters competing with one another over their hair (fig. 13). The Kardashians are a family of people whom you can watch handling their hair. They all do it, touching and adjusting and checking their hair. To introduce the Kardashians from the outside, most journalistic accounts will tell a genealogical story. I begin with the hair because I begin with what you see the most if you’ve never met them. If you ride on a subway with an ad for something they endorse, you may know they’re related, but most people who don’t know them don’t quite know how they are related. We don’t know genealogical trees when we see people on the street. We see something we call phenotype: the observable trait of the species. And it’s hair,

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Figure 13. Kanye West’s clothing line, Yeezy, Season 3 ( from left): Khloé Kardashian, Lamar Odom, Kris Jenner, Kendall Jenner, Kourtney Kardashian, Kanye West (kneeling), Kim Kardashian, Caitlyn Jenner, and Kylie Jenner attend the event at Madison Square Garden on February 12, 2016. Photograph: Courtesy Getty Images Entertainment.

hair, hair. Eyes, too. Hips and ass, absolutely. But to begin, it’s the hair that is unmissable. Take a minute and pause on hair, on how hair is advertised to be easy (the hair product ads showing how people run their hands through their hair, tossing it behind their shoulders with a casual flip) but how for most of us it is hard. “Ask a woman about her hair, and she just might tell you the story of her life,” the journalist Elizabeth Benedict has written. “Ask a whole bunch of women about their hair, and you could get a history of the world.”9 Cosmetology is not neutral; it is political. Most hair is nothing like advertisement hair and most advertised hair is highly racialized, preferring certain kinds of curl over others, certain colors over others, certain lengths over others. The Kardashians sail into this anxious morass and say: We know what it is to have complicated hair. And we can show you how to take your (ethnic, kinky, big, flat, unmanageable) hair and work it into easy breezy submission. The Kardashians teach us how to leave bad hair days behind, publicizing a process often secreted behind tinfoil and in the shadowy transpacific trade of  hair extensions.10 They teach us how to achieve their phenotype.

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They do so while uniting under the banner of genotype, under a brand defined by relation to a fierce genealogy of relation. The typical way to relate to the Kardashians is not through talk of hair but instead through talk of their dad. This beginning suggests that we’re looking (as we always are) for origins, but also, in this case, for accountability. Who is responsible for this brood? Immediately you find out his name, Robert Kardashian, and you then hear or recall that he helped O. J. Simpson win acquittal at his murder trial. Whatever else Robert Kardashian was, nobody—­not his children, his ex-­wives, or the media that propounds their circulation—­will let you forget that Robert Kardashian was a consigliere, a ride or die kind of guy, the one who had a friend and stood by him even when an entire country split over the insanity of his trial. Kids today use the abbreviation OG to describe someone who has been around, who has seen some things and done some things. The Kardashian kids call Robert Kardashian the OG, knowing that this suggests he is the Original Gangster. If you watch enough of Keeping Up with the Kardashians (#KUWK), you know that Robert is ceaselessly invoked as a father without comparison, the OG daddy. They connect with mediums to speak to him. They say he’s watching over them. OG and G-­O-­D are connected forms in this household, conjoining to form an OG theology of reiterative power whose wisdom is infinite and mistakes forgotten. He became famous for the way he offered a mobster’s loyalty in a professional guise. And later, his children would become famous in part by using his limited fame as their inheritance. Their dad, who died too soon of cancer, whose death left them all a bit twisting in the winds of Southern California, is the origin of their hunger. From a teeny tiny gap in the fame net, they seized their fortune by swapping up something relatively minor into major media empire. Their dad’s relationship with O. J. puts the family into several different circles of racial power. Prior to being tried for a double homicide, O. J. Simpson was the camera-­ready black all-­American. Easy to smile and verbally quick, he was a natural broadcaster, pitchman, and second comic lead. Advertising goods or commenting on Monday Night Football, O. J. was the black athlete that white fans felt comfortable to celebrate, the one who every­ one imagined spent more time golfing with the white team manager than hanging with his family. Kardashian and Simpson shared a plot of assimi­ lation; Kardashian was the child of immigrants and Simpson ran his way out of Jim Crow politics into the gated communities of Brentwood. An entertainment attorney, Kardashian is remembered by his children for his love of soul, rap, and pop music. Through his connections, Kim would have

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her fourteenth birthday party at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. Robert Kardashian profited from keeping black talent on the right side of legal respectability. When O. J. ran from the cops in his white Bronco, Kris Jenner would say later, she knew he’d killed his wife, Nicole. Robert Kardashian would say: whatever he did, he is my brother for life. This is what happens when you talk about the Kardashians, though. You get distracted quickly by subplots, and you start thinking about how white ethnic men conceive of themselves alongside, even conjoined to, the physical prowess and fierce ambition of black America, how Southern California is the place for everyone to commodify their face, and how violence rips through suburban calm to expose the jagged edge of intimate rage. But this pulls us too fast from our basic frame of reference, which is the present family Kardashian. What I simply want to establish is that their present whiteness is one borne in codependency with blackness. I mean this literally insofar as many of Robert’s clients were black artists and athletes; I mean this figuratively insofar as the legitimacy that the Kardashians continually parlay is their devotion to black people as their one true thing. They may be fake about everything else, but they’re real about this commitment to an identity often shut out from certain forms of power, politics, and economic ascent. The feeling you get when reading about Robert Kardashian is that what he felt he had in common with O. J. was his own sense that his financial success and social acceptance were as tentative and contingent as O. J.’s. Prison wasn’t an abstraction for either of them; it was the ever-­ dangling conceivable end to their relatively recent new lives as insiders to the kingdom. Kris Jenner (née Houghton, formerly Kardashian) was a partner to Rob­ ert in their excessive gentrification. She, a once-­upon-­a-­time stewardess, and Robert had four children—­the eldest, Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, and their youn­ gest, Rob. After their divorce, Kris married the Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner, who had four children of his own from previous relationships. Kris and Bruce then had two more daughters, Kendall and Kylie. It is worth noting that occasionally you get a glimpse of Brody and Brandon, two of Jenner’s earlier children, but you never see Burt or Casey. I don’t think it’s coincidental that those are the two with the best hair. For a time, Brody and Brandon seemed nearly on-­brand. The radiating epicenter of the brand is Kim. From the time she was a teenager, Kim practiced celebrity networking as a semiprofessional labor. This took several forms. For her sixteenth birthday, Kim was given a white BMW, which she accidentally crashed into another driver’s car while trying 11

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to find a fallen tube of lipstick. To pay for the damage, she found her first job as shop assistant at an Encino, California, boutique called Body. To earn extra cash after quitting her job at Body, she looked to eBay. She borrowed money from her father to buy five pairs of seven-­hundred-­dollar Manolo Blahnik heels similar to the pair Jennifer Lopez—­one of Kim’s idols—­wore in her “If You Had My Love” music video. Each pair sold for twenty-­five hundred dollars. This was, she claims, her first taste of entrepreneurial success, a form of celebrity futures derivatives. As you move through this biographical sketch of Kim, you can’t avoid seeing the commodities that reign over employment, and the employment forged in response to commodities. Kardashians tell their story as a leapfrog of products, one colliding into another through their mistakes and ambitions. “Female celebrity, for years, was rooted in luxury and beauty culture,” the journalist Nathan Heller has written. “Slowly it is moving toward a work and achievement culture, and such re-­narrativization requires active reinforcement in the public eye.”12 The Kardashians know you can never take their foot off the ambition pedal. After realizing that she couldn’t make a living selling her own stuff on eBay, Kim made a transition to organizing the closets of her rich and famous connections. In the early 2000s, she became known as “Queen of the Closet Scene,” helping the likes of Cindy Crawford and Serena Williams clear out their unwanted wares. In the process, Kim befriended the singer Brandy, who hired her as a personal stylist around 2003, and Paris Hilton, who paid Kim—­then dating Brandy’s brother, Ray J—­to sort out the dressing room and closet of her West Hollywood home. Now a member of Paris Hilton’s crew, Kim joined her sisters Kourtney and Khloé on a new venture: opening a clothing boutique called DASH in Calabasas, California, in 2006. She’s selling clothes under their shortened name, she’s organizing the clothes of others, and she’s connecting the distant shores of celebrities with the common people through an emerging e-­commerce consumer-­to-­consumer site. Missing from this account of Kim’s ascent is the sole product that was actually hers. During her early years, she made only one thing that wasn’t connected with the organization or purchase of clothes. I refer to her sex tape with Ray J, Superstar (2007). This graphic showcase of her sexual skills (rather than her closet organizing, sartorial selecting, or social networking skills) ended up in the hands of a porn distributor, Vivid Entertainment. Debates continue apace about how, exactly, a tape made (as Kim would say) “in privacy” became an object of mass consumption. Some say her boyfriend, desperate for cash, sold it. Some say she, desperate for fame, released it. Some say her mother, desperate for empire, distributed it. A critical feature

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of Kim Kardashian’s fame is that her fans are people who could believe in any one of those three theories. It isn’t that those who are most devoted to Kim automatically think an ex sold her out. No, Kim’s fandom is as much about those who think she sold herself out, or that Kris Jenner is the ultimate Mama Rose, as it is about those who think Ray J profited from her. It is the possibility that all three could be true, that all three crimes of capitali­ zation could have transpired, which makes this genesis one that invites perpetual rereading. Scholars of religion will take note that at the heart of the original story for the Kardashians, there are two elements that show up frequently from the beginning: absent dads and illicit sex.13 The forging of a race almost always begins when disputes among progeny over their father begin, disputes that often include whether they can have sex with their aunt, or if they can have more land if they marry someone from another tribe. The origin of religion is, in other words, the asking of questions about who kin are and what keeps them as such. But we’ll get back to that later. For now, just keep track: The sex tape was made in 2003, but it was released widely in 2007, which was within a year of the first DASH store opening. Keeping Up with the Kardashians premiered on the E! network on October 14, 2007, and instantly became the highest-­rated Sunday night program among women ages eighteen to thirty-­four. Observers thrill at the proximity between the availability of  Kim Kardashian as porn star and Kim Kardashian as cast member of a reality television show premised on the relationships within her large blended family. According to Nielsen, Kardashian viewers tend to be single, college-­educated women with no children, white-­collar jobs, and annual salaries of more than sixty thousand dollars.14 In November 2016, it concluded its twelfth season. Halfway through the run of the show, it engendered several spinoffs, each tracking a pair of Kardashians as they either launched a DASH store in Miami or New York or followed a basketball-­playing husband to Texas. There was Kourtney and Kim Take Miami (previously titled Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami) (three seasons: 2009, 2010, 2013); Kourtney and Kim Take New York (two seasons: 2011–­12); and Khloé & Lamar (two seasons: 2011–­12). A special two-­part episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians titled “Kim’s Fairytale Wedding” (9–­10 October 2011) garnered 4.4 million and 3.8 million viewers over two nights, but the finale of their fourth season (21 February 2010) remains the flagship program’s high-­water mark with 4.8 mil­lion views. That episode showed the birth of  Mason Dash Disick, Kourtney Kardashian’s first child. It goes without saying that Mason’s

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success on the show was established from the minute he was pulled by his mother from her vagina and showed his sweet head of Kardashian hair. Individual episodes track the unfolding evolution of the Kardashian women from girls and teenagers into adult mothers. Along the way, we watch as they struggle to sustain relationships with their men, and to balance their omnipresent work with their relationships to these men and their larger family. The specific highs and lows of their family story are well known, and emblematically redolent, whether it is Kim’s partnership with the hip-­ hop star Kanye West, or the decline of Khloé’s and Kourtney’s partners (Lamar and Scott, respectively) into addiction and personal ruin; the demise of Kris and Bruce Jenner’s relationship, and his emergence as Caitlyn; the struggle for Rob, Kylie, and Khloé to equal the embodied discipline of Kim, Kendall, and Kourtney. In what follows, I don’t dig into these soap opera plot points as much as I assume their results. The real filmic consistency of the show is not the romantic drama or tabloid exposures but the utter corporeal banality of their televised lives. If you watch a lot of the show, you become intensely familiar with their makeup application routines, their salads and their ice tea, their overlarge couches and their in-­club nondancing movements, their poses for photos and their speakerphone etiquette, the interiors of their cars and bedrooms. You know how Khloé holds the steering wheel and how Kim eats constantly. You know Kourtney is always saying “yeah, yeah” and redecorating whatever home she’s in and Kris is pretty much always just getting off a business phone call. Although the show began showing them working in their flagship DASH store in Calabasas, the later seasons tend to find them at home, in hotel rooms, or on location for family vacation. Histories of consumer culture repeatedly describe how shopping became a “feminine activity,” and how the proper public spaces for women were commercial spaces.15 In the Kardashian world, the shops come to them in large UPS boxes of clothes. Large portions of episodes show them interacting with one another as they fold clothes in their epic closets. Every movement occurs within a distilled world of domestic commercialism.16 The Kardashians grabbed the far edge of the thousand-­meter net that is the celebrity map and climbed onto it with suction-­cup hands. They brought with them an idiomatic Christianity, a phallus-­obsessed matriarchy, and names that begin with K. The K is an especially consonant letter that can brand something with a glottal dominance. Something about an E or an R or a Y is less dominant than that K, a K when piled together K-­K-­K can seem something ominous, a memory of racial power. They are, after all,

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the Klan to end all clans: the group that sticks together against the world’s criticisms, whose togetherness seems at times an almost irrational dependency relative to the insults applied to it. Why, so many ask, are they so popular when it seems they are so at odds with normal ideas of civilized behavior? The answer lies, precisely, in their clannishness. As the single, white, middle-­class women watch their show raptly, as a global congress of diverse fans track their every Instagram update, what they’re watching is this resilience to critique, this constant relational commitment above and beyond your insults. If you try to make them any one thing, they’ll duck from it. Make them white, and they’ll call themselves Armenian; call them immigrants, and they’ll point to Bruce Jenner, Olympic all-­American; call them clannish, and they’ll point to the extended circle of assistants, friends, and beauticians who become friend assistants, who all become, as they say, “like family” even though they aren’t blood family. The volume of detail in their shared communal reality is consistently resistant to your simplification of their empire. The volume is itself the most eliciting sin. If you read the comments fields beneath any online article about the Kardashians, you will see their bodies catcalled and their sex lives dissected. More than anything else, though, you will see one question reiterated: Do these people have no shame? Shocked reportage of their apparent lack of shame permeates even elite editorial commentary on their empire. Do they have no shame? If so, when did they demonstrate this? Was it when they started a reality show to promote their clothing store, or was it when they bought their parents a stripper pole for an anniversary gift? Did they lose their shame when they decided to televise their plastic surgeries, or when Kim published a collection of her selfies? Or was it when Kim went to cut the ribbon at the 5th Annual Charmin Restrooms in Times Square? When she opened holiday toilets (“a free, clean and family-­friendly place to ‘enjoy the go’ during this busy time of year”)?17 The Kardashians’ lack of shame is directly connected to their utterly unfettered relationship to the marketplace of themselves. Nothing seems unavailable for pricing. And they know this is okay, and they know this isn’t wrong, because it’s what their tribe does. You will not understand this family unless you understand that your insults only strengthen the singular tightness of their togetherness. Them against us, the Klan certain before our assaults. In Reality Gendervision (2014), Maria Pramaggiore and Diane Negra write, “If the tangled economics of neoliberal postfeminism raise questions about what constitutes work under postindustrial capitalism, Keeping Up

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frequently proffers a sentimental invocation of family unity to quell anxi­ eties.”18 Commentators define the Kardashians as “a tightly-­bonded family, willing to expose their most intimate moments, potentially engendering disgust, fascination, and envy toward their bonds and indecencies.”19 The word family appears time and again on their reality show. “When it really comes down to it, the most important thing is family” is a comment repeated at the end of episodes as the summary lesson used to resolve a conflict. Family is the limit to behavior, the boundary you stay safely within, the tether that pulls you back from whatever ambitious subplot you may pursue away from home base in Calabasas. As Kris Jenner will repeat, “In this family, that’s not how it rolls.”20 In their communal autobiographical account of their lives, Kardashian Konfidential (2010), the eldest three sisters explain, “Family values were always so important in our family. In a weird way, the divorce actually strengthened them for us.”21 The Kardashians would concede that family relations are paramount to their personal and economic survival. Attributing their strong work ethic to their family background, the sisters assert in their coauthored memoir, “Both of our parents were so strong on family values and confidence, and emphasizing responsibility and the importance of hard work.”22 Family relationships are commodity relationships. In a post about visiting the zoo as a family, Kim wrote, “Yesterday the whole family took Mason to the San Diego Zoo!! . . . It’s so nice to get out of LA for a short trip and spend time with Grandma MJ, who I don’t get to see as much as I’d like. . . . Style Snapshot: I’m wearing J. Brand leather leggings, Phillip Lim top and vintage YSL necklace.”23 Family time isn’t complete un­ til it’s branded time.24 Many journalistic appraisals of the Kardashians suggest that these materialistic surfaces deflect attention from the essentially sitcom morality of their enterprise. In this rendering of the Kardashian enterprise, their reality show is just another Brady Bunch, in which every episode adheres to a sitcom formula where lapses in judgment or boneheaded mistakes lead to nutty conclusions and hurt feelings that get resolved with confession, discussion, apology, and hugging.25 “It’s a modern-­type of wholesome,” said Bonnie Fuller, the editor in chief of the gossip website Hollywood Life. “We’re living in a very different world now. Sarah Palin’s daughter has a child out of wedlock. Despite everything that has gone on with them, [the Kardashians] come across as a very tight-­knit family, and that appeals to women.”26 Fuller suggests that it’s the tightness of the family that compensates for any perceived sins of the family. Or maybe it’s the tightness of the family that is the sin of the family? However you name it, we know it is a

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family story like so many others in American popular culture, yet what defines this family to a certain public is their seemingly voluntary degeneration, a loosening of standards of decency across generations indicated by a stunning laxity in attitude toward plastic surgery, frank talk, and public nudity.27 The Kardashians are the immigrants who seem to resist acculturation, the nouveaux riches who seek to remain forever nouveaux. Whatever standards of taste you apply to them will receive an immediate LOL. Famous for nothing, famous for being famous, whatever you say to summarize them your comment will likely include some sense that they do nothing but are everything, make nothing but are endlessly exposed. I am interested in the contrast between the public disgust for Kardashian ethics and the Kardashians’ own confidence about their work ethic, their family law, and their acceptable materialism. Consider this 2015 exchange between Kim and an interviewer: Interviewer: Do your selfies objectify you? Kim: Yes. I’ve taken them. I’m proud of them. There’s power in that. There’s a control. Even if I’m objectifying myself, I’m OK with that.28

If you consume the Kardashians, you know that selling themselves is not something they take lightly. They are happily, openly hustling. Every generation worries that the one after them is lazy.29 The Kardashians seem to be in a competition to out-­commercialize your embarrassment at their commercialization. It is not that they have no shame about their commercial interests; episodes of the reality show indicate their occasional wrestling over particular product lines or endorsement opportunities. It is that they manage any shame or anxiety through commercialization—­staying ahead of your judgment through a relentless embrace of profit. “These shows are a 30-­minute commercial,” Khloé Kardashian has remarked. The word for a thirty-­minute commercial is an infomercial, a word that I am not the first to apply to the primary conversational idiom of the Kardashians.30 They are telling you the whole truth about themselves, they say, and the truth is that every day they are using products, and engaging the world, in such a way as to forge themselves anew in it as, still, family. Infomercials are commercials distinguishable from regular commercials by the length of time and the seriousness with which their seller tries to exhibit the product’s utility. An infomercial always performs a kind of lay quick-­time science in its presentation of a product’s value. Infomercials try to build awareness of a product or service by an active demonstration of

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its use and benefits. If Grace Jones is right that Kim Kardashian is “a basic commercial product,” and it’s right to call Keeping Up with the Kardashians an infomercial, what can be objectively said about their product?31 What is their product, and what are its uses and benefits? One critic wagers that their product is our fandom, that they have “successfully engineered . . . a commodification of the public obsession with” them.32 This may be true, and certainly their use of social media (including sponsored tweets for which they can be paid twenty thousand dollars for one 140-­character endorsement of a lip balm) suggests they have learned how to make their consumption your consuming interest, and your consuming interest their market share. Yet it is also tempting to think about how the Kardashians may be the result of a certain product. Infomercials show how certain products can make things: the Ginsu Knife takes a tomato and slices it razor thin, and a Popeil Automatic Pasta Maker takes flour and makes pasta. And the NutriBullet describes itself as not a blender but a “nutrition extractor.” Its promoter, David Wolfe, reports: “This machine is designed to break down the cell walls of your food, releasing, unleashing the nutrients inside, transforming ordinary fresh foods into superfoods.”33 These examples illustrate the conversionistic aspect of infomercial television, how it exhibits goods that transfigure other goods (and, in the case of makeup or exercise infomercials, other bodies) through simple fixes to everyday domestic tasks. The product for sale in an infomercial is itself, known by its quick-­sounding name (the Ginsu Knife, the NutriBullet) and also for those fast-­moving demonstrations of its transforming efficacy. Writing about brand spokespersons like Colonel Sanders or Ronald McDonald, Charles F. McGovern writes, “To show consumers just whom they had ‘elected,’ advertisers often created public personae for leading corporate executives or concocted fictional corporate representatives to lend human form to their faceless clients.”34 To what do the Kardashians lend human form? The list of products that the Kardashians have promoted is prodigious, as they have secured several endorsement deals and product lines. Among the items endorsed: Beach Bunny swimwear, Bravada International sportswear, Kendall and Kylie’s Topshop line, Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé’s Karda­ shian Kollection at Sears, baby clothing at Babies “R” Us, Skechers Shape-­ Ups, ShoeDazzle.com, Arthur George, Rob Kardashian’s sock line, and the Belle Noel jewelry line by Kim Kardashian. The Kardashian beauty line, Perfect Skin cosmetics, includes everything from lip glosses to faux lashes, an OPI nail polish line, Kardashian Kolor (with polishes for each sister, such as “Kim-­pletely In Love”), Kardashian Glow tanning products, Tria at-­

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home laser hair removal system, QuickTrim diet pills, Hype Energy drinks, Midori Melon Liqueur, the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood video game, For Every Body candles, Zestra arousal oils, four perfumes under the Kim Kardashian name (True Reflection, Glam, Gold, and Kim Kardashian), Karda­ shian GLAM Silly Bandz, Kardashian “Couture” lollipops, and the Karda­ shian Kard credit card.35 Please note the replacement of C with K wherever possible. This list doesn’t include club appearances, or DASH stores locations (four and counting), or the Kardashian Khaos store that opened at the Mirage Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in 2011 and sells things like beach towels with the sisters’ images on them. Nor does it include massive moneymakers like their individual smartphone apps, each of which have monthly subscriptions, or Kim’s selfie book, or Kris’s memoir (Kris Jenner . . . and All Things Kardashian from 2011) and, later, her cookbook (2014), or Kendall and Kylie’s fantasy novel, Rebels: City of Indra (2014). This account doesn’t include Kendall and Kylie modeling for Gillette razors, or Kendall as the face for Neiman Marcus, Estée Lauder, and Fendi. This list is incomplete, since the sisters are still working, still working, always working, always. Another day is another deal. Even with this many specific deals in mind, we still haven’t begun to exhaust the products that the Kardashians mention in their multiple media platforms, products that they encounter through their own beautification and mention for their financial advantage as well as for their specification of their self-­making for you. These promotional actions are, also, work: work to keep at the edge of trends and of demonstrating these trends as theirs. Tracking their accomplishments means you will be on the media track. You think Keeping Up is on the decline, and they suddenly have the most Twitter followers; you think Twitter is getting old, and they dominate Instagram; you think Instagram is getting tired, and suddenly Kylie dominates Vine; you think they are getting old, and they produce eponymous apps and rule the Apple App Store for weeks after their announcement (fig. 14). They are ever moving toward the thing that will become the next thing. Before the technology is finished, they’ve pasted their trade bill to it; before the building is done, they’ve paid for the roof rights so they can mount a giant K atop it. In case you aren’t thinking about the truly handicapped history of women in banking, finance, or corporate development, you should be. The Kardashians press feminists to think about their point of liberated reference. With so few cisgender women in the boardroom, with so few women making it to partner, to professor, to elected political office, the question

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Figure 14. Apple Store Soho Presents Meet the Developers ( from left): Kim Kardashian, Khloé Kardashian, Kendall Jenner, Kylie Jenner, and Kourtney Kardashian attend the event at the Apple Store Soho, New York, on September 14, 2015. Photograph: Courtesy WireImage.

must be asked: Is the only way to become a woman with corporate power to commodify your capacity to expand your kinship networks, namely your ability to sell the products that magnify your physical features? Is the only way for girls, women, and mothers to seize the reins of economic sovereignty to sell their biological capacities and the materials they use to set their dewy cast to silicone stone? Beyond Keeping Up and its spinoffs, the Kardashians stoke their tech-­ savvy fans with an intense online presence that provides multiple daily moments of interactive promotion. They maintain the interminability of their infomercial through fan interactions, but also through the hope that you’ll buy their products and use them so that you may experience a piece of their body readiness. Use their hair dryer every day, use their perfumes on date night, use their waist trainers as part of your New Year’s resolutions. Be wholly occupied by their physical reformations.36 “Whether you’re stepping out on a red carpet, hitting the town, or relieving stress with a little retail therapy, you never know where the paparazzi may strike,” the promotion for their tanner reads. “With our premier line of tanning products, you will be photo-­op ready wherever you go—­bronze color perfection with a kiss of Kardashian!”37 The kiss marks you as like them: glowing and selfie ready.

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The missing element is the Kardashian relation, of course. They have each other. You can get their hair, but you can’t get their genealogy. Episodes of Keeping Up rarely have fewer than four instances of you, the viewer, watching a Kardashian looking in a mirror. They check how they look in every reflective surface, maintaining dialogue about boyfriend troubles or weekend plans while confirming that the hair and makeup remain as earlier established by professionals. Nobody jokes about or mocks this mirror engagement; it is a universal practice of the family. The body is the primary site of work for the Kardashians, with the product lines suggesting that you’re working to lasso your body into a kind of unnatural primitive sculpture. They like big hair, but no frizz; they like their butts, but they better not jiggle; they like their heritage, but they wish to be a shade or two darker. “The Kardashian women,” write Maria Pramaggiore and Diane Negra, “play to millennial male fantasies of peculiarly tamed exoticism.”38 The shift and tug of the Kardashian body into some kind of interracial fusion is something about which Alexandra Sastre has written quite well, noting that Kim’s “usage of her Armenian heritage to authenticate her body, and the uniqueness of the platform of reality television, complicates the racialization of her body in new ways.” Given that the Kardashians’ skin is white and their features are coded as ambiguously ethnic, Kim Kardashian is afforded a range of racial mobility that black celebrities, no matter how light skinned, are rarely allowed.39 The Kardashian product lines, most of which lean toward the lower end of the consumer taste spectrum, commiserate with a diverse demographic of consumer fans who clearly project into their racial dubiety a Rorschach of familiarity. Everyone can see some piece of themselves in the collage of wom­anhood that the Kardashians paste together, assemble and reassemble, in a ferocious will toward its materiality as one over which they have absolute dominance, even as their inherited features (eyes, hips, hair) are regarded as inherited features binding them to one another as family. This scrapbooking aspect of their bodies, the way that they seem available for the fixing and tweaking and re-­pasting, was only enunciated further when Kim partnered with the hip-­hop star and aspiring designer Kanye West. Kanye appeared rarely on Keeping Up, yet his one major early appearance showed him culling Kim’s closet. Later she would reflect, “He had his stylists come in and they put everything that he thought wasn’t cool enough in a pile, and I walked in and it was a pile to the ceiling of shoes—­all my amazing shoes that I loved, and I started crying!”40 Once the tears dried, Kim embraced

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the new her, claiming to love the totality of  his dominance over her self-­ presentation. Kanye’s makeover of Kim took her from a look defined by overlarge jewelry, dramatic taffeta dresses, Juicy Couture tracksuits, and colorful ruffled blouses to a far more monochromatic minimalism in which she rarely wore anything other than black, white, beige, camouflage, or pink latex. Her body, encased in his vision for her couture respectability, inverted the Pygmalion racial dynamic. The haute black artist enters the home of the white suburban starlet and transfigures her from a barely restrained body in cheetah print into a sharpened palette for his aesthetic reformation of the world. Photos Kim posts of her and Kanye always emphasize their skin tones as critically contrasting accessory elements to her look, the white hand on the black hand enunciated by the million-­dollar diamond ring he designed for her. Their nuclear family commercializes his auteur ge­ nius as something legible and replicable in a wrap skirt or a specific choice in neckline. When I write about the Kardashians and family, I use a word that is familiar to them. Family is a word that swirls in and around their operations as the ribbon choker to their enterprise. Yet I’ve also slipped now and then into another term, namely that of kinship. Kinship is a bigger category, one that captures the system of social organization based on real or putative family ties. The cross-­cultural comparison of kinship institutions was the primary province of anthropology in the nineteenth century. These studies sought to prove that the Victorian bourgeois family was the most “civilized” of all kinship institutions precisely because it privatized family relations rather than inserting them into every feature of social life. Primitive socie­ ties diagnosed by nineteenth-­century anthropologists had all kinds of  family arrangements, including polygamy and matriarchy, which required colonial reform. As David Schneider pointed out in his Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), these anthropologists consistently assumed that kinship was based on sexual reproduction. Yet they did so while observing in multiple societies how differently procreation was explained and managed. Schneider used this dissonance between evidence and interpretation to lodge a full-­sail critique regarding how anthropologists came to assume certain distinctions within a society that were, to his mind, utterly specious relative to the diversity of human kinship systems. Schneider argued that the various domains into which anthropologists divided social life—­kinship, politics, economics, religion, and so on—­had no analytic validity. Such anthropological distinctions between these subjects were prescriptive hopes of an industrializing society, not an ethnographic reality.41

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The story of kinship in anthropology is a rich topic of analysis and critique.42 I raise it to provide a way to think about the language of family in the Kardashians in a broader register of social history and human organization in which the ethnographic data tell us one thing—­everybody organizes his or her familiarity differently—­and scholarly and political literature often tells us something else, something hoping to reform that diversity into a predictable orderly whole. If the ethnographic fact of the modern family is that it is not one thing, this doesn’t stop us from believing it could be otherwise. Naming what the right family is hasn’t gotten any easier with the diminishment of ostensible kinship systems. If anything, it has become more political, more burdened with economic expectation and moral reform. As Sylvia Yanagisako points out, framing kinship and family as dichotomous with, or external to, the very processes of capitalist formation ignores the centrality of the connections and sentiments of kinship that make capitalist production possible.43 When Max Weber wrote about the Protestant work ethic, he explained that the primary worry of Puritans wasn’t wealth itself. It was the danger that if wealth became the end, no one would see the need to continue to work. “In fact,” Weber claimed, “it is only because possession involves this danger of relaxation that it is objectionable at all.”44 The discipline to work—­to work no matter what you accrued—­was the discipline instilled throughout the industrial period. During that time, “the conformity of all workers to the traditional model of the family—­a nuclear, heterosexual, patriarchal model—­was promoted by employers, politicians, religious leaders, and reformers as a crucial adjunct to work discipline.”45 The family ethic managed the balance between production and consumption. As long as a worker was serving the needs of a family, that worker would be producing and consuming in such a way as to commit always and ever further to work. No matter how much workers made, they would, in some sense, be living paycheck to paycheck, ratcheting up consumption to equal the consuming family, working to continue to feed the voracious cravings of the reproductive drive. But to return, briefly, to the nineteenth-­century anthropologists for a moment: if their hope was to ensure the universalization of the Victorian family, they did so with full consciousness that religion was also to be reformed in this process. Within their studies of kinship, social scientists in the nineteenth century often described something called totemism, which they understood as an early stage of an allegedly evolutionary progression of religion. For instance, John Ferguson McLennan (1827–­1881), a Scottish ethnographer, argued that the entire human race had passed through a totemic

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stage at some point in the distant past in which they worshipped animals and plants. A tribe selected a particular animal or plant as its totem, and it exercised devotions toward it for the protection of the clan. The ethnologist James G. Frazer (1854–­1941) put forth the idea that totems bind people together in social groups, and serve as an impetus for the development of civilization. Several years later, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud would place the totem as the stimulant for human religiosity. For Freud, the totem was the projection of a hypothetical tribe’s Oedipal guilt for the murder of its patriarch, and subsequently the linchpin for its systems of taboos and morality that allegedly developed to manage the aftermath of that guilt.46 But totemism was, finally, the defining subject for one towering twen­tieth-­century figure in the study of religion, Émile Durkheim. Durk­ heim theorized that all human religious expression is intrinsically founded in relationship to the group from which it emerges. He claimed that practitioners of totemism do not actually worship their chosen plant or animal totem. Instead, the totem is an attempt to connect tribespeople with an impersonal force that holds enormous power over the solidarity of the clan. Durkheim called this the “totemic principle.” Since the clan itself is considered one with its totem, the clan itself is what is sacred. This reinforces the taboo against killing other people in the clan. Hence, when the tribe gathers to worship the emblem representing its chosen totem, it is actually worshipping the tribe itself. A society can ascertain the commitment of any individual through his or her veneration of the totem. Rituals performed to the totem, then, are performed to promote consciousness of the clan, re­ minding tribe members that they are committed to a real thing.47 Despite further explorations of the subject by Claude Lévi-­Strauss, few later twentieth-­century or twenty-­first-­century scholars embraced the study of totemism, worried that it could not be substantiated through archaeolog­ ical data and could be seen as an unacceptable redaction of  human experience into unlikely symbolic forms. Yet, despite the reasonableness of such postcolonial critiques of totemism and its corollary kinship systems, they don’t seem to have taken root in the work of contemporary popular culture. Anyone who watches reality television knows that totemism and tribalism form the premises of a disproportionate percentage of reality programs since the genre emerged at the turn to the twenty-­first century. As Mark An­ drejevic explains, the long-­running program Survivor also helped inaugurate the trend of reality shows that offer the promise of return to a natural, and implicitly more tribal, environment. Scholarship on reality TV suggests that the popularity of such shows indicates a hunger for a simpler time with

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raw competition over basic goods, a time defined by a certain level of strategic collaboration among tribes to retain access to goods like food, water, and shelter. This theme was specifically picked up on by shows ranging from Temptation Island to Celebrity Mole Hawaii, as well as the Discovery Channel’s Naked and Afraid and TWC’s Remote Survival. Andrejevic writes, “The most cutting-­edge form of commodified entertainment is provided by the regression of the cast members to a premodern (‘precivilized’) level of tribal culture. The language of tribalism and totemism is pervasive.”48 In a world of diverse family arrangements and limited incentive for tribal adherence, the reality TV program that places you on an island encourages you to commit to cooperation that feels like nostalgia for something no one ever had but always wanted: a reason to focus on survival rather than commodities, on togetherness rather than individual self-­interest. That these same shows often award especially wily individuals for their routes to power doesn’t diminish the built-­in need for community on the way to such triumphs. The shows seem to suggest that nobody survives well alone. We all need a moderate amount of clan logic to endure. Andrejevic looks specifically at the shows that construct a remote environment for human competition over resources and for survival. I want to press his analysis to the rest of the reality spectacle, however, asking whether the oversize family in a suburban home is the other half of that primitive tribalism. On The Osbournes, Snoop Dog’s Fatherhood, Jon and Kate Plus 8, 19 and Counting, Gene Simmons Family Jewels, Sister Wives, Run’s House, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians, the organizing unit is the tribe against the world. The network sells the clan to the consuming public as unique—­as unlike all the other takes of reality tribes—­through some distinguishing, wacky feature (the once-­upon-­a-­time metal god or hip-­hop dad, the excess of wives, the excess number of children). But the sitcom summary of these programs is the sacrality of the clan. You get to stay if you worship the tribe. Frequent themes of Keeping Up episodes include conflict between particular family members that someone isn’t around enough anymore, or that someone’s partner is partying too much, or that someone thought some specific family event was going to be special, but then it was ruined by someone’s misbe­ havior. The fragility of family connections, and the difficulty of sustaining them alongside individual ambition, is a central theme stringing together the many seasons of Kardashian reality TV. Whatever wayward behavior occurs in a particular episode, arc, or season, the viewer knows that the constants of the show will reappear. Makeup application, clothing management, eating, talking about skin issues or plastic

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surgery options—­these are the recurring elements of the televised family story. In the Kardashian tribal universe, the totem is the woman’s body working on her body, which is woman-­identified. According to the sisters’ memoir, Kardashian Konfidential, Kris Jenner began waxing her daughters’ eyebrows once they reached age eleven and taking each to a salon for bikini-­line waxing at age thirteen.49 The sisters’ ritual entrance to adult womanhood is hair management by their mother, who is frequently described as the family matriarch and is self-­described as their “momager.” “I’m a unique combination of mother and manager,” Kris Jenner says. “I’ve actually trademarked the term ‘Momager,’ which is what I am.”50 In her assessment of Kris Jenner’s role on the show, Alice Leppert writes that although the press often vilifies Jenner “as an exploitative fame-­monger, in fact, she fulfills the idealized role of the self-­sacrificing mother, taking on the role of villainous mastermind and thus partially sacrificing her own celebrity image for the sake of her daughters’ images.”51 Yet this analysis doesn’t quite capture how Jenner’s primary appearance on the show is as this momager, organizing the family around the right opportunities for promotion, for vacations at which they can promote themselves as a family, and for relationships with one another, and with their bodies, that perpetuate the existence of their family brand. In the very first episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Jenner says this about Kim’s sex tape: “As her mother, I wanted to kill her. As her manager, I knew I had a job to do, and I really just wanted to move past it.”52 Jenner would agree with Misha Kavka that on their show “gender itself becomes the quality to be flaunted,” but Jenner would want to underline gender as the thing constituted by its relationship to the family economy.53 Scholars of evangelicalism may be unsurprised to hear that the momager is the most overtly Christian of all the Kardashians. Her Twitter handle is “MOM, MANAGER, MOMAGER, LOVER OF LIFE, LOVER OF CHRIST.” Yet all the Kardashians use Christianity and their own piety as frames for their experiences. Rob’s strongest memory of his father is that he prayed with him before bed each night.54 Khloé prays for Lamar in the hospital. Gossip rags report that Beyoncé Knowles and Kim Kardashian are reportedly bonding over religion. “Beyoncé and Kim are both regular churchgoers with strong Christian backgrounds so no doubt Kanye will have encouraged them to bond over that,” an insider told the British edition of Grazia magazine. “They’ll also be able to swap some exercise tips.”55 Magazine profiles of the family are replete with references to the family as a religious one, religion derived from their father’s Armenian Orthodox Christianity but increasingly associated with something less ritual and

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more spiritual, something appropriately Southern California and evangelistic. We’re told that the girls wouldn’t abort any pregnancy because of this religious belief. Speaking about her surprise first pregnancy, Kourtney said, “And I felt in my body, this is meant to be. God does things for a reason, and I just felt like it was the right thing that was happening in my life.”56 Khloé, too, advertises family values politics in her commitment to her marriage: “I’m a modern girl, but you should put your husband first.” Later, after it is announced that Kourtney broke up with her children’s dad, Scott Disick, in July 2015, Kourtney tweets from Psalm 7. In the eleventh season, Kim and Kanye baptize their twenty-­one-­month-­old daughter at the Saint James Cathedral in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. These examples don’t convey the totality of what the Kardashians do to religion, however. Their handling of religious idiom is always and ever Kardashian inasmuch as they are always focused on how whatever piety they embrace (Bible study, prayer, pastoral counseling) can bring them back to themselves. This can sometimes be read as a grotesque impiety. Kim will tweet “The pope is dope,” and will cause a minor uproar when Argentinians think she is suggesting the Pope is drugs.57 In a seventh-­season episode, Kim will remark, “I think if I’m forty and I don’t have any kids and I’m not married, I would have a baby artificially inseminated. I would feel like Mary—­like Jesus is my baby.”58 The pastor who married Kim and Kanye, Rich Wilkerson Jr., gets his own reality series, aptly titled Rich in Faith, on the Oxygen network.59 And the family says Bible for almost every unbelievable statement they utter, which is a lot of statements. For example, Kim will say to Khloé, “No way. You did not bring in a homeless guy.” And Khloé will reply, “No, Bible, we found him at DASH.”60 According to Khloé, Bible is a “word that you can’t go back on.” It means that people “can’t say ‘Bible’ and then not do it or lie.” And yes, everyone plays along. “That’s just the rule in the family,” she said. In short, it’s an easy way to determine whether someone is telling the truth. “Like, Bible, I did take a limo to school,” Scott Disick says to Khloé. “Bible, I’m not peeing,” Kourtney says while standing in a pool. “Did you eat good last night or were you bad?” Khloé asks Rob. “Don’t lie. Say Bible.” “Bible,” he replies.61 The conversion of scripture to slang is like everything else in the Kardashian universe, namely something bent to their own whims of intimate boundary formation. There is something shamelessly sloppy and precise about this millennial landscape of solipsistic family obsession. Sloppy in its excess of available sacrality, its commodification of every part of a day and its consumptions. But precise in its intensely consistent return to the same forms of

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behavior, same logic for every decision, same certitude that the measure of your life is your body and the family that gave it to you. This is every working day as casual Fridays, if casual Fridays meant you worked from home and changed outfits four times a day, every day. The Kardashians illuminate the inherent irony with which contemporary American consumers perceive family values. Scholars of religion, intrigued by the effect of “family values politics” on our elections and school boards, have offered a significant historiography attesting to the grassroots organizing and patriarchal theology of conservative American Christianity in the late twentieth century. Leaders of this movement focused on the failures of American culture and national policy, casting American culture in the role of the enemy. Instead of scripture, ministers such as Jerry Falwell appealed to romanticized visions of the American past in which patriotism, Christian commitment, and family stability purportedly were assured. Although the Moral Majority never represented a statistical majority within American Christianity, its political imaginary is a pervasive trope in any description of the US electorate. The scholars who have tracked this strain of thinking inevitably find themselves concluding with a cynical twist: the antifeminist evangelical activist Anita Bryant got divorced; the evangelical preacher Ted Haggard admitted to fornication; the infamously large Duggar family is revealed to include a pedophile brother. Such revelations are components of these people’s pop culture arc, as the consumers (evangelical or not) know enough about morality police to know that inevitably they are unveiled to be sinners just like us. The Kardashians confessed from the first episode, in which producers allowed a lingering shot of Kim’s sex tape as a part of the backstory to their family. Built into the televised origin of the mediated Kardashians was the impossibility of their piety, allowing them in some sense to be comfortably Christian for the viewing audience, comfortable in their weekly depiction of vanity, envy, and lust, resolved in sitcom morality reconciliation. Whatever meanness an episode depicts between grotesquely jealous, or weirdly violent, or obsessively materialistic sisters, it can be resolved when a discussion is staged to resolve the conflict. Often the resolution includes the giving of a gift: a framed photograph or a piece of jewelry, a tithing by the sinner to the party sinned against. It isn’t ironic that the Kardashians have recourse to family values; it is exactly in line with the manipulative rhetorical application of  family values in our political present. As Kathi Weeks has argued in The Problem with Work (2011), family values campaigns should be understood first and fore-

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most as a tool of political-­economic discipline. The family ethic endures “for the role it plays in reproducing a stable and able workforce.”62 No matter the sins the Kardashians commit, they—­like all of us—­have to go back to work at the end of each episode. Watching them resolve their shame for the sake of this resilient hustle is the most gripping of the realities depicted in this show. The way they keep working past their suffering, their mistakes, and their exposures to make themselves a totem of family even as their own family ceaselessly tears at the edges, with partners falling away and children disappearing to become obese men in the attic. The Kardashians show us, in public, how brands survive despite accusations of malfeasance, despite obvious failures of content. They survive by transforming your insults into their consumer power. Families being corporations isn’t new in the history of humanity. Nor is the availability of ethnographic evidence that suggests there are other kinds of families, and other kinds of kinship. Yet it is hard to find other kinds of kinship if you watch reality TV or the American sitcom. Our call as scholars is not only to ask why it is that family must be depicted as genetically bound together in order for it to be popular, but also to think about how our scholarship can continue to contribute to the formation of alternate views of  work­ ing life, away perhaps from the assumptions of biological family and into freedom from the primal horde. The freedom to possess again an errant hair, or to think again about why so many fights can’t be resolved in sitcom ways or in the sitcom depiction of a day. To think about Rob in the faraway wing, hiding because his body isn’t right for mass reproduction. To think, too, about those whose families are not safe spaces for truth, embodiment, or freedom. I began this by thinking about Melissa Click blocking journalists from coming into the campus campground and the time of ascendant Trump pop­ ulism that contributed to her public judgment. On the one hand, no one could seem further afield from the Kardashians’ knack for korporate self-­ exposure than Click. Mizzou fired Click within months of a viral video depicting her actions. Within days of any of their viral actions, Kardashians find themselves with more followers and more endorsement opportunities. The more the Kardashians abase themselves, the more they increase their profits. They fight on camera, they burp on camera, and they discuss flatulence and anal bleaching on camera. Those who loathe the Kardashians cite these exposures as signs of how they debase the culture of which they are a part. Whether you’ve clicked “I like this” or “I dislike this” makes no matter: the view is the thing.

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This was not Click’s experience. Despite millions of viewers for her infamous actions, Click’s gains from her exposure seemed few. She entered the same machine as the Kardashians, albeit perhaps with less consent, and exited with emptier pockets. Many who read this will say that the obligations of a scholar and state employee are different from that of a clothier and reality starlet. The Kardashians teach us, however, that whatever your profession might be, being a woman in the twenty-­first century is a job nobody who identifies thusly can escape. Women have two choices: they can commodify their gender and ruthlessly control their representation, or they can become subject to mediated mob justice. Although, to be sure, vigilante crews are likely to get you either way, at least if you get into the autographic game you might have some chance of surviving. The Kardashians depend on the clan as the scrutinizing safe space from public scrutiny. The clan is a kind of counterpublic haven from the debasement of the public sphere. Of course, the biological clan requires a commitment to genealogy and home that not everyone can stomach. What about those whose natal families are unbearable? Even more: what about those who risk a life more modern? The Kardashians don’t move away from home; only two of Kris Jenner’s six children went to college, and then they both promptly moved home. Clinging to home can be radical or reactionary. But the risks of staying home are surely different from immersing yourself into the society beyond your family tree. Sociologists tell us that wherever we wander we tend to find our clans, forging alliances with those who look like us, eat like us, and recreate like us. This affinity for kin is why there is something strange and extraordinary when this does not occur—­when we seek to connect across the crevasse of difference and then protect its fragile alliances. Concerned Student 1950, a group of students at the University of  Missouri seeking to protest racism on campus and demand their chancellor’s removal, could be seen as such an extraordinary alliance. Those who found Melissa Click’s actions violent saw her as inhibiting the freedom of the press from accessing the truth. When I watch this video, this is not what I see. What I see is a scholar of popular media keeping some small part of this protesting counterpublic from being subject to immediate public transparency. I see her as protecting the queer activist population from being interrogated again by a media that they know gnaw for sound bites. I see her as distinguishing between protest, which is public, and a fragile, transiently private community that might have become, temporarily, like family. It isn’t for me to decide if that made what she did legal or not. I know it is an ethics borne of a scholarly engagement with the effects of

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mediation which are not always good, not always freeing, not always inciting of your best life. I know this because I know that making ethical worlds sometimes takes a little hustle to counter the ferocity of those who want us to submit quickly to our commodification, and shut up, already. I know this, for real. Bible.

Rethinking Corporate Freedom

0 9 Corporation as Sect When those subject to bureaucratic control seek to escape the influence of the existing bureaucratic apparatus, this is normally possible only by creating an organization of their own which is equally subject to bureaucratization. Max Weber, Economy and Society I sold paper at this company for twelve years. My job was to speak to clients on the phone about quantities and types of copier paper. Even if I didn’t love every minute of it, everything I have I owe to this job. This stupid, wonderful, boring, amazing job. Jim Halpert, The Office

A United States Army private walks away from his post in Afghanistan. A county clerk refuses to issue a marriage license to a gay couple. A young man decides not to keep state secrets. And a for-­profit corporation decides it can’t provide health insurance coverage to its female employees for contraceptives that might prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. These are different incidents united by the fact that an act of workplace conscience defined their infamy. The results of their various trials reveal something about how much stock we place in our work as a site of personal adjudication and social belonging. Consider how intensely in each of these incidents the public replied with violent regard for the central actor. Robert Bowdrie “Bowe” Bergdahl walked away from his post in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, on June 30, 2009.1 He was captured by the Taliban within twenty-­four hours of his disappearance. Bergdahl was held in

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a cage for a large portion of his captivity, and tortured throughout it. After his 2014 release, journalists reported that in 2009 he deserted his post, and that he did so in order to attract attention to what he believed was poor army leadership. In March 2015, he was charged by the army with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. “The Army did the right thing here,” said Cody Full, twenty-­six, a former platoon mate of Bergdahl’s. “You give an oath,” Full said. “You sign your name to serve your country. No matter what you’re supposed to fill that oath.”2 Putting a sharper point on it, the presidential candidate Donald Trump recommended a harsher appraisal. “We’re tired of Sgt. Bergdahl, who’s a traitor, a no-­good traitor, who should have been executed,” Trump said to cheers at a rowdy rally inside a packed theater at the casino-­hotel Treasure Island in Las Vegas. “Thirty years ago,” Trump added, “he would have been shot.”3 Kimberly Jean Bailey “Kim” Davis was serving as a clerk for Rowan County, Kentucky, when she defied a federal course order that she issue marriage licenses to gay couples following the US Supreme Court decision that the right to marriage is guaranteed to all by the Fourteenth Amendment. Despite the fact that the US District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky ordered Davis to issue licenses as required by law, she continued to deny that court order, saying she was acting “under God’s authority.”4 “Our history is filled with accommodations for people’s religious freedom and conscience,” she would say. “I intend to continue to serve the people of Rowan County, but I cannot violate my conscience.”5 She was subsequently jailed for contempt of court, then released five days later. In addition to her legal troubles, Kim Davis was mocked incessantly by the public, spawning a wave of memes referencing famous film characters and other celebrities “still doing their job,” including one of a Monty Python character who has had his arms dismembered. That meme read: “LITERALLY DISARMED STILL DOES HIS JOB.” Results from one poll taken in Kentucky showed that 51 percent of registered voters believed Davis should be required to issue the forms because it was her job, while 42 percent would grant her freedom to refuse. (Another 7 percent were not sure.)6 Although some Christians rallied to her financial aid, the widespread reply to her refusal was that of disgust. “Welcome back to work Kim Davis, now just do your job,” was the sentiment expressed by many after Davis’s release from jail.7 Edward Joseph Snowden began working at the Central Intelligence Agency in 2006. His job was to maintain security for the agency’s computer network and look after computer security for US diplomats. He worked at the CIA for three years before he decided to leave his position to work

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as a contractor at the National Security Administration. Between 2009 and 2012, he says he found out just how all-­consuming the NSA’s surveillance activities are: “They are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them.” He also realized that the mechanisms designed to keep the NSA in check had failed. “You can’t wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act.”8 Sometime in 2013, Snowden downloaded NSA documents onto thumb drives. He sent an e-­mail to a documentary filmmaker, and began the process by which he would reveal a vast amount of classifed information to the public, including the information that the NSA was tapping fiber-­optic cables, intercepting telephone landing points, and bugging on a global scale. In June 2013 the US Department of Justice charged Snowden with violating the Espionage Act. Snowden fled to Moscow, where he is still living in an undisclosed location while seeking asylum elsewhere. “In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself, ” a current NSA analyst told one online news outlet. “I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “He is . . . the greatest traitor in American history.”9 Debate continues to rage about whether Edward Snowden is a “grandiose narcissist” or a “national hero.”10 The public appraisal of Snowden is, therefore, quite like Bergdahl’s and Davis’s. In each of these cases, use of a search engine can help you find images of people holding large posters containing a photo of one of these figures, labeled either traitor or hero. More often than not, those who see them as heroes agree with what their conscience guided them to reject; those who see them as traitors think they should have just shut up, hunkered down, and done their job. Or quit in an appropriate way. Finally, Hobby Lobby Arts & Crafts Stores is a company founded by David Green that sells home décor, frames, scrapbook products, yarn, fabric, beads, and other craft supplies. In 2010, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, and in August 2011 contraception was added to a list of preventative services covered by the ACA insurance that would be provided without patient copayment. Founded by a self-­professed evangelical Christian, Hobby Lobby balked at this requirement, since its owners believe that life begins at conception, which they equate to fertilization. The company filed for an exemption from having to provide contraception coverage to its employees, and argued for that exemption on the grounds of religious freedom. In 2014, the Supreme Court sided with Hobby Lobby in Burwell v.

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Hobby Lobby, allowing closely held for-­profit corporations to be exempt from a law their owners religiously object to if there is a less restrictive means of furthering the law’s interest. It is the first time that the court has recognized a for-­profit corporation’s claim of religious belief. I unite these cases because each of them involves an instance of an individual or organization claiming a right to conscience: a right to refuse to do what the law mandates them to do. Scholarship on conscientious objection as a legal question emphasizes the fine distinctions to be made between religiously motivated refusals to provide health care and government officials’ refusals to license or perform marriages, as well as the differences between refusals at for-­profit versus religious workplaces.11 There is also an emerging historiography on corporate religious freedom and its relationship to religious freedom jurisprudence more generally.12 This chapter seeks to focus instead on the way that working, and submitting to work, seems to be the assumed norm of contemporary life: we work without exception, and without complaint. If you complain, you should do so either quietly at the water cooler or online with total anonymity. Or you could quit altogether, joining the vast ranks of unemployed. Except, of course, if you are a corporation. If you’re a corporation, the expectations for your behavior seem a little different. Currently in the annals of public opprobrium, it’s better to be a corporation than a human being. Being an individual who resists regulation—­a person who acts with conscience—­is queer relative to the terms of law organizing your employment. Being a corporation that resists is something else. Not exactly heroic, but not exactly a disgrace, either. Bowe and Kim and Ed may spend (or have already spent) time in prison for their dissent. Meanwhile, Hobby Lobby found a way to evade a tax penalty. And this week you can get 50 percent off all home accents at your local Hobby Lobby retail store. Candleholders, knobs, trays, decorative lanterns—­whatever you want to garnish your home with, another layer of mass-­produced homespun gilt is yours for the discount taking. To be clear, according to many legal scholars, the Hobby Lobby decision could not be reasonably understood through the lens of conscience. The legal scholar Amy J. Sepinwall tells us why a corporation cannot be said to possess a conscience: A being with a conscience is self-­conscious—­it has a sense of itself as an entity over time, harboring memories of its past and committing itself

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to projects, goals and values into the future. And the fact that it chooses its projects, goals and values requires additional capacities: the ability to judge its options, which requires that it know its desires and aspirations, and that it be sensitive to morality, prudence and value. A corporation does not have anything near these capacities.13

As Sepinwall explains, however, the fact that a corporation can’t have a conscience does not settle the question of whether Hobby Lobby may oppose the contraceptive mandate, since its owners could still claim the corporation’s exemption from the contraceptive mandate as a matter of protecting their individual consciences. Individual acts of conscience have a significant history in the United States. In this history, individuals who claim conscience largely suffer for their protests.14 (As a note, a conscientious objector is an individual who claims the right to refuse to perform military service, whereas conscience clauses protect physicians or other medical professionals who refuse to perform a variety of legally permissible medical services because of their own moral objections.) In this sense, the stories of Kim and Ed and Bowe are nothing new. Those who have resisted military service or medical duty, or who have violated government confidentiality agreements, never have done especially well in American life, with their stories often concluding in prison, asylums, or exile. The question for this chapter is how corporations fare so well in their acts of conscience. How have corporations become understood so easily—­with so little apparent dissent—­as worthy of protection? And how has our individuality been subsumed with such seeming ease under corporate freedom?

Work determines life. I am not speaking about workaholism as a particular pathology of late capitalism. No, I am trying to capture how encompassing workplaces are, how they evolved to be the source of everything. Popular culture of the late twentieth and twenty-­first centuries used the workplace as the backdrop for every decision, the place where individuals experienced every part of their lives from socialization to romance to disease to death. In the American version of the television comedy The Office (2005–­13), the workplace was the site of daily irritation for every lead character; the office

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was the joke and the punchline. But the office in The Office served also as the primary source of self-­formation, providing for its employees the location for their intimate partnerships, psychological growth, social community, and economic reckoning. The show depicts a kind of obsessional monogamy among its characters toward their workplace. Their specific office is a paper distributor called Dunder Mifflin, a small company that has no reasonable right to exist in the Staples and Office Depot office supply climate. Being loyal to the office almost becomes an act of resistance for its employees, who at various times could leave this job but keep coming back to Dunder Mifflin because they claim to prefer its peculiar smallness to some larger corporate situation. Scholars of popular culture have long known that sitcoms appeal not because they represent conformity but because they convey some sense of dissent, through either a crotchety, ranting lead character or a communal resistance to some social norm.15 “The critique of mass society has been one of the most powerful forces driving consumerism for the past forty years,” write Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.16 To watch office dramas or comedies on television is to see a relentless exposure of the hypocrisy of modern corporations but also the inevitable return to a business setting, corporate or not, as the frame for human supplication. The place to which you give everything and from which everything comes. Work determines life. Underlining the full-­scale dominance of work is something that can be done only with a series of provisos: it dominates in different ways for people of different income brackets; it organizes relational options differently for different genders, races, or classes; it is not simply one form of wage or one form of activity. I bring together here two concepts, work and the corporation, that each summarize a broad diversity of job experience and institutional types. People work in a wide variety of ways, under a variety of conditions. Some of those conditions are organized by corporations and some are not. I want to emphasize that work is something that implies a kind of activity that earns one’s livelihood, and it is a location where one does this work. I look for work; that is, I am looking for a task that accomplishes something (including, usually, a wage); and I am at work; that is, I am at the place where I do this accomplishing. Corporations are one place where a lot of people work. Over the last forty years, American work has changed its corporate location. In 1972, the largest sectors of work were manufacturing (23.9 percent of the workforce), government (18.3 percent), and wholesale and retail trade (15.7 percent). In

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2012, the largest single context for employment was government (16.6 percent), followed by wholesale and retail trade (15.3 percent) and education and health services. By that year, manufacturers comprised only 9 percent of American employers.17 Among wholesale and retail trade (the second-­largest employer in the United States), large corporations dominate. For example, Wal-­Mart Stores Inc. is the largest American employer, with a workforce of nearly 2.2 million people.18 Several of the nation’s largest employers are retailers like Target and Kroger. Like large retailers, fast-­food chains also require plenty of low-­skilled labor in order to operate their stores and expand. These are not fabulous jobs: one recent study found that most low-­wage workers are employed by large corporations.19 To be sure, not all of America’s largest employers have a low-­skilled workforce. Technology companies such as IBM and Hewlett-­Packard conduct research and offer a wide range of products and services, requiring them to hire highly skilled workers. Conglomerates such as General Electric also employ hundreds of thousands of workers. This list of workplaces doesn’t acknowledge the vast number of small retail businesses or government offices that determine the work life of so many Americans. Corporations play an outsized role in American work life, but they are not the only site of working life. A corporation is a group of people authorized to act as a single entity and recognized as such in law. In the United States, corporations enjoy most of the rights and responsibilities that an individual possesses; that is, a corporation has the right to enter into contracts, loan and borrow money, sue and be sued, hire employees, own assets, and pay taxes. For most people, the idea that corporations would organize their life is something about which they would be ambivalent. The popular depiction of the corporation is as a controlling menace. No matter the employment opportunities it offers, the word corporate itself is pejorative, suggesting an entity more interested in profit than people, or more interested in maintaining consistency than celebrating individuality, innovation, or idiosyncrasy. In this sense, corporations embody certain criticisms not unlike those often leveled at religions. The corporation is just another word for sect, insofar as corporation is a term of cohesion, of particularism, of branding a communal whole as something that functions in seeming unison on its own behalf. It may or may not be democratic; it may or may not be inclusive; it may or may not be transparent. The corporation and the sect in modernity are not mere analogies; they are synonyms. To join a corporation is to join a sect; to join a sect is to join a corporation. This is a strong claim, and I

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intend it to be both provoking of new thinking and, possibly, axiomatic to those who know the intertwined histories of religion and economy in the United States. In the space remaining, I will consider the history by which business and religion intertwine, as well as the forms of individuality that corporate life produces. Finally, I will return to the case of Hobby Lobby in order to consider how religious freedom has become another territory of corporate occupation.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, there was perhaps nothing more pervading, invading, and inculcating in American culture than industrialization and the concomitant expansion of big business. Before the 1830s there were few corporations, because entrepreneurs had to convince a state legislature to issue them a charter in order for one to exist. In the early Republic, state and federal government offered extensive rights to individuals to associate in loosely defined groups and even to aggregate in ones with mutually understood rules. At the same time, government restricted the rights of associations to incorporate. Of the corporations that did exist, the majority were churches and other Protestant religious organizations that state officials interpreted to be politically neutral or benign. Organizations that were viewed by officials as socially or politically disruptive (such as Roman Catholic or labor organizations) found themselves at a significant legal disadvantage—­ especially when their members wished to acquire or protect property in order to advance their cause. As Ruth H. Bloch and Naomi R. Lamoreaux have shown, corporate power in the early Republic was largely Protestant power. To be sure, even Protestants depended on the state for their organizational agency. Voluntary associations in the early Republic “never really operated independently of the state . . . the political judgments of government officials skewed the development of American civil society towards conservative and acquiescent groups at the expense of oppositional ones.”20 If a group wanted to keep its charter, it had to remain legible as politically benign. Over the course of several decades around the mid-­nineteenth century, American lawmakers significantly widened access to the entity and personhood rights of corporations.21 This increased leniency toward incorporation was a direct result of increasing industrial power. In the 1830s, states began passing general incorporation laws, allowing companies to be-

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come corporations and issue stock without charters from the legislature. In response to the volatile boom and bust cycles of earlier industrial life, industrialists began to form associations in which former competitors became informal partners and tried to smooth out the market through the adoption of gentlemen’s agreements on production levels and prices. Soon these informal alliances evolved into more formal cooperative ventures among owners. Business leaders devised new and larger forms of business organizations and new ways to promote their products through the growing field of advertising. Meanwhile, small businesses with high operating costs found it difficult to compete with larger corporations, and many were forced out of business. This plot toward the centralization of certain industries climaxed with the merger movement of the late 1890s. Abandoning altogether the appearance of competition, industrial leaders simply absorbed their competitors. Many Americans feared the resultant monopolies, because they believed a monopoly could charge whatever it wanted for its product prices, and because they worried that the monopoly was nothing more than a new form of feudalism in which the democratic possibilities of the frontier had been erased by the domination of an elite few. Although these monopolies would in part be broken by the labor movement and the Clayton Antitrust Act, during the Gilded Age these mammoth operations determined consumer opportunity and individual labor.22 In the wake of the great merger movement, incorporation was the idiom. But this did not limit the free market to fewer options. Rather, as Naomi R. Lamoreaux has demonstrated, the nationalization and consolidation of American industries only elaborated the competitive marketplace.23 The effects of nationalization were not solely experienced in the fiscal marketplace. Just as economic operations increasingly occurred within centralized corporate structures, so did religious life occur within centralized institutional frames. To note just a few examples from the late nineteenth century, consider the formation of the Salvation Army in 1865, the Knights of Labor in 1869, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874, the Knights of Columbus in 1882, the Catholic Young Men’s National Union in 1875, the Congress of Jewish Women in 1893, the National Catholic Welfare Conference in 1917, the National Jewish Welfare Board also in 1917, and the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 1918, as well as the expansion of the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, and the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Associations, which transpired

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throughout the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. These organizations were the Harvester International, United States Steel Corporation, and General Electric of the religious world. Their formal assemblies resisted regional, local, and denominational terms for their composition, choosing instead to develop ecumenical communities for the diverse rural and urban communities from which they hoped to recruit participants. The purpose of these groupings was explicitly to develop broader networks of allegiance while still committing their memberships to their specific ecumenical vision. During the late nineteenth century, the power to incorporate was the organizing power to beat.

Yet just as Lamoreaux has suggested that mergers did not diminish the diversity of industrial markets, so did religious observers argue that America’s religious options seemed only more abundant in the wake of such consolidating, ecumenical efforts. A 1909 article in the New York Times, republished in many Anglophone papers, reported with wry excitement the variety available for Americans who were religiously inclined. Reviewing the 1908 survey of religious statistics in the United States, the reporter explained that religious bodies together had a net gain of nearly 750,000 members, bringing the total number of those listed on US church membership rolls to 34,282,543. Likewise, the number of churches in the United States had increased by 1,874 churches, and there were 2,835 more ministers. This article then turned to Dr. H. K. Carroll, who was in charge of an earlier federal census, and who could definitively show that more than one-­third of the US population was on church books. “If there is any American who cannot find a religious denomination to suit him he must be too fastidious for this earth,” the reporter concluded, in a tone suggesting that this was an impressive feat amid a slightly amusing overabundance.24 Dr. Carroll wrote an appraisal of the 1890 census titled The Religious Forces of the United States Enumerated, Classified, and Described on the Basis of the Government Census of 1890 (1893). In that volume, Carroll set the scene: The first impression one gets in studying the results of the census is that there is an infinite variety of religions in the United States. There are churches small and churches great, churches white and churches black,

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churches high and low, orthodox and heterodox, Christian and pagan, Catholic and Protestant, Liberal and Conservative, Calvinistic and Arminian, native and foreign, Trinitarian and Unitarian. All phases of thought are represented by them, all possible theologies, all varieties of polity, ritual, usage, forms of worship. In our economical policy as a nation we have emphasized the importance of variety in industry. We like the idea of manufacturing or producing just as many articles of merchandise as possible. We have invented more curious and useful things than any other nation. In matters of religion we have not been less liberal and enterprising. We seem to have about every variety known to other countries, with not a few peculiar to ourselves.25

Carroll here agrees with the analogy I draw between religion and industry. He argues that both are the result of our love of choice, of possibility, of diverse spaces for diverse people who want and create diverse products. We have everything the whole world has, plus some special items unique to our national story. To be sure, in Carroll’s account the unifying structures of these diversities remain invisible. The most important thing to know is that the markets are open. It is less important to think about who organizes the markets. Carroll’s voice allows us to see how fine a certain observer felt all this to be. Markets are ethically fine, and utterly reconcilable with religious experience. This is the turn that I want to observe, the one where whatever monstrous thing we might have imagined industrialization to be, it suddenly became beside the point. Incorporation of industries became our reality. This is the story of the long nineteenth century: the brutal arc by which we came to be sitting within a thoroughly marketed world. Historians would immediately underline this brutality, showing that incorporation always has collateral damage. There are many resistant events in the history of these markets, including the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket Riot of 1886, the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892, the Pullman Railroad Strike of 1894, and the Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912, as well as the formation of the American Federation of Labor in 1886 and the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, both of which were large operators of strategic resistance. Looking at the epoch that included such strife, most historians of religion look inside those labor protests, and consider the social services offered to those laboring in the form of applied ideologies like the Social Gospel and Christian Socialism.26 What I want to underline is that whatever resistance occurred, it didn’t stop the process of incorporation itself. Religiously

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inflected protests against capitalism’s incursion sought to regulate its effects on individual human dignity, and to moderate the terms by which it organized individuals into dense masses of labor.

A review of histories of religion and histories of Christianity authored in the nineteenth century suggests that there was one other story told about resistance to the market. Church historians repeatedly told their readers about a great pietistic campaign known as Sabbatarianism. During the early decades of the nineteenth century, many American Christians advocated the virtues of Sabbath observance. These “Sabbatarians” opposed the desecration of the first day (i.e., Sunday) by work and sought to make this religious observance federal law. During the eighteenth century, the legality of Sabbath enforcement was put into doubt by constitutional separation of church and state. By the close of the Revolutionary War, few Sabbath laws remained intact. However, as the late colonies slowly melded into United States, Christian leaders were increasingly concerned that the power of the federal government superseded the moral authority of religion. They were also worried about the role economic labor took in the lives of citizens. People seemed to be worshipping economic progress more than moral progress, and Christian leadership wanted to correct the obsessive acquisitiveness they perceived in many parish defections. When Congress passed a law in 1810 demanding that postmasters deliver mail every day of the week, the Sabbatarian movement was born. Supported by the evangelical culture spreading through antebellum revivals, ministers like Lyman Beecher (1775–­1863) argued that increasing profanation of the Sabbath signaled a collapsing society. Without the maintenance of the Sabbath, Beecher argued in his 1827 sermon, “The Memory of Our Fathers,” “irreligion will prevail, and the immorality and dissoluteness, to an extent utterly inconsistent with the permanence of republican institutions.”27 In this vein, Beecher formed the General Union for Promoting the Observance of the Christian Sabbath in 1828 with the goal of protecting the Fourth Commandment and, axiomatically, the Christian structure of American social life. Beecher’s agitating efforts to create a Sabbath sanctuary occurred alongside rampant structural transformation of the economy.28 Arguments for a

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Sabbath day emphasized the spiritual benefits of reprieve from the secular within such a new environmental, sociological, and economic frame. And church historians, no matter their denominational stripe, argued persistently to preserve the Sabbath day as a critical alternative to the business facts of our other days. In 1841, the Reverend George B. Cheever wrote, “No ordinance in our country’s statute book shall legalize the national violation of the Sabbath, and no rude noise of secular business intrude upon its heavenly repose.”29 Lest some citizens worry that such a prescriptive piety infringes on religious liberty, many observers of American religion argued for Sabbatarianism within a frame of freedom. “True liberty is the moral power of self-­government,” the church historian Philip Schaff wrote in 1888. “The liberty of infidels and anarchists is carnal licentiousness.” And what is the first enemy of the infidel? “They openly profess their hatred and contempt of our Sunday-­laws, our Sabbaths, our churches, and all our religious institutions and societies. Let us beware them!”30 The value of the Sabbath was, precisely, its valorization of the spirit amid the deadening effects of capital. “It is necessary and profitable for the body as well as for the soul,” Schaff wrote. “It is of special benefit to the laboring classes, and guards them against the tyranny of capital.”31 In A History of American Christianity (1897), Leonard Woolsey Bacon concurred with the spiritual and economic imperative of Sunday laws. Writing of those who try to legislate against the Sabbath, he said, “It threatens . . . to deprive us of that universal quiet Sabbath rest which has been one of the glories of American social life, and an important element in its economic prosperity, and to give in place of it, to some, no assurance of a Sabbath rest at all, to others, a Sabbath of revelry and debauch.”32 For all these Christian writers of church history, capitalism was inevitable. It could not be abated. And it should not have been, since the dominating majority of nineteenth-­century American religious advocates were not resistant to it. Whatever critical dissent from capital might have emerged from a narrow sphere of Christian theology in the later nineteenth century is but a tiny documentary blip in the overwhelmingly collaborative, or perhaps sometimes just conceding, relationship that explicitly religious thinkers had to the market. Sabbatarianism and its related blue laws (as well as the agitation for temperance) could be seen as articulations of a counterpublic—­a counterpublic that never quite succeeded in its provision of quiet, of rest, of a true silence from capital. As Daniel Dorchester observed in 1895, “The year 1850 marks the time of the best general observance

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of the Sabbath known for the last one hundred years in this country.”33 If Dorchester is right, the “high point” for Sabbath observation would occur long before labor unionized, before the Social Gospel theologians tried to recalibrate a country recalibrated by markets, before the telephone and telegraph and electrical wires bundled a nation into grids. At the outset of the industrial age, one Anglican reverend visited the United States and offered this summary dissection of religion in that nation: As might be expected, where there is so much scope for youthful enterprise, there is little time for matured thought and study. Everything has a superficial air, more of style than stability, requiring someday to be again rebuilt with more solid and enduring materials. Not only their dwellings, but church system, religion and letters, newspapers and periodical literature, all partake of the character of the superficial—­the best attainable rather than the best desirable. Everything bears the aspect of haste. To be rich, or to obtain office and public honors, seems in every one’s power; and to be a successful merchant, lawyer, or legislator, takes early possession of the heart, and makes all impatient to engage in the race of life.34

Much later, in 1933, another historian would reflect on the religious fortunes of the Gilded Age: Business was exuberant under the stimulus of the new opportunities for new investment and the new wants which these and other inventions both satisfied and stimulated. Instead of hoped-­for spiritual awakening, which is always expected after a war and never comes, there was a rank growth of that practical materialism which expresses itself both in an inordinate eagerness to acquire wealth and in an undisciplined use of it, and which, infecting even religion, creates a disproportionate interest in external expansion and the building of visible institutions.35

These two accounts, paired together, demonstrate the ways that evaluators assessed the relationship of religion and markets in America. Such profiles suggest that religion in the American nineteenth century elaborated its appearance (those longer membership rolls and new Gothic edifices) yet lost something. This is the “spiritual crisis” that subsequent historians would ascribe to the Gilded Age, a crisis exacerbated and possibly formatted by the distracting and dominating expansion of industry.36 Religion and economy

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are, for these observers, essential co-­conspirators in the formation of the American century to come.

When late twentieth-­century scholars and political thinkers started to apply the word neoliberal to the current state of our political economy, they sought to capture how corporate life determines so much of what and who we are and how, in particular, corporate governance superseded liberal structures of federal governance to regulate our every move. In particular, deploying the term highlights how a particular notion of individuality has triumphed, one that is defined by how much individuals deny they are embedded in these corporate matrices. To define freedom by the terms of neoliberalism is to summarize the way it focuses individuals on their individuality without highlighting the sense that this individuality may derive from a larger normalizing corporate system of beliefs. In the case of religion in the United States, the connection would be between such corporate matrices and the persistent effects of Protestantism, which, as Tracy Fessenden has effectively argued, determine American religious experience and identity.37 The specific theological concepts of democracy and divinity within Protestantism allow its adhering participants to imagine that they are fiercely antinomian and antiauthoritarian, so that they do not imagine they are within a structure of obedience but rather within a structure of liberation, independence, and revelation. There is no conflict between the self and any system, since any success indicates the capacity of the self to master any system. William Arnal has written convincingly about this dynamic, describing how individuals in modernity develop a peculiar dependence on authority: “The state as conceived by modernity serves the purpose of creating a framework in which the individuals who are imagined to constitute the state are best poised to pursue and create their own meanings, to be free from the aggression of others so that they may seek and realize whatever it is that they may regard to be their own particular selfish self-­interest.” As a result, Arnal proceeds, “ ‘religion’ comes to form a special political category in modernity—­one that creates a peripheral space for, and serves to account for and especially to domesticate, whatever forms of persistent social and collective action happen to retain a positive or Utopian orientation.”38 Religion becomes, in Arnal’s rendering, a specific vantage point in late

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modernity because it concocts a reprieve from the optional chaos. Late capitalism produces violent disruptions of nation, community, and family, such as downsizing of industries, privatization of public services, and the commodification of every form of social life, thus “parsing human beings into free-­floating labor units, commodities, clients, stakeholders, strangers, and their subjectivity distilled into ever more objectified ensembles of interests, entitlements, appetites, desires, purchasing ‘power.’ ”39 Against these disruptions, certain spaces—­be they fundamentalist sects or fantasy theme parks, Hasidic shuls or LAN parties—­“would seem to offer a stable realm: a return to community, a resurgence of civil society, sanctity for the individual.”40 Yet such specific enclosed social experience functions within a broader frame where the subjective choice of the individual is lionized as the determining interactive principle. The genius of the late modern corporation is therefore the way that it can claim to speak for the people, rendering its private ambitions as seemingly good for everyone. For example, in 2012, IBM released a new advertising campaign promoting a set of “augmented reality” applications for mobile devices.41 Founded in the 1880s, International Business Machines, or IBM, is now a multinational technology and consulting firm headquartered in Armonk, New York. It manufactures computer hardware and software, but its profits are increasingly derived from the development of informational infrastructure, such as hosting and consulting bent on organizing the billions of data that individuals produce in a given day. Its 2012 advertising campaign explains this transition from manufacturing objects to organizing knowledge, arguing that we have all the technology we need; what is needed now is new applications of what we know. “The technology is here,” the copy explains. “People are ready. The time is now.” Ready for what? A series of posters explains: Power grids reduce energy bills for you. Intelligence turns information into insights. Roads reduce their own congestion. Data helps prevent crimes before they happen. Medical histories alert doctors before patients get sick. Store shelves know exactly what customers want.42

Beneath each of these boldfaced slogans is the repeated subtitle, Smarter x for a smarter planet. Under “Power grids reduce energy bills for you,”

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the tagline reiterates: “Smarter energy for a smarter planet.” Under “Store shelves know exactly . . . ,” the copy underlines, “Smarter retail systems for a smarter planet.” Smarter energy, smarter business, smarter traffic, smarter public safety, smarter histories, and smarter retail systems: all of these make for a smarter planet. The closing summation: Let’s build a smarter planet.43 Observe how IBM invokes unifying infrastructures (like power grids, roads, medical records) to specify individual frustration (high bills, congested traffic, illness). The store shelves will know what you want, the medical histories will alert doctors, the roads will limit their jams—­all you have to do is accede to the totality of their corporation’s knowledge about you. The job of the consumer is merely to trust in that capability; to believe that the corporate data set is smarter than the consumer, the bill payer, the driver, or the patient. There are a lot of data in this data-­driven world, and those who want to live on the smartest planet will submit to its power. This is our neoliberal freedom: the freedom to decide what matrix will determine your cognizance. The corporation has done all the thinking on your behalf. For Arnal, this acquiescence by individuals to the power of companies should be familiar terrain for the scholar of religion. He suggests that capitalism succeeds because it provides this kind of corporate safe haven in the form of sanctified locations like Disney World, where individuals can locate themselves as both specific and statistical. These IBM advertisements do something similar, albeit without the same rituals of social experience like those of Disney. IBM has deduced your diversity to a predictable type, and can resolve your trouble (be it high bills or strange illness) through an effective algorithm. If you’re worried, worry not: a better system than you can conceive is on the case. IBM has a product that resolves your worries. The commodity has done all your work for you, leaving you alone to just be you. Well, yes and no. Not all individual choices are equally celebrated, as we saw at the opening of this chapter when I described the hard knocks experienced by Bowe Bergdahl, Kim Davis, and Edward Snowden when they chose to resist the workplaces they occupied. In these instances, only Kim Davis invoked religion as the specific rationale for her dissent. Bergdahl and Snowden described their motivations as acts of secular conscience. The presence or absence of sectarian religion in each of these cases makes no significant difference, however. Whatever your job commands is what you finally are. The primacy of the workplace as the site of your individual reckoning is one of the major reasons Hobby Lobby could acquire an exemption

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for its act of conscience, and others could not. But this requires more exploration to understand fully.

It is easy to forget that religious freedom wasn’t an only child: she was a part of a family of countermeasures listed in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The naming of religion in the Constitution was, and is, a defensive move: whatever government does, it should not get in the way of its citizens trying to articulate their opinions—­opinions articulated through speech, through the press, through assemblage, and through petition. Religion appears in the Establishment Clause as a reminder that religion has been one of the things that has kept people from being able to reply freely to their government. Free from influences within government, and free from religions that compete with government in their authority. Although many institutional structures within the United States might be described as religions, the Internal Revenue Code supplies certain benefits to those collective bodies that apply to be recognized as “churches and religious organizations.” The exemption requirements for these organizations make clear that prospective 501(c)(3) organizations are restricted in their political and legislative activities.44 This is a knotty issue, on which church leaders have at times protested on the grounds of free speech. Why should their collective political opinions be less worthy of articulating than those of anyone else? Nevertheless, churches, unlike many public charities, cannot take a 501(h) election, the expenditure test supplied by the IRS to facilitate appropriate lobbying by 501(c)(3) organizations.45 The sort of religion that many people worry about when they worry about religious influence is why the Establishment Clause was necessary: namely, religion as a persuasive, even manipulative, power. The truth and fiction behind such an understanding of religion is a topic discussed heavily on websites like Religion News Service and Religion & Politics. In recent years, a spate of excellent studies have been produced on the specific practices of religious freedom in the United States, that is, the practice of adjudicating something called religious freedom. Such works include those by Garrett Epps, Greg Johnson, Thomas C. Maroukis, Shawn Francis Peters, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, and Tisa Wenger.46 There have also been synthetic contributions by Sarah Barringer Gordon and David Sehat.47 One takeaway from this rich bibliography is that a discursive mayhem ensues

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whenever communities are forced to represent themselves as religions, and whenever governments are charged with determining the legal legitimacy and the testimonial sincerity of such claims. For readers of this scholarship, the decision to award Hobby Lobby a measure of religious freedom is surprising, because the central actors didn’t have to work very hard to prove that they were religious. Indeed, this is the one aspect of the case on which everyone, from any political perspective, was able to agree: these people are really, truly religious. In the annals of religious freedom jurisprudence, just proving you are legitimately religious, and as such that you have rights to certain freedoms, has been a pretty exhausting venture. Maybe it was so easy in this instance because the religion to prove was the owners’ evangelical Christianity, a religion that has long been the form against which all other religious performances in the United States have been measured. Perhaps, though, there are additional reasons for our eager assignment of religious to the owners of Hobby Lobby, reasons that have more to do with our present relationship to corporate power than to our relationship with religious power. Better put, perhaps we perceive that corporations are functioning increasingly in present society like the religions that the Establishment Clause sought to moderate. Any reader of the Hobby Lobby decision is arrested by the masterly ease with which the religious nature of this corporation is decided, a decision based on the understanding that the Greens are sincere in their religious belief. Why are they understood to be sincere? Because they don’t just belong to a 501(c)(3); they have made their corporation into a place that feels and acts like a 501(c)(3). In his book, More Than a Hobby (2005), David Green devotes an entire chapter to explain “This Is Not a ‘Secular’ Business,” and the majority opinion of the Supreme Court agrees, quickly listing features of the company that prove its sincere commitment to religious belief.48 The Hobby Lobby statement of purpose commits its owners to operate the company in a manner “consistent with Biblical principles.”49 Hobby Lobby stores close on Sundays, even though they “lose millions in sales annually” by doing so. The decision of the court proceeds: “The businesses refuse to engage in profitable transactions that facilitate or promote alcohol use; they contribute profits to Christian missionaries and ministries; and they buy hundreds of full-­page newspaper ads inviting people to ‘know Jesus as Lord and Savior.’ ” And we are told, repeatedly, that their business is “small” and “closely held.”50 The description of Hobby Lobby offered in the decision isn’t a profile of a for-­profit corporation. It is a study of a sect. This is how the Supreme Court could argue that Hobby Lobby, in particular, deserved religious

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freedom: by rendering it as the Supreme Court has rendered other minority groups in religious freedom jurisprudence.51 The Greens aren’t evangelicals in this depiction. They aren’t demographically powerful, or democratically accountable to a diverse community. No, they are dissenting players within the realm of capitalism. Who else would not make a profit if they could? The Greens can therefore be seen as fighting for a minority way of life and a minority position regarding birth control. If they acted more like how the Supreme Court thinks for-­profit business owners normally act, the case would not have been so easy to make. The point of scale—­Hobby Lobby is small, particular, integrated, committed—­is not so unusual in the annals of business self-­promotion. In my research on the Goldman Sachs Group Inc., I have been struck by the reappearance of a similarly bantam grammar to describe its operations. Few people would be comfortable describing Goldman as small or closely held given its force in the global marketplace. Yet this is the language of its Business Principles and Standards, a series of imperatives referenced throughout Goldman operations and quoted in legal documents, congressional testimony, and media coverage. “We want to be big enough to undertake the largest project that any of our clients could contemplate,” the firm explains, “yet small enough to maintain the loyalty, the intimacy and the esprit de corps that we all treasure and that contribute greatly to our success.”52 The equipoise of the remark is intended to be reassuring: Goldman is big enough to fulfill your biggest dreams, but small enough to be cost-­efficient relative to that bigness; small enough to feel exclusive and particular in its relation to you; small enough to remain closely guarded, reliably secretive, and highly selective. Employees of Goldman reiterate this profile, pointing to particular aspects of its management and the resultant operation. The way Goldman combs through applicants to find the absolute best. The way it builds a consistent record of performance among those employees. The way its approach to business meets a higher standard than any of the bigger banks out there. The way the place becomes more significant to you than your family. As one account of Wall Street life explains, at the same time that junior analysts are being educated in the ways of Wall Street, “[they are] also being slowly separated from the outside world.” Joining a bank is a “cultural baptism that encompasses every aspect of their lives.”53 What I want to underline is that every company avoids depicting itself as oversize, unknowable, or unethical. This is how companies talk about themselves when they want to be understood as persons, when they want to break through the obscurity of financial reports and the dependency of

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financial relations to say that their incorporated it is a human we, and their human entity is responsibly humane: we think small, we think local, we think about you. But of course, they are not exactly what they say they are. They are organizations. They are a form of organization that helps “human beings to achieve desired ends,” to quote from page 18 of the Supreme Court decision. Most corporations distribute stocks and report on their profits. Almost all organize large numbers of people in a variety of hierarchical relations. And nearly every one manages large abstractions and large-­scale material scenes. No matter the scale of actual operations, however, every corporation begins the same way, with someone filing a short form with the Secretary of State’s office.54 As a matter of bureaucracy, becoming a corporation is stunningly simple. In order for a small business to become one, it needs a name, an address, and a set of directors. When it files the initial paperwork, called the articles of incorporation or articles of organization, there is no need for it to provide a list of business principles. The assumption is that the corporation will be obedient to the regulations of the state in which the corporation resides, and there is no need to recount the history of the company, or to account for the principled relations between its major parties. By contrast, in order to be recognized as a church or religious organization by the IRS, an organization must fulfill a list of criteria that include proving its recognized creed and form of worship, explaining its formal code of doctrine and discipline, and relaying its distinct religious history.55 Presently in the United States, making a business is a lot easier than making a recognized religious organization. But the ease isn’t the point. The point is that the tax code commands that religious organizations give a certain account of themselves in order to have certain benefits. In order to give Hobby Lobby religious freedom, the Supreme Court constructed a similar account of the Greens: their religious history, their doctrines and discipline, their creedal positions about life. This work—­the work of arguing for their religion—­was not a part of what made Hobby Lobby a for-­profit corporation. That part was the sale of its scrapbook-­making products. Yet it will benefit from that work having been done, with none of the kinds of limits churches and religious organizations face in their economic and political activities. As we know, there are essentially no limits on corporate lobbying.56 Our Constitution does not currently offer us many tools to regulate the competing form of governing power that corporations present. The historiography on religious freedom looks grimly upon the capacity of government

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to regulate religion. It seems, by all available evidence, that government does no better with corporations. We can either decide to give up on the possibility of governing either corporate or religious power, or we could—­at the very least—­achieve parity at their inception. Let the corporations name their formal doctrines before they have a right to practice their religion. Or at least cap their lobbying power. One way or another, if corporations get excused for being religions, they ought to have to pay the standard fee for being one. But it is unlikely that they will. I began with the figures of Bowe Bergdahl, Kim Davis, and Edward Snowden to ask what kinds of freedom, religious or otherwise, we possess as workers. These whistleblowers were not employed by the private sector but by the public: the US military, county government, state intelligence. Is it possible that conscience is something only a nongovernmental employee has the right to possess? A corporation is a company or group of people authorized to act as a single entity and recognized as such in law. In an earlier meaning of the term, a corporation referred to the group of people elected to govern: to govern a town, a borough, a company, or a church. Sometimes we imagine that a corporation can only be the former description and not the latter. We defer to definitions like that of the Small Business Administration when it describes how a corporation is an “independent legal entity owned by shareholders.”57 Under federal law, corporations—­and not their shareholders—­are legally liable for their actions. The SBA discourages small businesses from becoming corporations, because corporations’ tendency to have costly administrative fees and complex tax and legal requirements makes them more complex than other business structures. The SBA therefore suggests that to have corporate personhood, there must be many individual persons within a given organization. The bigger the operation, the more likely it can bear the burden of its form of consolidated personhood. Much has been said—­seriously and snidely—­about the problem of corporate power. As we continue to scrutinize the nature of religious freedom, corporate and otherwise, we should also develop an account of what kinds of freedoms we can have in our workplaces. Every account of neoliberal life says we have few. Yet there we are, living out ever-­more hours of our existence in these places. (“Americans Work More Than Anyone,” ABC News proclaims.)58 We work in structures of communion; we work in corporations (public and private, profit and nonprofit) where we find ourselves perhaps at odds with the forms of corporation forced on us. It is easy to laugh about the strangeness of corporate personhood. But the history

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of religions enjoins us to ask about the persons within that abstraction of personhood. Scholars of religion know that any given Methodist might not be obedient to the Book of  Discipline and still be a Methodist; we know that a specific Buddhist could conduct her meditation practice quite differently from everyone else in her sangha and still be a Buddhist. We know about the range of decisions that individuals can make to retain their freedom while still being identifiable socially as members of a communal whole. We know less about what it means to be a county clerk, an associate vice president, or a Target checkout clerk. Turning our attentions to the conditions of those occupations, and the personhood they forge, might be what we need most in order to understand who we are when we work.

1 0 On the Origins of Corporate Culture I

What is it to be in a crisis? We are in one, we are told: we humanists, we scholars, we intellectuals. We are told, time and again, that we exist in a time of shifting tides, tides in which our nonprofit institutions of higher learning become for-­profit corporations producing alumni databases. Our pedagogical relationships are increasingly monetized and our scholarly labor is increasingly devalued. We are told this, and we feel it. My tone should invite these questions: Which comes first, the telling, or the feeling? Did you know you were in a crisis before you were told about it? Or did you see the crisis only after someone pointed at it and said, there? These questions suggest suspicion, and I don’t want to start there. I do not mean to undersell the empirical tides of our present odd fortune. As Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth have explored in their book, The Humanities, Higher Education and Academic Freedom (2015), there is a real crisis in the humanities, and it is the large-­scale employment of non-­tenure-­ track professors with no academic freedom who are hired, rehired, and fired relatively informally and noncompetitively. This is real, and it needs no fingers to be pointed for us to see it. It is.1 But the crisis in the professorate is best described, I think, as a problem of labor. It is specific. It can be seen. Yet we know that speaking specifically is not how we usually talk when we talk about crisis. Crisis talk is rarely contained to numbers, or meteorology, or sociology. Crises are usually some symphonic cataclysm of noncontainment in which sociology alters structures, structures shift with earthquakes, and earthquakes are made more problematic because of mete-

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orology. In part because of this infectious quality of crises, Giorgio Agamben warns us against talk of crisis. Or, rather, he tells us to think of this term as an instrument of rule that “serves to legitimize political and economic decisions that . . . dispossess citizens and deprive them of any possibility of decision.” Agamben finds the problematic freight of crisis in its etymology: The very word expresses two semantic roots: the medical one, referring to the course of an illness, and the theological one of the Last Judgement. Both meanings, however, have undergone a transformation today, taking away their relation to time. “Crisis” in ancient medicine meant a judgement, when the doctor noted at the decisive moment whether the sick person would survive or die. The present understanding of crisis, on the other hand, refers to an enduring state. So this uncertainty is extended into the future, indefinitely. It is exactly the same with the theological sense; the Last Judgement was inseparable from the end of time. Today, however, judgement is divorced from the idea of resolution and repeatedly postponed. So the prospect of a decision is ever less, and an endless process of decision never concludes.2

Agamben’s words are provoking: How do we know a crisis has passed? He says that in the twenty-­first century world to which he speaks there is no passage through crisis. Now, there is only a new ontology of crisis, a crouch from which we never unfold. For the past several years, I have reacted to my occupation of the crisis in higher education as a vantage from which to think about another crisis, namely the financial crisis. Descriptions of the financial crisis diverge in their identified points of origin, their accounts of causes, and their sense of what comprised its worst effects.3 Everyone agrees that the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 was the indicating event: a demise that almost brought down the world’s financial system and suggested the vast systemic crash to come. Even with a huge federal bailout, the ensuing credit crunch turned what was already a downturn into the worst recession in eighty years. Many years later, the effects of the crash ripple through the world economy.4 Like the crises that have been described in the humanities, the professorate, and the contemporary university, it is, in other words, hard to tell if the financial crisis is past, or we are just slowly waking to its perpetuity. This chapter is about the financial crisis as a subject for the humanities in their time of crisis. I am not the first scholar to try to offer a humanistic account of the financial crisis.5 What distinguishes my interest is that I

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am not mounting a critique of what the crisis was from a humanistic perspective as opposed to a financial perspective. Rather, I am looking at the humanism that defined many replies to the crisis from within the corporate world. As they emerged from years of fines, layoffs, and reported losses, American bankers repeatedly told their customers that they were working to prevent another crisis. How? The main defensive strategy identified by banks was that they would increase “monitoring employee attitudes and values to avoid future problems.”6 The financial crisis was explained, in part, as a problem of culture. Future crises could be avoided through new cultural writing, better cultural strategies, and a stronger ethical culture. Why did financial monitors and business leaders recommend culture as the central proactive reply to the crisis? The turn to culture is, as we shall see, an acknowledgment and an evasion.7 Senior officials with the Federal Reserve made it clear that what went wrong was not the result of overzealous trading by a select few. Time and again in the wake of the crisis, regulatory authorities advised firms to find ways to assess patterns of misbehavior rather than call out individuals who had misbehaved. In particular, federal and state authorities encouraged banks to improve their internal tracking mechanisms, to “track warning signs of excessive risk taking and other cul­tural breakdowns.”8 This transition is the one I want to underline: how “excessive risk taking” is marked as one kind of “cultural breakdown.”9 An emphasis on cultural misconduct makes a solution more conceivable than an emphasis on individual or systemic wrongdoing. If you improve culture, if you improve local networks of managed sociability (the hypothesis goes), the crisis won’t be repeated. Better culture, in this sense, rescues individuals from their irrational greed or legal impropriety. This is, to be clear, a cagey maneuver, since the culture of particular firms is hardly disconnected from broader systems or local operators. The appeal to corporate culture is a sleight of hand that conceals the larger systemic properties of the practice in question. Here, religions provide provoking analogies. Synagogues, churches, and mosques are generic terms for buildings where particular assemblies or congregations meet for worship and religious instruction. No matter how particular the modes of governance might be within a particular synagogue or church or mosque, no analysis of the communities that reside within those buildings would be complete without understanding them relative to the broader theological, sociological, and liturgical histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that produced the ritual grounds for their architectural existence. Within the world of financial capitalism addressed by regulators after the crisis, turning to local culture is one way

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to avoid looking at the inherent risks of capitalism. The language of culture domesticates the caprice of risk. To be sure, even regulators acknowledge that culture is a difficult thing to measure. “I confess that proof is hard to come by,” said Thomas C. Baxter, executive vice president and general counsel for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in a speech given in January 2015. “Yet I am not alone in the fundamental belief that a strong ethical culture will lead to better behavior.”10 I quote now from that speech: Bad behavior in the financial services industry prompted the New York Fed’s call for a stronger ethical culture in banking. My list of the most serious transgressions is probably not much different from anyone else’s. It includes the evasion of taxes and economic sanctions; conspiracy and market manipulation with respect to LIBOR and foreign exchange rates; and misselling financial products, including residential mortgages and insurance, to people who should not have acquired them. This list is only illustrative. It is not by any means exhaustive. The traditional means to address bad behavior are enforcement actions against the bad actors and the organizations where they worked. This traditional response, in my view, is appropriate and I strongly support the actions that have been taken and that will continue to be taken. All enforcement actions, though, are essentially retrospective. Of course, we like to think that enforcement actions will not only punish but also deter. But I wonder if this hope is really a prospective strategy. We would better serve the public good if we could do something—­anything—­more forward looking, and complementary to what our enforcement colleagues are doing to deter future bad behavior. The new emphasis on an ethical culture within financial services firms arises from the policy interest in preventing some of the bad behavior that has been observed. Now I use the phrase “some of the bad behavior” deliberately. I fully embrace the goal of eliminating all bad behavior. But we cannot let the goal of perfection become the enemy of progress. We need to start making progress, so let us agree that perfection is probably not realistic. Even an organization with the strongest ethical culture will have episodic bad behavior. Although culture is no panacea, I believe that the ethical culture of an organization can improve the behavior of the people who work there. Strengthening the ethical culture of financial services should therefore reduce the volume of bad behavior we have been seeing.11

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This account underlines three features of post-­crisis hermeneutics. First, everyone seemed to agree what was a bad behavior or transgression. Second, the historic way to manage bad behavior was to punish individual actors and organizations for those transgressions. Third, developing a strong ethical culture was understood as one strategy by which organizations might prospectively ward against transgression. What I want to dwell on is the way the concept of culture crops up in this moment of crisis prevention as the resolution to an irresolvable set of misbehaviors. What is this term doing here, now? Culture was everywhere in the months preceding Thomas Baxter’s talk on ethical culture. Indeed, even Merriam-­Webster declared that the 2014 Word of the Year was culture. In its justification of this choice, it wrote: The term conveys a kind of academic attention to systematic behavior and allows us to identify and isolate an idea, issue, or group: we speak of a “culture of transparency” or “consumer culture.” Culture can be either very broad (as in “celebrity culture” or “winning culture”) or very specific (as in “test-­prep culture” or “marching band culture”) . . . the use of the word culture to define ideas in this way has moved from the classroom syllabus to the conversation at large, appearing in headlines and analyses across a wide swath of topics.12

The capaciousness (it could be “very broad” or “very specific”) of culture seemed one of the reasons that it had popular value. Another reason for its utility is tied to the concept of systematic. No matter the randomness of its application, culture was itself not something flimflam; it was, rather, something identifiably coherent within a madly diffuse, complicatedly hyperlinked society. Merriam-­Webster suggests that culture offers a rhetorical distillation of human diversity. Culture captures something intentional, organized, and repeated. This is an interesting heyday for the word culture. Merriam-­Webster attaches it to the university, suggesting that use of that word conveys “a kind of academic attention” to something. Yet by 2014, culture had lost a lot of intellectual esteem within the university. This is, as we shall see, a telling inversion. Just as culture began to diminish in its appeal within the academy that bore it, culture ascended in its corporate applicability, becoming essential as well within a media vernacular. Sherry Ortner describes the rise and fall of the culture concept in her account of the discipline of anthropology. For much of the twentieth century, culture was what anthropologists studied: they would go abroad to

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so-­called other cultures and report back to their university colleagues what they found there. However, starting in the late 1960s, anthropologists began to get uncomfortable with this account of their work. They began to ask if cultures could be imagined so simply, if there was “a culture” of a given context. If classic anthropology “tended to portray groups of people as having ‘a culture,’ as being in the grip of that culture, and as acting in ways that could be explained largely by reference to that culture,” recent anthropology has been distinctly more ambivalent about this work, pursuing instead the multiple and conflicting organizing terms for a human community. To be sure, as Ortner explains, “the initial development of the anthropological concept of culture emerged from impeccable intentions—­as an alternative to the concept of ‘race,’ as providing a sympathetic way of thinking about difference, and as providing a positive way of achieving cross-­cultural understanding—­it was hard to contain the concept within this basically liberal frame.” Culture quickly became less about an explanation of what diverse perspectives could be and instead a stereotype of what a certain ethnicity, race, class, or religion would be based on some redacted idea of their culture. As Ortner writes, “Groups can be labeled (even ‘profiled’) as intrinsically culturally prone to this or that (good or bad, model minorities or terrorists) pattern of behavior. For this reason and others, over the past several decades many anthropologists have argued for dropping the culture concept altogether.”13 Culture, in other words, fell from the anthropological vernacular because it seemed to no longer be a tool for human commiseration and understanding. Instead, it began to mark distinction in a dangerously flattening way. Your culture wasn’t a range of options that produced a range of individual experiences; it was an assignment of a particular criminal profile that you presumptively could not resist. Scholars of religion are familiar with the worrisome work our words do. Figuring out what religion is, not to mention its relationship to culture, has produced several metric tons of analytic pages.14 The ascent of culture in public life exists simultaneously with its ambivalent circulation in academic life. Given the odd arrival of culture on the financial scene, it may be useful to journey a bit through the history of its application within that culture in order to see what it means, exactly, to have a business, managerial, corporate, or ethical culture. Given the entwined histories of culture and religion, we may find that the cultures prescribed in those economic enclaves have some recourse to the realms of religion. Or, at the very least, that they themselves have become such spaces: places where a good culture makes for right religion. Thinking about the cultural reactions of the

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financial industries may help us locate ourselves, as humanists, in this time, a time in which crisis is a word to describe the impossibility of our every move. At times you may ask yourself where religion is—­in this chapter, in this situation of crisis, in our sociology. The answer is this: religion is where culture is articulated as a rescue mission, where culture is named as the resuscitation of our civility amid our uncivil survival. Religion is a language, a label, a slogan, an immaterial discursive regime with material consequences for our contemporary economy.

II

To begin, let us think about the history of the use of culture by business professionals. This is a term of relatively recent deployment. During the 1970s, several independent consultants began to advise corporations on how to manage the particular challenges of corporate expansion. Stanley M. Davis, for instance, claimed he originated the term corporate culture in 1970. In that year, he published a book titled Corporate Management: Organizational and Cultural Perspectives. “Around 1978,” he explained in a later work, “a few executives started picking up on my use of the term ‘corporate culture,’ viewing the concept as useful to them as corporate leaders.” Davis suggested that managers asked him to help them develop their companies’ management strategy, to “manage and change their cultures.”15 Davis wasn’t the only management guru to claim that he coined the term, but his description of corporate culture mirrored what everyone else was claiming: Corporate culture is the pattern of shared beliefs and values that give the institution meaning, and provide them with the rules for behavior in their organization.16

For comparative reference, consider this description from a major business school textbook published in 1982: A theme shared by recent best-­selling books about companies with outstanding performance records (In Search of Excellence and Corporate Cultures to name but two) stresses the role of shared values in creating a climate for success.17 Corporate culture is a term used to describe systems of shared values (what is important) and beliefs (how things work)

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that create behavioral norms (the way we do things around here) to guide the activities of organization members.18 The popular argument found in the best-­sellers is that strong corporate cultures facilitate high performance. As a system of shared values, the corporate culture reflects a climate within which people value the same things and apply these values to benefit the corporation as a whole. . . . The concept of “corporate culture” and its companion notion of shared values is of considerable current interest in the field of OB [organizational behavior]. Researchers are now studying organizations as cultures in the attempt to increase our understanding about how value systems emerge and change in organizations and about how values impact the performance and behavior of people at work.19

Systems of shared values that create norms—­this is the description of corporate culture (also sometimes referred to as organizational culture) that emerged from business analysts in the late 1970s.20 A 1983 special issue of Administrative Science Quarterly addressed these emerging ideas of culture within organizational management. Acknowledging that the methods of cultural anthropology had been applied to organizational analysis for some time, the editors said there was “something new here”: “Researchers seem to be striving for some way to address the interactive, ongoing, recreative aspects of organizations, beyond the merely rational or economic.” They define culture as “another word for social reality,” which shapes “human interaction and the outcome of it” and is “continually created and recreated by people’s ongoing interactions.”21 Cover articles in Business Week (27 October 1980) and Fortune (17 Oc­ tober 1983) promoted research into organizational behavior and, especially, the study and production of corporate culture by proclaimed “culture vultures.”22 A spate of books appeared to advertise the particular skills of specific management gurus. In addition to Stanley M. Davis’s Managing Corporate Culture (1984), there was also Robert F. Allen and Charlotte Kraft, The Organizational Unconscious: How to Create the Corporate Culture You Want and Need (1982); Terrence E. Deal and Allan A. Kennedy, Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life (1982); Craig R Hickman and Michael A. Silva, Creating Excellence: Managing Corporate Culture, Strategy, and Change in the New Age (1984); Lawrence M. Miller, American Spirit: Visions of a New Corporate Culture (1984); Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr., In Search of Excellence (1982); and Edgar H. Schein, Corporate Culture: What It Is and How to Change It (1983).23 These volumes offered

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the same basic pitch: you need to assess what your culture is, define what you want your culture to be, determine the forces that affect your culture, and work to change what is into what you want your culture to become. Each features several repeated tropes, including specific anecdotes from specific corporations; charts and worksheets to guide your assessment and improvement; and, almost always, a positive invocation of religious organizations for their particular ability to maintain cultural coherence. “New techniques or structures succeed because they are an expression of an accepted value or spirit,” Lawrence M. Miller wrote. “The Catholic Church rep­ resented the creation of a new organization, a new structure. It could not have evolved in the absence of the spirit of Christianity that was its moti­ vating force.”24 In Faith of the Managers, the theologian Stephen Pattison ar­ gued that managerialism is a kind of religious faith.25 I emphasize that in managerialist literature, religion served as an especially useful exhibit for right culture. Why did this language of corporate culture appear when it did? I want to offer several reasons. First, corporate culture must be understood as a category with academic origins. In the 1950s, psychologists began to turn to the workplace as a site of critical psychological formation and effect. At Carnegie Mellon, academics were working on what they called management science—­a theory of decision making inspired by the computers that had come out during World War II. Meanwhile, at the MIT Sloan School of Management, three professors—­Douglas McGregor, Edgar Schein, and Richard Beckhard—­were creating a new field called organizational development. Schein is largely credited with coining the term organizational culture (the linguistic cousin of corporate culture). “In the 1960s, there was an emphasis on humanistic psychology, involving the worker, because then they would work better,” he would remark, looking back on his early days of research. “We were interested in how groups and leadership could be made more effective. So we started something called the human relations lab.” A pair of hypotheses emerged from this MIT lab. As McGregor explained in his 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise, managers could think of their employees in one of two ways: as lazy and unintelligent and therefore requiring serious direction (theory X), or as ambitious and self-­directed who need only a clear sense of organizational objectives to succeed (theory Y).26 “This introduced the idea that effective managers believe in their people and trust them and don’t feel that they have to monitor them all the time,” Schein said.27

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Although the researchers didn’t necessarily favor one theory over the other, theory Y fit perfectly within the sixties zeitgeist. It drew on Abraham Maslow’s increasingly popular theory of the hierarchy of needs, which positioned “self-­actualization” as the highest goal of human life. Also inspired by Maslow, Michael Murphy and Dick Price founded the Esalen Institute in 1962 to nurture the burgeoning Human Potential Movement, and Look magazine’s George Leonard helped bring it into the mainstream. Theory Y extended this worldview into the realm of work: jobs, much like meditation and mind-­enhancing drugs, were seen as a way to discover untapped inner power and find personal fulfillment. Business schools expanded in order to train managers who could serve as strategists, coaches, and innovators in their corporations. In his 1954 manifesto, The Practice of Management, Peter Drucker wrote that “the manager is the dynamic, life-­giving element in every business.” Over the next five decades, Drucker would lead the way, helping companies to find new ways to turn “resources”—­people, in other words—­into productivity engines.28 Corporate culture emerged in this reframing as a way to describe the context in which a subject could pursue not merely profit but also self-­cultivation and betterment. The workplace wasn’t a job; it would become a site through which you forged your value. This is how it became a culture. Why, though, did it seem so important to focus on the capacities of the worker then? The books devoted to instructing managers about corporate culture described their context as one of increasingly tough competition. “Everywhere, American products and American know-­how are being challenged,” Drucker would write in the mid-­1970s, “even in product lines in which U.S. superiority has long been taken for granted. More and more, the competition is coming from rivals as big and well financed as the U.S. giants.”29 Elsewhere, Stephen Downey would similarly remark that “enlightened managements will increasingly be searching for any additional edge possible in an ever more fiercely competitive marketplace.”30 There was an economic reality behind these strongly worded descriptions. The twenty-­eight years following World War II were the greatest economic boom that the United States has ever known.31 In the early postwar period, the leading American companies had little to fear from international competitors, then only beginning to emerge from the ruin of the Second World War. US political and military power helped secure sources of cheap raw materials and energy. The US government propped up friendly dictators whom it could count on to fight communism, maintain the security

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of American companies’ investments, and quash efforts at labor organization. When this strategy failed, as when socialist or nationalist governments came to power and threatened American companies’ property or access to cheap labor, the US government engineered coups or intervened militarily. Around 1973, however, the nation’s economic engine slipped into low gear, where it has remained stuck to this day. More specifically, individual worker productivity—­which is also how economists measure our standard of living—­grew nearly 3 percent a year in the postwar years. It fell to 1 percent after 1973, and not even the Reagan years revived it.32 This slowdown put into question the United States’ position as the unchallenged colossus of the capitalist world. The US economy was suddenly threatened from mul­tiple directions: rising international competition, spiking energy prices, declining productivity and profitability, and soaring inflation and unemployment. Internationally, the United States no longer enjoyed uncontested economic, political, and military dominance. Its government had encouraged the reconstruction of the economies of western Europe and Japan, both to undermine the appeal of communism in those countries and to demonstrate the superiority of capitalism to the rest of the world. The revival of manufacturing in Europe and Japan, however, also meant increased competition for American firms in core manufacturing industries like steel and automobiles. Resistance to US dominance in the global South, meanwhile, undermined American companies’ access to cheap materials and energy resources. Back in the United States, increased pressure for social reform also gave rise to increased government regulation of private business. Under the old “economic” regulation, government agencies had overseen specific industries such as railroads, trucking, telecommunications, utilities, and banks. In contrast, the “new social regulation,” including environmental, consumer-­ protection, occupational safety and health, and antidiscrimination laws, af­ fected companies across all industries. Regulation was a way, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for the government to respond to increasing demands for reform without increasing government spending (already surging for both domestic and defense purposes). Capitalist corporations railed against the new regulations as imposing onerous new costs of doing business.33 It is in this increased context of regulation and diminished economic power that corporations turned to gurus to negotiate their newly challenged location in the social and political economy. Management gurus consistently remarked that their job was to show companies the unique cultures they possessed. This counsel directly contested the increasingly diffuse, even redun-

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dant market. American companies had changed in their organization since World War II. “Most of the large organizations that were emerging at this time were not in any single business,” Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard Business School, has observed. “They were large, diversified conglomerates that had been created as a consequence of World War II and of the huge mergers and acquisitions activity that took place in the 1950s and ’60s. Firms like Pepsico owned trucking companies, even though they were in the food business.” This complicated organizational structure within large companies made it more difficult for workers to feel a connection to their companies, Khurana suggests. “What people were very much focused on was: How can we get workers to feel differently about their jobs?”34 For academics, this was as much a question of sociology as efficiency. It soon became a question of money, too: “As a manager, how can I maximize profits by creating a certain emotional atmosphere at my company?” In this way, the professionalization of the management guru could be seen as another part of the co-­optation by capitalism of counterculture in the 1970s. Abe Peck, for instance, has defined the era as “from counterculture to over-­ the-­counter culture,” citing Columbia Records’ infamous advertising campaign, “But the Man can’t bust our music.”35 As Thomas Frank has shown in his book, The Conquest of Cool (1997), the story is not so one-­directional. Key elements within American business, notably advertising, had begun formulating their own critique of the staid post–­World War II business culture several years before the development of the counterculture. In significant ways, this emergent business culture articulated the same anxieties that would motivate the counterculture: fear of conformity and alienation and, ironically, revulsion at the manipulation of consumerism. In Frank’s view, “the counterculture may be more accurately understood as a stage in the development of the values of the American middle class, a colorful installment in the twentieth century drama of consumer subjectivity.”36 With its emphasis on self-­fulfillment and immediate gratification, on the new and revolutionary as opposed to the stodgy and conformist, the counterculture did not need to be co-­opted. It was already firmly within the value system of consumer capitalism. It is in this context that business managers began advocating for an articulation of corporate culture. Scholars emphasized that corporate culture was a shared set of values which distinguished one group of people from another.37 Unsurprisingly, countries perceived as having coherent in­ternal cultures of obedience and consistency, like Japan and Germany, were figured as especially able to inculcate a productive culture within the workplace. Yet

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the unit of the nation-­state was not the only comparative example, although, to be sure, business managers deployed a competitive nationalism when and where they could. In addition to describing such national regimes of workaholic commitment, business administrators turned to other models of group adherence. Trying to explain how groups distinguish themselves from one another, business managers reached for analogies in the broader survey of culture to see what comprised culture more generally. “Groups which speak the same language or believe in the same religion often share the same values,” one text explains, continuing elsewhere: For instance, Protestantism, English and common law are commonly linked characteristics which are associated with similar corporate governance regimes. For instance, Stulz and Williamson (2003) underline the importance of culture with regard to investor protection issues, in particular, and finance, in general, arguing that a country’s values depend on its culture (e.g., the ethos of  levying interest on loans), that culture affects institutions (e.g., the legal system and property rights), and the allocation of resources (e.g., church spending). Having investigated 49 countries, they show that religion is a better predictor of investor protection than language.38

This is to underline how the language of corporate culture is not distinct from religion, even in its own rendering. In fact, it is inclusive of religion: as example and exemplar. To the already offered reasons, then, for the emergence of corporate culture as an idiom, pedagogy, and business action plan in the late 1970s, I want to add one more, namely ongoing academic discussions about the relationship between culture and religion. Consider, for example, this recent definition of corporate culture, drawn from Industrial Management magazine: Corporate culture is a powerful way for an organization to define itself, motivate its employees, gain brand loyalty among its customers and distinguish itself from competitors. Six elements are vital to creating a high-­ performance corporate culture: The organization’s founder; the company’s vision and mission; the behaviors displayed and rewarded by managers; the selection process; formal and informal ways of teaching employees about the culture and reinforcing it on an ongoing basis; and, finally,

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effective performance evaluations that include the ability to take on the organization’s culture as one of its criteria.39

I could offer many more available descriptions of corporate culture and how to foster it, but they would repeat the same elements, focusing on how individual leaders foster visionary accounts of an organization’s values, and then develop reward systems and rituals to teach, inculcate, and reiterate these values. “Culture is the set of behaviors, values, artifacts, reward systems, and rituals that make up your organization,” explains one recent Forbes article. “You can ‘feel’ culture when you visit a company, because it is often evident in people’s behavior, enthusiasm, and the space itself.”40 Recall that this chapter began with a sense that religion and culture are two categories of analogous, even connected, interpretive difficulty. By this point, I hope all this talk of symbols, rituals, feelings, and appearances has led you as a reader to think about the consequences of talking about culture in the context of religion. For scholars of religion, there is one figure who most famously tried to reconcile the relationship between culture and religion, and that was Clifford Geertz. In an essay titled “Religion as a Cultural System” (1965), he spelled out a definition of religion that many others have borrowed, adapted, and employed in studying religion. In that essay, Geertz suggested that every group—­and every individual—­may have a religion, even if no one in that group believes in a god or an afterlife or any of the more familiar trappings of organized religion. Every group has a religion because every group has some overall framework that all its members share in common, to make sense out of life and guide behavior. Every group has, as he wrote: (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-­lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.41

This description of religion gained ascendance within the broader humanities because it trained the scholar’s eye upon a particular set of evidence (i.e., symbols) with particular effects (“powerful, pervasive, and long-­lasting moods and motivations”). But this wasn’t all that Geertz did. He also suggested what the system was that organized these symbols. Namely, he suggested that the distinction of religion was that it took whatever long-­lasting

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symbols it organized under a particular aura of factuality which made these symbols appear not metaphorical but realistic. Religion was, for Geertz, a system that convinced you it wasn’t emblematic but authentic. Religion was a system that made you feel not systemized as much as realized in a world of stronger truths about your experience. Geertz’s description of culture has fallen prey to the critiques of the culture concept more generally in anthropology. Talal Asad, in particular, has provided a deeply provocative reading of Geertz and this definition of religion as essentialist. Asad challenges Geertz’s definition as rooted in Christian colonialism, and argues that Geertz’s unconsciousness of this renders his analysis less than helpful when trying to capture the diverse engagements by individuals within societies to understand and practice their mutable concepts of tradition.42 What I want to underline in Asad’s critique is not what he finds incorrect about Geertz but what he describes as true about this definition. “Clifford Geertz’s essay ‘Religion as a Cultural System’ is perhaps the most influential, certainly the most accomplished, anthropological definition of religion to have appeared in the last two decades,” his assessment begins. He accurately summarized the territory: Geertz was influential. Indeed, Geertz’s 1965 description of religion should be read alongside the mid-­1960s emergence of organizational culture at MIT. If understood as concomitant descriptions of social life, these two diagnoses (of religion, of corporations) could be seen more strongly as bearing significant critique. Religion and culture in Geertz may be flawed diagnoses relative to some ideal anthropology of the social real, but those flaws may be accurate to the corporate forms of acculturation that religion (in Geertzian terms) could also program. Put another way: replace the word religion in Geertz’s essay with corporatism, and it works. Asad says to Geertz: your definition of religion does not perceive the differentiated forms of religions that I perceive. I say to Asad: perhaps the religion Geertz captures is not about differentiation but about the appearance of assimilation. Geertz calls that “appearance” religion. And I note, in reply: this appearance was something corporate management became very good at promoting.

III

I am not trying to force you to believe that corporate culture emerged conceptually from a critique of religion provided by anthropologists. What I

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want to argue instead is that whatever corporate culture became in lived, messy practice, it was, in principle, not unlike the religion described by Geertz. The work of business managers is to cajole their workers to submit to the symbols and rituals that organize the proper long-­lasting moods. Those symbols and rituals are presented as uniquely critical for the organization’s survival. “Managers exercise their influence over workplace stress in part by how they mold the culture of their work units,” writes one behavioral adviser in a 2015 article.43 This influence is exercised often through new efficiency systems, team-­building exercises, or ethical axioms, all of which are incorporated in such a way as to make their existence isomorphic with the corporate body itself: one seems impossible without the existence of the other. The pressure to build “right” culture within given workplace units is strong. A recent Forbes article describes how building right culture is essential for the retention of workers. The article gives several pieces of evidence to prove this, noting that companies with strong “positive cultures” are now the most in demand, and that companies increasingly circulate “value statements” to describe their positive claims toward culture. The article commends a list of organizations that clothe particular innovations with an aura of factuality by branding particular principles as promotional vernacular.44 Google has its ten “truths”; Robert W. Baird & Co. has its “unique culture”; LinkedIn is in the “human service” business and calls itself a “tribe”; Salesforce focuses on giving to the community; and the examples go on and on. Even more traditional companies like Aetna are now heavily focused on culture. Recently, the New York Times published an article about Aetna’s CEO Mark Bertolini, who has raised wages, improved health benefits, and introduced yoga and mindfulness training to his entire company to improve retention and culture in the call centers. He claims to have already improved the bottom line by 3%–­4%.45 Each company in these media promotions emerges as a warrior. Each fights against cultures of diffident ethics or uninterested cultural relations. It is impossible, though, to avoid thinking more critically about this gleeful promotion of culture. What kind of a culture needs a culture? What kind of workplace asks for a culture, even designs a culture? In October 2014, New York Fed President William Dudley warned bank executives that regulators would consider breaking the big banks apart if executives didn’t do enough to root out wrongdoing. Dudley mentioned the word culture forty-­ four times in his speech. He said the problem was that too many people in banks were compelled to be risky when they should be responsible. “Risk

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takers are drawn to finance like they are drawn to Formula One racing,” Dudley noted.46 All the largest US banks are grappling with how they might measure culture nowadays, because they think that better culture might have stopped what was so wrong back in 2008, when the world seemed to fall apart. Thirty-­five years after corporate culture became the resolution to an economic crisis, it becomes now a resolution to an ethical crisis. “The industry is sort of having a culture moment,” says Susan Ochs, founder of the Better Banking Project at the nonpartisan think tank New America Foundation.47 With culture on everyone’s minds, organizational managers leaped to the fore, suggesting that the stumble was in organizational modes. According to their critics, banks and mortgage companies had reinforced conformity, censored ethical reply, developed illusions of unanimity, rationalized their decisions, and developed an unquestioned belief in the team’s morality. They had developed an illusion of invulnerability. There was—­as one textbook had diagnosed—­too much groupthink, and not enough culture.48 “Organizations looking to make a meaningful impact on performance must create the culture they want to deliver the performance they need,” one human relations magazine would explain. “And that culture should be one that is inclusive, engages others, and creates favorable conditions for organizational and individual performance. If not, the prevailing attitudes and expectations of a workplace will create a de facto culture.”49 In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, US Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. sought help in navigating the Wall Street meltdown. He turned to his old firm, Goldman Sachs, snagging a handful of former bankers and other experts in corporate restructurings. In September, after the government bailed out the American International Group (AIG), the faltering insurance giant, for $85 billion, Paulson helped select a director from Goldman’s own board to lead it. And when Paulson needed someone to oversee the government’s proposed $700-­billion bailout fund, he again recruited someone with a Goldman pedigree, giving the post to a thirty-­five-­year-­old former investment banker who, before coming to the Treasury Department, had little background in housing finance. Goldman Sachs dominated the federal response to the financial crisis. Depending on your perspective, you could see their centrality to the resolution of the crisis as an indicator of their expertise, their ethics, on their hold on the economy.50 The power and influence that Goldman wields at the nexus of politics and finance is no accident. Long regarded as the savviest and most admired firm among the ranks of Wall Street investment banks, it has a history (and

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culture) of encouraging its partners to take leadership roles in public service.51 The ethical crisis found its cultural model, and its name was Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs was practically alone among its old Wall Street peers as a solvent, independent entity. It survived the credit calamities by redefining itself as a commercial bank and getting a cash infusion (of $5 bil­lion) from the legendary investor Warren Buffett.52 In The Partnership (2008), his definitive history of Goldman Sachs, Charles D. Ellis argued that it had become Wall Street’s strongest and most enduring player because it had a better way of doing things. Success, he concludes, started with hiring ambitious people from working-­class backgrounds. If their parents were postal clerks or groundskeepers, they were likely to work relentlessly to secure a better life—­and help Goldman amass profits in the process. Niceness and at least the appearance of humility counted, too. Goldman nearly hired the junk-­bond wizard Michael Milken early in his career but backed away when it decided he was demanding too big a slice of future profits for himself.53 Teamwork mattered as well. Goldman started splitting top jobs in 1976, when a managing partner, Gus Levy, died without choosing between two possible successors. The heirs apparent shared command, and it worked out well. That arrangement was repeated in many departments, even though management consultants predicted it would fail. Shared command meant Goldman wasn’t always the first in a new opportunity, but the firm made far fewer blunders tied to any single executive’s hubris. Despite such promotions of its superlative ethical culture, insiders describe Goldman as a changing place, someplace increasingly less reliant on interpersonal relationships and bonds created by such long hours and more reliant on technology, data, and quick deductive dominance. The accusations against this new generation of Goldman employees are abundant: they know nothing about classical economic theory; they know nothing about the history of anything; they know nothing about relationships, loyalty, commitment, trust. In other words, Goldman looks and sounds a lot like the universities we inhabit, with the new guard looking pretty distasteful to the old guard and the administration anxious to bridge the gap to new modalities of organizational and consumer reach, with renewed public claims about the firm’s mission, purpose, and structure of accountability. In a series of public statements following the crash, Lloyd C. Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman, said his firm would always put clients first. “Frankly, at this point we have to go with an open mind and determine what we may be doing wrong,” Blankfein told customers of its private-­ wealth-­management business during a thirty-­minute conference call. “On a

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very microscopic level, we’re going to use this as an opportunity for a deep dive on our practices and how we run things.” He pledged to clients that he wants Goldman to “be the leader in things like ethics, in putting clients first.” He added, “We don’t want people to be OK with Goldman Sachs. We want people to be bragging that they have their accounts with Goldman Sachs.”54

IV

To return to my earlier question: what kind of a culture needs a culture? First and foremost, a culture that needs a culture is one that is perceived as falling off the organizational wagon, of getting too far from the doctrinal core, of being too distant from central control. A culture that needs a culture is one that is understood to be diffuse, dissenting, and too diverse. In other words, the culture that needs a culture is not the kind of culture that Asad and other critics of Geertz want to see; it is, very much, the culture prescribed by Geertz’s definition of religion. A culture that needs a culture is one that wants to establish identifiable moods and motivations that it can inscribe powerfully, pervasively, and durably onto human beings so they might remain committed to the order of existence that it needs to keep cre­ ating whatever aura of factuality it seeks to sustain. It has been said that we now live in a time in which overworking is the norm of working. “What is the relationship of work to life?” one prominent textbook author has asked. “It has been said that some people work to live, whereas others live to work. In some cultures, work is often viewed as a calling, passion, even spiritual quest. In other places, work is often viewed as a necessary evil or a means to an end such as survival or a comfortable life. Although these descriptions are extreme views, trends regarding vacation time, work hours, and business hours suggest that there’s some truth to them.”55 These “trends” are so axiomatic that even those far afield from business schools have become increasingly habituated to a diagnosis of business culture as one trapped not only in an ethical quandary but in an addictive one. Consider, for instance, the spate of popular workplace ethnographies and manifestoes against the “cult of overwork.” In the summer of 2015, there appeared a lengthy exposé of Amazon.com’s workplace in the New York Times. In it, readers were told of a brutish land where “emails arrive past

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midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered.” The article described how Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, planned from the beginning to do something we now see as deeply tied to the prescription of a corporate culture, namely to “codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them proudly counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of businesses he wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared.”56 The result: The result was the leadership principles, the articles of faith that describe the way Amazonians should act. In contrast to companies where declarations about their philosophy amount to vague platitudes, Amazon has rules that are part of its daily language and rituals, used in hiring, cited at meetings and quoted in food-­truck lines at lunchtime. Some Amazo­ nians say they teach them to their children. The guidelines conjure an empire of elite workers (principle No. 5: “Hire and develop the best”) who hold one another to towering expectations and are liberated from the forces—­red tape, office politics—­that keep them from delivering their utmost. Employees are to exhibit “ownership” (No. 2), or mastery of every element of their businesses, and “dive deep” (No. 12), or find the underlying ideas that can fix problems or identify new services before shoppers even ask for them.57

As the company has grown, Bezos has become more committed to his original ideas, viewing them in almost moral terms, those who have worked closely with him say. “My main job today: I work hard at helping to maintain the culture,” Bezos said in 2015.58 Maintenance of culture requires ever more from the worker who occupies it.59 The workweek at places like law firms, banks, and high-­tech companies has steadily increased, to levels considered intolerable by many people.60 So intolerable, in fact, that in October 2013, Goldman Sachs told its junior investment-­banking analysts not to work on Saturdays, and it has said that all analysts, on average, should be working no more than seventy to seventy-­five hours a week. Alexandra Michel, a former Goldman associate who is now on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, published a nine-­year study of two big investment banks and found that people spent up to 120 hours a week on the job. In the pre–­cell phone, pre-­e-­mail days, it was possible for people to find respite when they left the office. But, as David Solomon, the global codirector of investment banking at Goldman,

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told New Yorker reporter James Surowiecki, “Today, technology means that we’re all available 24/7. And, because everyone demands instant gratification and instant connectivity, there are no boundaries, no breaks.”61 A 2008 Harvard Business School survey of a thousand professionals found that 94 percent worked fifty hours or more a week, and almost half worked in excess of sixty-­five hours a week.62 All this work by the employed doesn’t seem to increase the commitment of their employer to them, however. As David Weil writes in his recent book, The Fissured Workplace (2014), companies no longer employ workers directly. The only constituency to which companies have primary interest is their customers, whom they cultivate through the development of brand loyalty. Weil reports that about one worker in three is hired not by the corporation identified with the product but by someone else.63 The connection between employer and employee is fractured. So, those who are working, and working incredibly hard, seem to have less and less commitment from those who employ them that their work will, in fact, achieve anything for them. The promotion of culture in such a context could be seen as the ultimate red herring. Give us mindfulness at the office, sure, even a corporate chaplain; give us new ethics circulated far and wide on newly printed brochures; give us longer lunch hours, or better routes for intrafirm dialogue. But these accessories—­these symbols—­truly offer only an aura of factuality. In truth, their appearances of assimilation are disingenuous: the culture is the only coherent, committed aspect of the organization. Everything else is mere appearance. “Culture” is a false front to make us think all of this is more coherent than it can possibly be.

V

In 1990, the economist Deirdre McCloskey observed that economists have a tendency to answer criticism with accusations of a lack of understanding. In a book called If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (1990), and another called The Rhetoric of Economics (1986), she described economics as an essentially humanistic discipline to which storytelling and rhetoric are fundamental. Economics, both the intellectual discipline and the realm of markets and prices, is more entangled with metaphor and narrative than quantitative analysts would have us believe. Material economic

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realities, she argued, are changed by the use and abuse of metaphor and narrative.64 I began with a discussion of crisis, and that is where I will conclude. In an assessment of recent literary works examining economic themes, the critic Michelle Chihara writes, “A necessary part of the answer to the invented crisis in the humanities, then, can only be further study of the crisis of finance capital.”65 I turn to this discussion of corporate culture—­its origins and present applications—­because I sit in an institutional frame that is equally obsessed with, and vexed about, culture. Any number of examples from the contemporary university could be drawn on to enunciate the problem of culture, but I want to focus on the relationship between faculty and graduate students. Many of my faculty colleagues will remark, now, that this generation of graduate students is more invested than ever before in professionalization, and they say this with a bit of worry, a shake of the head. Professionalization to them is a bit nouveau riche; a bit too on the nose in its exposure of desires and strategic ambition. I see professionalization differently; I see this uptick of interest in professionalization as a reaction to a culture defined by crisis, a crisis both real and exacerbated by poor structural reactions to it. If the university is in a crisis, we must admit that our training prepares us poorly to move with it, to act in reaction to it, to think collectively in relation to it, whatever it is. Sherry Ortner commands us to see culture as the “politically inflected schemas through which people see and act upon the world and the politically inflected subjectivities through which people feel—­emotionally, viscerally, sometimes violently—­about themselves and the world.”66 This cannot only be an interpretive problem, she explains. “While recognizing the very real dangers of ‘culture’ in its potential for essentializing and demonizing whole groups of people, one must recognize its critical value as well, both for understanding the workings of power and for understanding the resources of the powerless.”67 I conclude with a call to consider the practices of acculturation, corporate and otherwise, as not only ones received but also practices which are formed by the practitioners. This seems impossible, at first. How can any of us conceivably resist the economic or corporate tide? I return to the words of Thomas C. Baxter, executive vice president and general counsel for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Before a crowd of people deeply dubious about whether anything can be done about financial malfeasance, he stated, “We would better serve the public good if we could

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do something—­anything—­more forward looking, and complementary to what our enforcement colleagues are doing to deter future bad behavior.” I am deeply suspicious, too, about the obscuring rhetoric of an ethical culture. I am pressed to think about what such a term obscures and congeals as much as I hope to imagine what it could coalesce or diversify. Most pertinently: what critique can a culture truck? Just because we scholars say a word is mistaken doesn’t mean it hasn’t been useful for others who liked the very mistakes we decried. Likewise, just because we decry the very mechanisms of our acculturation, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still available to us, to seize, to grab, or even to offer new words in reply. Corporate culture wasn’t something invented by them. It was made by us. We built it. That means we have the tools to take it apart and to try again, conceiving of new possible ways that we can work together in and through whatever crises we feel, through whatever crises we decry. Finally, this thinking emerged in a moment when our institutionalized occupation is increasingly to be determined by economic terms. The incorporation of the university, the financialization of the university, the privatization of the university—­whatever one calls it, it seems to be everywhere, creeping into curriculum, into our enumeration of enrollments, into the expansion of student services, and into disenfranchisement of contingent teaching labor. As we mull over the meaning of this market transformation of our culture, it may be productive to think about the ways that many research universities have, as their origins, the ministerial ambition of denominations in the New World, the imperial philanthropies of robber barons, and the state effort to organize a citizenry that could serve the market development of regions. That is to say: our present story of political economy as scholars is not disconnected from the intersectional history of religion, culture, and consumption. Perhaps our future solutions may emerge from reviewing those stories of merger, piety, and vocational designation, and identifying revised aspirations from an archaic calling to remove from the world in order to see it, serve it, and rebuild toward the new.

1 1 Do Not Tamper with the Clues Notes on Goldman Sachs Culture is our religion. Eric Dobkin, Goldman Sachs & Co.

The very first Goldman employee whom I meet begins in the middle of the conversation. “You must be here about the rabbis,” he says, immediately turning to the waitress and ordering his lunch. I haven’t looked at the menu. We haven’t shaken hands. Since 2012, I have conducted forty-­two unstructured interviews with past or current employees of Goldman Sachs. Already that sentence sounds undeservedly scientific, and needs immediate emendation. It is more accurate to say that over the last four years I have found myself running into, eating hasty breakfasts or having abbreviated coffees with, or stealing a corner of a fund-­raising event with people who claim affiliation with Goldman Sachs. Everything about this experience runs counter to my experience as a researcher with largely historical interests, and so it requires some elaboration, if only to explain to myself how this has come to pass, how I came to chase accounts of Goldman’s culture from those who occupied it. This chapter was originally going to be an explanation of what I, a university professor, found in common with those I met from a large bank holding company. Perhaps predictably, it became something larger. I say that this is predictable because it is what professors, and especially humanists, do. We make bigger things of small things, deciding that whatever we thought something was at first glance wasn’t quite what it appeared to be.

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Scholars within the humanities pursue many different things, of course: we might analyze a painting and its painter, laws and the legal systems that give rise to them, or sign systems that range from Babylonian cuneiform to the semiotics of new media. What unites these projects is the intimate labor by the humanist scholar to perceive how individuals imagine, create, and interpret the worlds they occupy. The university is one such world, imagined and made by its workers every day; the bank is, too. Uniting the two places—­colleges and banks—­may seem a pugnacious comparison. Yet I think the comparison provokes something important, pointing us to the way a corporate subjectivity informs each venture. Scientism is, for both, an important effect. Yet I hope this work exposes the humanity of that performance, the way seeming like you’re in control is essential to the social norms that unite their elite economies of distinction. This is, therefore, an account of how we propel confidence through very specific acts of interpretation. Faith in the market, faith in merit, faith in the future—­the hypothesis that something might work is commonly central to modern capitalist survival. The question at the end of this chapter is not whether Goldman Sachs is good or bad, or if modern universities are working or not. The question is whether we have done as much as we can to resist the smooth surfaces handed to us by each of  them. Humanistic thinking has been a place for such resistance, a place where surfaces are exposed as such. It should still be.

In the first several years that I taught at Yale, it became clear to me that a large majority of my students would become either bankers or consultants.1 The consultants are the ambivalent capitalists. They may have long resumes indicating theatrical talent, volunteer commitment, or a concern about international development. But they have no singular focus within this profile of above-­average interests, and don’t think of themselves as uniquely talented enough to risk their future in the entertainment industries that were another distinct post-­Yale pathway. Consulting is a compromise: it is the highly performative helping profession; the one that is as much about a charismatic use of  Power Point as anything else. It is a layaway for students who liked the club feeling that dominated Yale and who need a certain income to weather postcollegiate years. Consulting offers a two-­or three-­year postbaccalaureate circuit of big-­name companies who are the clients of the big-­name consulting

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industries. The discerning student could use the consulting firm as an employment dating service, checking out the available options while magnifying his or her professional skill set and flying around on the company’s dime. Few students who go into consulting would describe themselves to me as being people who loved money or business. Many of them write beautifully, or have secret devotions to a peculiar subgenre of popular music. Consulting is not for the people who want to win. It is for the highly competent who want a laminated transom into the compromises of adulthood. Bankers are different. They are often less chatty during my office hours, and rarely do they expose any particular struggle about their life as a student at a highly competitive school, or their life eventually played out in a highly competitive marketplace. Students cry so frequently in my office that I have a shawl crocheted by my Midwestern mother for people to wear in the postcry hiccupping stage. “The blanket of tears,” one young man called it. The future bankers never ask for the blanket. They never ask for extensions on the due date for their papers. They never need anything other than clarification of points discussed in class or my edits on their drafts of papers they have prepared many days before the deadline. Once I asked a future banker how she liked a class on lyric poetry I knew she was taking. The syllabus was one I told her that I wished I could take. The student shook her head. “I don’t understand humanities professors,” she remarked. “You all like interpretation so much.” I asked her what there was in life other than interpretation, other than a series of determinations about what’s in your head relative to whatever is placed before you. “I like things more solid,” she replied, underlining this as one of the better characteristics of her chosen major, economics. I want to be clear that I like the bankers. This is partially a class affinity. The vast majority of consultants are determinedly upper middle class. They are children of egalitarian marriages between two highly professional adults who have nurtured their offspring with every scholastic and developmental opportunity. Future bankers are invariably either the scions of the megarich, or children of more precarious economic origins. No matter which is your genealogical inheritance, banking is what you do if you know for certain that you cannot be poor. The students who came to banking with such a res­olute relationship against their proximate ancestral poverty are more  ra­cially and ethnically diverse than the consultants. Yet they never speak of this racial or ethnic difference, unlike other students whose otherness spurns them to think aloud about privilege in a way that suggests they will someday write for a national magazine, become an attorney, or run for public office. Future bankers—­those who are not descendants of former

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presidents—­pos­sess what can only be described as a kind of unflappable grit. My critiques of capital are not going to get in the way of their ascent, because it is about time this capital got to be theirs, too. It is with this experience of banking that I went to lunch several years ago with a recent graduate of Yale College who had returned to campus to visit his brother, a new freshman. This was the first day off he’d had since he’d begun working. He didn’t say much about what he did exactly, only that he worked constantly, and felt challenged “in every way a person can be challenged.” I felt similarly, I said. When students are still enrolled at Yale, I refrain from discussing my experiences as an employee, but once they graduate I don’t hesitate to connect to them. I’ll quickly offer tales of exhaustion, confusion, and ambition, especially if I think it will help soothe their own sense of being overwhelmed by the expectations of professional life. On this Saturday in November, I replied to this former student’s sense of  being absolutely wrung-­out by work with my own feeling of being pressed to the limit of physical and mental wellness. He smiled as I careened forward in my divulging monologue, and I thought the smile meant that I had comforted him, and I was inwardly pleased. He was a serious person, who spoke rarely in the one class he took with me. But his final paper was so good I wrote to him, asking that we meet the next semester, perhaps with the hope I could cajole him to consider religious studies his major. I failed abso­lutely in this persuasion, but we continued to get quick lunches at the residential dining halls with relative frequency during his remaining time in college. I would ask him about his classes, and he would ask me what thing I’d been thinking about lately that I was “making religious.” Now, after a more personal monologue, I hoped I could help him feel like whatever he was enduring was understandable and survivable. However, when I finished, he indicated no need for counsel. He just smiled and said, “I think you would love Goldman.” This statement established the database for my circuitous route around the Goldman Sachs Group. Quite quickly, my former student made it clear that I wouldn’t want to be an employee of Goldman. “I don’t mean you would like it like it,” he said. “I mean you would like it as a thing to talk about. Be­ cause it is really religious.” I asked him what he meant by that, and he offered a couple immediate examples. People believe in Goldman more than anything else; the structure of relationships within Goldman is very carefully conceived to include a reflexive decision-­making structure; and something about a treasure hunt. He didn’t have a lot of time, and neither did I. He conveyed only that whatever struggles he was having, this was his commitment. Being a Goldman employee was of greater value than his wellness. It

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was the most determining force in his life. It was his worldview. It was how he organized not only his workday but his description of what was valuable in life relative to, and other than, work. I have a lot of conversations with students that include hypothesizing whether something produces a religion or not. Within the last week, students have written or spoken to me about a Snapchat star named DJ Khaled, the baby name Saint West, and Donald Trump’s followers, raising each example to me as a potential subject for my courses. It is not weird for an undergraduate to say to me, “If you think that is a religion, check out this,” at which point I watch a newly popular YouTube video, or get shown some meme that has taken over their social media. These conversations are both serious and unserious. They are serious because I do treat the archive of culture as a repository of religious substance; they are unserious because the fact that I do this has become an easy source of satire. I did not therefore make a big deal out of this student’s remark about Goldman Sachs. After all, finance wasn’t my idiom. Every subject I had previously researched was one that was available by driving to some archive with business hours, visiting a library, or getting on my favorite search engine. If you wanted to check my sources, you could, easily. Whether I was studying  Christian modernists or Britney Spears’s song lyrics, Oprah Winfrey or soap advertisements, my documentary interests have leaned toward the excessively accessible, not the insistently obscure. Goldman was absurdly secretive, and I had been following the financial crisis enough to know that even international investigations had not produced a revelation of material discovery about the firm and its functioning. I am interested in public things, popular things, things that people can use even with limited resources, limited literacy, and limited class privilege. Some scholars of religion are fascinated by the hermetic and the esoteric, by the kinds of organizations that “manifest true zealotry in their desire to keep their secrets hidden.”2 These have not been my interests. So turning to Goldman felt like deciding to study the inner workings of the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors or the Order of the Golden Dawn or Opus Dei.3 People should do it, I thought, but not me. I want to study the things that avail themselves at every turn.

In the months that followed this interaction, I repeated it to several colleagues and friends. In this retelling, I didn’t emphasize the fact that my

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student had pressed me to think about Goldman as a religion. Rather, I focused on how similar his life sounded to mine, like ours, like those with whom I worked at Yale. In the limited things he divulged about being an employee of Goldman, I felt great recognition of my life as an employee of a private university, especially insofar as the brand name of your enterprise so superseded anything particular that you, the individual worker, might do or become. Grousing with colleagues about the corporatization of the university and our complicity with it, I would pull out this anecdote, and ask rhetorically whether we were like or unlike the world’s most famous investment bank. Because I repeated this story in the places that I did, I would often hear about other Yale students who had gone on to work at Goldman. Or I would hear about a Goldman donor to our university. Or I would hear about a friend whose friend is a managing partner at Goldman. Everything about these references indicates the deeply intimate relationship between the Ivy League and Wall Street. My ability to access any part of Goldman is not coincidentally due to my affiliation with Yale. It is only because of that affiliation. When I would then meet with these connections—­alumni, donors, friends of friends—­our entire interaction was organized by the frater­ nal­ism  of this long-­standing relationship between elite educational institutions and the elite economic institutions they supply with young talent. “Elite kinship,” as Karen Ho writes, “creates a bridge or network to access fi­nance capital.”4 This relationship, and the resulting cast of participants, is easy to caricature. Consider, for example, this depiction of financial workers: Plainly, when we look at the heroes (and demons) of the last forty years in global finance, especially in the United States, we cannot see in them much of the spirit of the ascetical Calvinist businessman who was deeply opposed to greed, excess, exuberance, and worldly pleasure in almost any form. Rather, the typical “master” of the financial universe is not a dull or nerdy accountant or lawyer but a gaudy, adventurous, reckless, amoral type who embodies just the sort of avarice, adventurism, and charismatic self-­motivation that Weber saw as the absolute enemy of sys­ tematic capitalist profit-­making.5

Arjun Appadurai here suggests that Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, and Bernie Madoff are the telling figures of finance. He suggests that the sociology of Wall Street is one just thinly removed from its Delta Kappa Epsilon

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brotherhood. And it may seem easy to accept this account, since it is the one portrayed in Wolf of Wall Street and The Bonfire of the Vanities. It is the portrayal of Wall Street circulated most strongly in popular culture. In it, the passageway between elite universities and elite financial industries is one defined by a kind of  bad-­boy white fraternalism in which hard partying is the required accompaniment to high-­risk trading. Without a thoroughgoing sociological survey of Wall Street, it is hard to disagree altogether with Appadurai’s caricature. I can only say that in the literature on Goldman Sachs, and in my own encounters with its workers, I met nerds. Nerds who may have homes in France, nerds who had apartments in the exclusive street numbers of Manhattan, but nerds nonetheless: people whose commitment to controlling the world through knowledge greatly superseded any obvious interest in blowing it up at a Mediterranean yacht party. The surprise of this incongruity between pop profile and individual reality was a key reason I kept agreeing to these conversations. I followed up on inquiries or opportunities for connection out of curiosity about a species of people who were, in some weird sense, now a kind of kin. I wanted to hear about Goldman as a place to work, and about why people worked at Goldman rather than other banks. I wanted the reasons they stayed, the reasons they liked it there. Because I was not recording our conversations, the conversations were more akin to networking encounters, not a grill­ing session with a journalist. In a couple of instances I wrote down something that was said and e-­mailed it to that person after our meeting to confirm it was accurate to our conversation. In each of these instances, the reply was exactly the same: sure, you can use it, but don’t think it means anything. I had accurately quoted them, they explained, but they wanted me to know that those words shouldn’t be taken as telling. Time and again, our conversations indicated to me that the reason I could be trusted—­to the extent that I could be trusted—­was because I was understood to be a part of an orga­ nization equally anxious about privacy and the preservation of its perpetuity. But just because I was treated like kin didn’t mean I understood the fam­ ily way, and at every turn they reminded me that I just didn’t get it. This was a committedly noncommittal relationship to ethnography.6 I was honest about my intent as a researcher—­everyone knew I wanted to talk about why Goldman is like a religion—­but I wasn’t wholly open about my conflicted regard for some of the things they said. I didn’t say if something they said sounded illogical or too quick by half. I just nodded and asked for more. My anthropologist friends say this is normal. But because

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I thought I was getting to know something about estranged cousins, it felt incomplete. I had, merely and pointedly, said I was interested. Interested in how Goldman and Yale are alike, interested in how a corporate entity is like a religion, interested in how the workplace defines contemporary ethics, interested in how individual people reconcile their individuality with the companies to which they attach themselves in ways described properly as intensely devotional.

In her anthropology of Wall Street banks, Karen Ho uses her own experience of being downsized as a bank employee to reflect on the capriciousness of that industry. From this work, Ho is able to offer a stunning profile of banking as a persistent experience of contrariety, from recruitment to downsizing, defined by a tentativeness of commitment to the workers that make its transactions possible. Informed by her first-­person encounter with financial fickleness toward its workers, Ho is able to make an observation that it seems unlikely she could have achieved without that involvement. What she finds is that her informants did not see themselves as losers in this economy. Instead, they “viewed themselves as gatherers and purveyors of the capital that forms the foundations and enables the growth and expansion of our largest corporations and public and private works.”7 Enduring in the field of capital without employment security made these employees more confident in their economic importance. As Ho explains: They understand their lack of employment security as testing and developing their “mettle.” In this context of privilege and insecurity, investment bankers, on a practical level, are incentivized and learn to re­ lentlessly push more deals (usually short-­term transactions intended to boost stock prices) on to corporate America. By thus pressuring corpo­ rations, bankers transfer their own models of employee liquidity onto corporate America and set the stage for market crisis.8

As a scholar working in a twenty-­first-­century university, it is impossible to avoid seeing a correlation between the liquidity of the banking industry and that of university life. With the prevailing insecure academic job market, the preparation of a graduate student for postdoctoral survival seems quite akin to this description. Our lack of security seems itself a test of met-

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tle. Our insecurity often presses faculty to publish early, to bring their work forward sooner than is sometimes advisable. We don’t make bad financial deals, but maybe in our press to produce we make wasteful arguments, arguments that exist for argument, not for sustainable discourse. I have gotten ahead of myself. I want only to emphasize the way that Ho may have taken her experiences as a graduate student and as a junior bank employee as critical phenomenological resources in her clear-­eyed  per­ ception of a diffuse and battering industry. Her anthropological lens is in part the result of her consciousness of liquidity at a very personal register of privilege and precariousness. Ho studied banks, but she knew what she saw in part because she was an academic, an academic considering other options, and someone who had been unemployed after an extraordinarily privileged educational launch into the world. Her hermeneutical panache among bankers derived significantly from her nerd autobiography. Without an immersive encounter with Goldman Sachs, I decided instead to default here to print and public materials. With the exception of one exchange, what I have written here can be immediately checked against your reading of the texts that I cite in the notes. The existence of a commonly accessible documentary field makes the process of ongoing refereeing possible. You and I can have a discussion about the nature of these in­ terpretations because you, too, can have my archive. As a scholar of religion, what matters to me in this work is to make that evasive something perceptible. This seems especially important, given that so much of Goldman’s history is intentionally not in a public archive.9 How do you debate something that is beyond your investigative reach? This question is the question when it comes to Goldman Sachs. How do we debate it, when it is so resolutely retreating from our ability to know it? If this chapter offers anything, I hope it is the beginning of a scholarly conversation about a form of industry that survives in part by being inaccessible to scholarly (and regulatory) scrutiny. What happens at Goldman is not unlike what happens at elite universities. Like scholars, Goldman employees hoard facts, cultivate filial ties, and calculate minimal risk in the hypotheses they wager.

The challenge of  the public record for  Goldman is that it is redacted and highly polemical. It includes business-­school textbook descriptions of economic

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events, Wall Street Journal comments on Goldman deals, and testimony by Goldman employees before congressional committees. It includes two detailed, if quite celebratory, histories by industry insiders.10 These sources re­veal especially what Goldman represents in the global economy. But this rep­re­ sentation is not the same as an objective account of what it is to be Goldman. And I wanted a portrait of  being Goldman in everyday life. I wanted the lived religion, the absorbing enclave of geeky people whose ambition was to interpret and resolve the world through the precise management of its scarce resources on behalf of their corporate gain. In Charles Ellis’s admiring portrait of  Goldman, The Partnership (2008), he frequently alludes to some key characteristics that, he argues, define its longevity, including teamwork, frugality, humility, and intensity. Ellis suggests that individual Goldman employees are trained to adhere to certain unstated norms. They are unstated, but Ellis can quickly find sources who will articulate them. He quotes one manager, who reportedly said to junior employees, “Clients are simply in your custody. Somebody before you established the relationship, and somebody after you will carry them on.” Employees are expected to maintain open communication, and employees learn that flashing their wealth is unacceptable. Employees understand that business triumphs are collective, while business failures are solely borne. “Ego management has been a continuing priority at Goldman Sachs,” Ellis explains: If someone new to the firm says “I just did so and so,” a partner will say, “Excuse me?” “I just did a big trade,” the newcomer repeats. “Stop. Wrong pronoun. We just did a big trade. Try again.”11

One of the key ways human beings locate one another culturally is through their uses of language. The use of such a plural pronoun—­we rather than I—­ associates the speaker with a larger group. They are component to a whole they don’t entirely control but they do consider themselves a part. Members of particular religious units, especially emerging sects, indicate their membership exactly this way; that is, “we believe,” “we don’t eat that.” Retraining language is essential to the establishment of a religious community. However, to be clear, such language is not as common as it once was; in general, narrow sectarian language has receded as a public religious language.12 Public speech acts, whether on behalf of the state or any corporate sensibility, must be, at least on the surface, nonsectarian. The main way that indi­

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vid­uals distinguish themselves in such a society is not to reiterate their individuality but to represent their individuality as voluntarily submissive to the whole. Language is the trade of  humanists. This is why I was so surprised when Goldman employees were so diffident when I asked them to confirm their words to me. Whatever quotation I would recite back to them received in reply a shrug. This wasn’t how they were about all topics. They had an array of questions for me as a Yale employee regarding our governance, culture, demographics, and difficulties. In my role as a scholar of religion, they were game to offer free associations about finance and Hinduism, Goldman and the medieval church, stochastic calculus and numerology, associations meant to discern my own acumen as much as to display theirs. Yet, whenever I posed as a researcher about Goldman, I think the kindest thing I could say about their response was that it was bemused. This seems appro­ priate, given my general lack of acumen about business finance. But it also seems right given their certitude that whatever I said about Goldman, it would be inadequate to what they know about what they do. There was a confident discretion in their gatekeeping, as if what I wanted to know was something that would be kept rightly out of reach. Whatever first-­person thing they said to me about this or that was just that—­some individual remark not really meaningful to the corporate whole of their enterprise. This commitment to their collectivity was their sectarian privacy. Thinking of this remoteness, I thought of the quiet that often exists around long intimate partnerships, the privacy of confidentiality that is not exposed to public light. Goldman employees knew that I could come to know some surface things about what they are, but that the thing I most wanted to understand would always be just beyond reach. A novelist could conceive it, a filmmaker could try to depict it, but these two would be fantasy facsim­iles. The assumption of our exchanges was that we knew where power was, and where it wasn’t. And the strongest power, the biggest in the world, isn’t in telling everybody everything. It’s keeping things private. Goldman’s inaccessibility is the perpetuity of its power. Because—­and I want to underline this, at the outset—­every single Gold­ man person I met demonstrated an uncanny grip of the matter, a knack with the articulation of perception. They all refused to be subjected to anyone’s study without getting some study of their own in return. They were, in a word, smart. Not smart in that schmoozing way of knowing how to handle me, the inquisitor, but smart in that way of world-­seeing, like they have figured out where I sit in a kingdom they had mapped out long ago.13 People

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keep connecting me to Goldman employees, I realize, because they want to show me a society that they think I should know, that they think I might like. And quickly I see why. I, a world-­mapping humanist, have a lot in common with the world-­mapping financiers. We both look out into the world, and have the confidence to imagine we can explain its mistakes. We also think we have some good recommendations for revision. Even as I write this commiseration, I am haunted by a September 2014 episode of the weekly radio program This American Life, in which listeners heard dialogues between Federal Reserve Bank examiners and Goldman executives, dialogues that suggest that for many Fed employees embedded in banks, regulatory capture is inevitable. “Regulatory capture” is the phrase commonly used to describe a situation where banks co-­opt regulators—­a kind of governmental Stockholm syndrome. The psychological phenomenon known as Stockholm syndrome, also referred to as capture bonding, refers to a reaction in which hostages develop positive feelings toward their captors, often defending and identifying with them. Humanists have a strange relation to this syndrome, since sympathizing with our subjects—­trying to understand their logic as well as our own—­is a professional mandate. Anthropologists have written well of the worry they have about going native.14 Of either confusing their life with that of the contexts to which they are visitors, or being a poor steward of the communities that they benefit from analyzing. I experienced this, in a way, by thinking of what I did and what Goldman employees did as something similar so as to justify the kinship assigned to us by our institutional occupations. But these moments were rare. The more pervasive feeling that I had was one of hustle. When I sat or stood and walked with Goldman employees, the one consistent feature, stronger than anything else, was the press of time. Even if we were together for two or three hours, every speech act seemed to have the meter of an Aaron Sorkin script: commentary, question, punchline, commentary, question, punchline. We moved through words, through the exchange of our thinking, with enormous rapidity. It wasn’t short-­shrift, exactly. But it was precisely not ruminative. As a result, the sense I got from these encounters was that this was Goldman. Goldman was a place where every resource would be tapped to maximize the encounter. Statements would be made, questioned, commented on further, and then dismissed. Topics would be raised, abandoned, cycled back to, summarized, and then abandoned. Lingering was for a college seminar. Goldman was for lassoing every wit at your disposal. I began to think of Goldman Sachs as this cadence of

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intense interactivity and dismissal, quick glances and brisk walks and talks and lunches. What do I make of this affect, of this insistent hustle and exchange? As I’ve reflected on the style of Goldman engagements, I am especially moved by a remark from Bruno Latour, in which he describes the fetish that people—­ modern people, or Moderns—­have for facts. Before I transcribe the quotation, I’ll just remind you that in his significant bibliography on the formation of the contemporary regimes of science, Latour uses the word Moderns to describe a particular posture of authority in society. He is wary of the Moderns, yet also fascinated by them. Why? He writes that the way Moderns function in our world “allows the Moderns to see all other peoples as naive believers, skillful manipulators, or self-­deluding cynics . . . the Moderns refuse to listen to the idols; they split them apart like coconuts and from each half they take two forms of dupery: you can deceive others, and you can deceive yourself. Moderns believe in belief in order to understand others.” He concludes, perhaps surprisingly, “Can we recover their way of thinking for our own use?”15 Latour—­master ethnographer of the lab, the statisticians’ nest, the tallying and measuring of the world—­here presses us to consider what we might learn from tracking these Moderns, knowing them not simply by their insults (the way they can, sometimes, make us feel pretty lousy—­naïve or self-­deluding) but also by their clarity. Maybe we can learn something from all that clarity. Like many organizations, religious, educational, and otherwise, Goldman begins its work with the simple supposition that you should know ev­ erything possible about what you want to understand. And, like many organizations, sectarian orders, and corporations, it imagines that once you know all you need to know, you’ll likely choose it. Whether you’re engaging a priest at a Hindu temple or an agent at a Scientology center, you’ll find that a defining feature of things we designate as religion is their total confi­ dence  of the totality of their world knowledge. Everything they describe connects to everything else. Religions are never specialized operations—­ they never only talk about feet, or only offer rituals about childbirth. The word religion describes an epic container, a thing that organizes all of life into and out of certain ideas and rites. The idea is that if you knew every­ thing about Scientology, you wouldn’t be only a little committed; if you understood everything they can explain, you’d be all in, and make it yours. Goldman is openly, unapologetically totalizing: you’re in or you’re out, you’re a we or you’re still just an I. I offer an initial portrait of Goldman Sachs with a specific emphasis on aspects of its organization that I think tell

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us about how it has survived in the marketplace, and how it is problematic to a broad public that draws devil horns atop its every action. I focus in what follows on the discursive attributes of the Goldman workplace—­on how Goldman understands itself and other people (sometimes known as clients, sometimes known as potential clients, sometimes referred to simply as our relationships)—­in an effort to sketch a portrait of Goldman Sachs that renders it less impenetrable to our accusations. I want, in other words, to make sense of its sensibility, and in so doing, begin to consider what its incommensurability tells us about our present age.

Every research project includes an encounter with the existing bibliographies on the subject. Quickly, three areas of scholarly interest seem especially pertinent to contemplating the relationship between Goldman Sachs and the history of religion: the history of Jews and finance in the United States; workplace sociology; and social theory of finance. First, you could consider the religious history of the place and time of its origin. In this case, you would research late nineteenth-­century New York City, and evaluate the origins of the firm in its ethnic and religious environments. For almost fifty years after its inception, Goldman Sachs’s partners were members of intermarried German Jewish families, the Goldmans and Sachses. When its founder, Marcus Goldman, retired, he left the firm in the hands of his son, Henry Goldman, and his son-­in-­law Sam Sachs. By the time the firm joined the New York Stock Exchange in 1896, Goldman Sachs was the largest dealer of commercial paper in the United States, with sales nearing $70 mil­lion annually.16 Even after members of the immediate family no longer dominated the partnership, another Jewish family, the Weinbergs, occupied many key leadership positions in the firm. “These unbroken chains of succession allowed Goldman Sachs to remain a family firm long after all of the other major Wall Street partnerships had transformed themselves into large public corporations,” Lisa Endlich, a former Goldman partner, exclaims.17 Since Max Weber, it has usually been assumed that industrial capitalism is the stage of capitalist development that superseded the Jewish history of profit-­making activities based on money-­lending and is of a politi­ cal character.18 A latter-­day Weber, Yuri Slezkine, has reflected at length on the role Jews played in the history of capitalism, commenting:

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The Jews did not have a monopoly on familism, of course, but there is no doubt that their entrepreneurial success was due to a combination of internal solidarity and external strangeness—­and that the only way native entrepreneurs could compete (as it turned out) was by battling kin solidarity and legislating strangeness.19

Writing about the history of socialism in Europe, Slezkine argues that what made Jews especially good agents of any economic program wasn’t an archaic familism but a new version of it in which the family was a building block toward something more cosmopolitan, namely the nation. “In a sense, good citizenship . . . is a version of the ever vigilant Jewish endeavor to preserve personal and collective identity in an unclean world,” Slezkine provocatively suggests.20 It is inviting to track Slezkine’s words relative to Goldman’s story. With Slezkine, you could argue the sort of thing that Marx argued in On the Jewish Question, or that Weber argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, namely that “certain kinds of religious orientations have profound, if unintended, material effects.”21 It would be easy to slip into an essentialist tale of Jewish families giving rise to the close-­knit, disciplined partnership that Goldman became. Yet these kinds of writings invariably run up against historical and demographic critique. Any statement about Jews’ ability with entrepreneurship can be countered with archival instances of Jews who were unsuccessful financially, and any celebration of Jewish family ties can be challenged with sociological descriptions of the multiple kinds of households with Jewish members in America. Conflict between Henry Goldman and his brother-­in-­law Sam Sachs due to differing opinions about World War I (Henry supported the kaiser, Sam stood with the Allies) deteriorated family relations and led to a media firestorm when it became apparent that Goldman was not united in support of Britain.22 Correlating arguments about German Jews and financial culture seem hollow at best, flatly racist or weirdly celebratory at worst.23 US economic history is almost invariably a plural story in which groups intermingle in American streets, markets, and banks. A religious examination of Goldman Sachs would think about the interlocking of its founding Jewish families in a historical context that included an insurgence of what some younger historians of US religion, such as Janine Giordano Drake, Heath Carter, and Chris Cantwell, have recently called “working class religion,” that is, the large number of early Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish

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workers who were united by a common anticlerical disposition and a moral critique of capitalism.24 This religious history would be buttressed by the long-­running bibliography addressing the relationship between Protestant churches and Gilded Age economic life, from Henry F. May’s 1949 masterpiece Protestant Churches and Industrial America to Thomas Rzeznik’s 2013 monograph Church and Estate.25 Somewhere between these two bibliog­ra­ phies—­between that of Protestant industrialism and that of working-­class dissent—­sits the story of Goldman Sachs. Every available history of Goldman repeats the critical importance of family to its origins, with the primary evidence for this being the long marriages connecting a small number of families in New York City. One history suggests that the founding families of Goldman Sachs largely used  syn­a­ gogues not for worship but as centers for German Jewish socializing. “Marcus paid lip service to the Sabbath at the Society Hill synagogue, sure that his mother would be disappointed if he didn’t, and he learned to play baseball on Saturday afternoons,” one family historian writes about the New York piety of the recent émigré Marcus Goldman. About Marcus’s son, Henry Goldman, the same writer reflects: Contrary to what some may have assumed, in spite of his Jewish heritage, Henry Goldman was no Zionist. He was, in fact, far more partisan to assimilating German Jews into the American lifestyle and regarded Palestine as a sanctuary for persecuted Jews and a seat of Jewish learning, not as a prospective sovereign Jewish state. He revered scholarship and considered organized religion of any kind irrelevant in his life.26

Likewise, it becomes apparent that a significant wing of the family embraced a variety of philosophical views toward religion once Henry’s brother, Julius, married the daughter of Felix Adler, the social reformist who founded the Ethical Culture movement in New York City. Adler established a retreat in Keene Valley, New York, and was part of a circle of theologians, including Henry Sloane Coffin of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, who had settled there and enjoyed interdisciplinary and ecumenical discussions on philosophy, morals, and religion.27 These are shards of a religious history, nothing quite complete, but enough to suggest something about what kind of upwardly mobile immigrants organized Goldman Sachs, and how they assimilated into the American culture within the dramatically changing, rapidly globalizing cultural and intellectual landscape of the second half of the nineteenth century.

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Yet no matter what this area of historical research shows about the past, it is important to underline how little it matters in the future. Nothing in the contemporary culture of Goldman Sachs suggests something familial. The incorporation of charisma from its founding is complete: today’s Goldman boldly promotes itself as an international assemblage of individuals culled from a meritocratic pool of exemplary applicants, not as relatives connected by any genealogical relation. Talk of its origin as a family business is something Goldman doesn’t promote on its website or in its recruitment materials. It is something the historians recall, as if to try to render familiar and accessible something outsized and incomprehensible. A second area of research on Goldman as a subject for students of re­ ligion would be to consider the organizational operations of the company, the ways that Goldman is a total culture for which its participants gladly—­to borrow a metaphor repeated on employee reviews of the firm—­drink the Kool-­Aid.28 Such a study might focus on the phenomenal array of religious metaphors, disciplinary structures, and ritual habits of the Goldman workplace. When my interlocutor began our conversation with “you must be here about the rabbis,” he was referring to the informal mentoring imper­ ative at Goldman. No junior analysts will survive if they don’t identify, and are not identified by, a senior employee during their initial year, “some­one who liked you, thought highly of you, wanted to work with you, mentor you.”29 Rabbi here could be a one-­off joke, a contemporary recasting of the firm’s Semitic origins and its multinational pluralist triumph over all the WASP-­run operations that once excluded it. No document about investment banking culture, and no interaction with an investment banking employee, did anything other than amplify the list of possible religious metaphors worth deploying when describing the total world of these companies, Gold­man being chief among them in seriousness, internal difficulty, and external cachet. In this sense, the first route to Goldman and the second path intersect. While it is true that the Goldman and Sachs families faded from employee rosters long ago, the firm prides itself on its highly stable workforce. Employees tell me that Goldman’s ability to maintain relations with so many long-­term clients is dependent on the number of partners who have been at the firm for more than ten years. There is not a lot of coming and going in the upper echelons. Likewise, employees point to the fact that Goldman is not an amalgamation of many firms, having made only one major acquisition in its history. Goldman extols firm monogamy. “This is why we make an unusual effort to identify and recruit people who, in addition to their

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intellect, share our commitment to leadership in business and to the communities where we work and live,” the firm crows on its website. Employees put it to me differently: we do well and give back, they say, pointing to the number of partners on nonprofit boards of directors. One partner tells me that he doesn’t trust any employee who doesn’t seem to have close friends at the firm, since those friendships indicate that an employee has forged kinship ties. Studying the workplace sociology of Goldman might show how its present intimacy is foundational to its success. A third way to approach Goldman would be as the high church of what Randy Martin has called the financialization of everyday life. The neologism financialization has not yet been as widely used as the more evocative globalization, but in scope and import they describe substantially coextensive economic developments. Martin quotes Michael J. Mandel’s basic explanation of financialization from The High-­Risk Society (1996): Historically, activities on the financial markets—­the buying and selling of stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments—­have been regarded as far different from the day-­to-­day endeavors in the real world. . . . This distinction is quickly disappearing, as the high-­risk society becomes as fluid and as competitive as the financial markets. . . . The combination of high uncertainty and unrestricted competition is reducing the difference between the real economy of factories and offices on the one hand, and the financial markets on the other. The rules governing Wall Street now apply to the entire economy. The implication: In the high-­risk society, workers, businesses, and countries must start thinking like investors in the financial markets, where the only way to consistently achieve success is to accept risk.30

Whether this development is figured as neutral, malevolent, benevolent, or utopian, financialization represents a colonizing of daily life. Financialization entails a relentless exhortation to “financial self-­management” that “leaves no corner of the home untouched,” so that “cradle to grave, dawn to dusk, the oikos of economics returns to its original residence where home organizes both labor and its reproduction.”31 This, for Martin, is something for serious moral concern, and an exploration of financialization would open pathways for philosophical critique of the economic work that Goldman does. Or, we could offer a theological exegesis of the contents of modern economic thought, as the economist Robert H. Nelson has spent the past

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decade producing in his scholarship. This would examine how “the major theories of economics as they developed in the intellectual history of the West can best be understood in terms of one or another of the great contrasting traditions of theology.”32 Nelson has written, “Economists think of themselves as scientists, but [I argue] they are more like theologians. . . . We economists are . . . the heirs of Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther.”33 Such an analysis of economics and religion would specifically look at the values inlaid in the Chicago school of economics that have had such an influence on the last thirty years of Goldman Sachs strategy, and would, perhaps alongside Nelson, consider the hermetic principles of such alchemy. These bibliographies indicate how we explain religion: through historical, anthropological, and philosophical examinations that seek to draw contextual and metaphorical connection. Religion isn’t something that can be solved with one lens, or stated in a single sentence. To get at its modes of containment, you need to grab for many containers; to get at its claims of freedom, you need to identify many thruways.

Goldman Sachs was founded in 1869, when a German Jew named Marcus Goldman hung out a shingle, “M. Goldman,” and advertised himself as a banker and broker of IOUs for the tanners and jewelers along Maiden Lane in New York City. By buying promissory notes at a discount in the morning and selling them to banks in the afternoon, he enabled merchants to raise short-­term working capital at attractive rates and, at the same time, to garner handsome commissions for him. The notes, originally referred to as trade bills, later came to be known as commercial paper.34 Commercial paper summarizes an ongoing transactional feature of investment banks: an unsecured, short-­term debt instrument is issued by a corporation, typically for the financing of short-­term liabilities. Today the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is an American multinational bank holding company that provides a wide range of financial services to a substantial and diversified client base which includes corporations, financial institutions, governments, and high-­ net-­worth individuals. It is a publicly owned entity regulated by the Federal Reserve. It covers about 2,750 companies worldwide and over fifty national economies. Goldman has been called “the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history.”35

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Understanding what Goldman is and does is one of the greatest problems in its assessment by social observers and in its regulation by governmental authorities. As Michael Lewis has noted, the financial system has gotten so complex that regulators must have it explained to them by the fi­ nanciers who create it.36 In her celebratory history of Goldman Sachs, Lisa Endlich describes the activities of Goldman as highly diversified, and quite legible: “The firm, among other activities, traded coffee and lumber, underwrote bonds and stocks, arranged mergers, and invested its own capital in growing businesses.”37 This makes what Goldman does seem simple, when in fact its success is anything but: Of the many ongoing mysteries about Goldman Sachs, one of the most overarching is just how it makes so much money, year in and year out, in good times and in bad, all the while revealing as little as possible to the outside world about how it does it.38

There are scholars whose knowledge of arcane materials is such that publishers have a hard time finding people able to referee their materials—­so obscure is their archive, only they have it mastered. Researching Goldman is not unlike trying to upend such a sage elder of arcana. Students begin with the basic humility that whatever they know, members of the firm have been in its hexagonal rooms for a lot longer than they. David and Goliath is not quite the right casting. It is more like being the new librarian at “The Library of Babel” described by Jorge Luis Borges. It seems best, then, to start from the outside in. To start from the things we know before we start plundering the hexagonal rooms. Of the many words associated with Goldman, one word used in recent years has been enduring. Goldman persisted through all the major economic crises of the twentieth century, and strongly through the harshest one of the twenty-­ first. Why do certain institutions endure, and others do not? This is a particular kind of question, one that focuses on duration as a metric. I do not see duration as necessarily a marker of positive value. We use the word sometimes in a positive way, remarking positively about an enduring marriage or enduring hope. But I want to flatten the word to counter any affirmations of durability with a critical sensibility. One of the most prominent questions in post-­9/11 scholarship on religion has been to ask how and why religions have endured. Why is there still religion in the twenty­first century? Why are there religions marked by violent, public ac­tions, re­

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ligions often labeled strong or fundamentalist? The presumption of such a question is the sense that better reason ought to have prevailed. What keeps people in something despite everything? This is my question, one obviously formed in no small part due to the raging conversations about the secular, the secular that hypothetically removes us from the hold of tradition, of institution, or traditional relation or institutional autocracy. In the midst of the sex abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church, many pundits asked: why do people still go to church? After hearing about yet another divorce, you may ask: why on earth do people still marry? And after contributing to, being witnesses of, and being involved with multiple financial crises, how on earth is Goldman still standing (not just standing, but thriving, dominating, standing as sui generis in the world of finance)? I connect here many images of institutions—­denominational, financial, and relational—­and I’ll add one more, namely our own: the university as a frame for our work, the university as a kind of test case of institutionalization. How do we exist? And will we exist for much longer? I want to pull your mind to think about the difference between ideas or relations that become institutions, and ideas or relations that fade as mere historical curios. Why do rabbinical councils continue to hold sway, and Karaite Judaism is nothing but a minor movement? Why does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­day Saints continue to grow, and the Strangites have but two known congregations? Sociologists have made the study of new religious movements one of rich answers to these inquiries, and I will apply some of those analytic frames to consider how it is that Goldman endures, and what its endurance reminds us about the definitional facts of institutions. Scholars who look at successful sects emphasize how new religions endure if they include a new synthesis of truth, foster strong relational ties, and bind the community together through a sense of distinction from the broader society.39 And I want to be clear, unless there is any confusion: Goldman endures. Its stock price shot up nearly 40 percent in 2013, despite the choppy performance of its fixed-­income unit and continued uncertainties around tightening banking regulations.40 Goldman did not easily survive the finan­cial crisis. The crisis produced many hours of self-­scrutiny within the firm. But this self-­analysis only shored up its domination, positioning it as the bulletproof post-­crash colossus. Given our sense of constant institutional crises, given our sense of constant institutional battery and loss and gain and loss, and given our general worry that institutions themselves are, perhaps, the

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problem, let me offer several things that Goldman Sachs can teach the study of religion about what makes, and what might break, an institution—­ religious, educational, marital, or otherwise.

Information is a distinguishing feature of enduring institutions. Institutions can be businesses, universities, people, even concepts. What differentiates a person or a business from other institutions is their representation of something greater than their core service. Businesses that become institutions somehow find a way to become not mere processors of information but producers of vast amounts of it. Through the acquisition and upkeep of names on ledgers, registered participants, and rolls of census data, they acknowledge who associates with the institution. This processing of information never stops. No matter the historical, economic, or psychological con­ texts, an institution never stops its processes of information collection, information management, and information control. A large portion of Goldman’s profit comes from trades transacted for mutual funds, pension funds, endowments, hedge funds, and other big institutional investors. For the majority of its transactions, Goldman is a facil­ itator, making bets on the deals of others. Particularly with the slow demise of proprietary trading, it’s always been true but now it’s almost exclusively true that Goldman’s role is to lubricate the wheels of finance. It takes large principal risk positions within both proprietary books and customer books. As such, two factors are of overwhelming importance: information and relationships.41 Every observer agrees that Goldman has developed extremely close relationships with the largest customers in the market and the largest power brokers in positions of governmental power.42 (The extensive network of top government officials who previously worked for Goldman Sachs is so extensive that led to a nickname for the firm: Government Sachs.) These relationships are Goldman’s primary source of information, and the major reason it can claim a controlling hold of information. “Goldman Sachs believed in and observed the religion of client service,” one former employee would write.43 A central practice of that religion is to cull and analyze information from clients in order to provide precise accounts to those clients of what other connections, deals, or opportunities could be pursued. To call Goldman an information manager is to understate the case dramatically. Everyone associated with the firm speaks about facts as the primal

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coin of their realm. No fudging. No lying. Know your facts. Such recall is a practical skill in a world of client management, and a necessary imperative in an increasingly regulated financial landscape. Even the apostate Greg Smith praises this feature of Goldman training, recounting: I liked the fact that the firm took its culture so seriously; I liked that we were learning to be so serious about giving clients correct information. This is what the Open Meeting instilled in us: Don’t make things up; don’t exaggerate. Just be up-­front. If you don’t know something, be very skillful at finding it out, and that’s good enough. And if you make a mistake, admit it—­immediately.44

Employees throughout the ranks are relentlessly tested on the facts. You will know about that which you speak and fulfill the deal by way of its details. It starts at the top but applies to everyone: “Accuracy about names, dates, and facts is a strong habit—­even a compulsion—­for investment bankers generally and particularly for the partners of Goldman Sachs.”45 When the summer interns are told to get very specific breakfast orders for fifteen people on the Emerging Markets Sales Desk, this is a component of their evaluation. We can be sure, “Wall Street looks at attention to detail as an indicator of how people are going to do in their job.”46 Goldman employees assume, in some ways, not the facts as facts but the facts as the commensurable grammar of exchange, the way we convey who we are to one another. The title of this chapter, “Do Not Tamper with the Clues,” refers to one of only two rules for Midnight Madness, a scavenger hunt played annually by Goldman employees. Media reports about the event tend to focus on its expense (roughly $270,000 for a single evening of play, raising over five times that amount for charity, etc.). What interests me is the way the rules of the game are a synecdoche for the employees’ work. The game requires teams to solve a series of puzzles placed around New York City. The solution to one puzzle points players to the location of the next puzzle, and so on. All the players receive at the outset a note that reads: “Welcome. There are only two rules to Midnight Madness: 1. Do not tamper with the clues. 2. No private motorized transport.” A lot of player behavior is driven by mistrust of the thirty-­four people running the game, who are collectively known as Game Control. Information is not offered in an advance packet or in an archive of preceding games. No, information emerges through the playing of the game itself. Participants are not informed of the location of the starting line until the

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day of the event. They are not told where the finish line is until they have solved the final puzzle. Nor are they told how many puzzles remain in the game. What they are told is: Do not tamper with the clues. Most players’ default assumption was that Game Control was trying to double-­cross them, giving them information that looked like one thing, but needed to be read closely to find the duplicity. The clues are all the truth you need to know, but that truth is not readily apparent. Do not tamper with the clues, since they are all you have. Their potential falsity is an inherent feature of their facticity. Ques­tion the facts, but don’t tamper with them; they are what you can think them into being. Such a game makes sport of clue handling, especially when we know that there is a profound, intense drudgery to most information management. Facts here are object and profession. This is a prescriptive vision for market conception and occupation, enjoining those involved to be not merely informed but also dominant in the consumption of information. You cannot exist in a system unless you make facts a kind of superlative exigency, and you make yourself into someone who could survive any hunt, no matter the surprises. Because there are no surprises if you see the world as endlessly unveiling itself through prices, situations, appraisals. “Much of what happens on Wall Street is terrifically boring,” writes William D. Cohan.47 The work of institutions is the work of managing information, of handling it with a view of the deceptions embedded in the facts. This sometimes seems like an abstract puzzle. Sometimes it seems like a house of cards. This is an abstract series of statements, when in reality the practice of investment banking is one of ferocious specificity. Goldman Sachs prides itself on being a “mark-­to-­market” firm, Wall Street lingo for being ruthlessly precise and transparent about the value of securities—­known as “marks”—­on its balance sheets. Investment banking is an information processing business, moving valuable information around to the greatest advantage of the firm and its clients. Goldman believes that its precision about this information promotes transparency, allowing the firm and its investors to make better decisions. Lloyd C. Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman, once wrote, “Because we are a mark-­to-­market firm, we believe the assets on our balance sheet are a true and realistic reflection of book value.” If, for instance, Goldman observed that demand for a certain security or group of like securities was changing or that exogenous events could lower the value of its portfolio of housing-­related securities, the firm would lower the marks on these securities and take the losses that resulted.48

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Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera have written, “The modern Goldman attitude—­that there was no conflict it couldn’t manage, no complex product too complex, and few trades the firm should turn its back on—­was bound to leave a bad taste in the mouths of people who were not part of Wall Street.”49 If you were on Wall Street, though, you understood that Goldman workers were agnostic toward the clues, toward the deals, toward the trade. Their only imperative was that agnosticism. Take the facts, and manage them, organize them, place them in layered deals, and keep them true. They are our rationality, our common grammar, our ethical supposition. Framing the facts was what defined Goldman’s client relations.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, critics suggested that Goldman’s role in the crisis deserved serious federal scrutiny. Goldman would release nine hundred documents, including an e-­mail written by Goldman’s chief risk officer on May 11, 2007. The e-­mail explained how Goldman would stay in the black while many other banks went down the tubes. It said that Goldman’s decision to mark down the prices on its portfolio of derivatives such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and synthetic CDOs “will potentially have a big [profit and loss] impact on us, but also to our clients. . . .  We need to survey our clients and take a shot at determining the most vulnerable clients, knock on implications, etc.” Goldman would prove to be correct about the value of these securities—­they were worth far less than most of Wall Street was saying they were. Many of the discussions in the wake of the financial crisis focused on how to interpret what Goldman did with this knowledge, and how it protected itself against grievous losses.50 There is a vast bibliography of assertions and counterassertions. A newspaper reported, for example, that Goldman had decided in 2009 to exit the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). In this story, the reporter for the Financial Times suggested that the only reason Goldman converted itself into a bank holding company in 2008 was so that it could be eligible for TARP funds. Three days after this article appeared, Lucas van Praag, a managing director at Goldman, wrote that this report was wrong: Goldman had filed to become a bank holding company one month before the US Treasury announced TARP.51 The reader is left unsure who or what to believe: the newspaper that accused Goldman of

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throwing off its “golden fetters,” or Goldman, who said that nobody got the facts right. Goldman is good at the facts; it’s good at getting the regulations to work to its benefit; it’s good at staying on the right side of the law. Can any of it be seen as wrong? Supporters of Goldman Sachs would argue that buyers shouldn’t have cared what Goldman’s position was during the financial crisis. Goldman had better information than Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns, and it made good on that information for its clients. Other banks, the banks that failed or faltered, were responsible for doing their own analysis of the underlying securities. “The deal is the deal,” Dan Sparks, the former head of the Goldman mortgage desk, later told the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.52 That many buyers didn’t do that analysis was not Goldman’s responsibility. “It wasn’t Goldman’s job to protect clients from their own mistakes . . . Goldman’s job is to protect Goldman’s interests.”53 Goldman says it looks after its interests for all our benefit. If we all watch our interests with discipline, reason, and a commitment to the facts, a right outcome will occur. For Goldman, there is no concept of capitalism that is distinguishable from society, no concept of society distinguishable from the community of people established by coordinated interactions with society. Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein explained this as a contribution to the common good: “We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle. We have a social purpose.”54 For many people on Wall Street, such claims are not empty talk. A 2010 poll showed that by a landslide, Goldman was understood to be the place most financial professionals want to work. It is, as this report suggested, the ethicist of Wall Street; it is the who’s who that establishes the standard of care, innovation, and prescience by which everyone else is measured.55 Goldman employees reflected this sense of their superiority to me time and again, arguing that they are the firm with the greatest diversity among its employees, the strongest ethical culture within its ranks, and the best record of client service in the business. Some analysis of the financial crisis suggested that if Goldman was as diverse as it argued itself to be, then this might be one of the reasons it survived the crisis. This research argued that price bubbles are affected by ethnic homogeneity in the market and can be thwarted by firm diversity. These findings suggest that price bubbles arise not only from individual errors or financial conditions but also from the social context of decision making; firms with greater diversity have a greater likelihood of internal friction and debate. Such debate enhances

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deliberation and upends conformity. If Goldman is the meritocratic palace it proposes itself to be, perhaps this makes it more ethical than the average banking operation? I want to hold in temporary abeyance the reply that you might have to such a claim, namely that such praise is inherently contradictory. Those who might home in on its contradiction would observe that there can be no ethicists on Wall Street, since Wall Street is nothing but a steroidal locus of capitalism, which is itself an unethical frame for human exchange. Even reputable economists can sometimes partake of this view. For example, John P. Watkins has suggested that on Wall Street, there is no Golden Rule, only the Goldman Rule, which he states as “pursue profitable opportunities regardless of the effects on others.”57 I don’t quickly join Watkins in such an appraisal, because I am interested in the way Goldman employees, with clear eyes and full hearts, absolutely dissent from it. Goldman employees don’t just have a different view of capitalism from Watkins. They have a different view of their occupation of the world relative to this concept of the Golden Rule. I admit to being transfixed by this discursive conflict—­between a sense that the system is elegantly occupied and that which says the system is inherently corrupt. For me, this sort of divergence is precisely where the study of religion has the most to offer. Scholars of religion are especially good at listening to accounts of the world that are totalizing, accounts of the world that have accompanying ritual practices, and accounts of the world that exclude certain communities from participation in those rituals. The tension between those who get to be inside a ritual community and those who are left outside defines much of human activity, theology, and technology. For some scholars, that tension has been described as the maintenance of a distinction between the sacred and the profane. “Religious beliefs are the representations that ex­press the nature of sacred things and the relations they sustain among them­selves or with profane things,” Émile Durkheim famously explained in 1912, setting the stage for the modern study of religion as one devoted to the anal­ysis of the perpetuation of that binary.58 Is it merely that financial institutions have different conceptions of the sacred? As Goldman’s reputation in the general public suffered in late 2008 and 2009, several Goldman spokesmen began to invoke religious themes in their media appearances and public events. “The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-­interest,” Goldman Sachs international adviser Brian Griffiths said on October 20, 2009, to a crowd in Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. “We have to tolerate the inequality as 56

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a way to achieving greater prosperity and opportunity for all.”59 In addition to describing his company’s work as having “a social purpose,” Lloyd Blankfein described himself as “doing God’s work.”60 While he later said this was meant as a joke, he also told one of Vanity Fair’s editors that “what’s good for Goldman Sachs is good for America.”61 Institutions need perpetual critique. This critique from the outside re­ iterates the difference between what they are versus those who are outside of what they are. Goldman’s theological hyperbole about its good—­its inherent good, and it’s good for you—­occurred precisely in the moment of its greatest evisceration. Perhaps the most dramatic assault came from a lengthy article in Rolling Stone, in which the writer, Matt Taibbi, placed Goldman Sachs at the center of every market manipulation since the nineteenth century, including the Great Depression, the Internet bubble at the end of the 1990s, the housing craze that led to the 2008 financial meltdown, and, most recently, the speculative surge in commodity prices. Calling Goldman a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” Taibbi concluded, “the bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth—­pure profit for rich individuals.”62 The way Taibbi figures Goldman is as outsized as the way Blankfein does. Blankfein thinks he’s God, Taibbi thinks Blankfein is the devil. They each need the other as the Other in order to maintain their categorical differences and their oppositional purity. Goldman’s position as an institution continues, not in spite of critiques like Taibbi’s, but through the underlying assumption of such indictments, namely that Goldman’s power is so powerful, we need mammoth abstractions to capture its domination. God is the squid, the squid is God.

No one at Goldman other than Blankfein would agree that God should be figured in their promotions. This is distinctly the language of a charismatic director, not the language of executive officers or the management committee. A part of the Goldman acculturation is an education in a certain ferocious modesty. The firm knows everything and rules everything (this you know within minutes of meeting any Goldman worker), but it doesn’t show off its wealth or its power in any flagrant way. Goldman office buildings never have the Goldman name on them, and those office buildings are

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invariably understated in their look (describing the new 200 West Street headquarters in New York City, one employee said its baseline aesthetic was “German airport”).63 In his account of Wall Street, the journalist Kevin Roose describes one Goldman employee’s reflections on its offices: But as much as 200 West Street seemed familiar, it also had an odd sterility to it. Samson wasn’t sure how to characterize it, but something about the building felt fortified—­as if the entire place had been sanded down to make it a little more secure and a little less welcoming. The new building felt designed to keep employees and information securely inside, while keeping outsiders at a total remove.64

The fluidity between Goldman and government work makes sense, insofar as Goldman employees are accustomed to feeling simultaneously in charge and compulsively abject about this power. Whatever God they are, whatever theology they practice, it isn’t swaggering as much as it is savvy; it isn’t oppressive as much as it is patient. Invariably, the world will come to them to solve its problem. Their only job is to anticipate your arrival, and to know everything they need to know to answer questions you don’t know yet that you’ll be asking.

Critique is not just external to successful institutions. Durable institutions organize ritual frames for internal dissent. Institutions incorporate radical discontinuity as a component of the substance of the institution. People will change, opinions will change, and markets will change. The institution has as its task the formalization of dissent so that any internal act of critique is a component to the system which propelled it. This is a hard balance to achieve. Institutions can’t survive without criticism. Within institutions, there are of­ ten elaborate review procedures to consider complaints against parties. For instance, the Beth Din of America is a court of Jewish law affiliated with the Rabbinical Council of America that serves to adjudicate purported violations of Jewish law; likewise, the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, also known as JAG Corps, refers to the legal branch of the US military concerned with military justice. These are highly formalized structures of internal jurisprudence. There are also many smaller practices of interrogation, as in the Oneida Perfectionists, a small sect in the antebellum United

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States founded by John Humphrey Noyes. In that community, mutual criticism was established as a regular practice in which members were subjected to criticism directed at traits which detracted from the unity of the group. These examples demonstrate how groups seek to organize criticism within a given system in order to control its effects. This isn’t easy, since members’ anguish often causes the severest strain in a specific association. Yet criticism must, ultimately, occur in order to preserve the institution. Insti­ tutions that manage talent are especially challenged, since a hallmark of talented people can be their idiosyncratic views, their resistance to easy conclusions and their impatience with processes. Let talent be talent. In his history of Goldman Sachs, Charles Ellis concludes, “At the heart of it all has always been the ability to attract and keep extraordinary people. Of all the firm’s competencies, recruiting must be the most consequential.” As John Whitehead (a Goldman Sachs codirector from 1976 to 1984) says, “If you don’t have the best people, you can’t be the best firm. But if you do have the best people and you train them rigorously, organize them effectively, and motivate them to do their best work consistently, you will inevitably become the best firm.”65 If you read Forbes or Fortune or Bloomberg or Business Insider, this is what is repeated when Goldman is compared to Merrill Lynch or Deutsche Bank or JPMorgan Chase & Co. It gets the big talent. In most ways, all the major investment banking competitors are equals. All firms strive to serve the same customers; all firms use the same computers, telephones, markets, databases, airplanes, hotels, and office buildings; all firms are subject to the same regulations; and they all know one another and can quickly copy one another’s newest services. So with all these equalizers, how can any firm get out ahead—­and stay out ahead? The people it gets inside, and how it organizes them once it does. Goldman gets first bid at the best, and this is what it claims to sell. Goldman’s own promotional language reflects this principle of competitive excel­ lence in the first words of its public self-­description: “Goldman Sachs is a meritocracy built on the belief that collaboration, teamwork and integrity create the right environment for our people to deliver the best possible results for our clients. When we’re recruiting we look for people who we believe will thrive in this environment, prioritizing quick thinking, passion and communication skills above specific qualifications.”66 And, once it gets them, Goldman organizes its workers in a way that promotes criticism. The easiest way to lose your job at Goldman is if you show yourself to be passive in critique, if you don’t point out mistakes or problems in strategies. Conversations are structured so that consensus oc-

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curs only once all the criticisms have been aired. Keep analyzing, the culture instructs, and keep doubting. See the trade from all angles. See your weaknesses from all angles. They may have drunk the Kool-­Aid, but like many religious traditions, conversion doesn’t mean obedient silence. Rather, it inaugurates relations of mutual criticism that makes Goldman a place “intoxicating” in its intellectual seriousness.67

I was telling a colleague, Eliyahu Stern, about this culture at Goldman. I said that what everyone remarked on was how nice everyone at Goldman was. These weren’t frat boys fist-­bumping at strip clubs; these were people committed to a common decorum by a kind of rigid interpersonal kindness. He sent me this quotation, from an eighteenth-­century Lithuanian rabbi, Hayyim of Volozhin, who was the founder of the yeshiva movement: “It is permissible to argue with our great teachers who now lie in the ground but whose well-­ known books are still with us. They themselves gave us permission to duel and fight against them . . . provided that one takes extra precaution not to treat them disrespectfully or be haughty when disagreeing.”68 This quotation captures exactly the way that form becomes the controlling feature of the Goldman environment. Recruitment focuses on trying to identify individuals who can be “culture carriers,” a phrase used to describe people who could “deal with clients and colleagues in a way that preserves the firm’s reputation.”69 The hiring process invariably includes something more than mere assessments of excellence. It also becomes an evaluation of how the contenders might fit with the firm. Descriptions of “right fit” by any given institution can be a space of significant discrimination. Fit is not just an aesthetic calculation but a determined investment in a concept of culture, a concept of ourselves as components of institutions. We want commitment to our concepts of ourselves as institutions, even more than we commit to our concepts of concepts, as ideas abstractly debated in the marketplace of thought. Institutions endure because the participants, consciously or unconsciously, desire their continuance. The participants subordinate their individuality for the sake of the brand. They carry the culture of their institution as a component to carrying themselves. Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian  phi­ losopher, puts this in a certain way: “Desire inheres to capitalism at a . . . systemic level: drive is that which propels the whole capitalist machinery, it

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is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-­reproduction.”70 For Goldman, such an image of reproduction is why it understands economics not as a game that someone wins but as a science of constraints of which it is a devoted student and scientist. “Someone wins, someone loses” is not Goldman’s view. Goldman does not understand its practice as a practice of gain. It is a science of constraints. Everyone experiences constraints, everyone participates in a system of negotiation between parties. Goldman understands its economics as definitively relational. This does not mean that the firm’s economics is a neutral matrix of determination. It means, according to Goldman, that the system will not work if everyone does not experience some loss and some gain. This is how we become dependent on systems. Not because we lack the enlightenment to perceive our dependency, but because that dependency is in some senses remunerative. We get back something for our submission. This is why Goldman describes itself as having no more conflict of interest than any other investment banking firm. Indeed, it prides itself on its conservative treatment of clients and client relations under a banner mantra, long-­term greedy, which Goldman executives translate to mean “don’t kill the marketplace.”71 The preservation of the market—­that is, the relations between parties determined by a variety of constraints—­is Goldman’s priority. Its market, your market: it is all the same market. Goldman’s public critique of other economic participants is always articulated in terms of a failure to fulfill this obligation to foster the market. Sharp listeners may hear the echoes of a certain philosophy that does indeed lurk within this dynamic, namely the voice of John Galt. As Ayn Rand, who wrote—­in Galt’s voice—­in 1957: I work for nothing but my own profit—­which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. I do not produce it for their benefit at the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the expense of theirs; I do not sacrifice my interest to them nor do they sacrifice theirs to me; we deal as equals by mutual consent to mu­ tual advantage.72

Like all institutions, Goldman can’t be as sovereign as Galt portrays his individual principles to be. At the end of any transaction, Goldman employees must forge a continuing profitable relation for the firm first (and secondarily for themselves). The firm must exist in the end. In their history of the financial crisis, All the Devils Are Here (2010), Bethany McLean

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and Joe Nocera observe, “[Goldman] had no grand scheme to destroy Wall Street. . . . Mainly, Goldman’s traders were just doing what they had always been taught to do: Protect the firm at all costs.”73 This bolstering of the firm is why institutions are not just and can never be purely market driven. They have one standing value beyond profit, and that is their existence. Within Goldman, the tension has been whether the relationship to be preserved is its relationship with clients or the one among its employees. One of Goldman’s critics argues that the firm decides time and again to preserve its own profits above those of its clients. Goldman replies that a profit for Goldman is a profit for the world. One private-­equity investor offered this example to explain the situation: If I’m a [widget] company and I’m using Goldman and they’re analyzing my business information for a potential sale of it or an IPO of it or whatever, and they see that like my daily orders are declining before that information is released to the public on a quarterly basis, well, they take that information and they go, “Holy shit. We need to go short the [widget] industry.” That is their business model! To use their client—­and their client relationships—­to generate information on which they can trade.74

In response to such a worry about conflict of interest within Goldman, the firm replies that it has thought about this, carefully. And (in the words of the Goldman Sachs Business Principles), “We regularly receive confidential information as part of our normal client relationships. To breach a confidence or to use confidential information improperly or carelessly would be unthinkable.”75 Of course, in the wake of the financial crisis, there was evidence that the unthinkable was thinkable. The standard embrace of conflicts by Goldman was shown to be more ethically challenging than it had imagined. Goldman had argued that conflicts “are evidence of a healthy tension between the firm and its customers,” reported the New York Times. “If you are not embracing conflicts, the argument holds, you are not being aggressive enough in generating business.”76 Yet governmental observers, especially senator Carl Levin (D-­MI), were unsatisfied, as this dialogue between Levin and Lloyd Blankfein before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations indicates: Blankfein: In the context of market making, that is not a conflict. What clients are buying, or customers are buying, is they are buying an exposure. The thing that we are selling to them is supposed to give them the risk they want. They

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are not coming to us to represent what our views are. They probably—­the in­ stitutional clients we have wouldn’t care what our views are. They shouldn’t care. We do other things at the firm. We are advisors. We manage their money. There are parts of the business where we are fiduciaries. Levin: Yes, and that is the part that’s very confusing to folks, they think you—­ Blankfein: I know. Levin: They think you are fiduciaries, and then—­ Blankfein: Not in the market making context. Levin: Yes, but they are not told that not only are you not a fiduciary, you are betting against the same security that you are selling to them. You don’t disclose that. That’s worse than not being a fiduciary. That is being in a conflict of interest situation. Blankfein: I don’t think our clients care or they should care what our positions are—­ Levin: That you are betting against the security you are selling to them? They don’t care? Blankfein: You say betting against—­ Levin: Yes, you are betting. You are going short against the very security . . . I read you over and over and over again, you are selling securities, many of which are described as crap by your own sales force internally . . . there is an inherent conflict when you don’t disclose to your client that this security you are buying from us has obviously a short side, but we are the people who are keeping the short on this one. We are betting against this security succeeding, and you don’t think that is relevant to a client? Blankfein: We live in different contexts and this is a professional—­this is a market—­ Levin: I am just calling it in an inhuman context. Blankfein: In a human context, the markets work on transparency with respect to what the item is. It doesn’t carry representations just of what a position the seller has. Just think of buying from a stock exchange or a futures market. You are not even supposed to know who’s on the other side. You could have the biggest mutual fund in the world selling all its position in something. They could hate it. You would never know that if you were a buyer of a stock. . . . Liquidity in the market demands transparency, that the thing is supposed to do what it is supposed to do. The people who are coming to us for risk in the housing market wanted to have a security that gave them exposure to the housing market and that’s what they got. The unfortunate thing . . . is that the housing market went south very quickly . . . and so people lost money in it.

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But the security itself delivered the specific exposure that the client wanted to have.77

Many observers of this exchange were impressed by Levin’s hardball questions, and perceived Blankfein as evading responsibility. But it should be clear by now that Blankfein was accurately conveying what Goldman sells to its clients. It sells the best of the thing you want. This is a relational exchange. The client asked for risk, asked for financial exposure. Why should Goldman be responsible if the risk of that exposure exposes itself? As part of a Business Standards review initiated by Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman examined its approach to conflicts that arise in its business and how it could strengthen procedures for resolving them. In particular, the firm reviewed the various ways in which its role in serving one client may intersect with its role in serving other clients or with its own interests. And it decided to enhance disclosure and origination standards for each business unit responsible for originating structured product securities, and to provide explanations in plain language to its clients about Goldman’s conflict resolution and business selection processes, including describing activities it might continue to conduct while advising or financing a particular client.78 In other words, after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Goldman said: We’ll try to be clearer with everyone about how risky this is. We won’t change what we’re selling. We’ll just do a better job explaining to our clients, and to ourselves, how liquid the whole enterprise is.

Whatever the severity of the interruption, whatever the deconstruction or secularization or immolation that transpires in society, no one is free of in­ stitutional dependency. We are all embedded in structures of our containment. We are all hedged. All of us submit ourselves to systems in which we do not hold all the parts. There is no secular safe haven out there wherein we can escape such contingency. We cannot avoid being organized, being structured into financing, being counted in a demographic, being responsible for things in the small print we never knew would hold us accountable. Let me try to say this in a less absurdly opaque way. Why did the financial crisis happen? Here is a summary of the crisis from the most popular financial textbook for business schools:

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The availability of very low interest rates was accompanied by the willingness of individuals, businesses, and institutions to take on large amounts of debt. Individuals in the United States were not saving and had borrowed large amounts on their credit cards and their homes in the form of mortgages and home equity loans. Lenders were offering large numbers of subprime mortgages to home purchasers with low credit scores. The deregulation of financial institutions and lax oversight by government regulatory agencies and private debt rating agencies contributed to the severity of the financial crisis. Financial institutions and business firms borrowed large amounts of debt in an attempt to reach out for a little higher return for their investors. Individuals, financial institutions, and business firms failed to “balance” the financial principle relation to “risk versus return” with the result being the taking on of excessive risk.79

Notice how blame is distributed among “individuals, businesses, and institutions.” This view suggests an equality of culpability among those groups. Indeed, the explanation unfolds with careful neutrality, dropping a measure of blame each for individuals, businesses, and financial institutions. The de­ scription suggests that no one was more powerful than anyone else. Individuals did their part, so did lenders, and so did government. Our complicity is our connectivity, this explanation suggests, remaining neutral on that connection. Others are, of course, not so mild. Resisting Žižek’s account of desire in capitalism, the political scientist Jodi Dean has observed, “Desire alone can’t account for the persistence of capitalism. Capitalism cannot be reduced to our desire for it. Rather, capitalism persists as a system of practices in which we are caught.”80 Dean turns us away from thinking of ourselves as consumers, and instead frames individuals as captives. In the documents that Goldman Sachs made available to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the firm stated that it “did not have access to any special information that caused [it] to know that the US housing market would collapse.”81 It explained that its risk management decisions were motivated not by any collective view of what would happen next, but rather by fear of the unknown. The firm’s risk management processes did not, and could not, provide absolute clarity; they underscored deep uncertainty about evolving conditions in the US residential housing mar­ ket. That uncertainty dictated our decision to attempt to reduce the firm’s overall risk.82

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Jodi Dean points us to this passage, and wickedly asks a question that returns us to religion. She writes, “The Goldman Sachs’ report presumes a binary of absolute clarity versus deep uncertainty, of knowledge of what would happen next opposed to fear of the unknown. It’s as if Goldman Sachs’ defense is that it is not God.”83 I hold in check the question of the divine sensibility of Goldman and focus instead on how Goldman here admits its own contingency. It, too, exists in a system that it does not fully control. Goldman says: we did the best we could do, given our principles, given our context, given the facts. And our job—­as scholars and humans and citizens—­is to decide: would we have done any differently?

For more than two years, Goldman Sachs’s reputation was under fire for its alleged role in the financial crisis. On August 9, 2012, the US Justice Department (DOJ) announced it wouldn’t prosecute the firm. In response to the DOJ’s announcement, Blankfein’s interrogator, Senator Levin, said in a statement, “Whether the decision by the Department of Justice is the pro­ duct of weak laws or weak enforcement, Goldman Sachs’ actions were deceptive and immoral.”84 It is for us, a public, now to decide whether Levin was right to slap Goldman right before the feds let Goldman go—­for the feds to be catcalling as they take off the cuffs. As Richard Posner has recently explained, the financial crisis cannot be neatly blamed on financial industries, since financial industries were, by and large, functioning within the (wrongly drawn, by his view) parameters of the law. Deregulation was the problem, he argued, pointing the finger back at figures like Levin. “The movement to deregulate the financial industry went too far by exaggerating the resilience—­ the self-­healing powers—­of laissez-­faire capitalism,” Posner said.85 Goldman agreed. In his testimony before Congress, Steven Strongin, head of research at the firm, would report: Some financial firms used the relatively favorable rules around securitization to reduce the capital held against poor quality loans. They also made their balance sheets appear healthier than they were by reporting that they were holding “good” public securities, rather than the high risk loans underlying these securities.86

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Strongin emphasized from the outset that whatever the banks did, they did because the rules let them do it. Appearing healthy is a tolerable falsification. Strongin continued: The combination of these actions taken by some financial firms left the system under-­capitalized and brought the balance sheets of all financial firms into question—­regardless of whether a specific firm had engaged in these questionable strategies. . . . It is precisely this loss of faith in the balance sheets of all financial firms that moved this problem from an institution specific crisis into a general one, and caused all firms (healthy or not) to require government assistance.87

It is precisely this loss of faith in the balance sheets of all financial firms that moved this problem from an institution specific crisis into a general one. Acquiring the right facts, maintaining strong relations, absorbing critique—­in­ stitutions need all these things. But more than anything else, Strongin suggested, institutions also need something quite intangible. Our belief in them. Why do you keep going to church? Why do you stay in that marriage? Why do you buy a house for which you can’t afford the down payment (and why did it get sold to you)? Faith creeps into answers, clumsily and embarrassingly. Because maybe there is a good here. Because I want to be­ lieve. The roots of credit in faith, evident in the general appearance of financial services today, constitute what Marieke de Goode calls “a genealogy of finance,” whereby our confidence in money is established through all manner of religious and artistic representation.88 In this moment in his testimony, a Goldman Sachs employee says it so we can all hear. At some point, what an institution does ceases to matter. What matters is what you believe about what it, the institution, can do. He suggests that institutions can’t be institutions unless we are somehow, somehow despite ourselves, latched onto them, believing in them.

“You must be here about the rabbis,” he says, arranging his Blackberry in line with his napkin, straightening his fork to be perfectly parallel with his place setting. “Well,” I say, “not exactly. I know that there is an intense

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culture at Goldman, and I guess I want to understand what that culture produces. What do you think is the thing Goldman makes?” “That’s easy,” he replies, knee jiggling under the table. “We reply to the limits of the markets and we organize its exchanges.” “For the whole economy?” I laugh. “Aren’t you worried that makes you sound like God, or Oz, or Donald Trump?” “No,” he says, pointing his finger in my direction, very serious, and not a little proud. “If you knew what the economy was really like, I think you’d be asking whether that makes me a mobster. That’s why we were investigated, and that’s why we got to keep going: because the line between a mobster and a rabbi is entirely in how you understand the law, and we are, like the rabbis, really, really good at reading the law.” “I know I said I wouldn’t quote you, but can I quote you on that?” “Sure,” he says. “But be sure you mention that I think the Old Testament god was a mobster. That’s why I stopped going to synagogue long ago.”

Like all scholars, I tend to look for certain things more than others. In my work, I am seeking to offer a profile of the present, and I do so through a variety of histories of the word religion. I choose this word with a little wickedness. It is a word people have spilled no little ink deriding, and one over which many people claim we have spilled no little blood defending. On both points (derision and defense) there are even more words. Is religion finally an unsalvageable category? Is what they’re fighting over really about religion? I invite those discussions. I invite your sense of what religion names in this time and place. I invite those discussions because I think if we have them, we may begin to reply to both the derision and the defense. We will begin, in other words, to see what we value. The thing I found most moving about Goldman employees—­in reading their vast testimony before multiple national government committees, in consuming their web presence through blogs and message boards, or in finding in their apostate literature accounts of their experiences—­was the way they felt unabashed about their work. In religious studies, we might speak of  their piety, reaching for a word to describe the way they can be si­mul­ taneously very wakeful, critical, and thoughtful about every deal, yet never finally question the soundness of their overarching institutional enterprise.

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“This is a good place to work,” you hear, time and again. “These are good people, smart people, working to the maximum of their capacity.” Religious studies is a field of inquiry committed to understanding this devotion with a neutral eye. Scholars of religion have explained a wide variety of human practices, including acts of violence and submission, with a quietly steady interest in understanding the theological, ritual, or historical logic that makes someone sacrifice an animal to a deity, or wage war with an entire community of people. Take the facts of the case, and show how the case can be made. It is very easy to imagine that animal sacrifice or holy crusades are something other people do out there. It is easy to believe that we occupy an era after miracles, after divine prophecy, and after spiritual calling. It is easy to be disenchanted, even cynical, about everything. About what collectives can do, and what our values might be. Universities are places where it is rare to hear people speak with easy fondness about their institutions. Very often you hear resignation about and disdain for their employers. This is a critique inlaid with examples indicating how far their institutions have fallen from the ideal of higher education. Goldman employees like where they work. We could call this a dislikable greed, a moral bankruptcy, or a convenient delusion. If you want to find hatred toward Goldman, there is plenty of it, filling Tumblr pages and Twitter feeds, sitting in comic punchlines and newspaper editorials. Rather than sit in that aversion, I ask what other institutions besides Goldman could we imagine to be worth creating, and worth sustaining? What kind of culture carriers are we now, in this epochal time, in this geographic place? And what do we think our work, our culture, our commitment, is supposed to make, to do, out there? If we do not have answers, if we do not have institutional actions commensurate with our answers, I ask, finally: why are we here? And what do we see of the world from where we stand? “So long as the actions of the masses are not commensurate with the reach and effectiveness of the media, dissent will continue to be atomized, and group behavior erratic, connected more by consumption than by communitarian desires,” writes the anthropologist Néstor García Canclini.89 Goldman persists because it has made—­for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health—­a religion. If its religion isn’t ours, what is?

Conclusion Family Matters

After your flight is over, you disembark and begin to walk from the arrival gate toward customs. If you have flown into the United States from another country, you fill out the US Customs and Border Protection Declaration Form 6059B. The instructions at the top read as follows: Each arriving traveler or responsible family member must provide the following information (only ONE written declaration per family is required). The term “family” is defined as “members of a family residing in the same household who are related by blood, marriage, domestic relationship, or adoption.”

The form then asks for a name, birthdate, address, and passport number for the representative family member. The implication of the form is that if you are a family you will reside together at a home that you share or at a hotel where you will stay together during your visit. The form then directs its questions to assess the goods you are bringing with you into the country. You are asked if “I am (We are) bringing” fruits, plants, insects, meats, cell cultures, or soil. You are asked if you’ve been in close contact with livestock. You are asked if you are bringing more than ten thousand dollars into the country. You are asked if you have articles for sale. You are asked the value of the goods you have purchased, including the gifts you plan to bring other people. “Welcome to the United States!” the document exclaims. Your entry into the United States involves two reckonings. First, an assessment of your

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family status: is the party with whom I am traveling a family? Second, an assessment of your consumer success: what did I acquire? Customs and Border Protection exists (in its own language) “to safeguard America’s borders thereby protecting the public from dangerous people and materials while enhancing the Nation’s global economic competitiveness by enabling legitimate trade and travel.” Customs Border Protection describes itself as on the defense against bad people and bad products, as well as embracing the possibility of right families and right goods moving straightforwardly. You are welcomed as a person rightly located: in geographic space, genealogical affinity, and fair commerce. In his history of port customhouses in the early national United States, Gautham Rao explains how customs officers were “reconceived as redistributive, police, and political institutions.”1 Customs officials did not just uphold the rule of law but also instructed new communities on the nature of the law. In Terrorist Assemblages (2007), Jasbir Puar argues effectively that there is nothing neutral about these instructions. “Insofar as racial profiling of the panopticon works to discipline the patriot, the informational profile works to accuse in advance of subject formation,” she explains, reflecting on the border patrol and homeland security screening. “The panopticon serves to isolate, centralize, and detain.”2 Form 6059B forms you into the readable subject needed for a decision to be made about whether you belong. Throughout this book, a variety of examples have been examined to discern the relationship between religion and consumption. As I focused on the social function of consumption, I was struck by how often the family appeared as sociological form and metaphorical exemplum. Family appeared as the founding community for a particular company; family appeared as the thing to be restored or protected through ritual or practice; family appeared as the commodity to sell; family appeared as a metaphor for working in a corporation. However much the family might be reorganized or queered, it endures as the story within every story. Many accounts of consumer culture focus on the gender of consumption; some new studies examine its racial elements.3 These studies demonstrate that consumer culture is not an expansively plural thing; it appears predictably, conditioned by social norms and in service to social anxiety. What must be underlined in any account of consumption is that the family as legal entity and fantastical concept is the irreducible social unit on which consumer behavior relies. In the history of its English-­language usage, family means usually one of two things: either a group of descendants of a common progenitor, or a group of persons who form a household. The latter suggests a bond forged

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for reasons of material contingency; the former depends on notions, explicit or inferred, of blood relation.4 Either way you define it, family is a claim of differentiating dependency: this us exists in part by how it distinguishes itself from all the other they. It turns out that companies and consumer goods do this, too, and not merely coincidentally so. Consumer goods succeed through the advertisement of the families and familial roles they inscribe through their consumption; companies survive through the facsimile of intimate structures of obedience and need. Succession planning, good governance, responsible expenditure, creative facilitation: running a family can be quite like running a business. And, of course, the advertisers and culture brokers know it. “10 Business Strategies to Organize Your Family Life,” the popular periodical Real Simple recommends, before advising that you “keep your values and top priority visible” and “don’t confuse long-­term strategies and short-­term tactics.”5 Your family is best run with business values; the best businesses are run with family values. According to the US Bureau of the Census, about 90 per­ cent of American businesses are family owned or controlled. Ranging in size from two-­person partnerships to Fortune 500 firms, these businesses account for half the nation’s employment and half its gross national product. What is clear from the literature on the history of the family is that it has always been an economic proposition. Is this how it must always be? Are we inevitably subjects of consumer interest and familial relation, understood as such by the state and rendered so by economic markets? The locution “family values” is usually applied by politically conservative movements to their domestic assignments for our social betterment. But if you watch commercial television, go to the movies, or read genre fiction, you find family values all over the place. Not the lamely myopic antiabortion or antihomosexuality family values but the family values in which the value of family is unquestioned. Even those sitcoms with the most pugnacious attitude toward family actors (All in the Family, Married . . . With Children, The Simpsons) still return the viewer, inexorably, to the intact family. The family is the only indissoluble form in the pantheon of American consumer culture. We know that humans structure their survival in a variety of ways. Yet it seems as if the family is the organizational imperative nobody can shake. Is there nothing that exceeds its grasp? In an essay written in late 1908, Sigmund Freud answered with a definitive no. The family was for Freud not unlike what the family is for contemporary network TV: the invariable idiom of his creativity. His essay, titled “Family Romances,” describes the

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common phenomenon in which children seek revenge against their parents through imaginary means. The child begins to fantasize that his birth parents are not actual but adoptive parents, or that his birth was the outcome of maternal infidelity. “The child’s imagination becomes engaged in the task of getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others, who, as a rule, are of higher social standing,” Freud wrote. The parents of adolescent children’s fantasies are wealthier, prettier, more loving versions of their given parents, and it is the children’s vengeance against their parents to fantasize greater happiness under the care of alter­nate versions. Dwelling in such a family romance is a way that children be­come independent of their parents’ authority: to conceive of another au­thority in their shadow to whom they commit voluntarily. Freud emphasized that this isn’t an abandonment of the family of origin. “The faithlessness and in­grat­ itude are only apparent,” he explained. “If we examine in detail the commonest of these imaginative romances, the replacement of both parents or of the father alone by grander people, we find that these new and aris­ tocratic parents are equipped with attributes that are derived entirely from real recollections of the actual and humble ones; so that in fact the child is not getting rid of his father but exalting him.” Rebellion in Freud is not a dismissal of the figures of our malcontent. Rather, it is a reckoning with their greatest magnification. “The child’s overvaluation of his parents survives as well in the dreams of normal adults,” he concluded.6 Such an account suggests that there is no way to escape the readmission to the familiar family sanctuary that follows every Ferris Bueller rebellion or midlife crisis. Portrayals of resistance to capitalism indicate the same recapitulation. Films that show a wisecracking hero taking down his boss don’t leave him unemployed at its conclusion. Invariably, our hero is self-­employed, more happily employed, or even—­and quite often—­now the boss. He also always wins the girl. There are often scenes in the credits that fast-­forward to chipper reproductive futures. Trying to escape the stock tableau of consumer culture can feel like a Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoon, in which the backdrop looks to be changing as their chase proceeds, but in fact is just repeating itself on an interminable loop: one cactus, gray mountain, fern cluster, three cacti, peach mountain; one cactus, gray mountain, fern cluster, three cacti, peach mountain . . . Religions usually have something to say about family organization. Texts explaining how humans relate to gods describe filial ties and elaborate genealogical trees; rituals that mark life-­cycle events describe how individuals enter right relations to the social whole. Yet just as religions inscribe proper

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families, so do they include serious criticisms of family. Elizabeth Clark has shown how a propagandistic attack on the family was essential to the ex­ pansion of ecclesiastical power in early Christianity, and scholars of Bud­ dhism have described how monasticism was interpreted as antifamilial.7 Even when religions reject the family, the family comes back, resituated in such a way as to manage the attacks. Shayne Clarke, for example, has described how “renunciation with or as a family is tightly woven into the very fab­ ric of Indian Buddhist renunciation and monasticisms.”8 And so rebuttal concludes in readmission: resistance to the form finds it taken up, again and again. We must seek escape hatches from these resilient reproductions. Con­ sider the seething critique of capital embedded in The Hunger Games (2008), Suzanne Collins’s young-­adult trilogy. In that series, the messianic heroine is pitted not against an amorphous monster but against Capitol City, the most elite and resplendent region in a country otherwise suffering from star­ vation. An annual sacrificial ritual—­the Hunger Games—­is designed largely for the viewing pleasure of the wealthy in that city. “To make it humiliating as well as torturous, the Capitol requires us to treat the Hunger Games as a festivity, a sporting event pitting every district against the others,” the heroine observes, explaining that at the end of this event the winning district will receive a year’s supply of bread as repayment for its successful circuses.9 Upon arriving in Capitol for the first time, the heroine encounters decadence. In other works of fiction, such a magical sight might elicit wonder from the provincial girl, but for her it only produces discomfort. “All the colors seem artificial, the pinks too deep, the greens too bright, the yellows painful to the eyes,” she explains.10 To be sure, the mythic plot of the Hunger Games story is familiar, trapping precocious children to triumph despite personal disadvantage and adult manipulation. The violence of the story, however, organized around a potential rebellion against Capitol, encourages an exploration of the precise ideology that this particular myth exposes and promotes. In an era without common scripture, popular serial fictions become the premise of new communities, and new discussions of familiar values. Toward the end of book 1 in the trilogy, the heroine reflects: “The Hunger Games are their weapon and you are not supposed to be able to defeat it. So now the Capitol will act as if they’ve been in control the whole time. . . . But that will only work if I play along with them.”11 Even as The Hunger Games magnifies itself as a commodity (through spinoff texts, films, and figurines), it also contains a plot to deconstruct the power of those goods.

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Strung throughout the series is a strong sense of family loyalty and the distracting press of heterosexual desire; at all times, the ability to beat those in Capitol City seems impossible alongside human contingency. The challenge of consumer society is not that you can’t imagine how to exit it. The difficulty is that you worry you will be left with nothing if you do: no goods, no family, no country. Conceiving of alternative structures of collectivity requires not that we eradicate human desire but that we imagine new ways to share what we have and care for those who have not. There is nothing easy about this work. It requires reimagining our every move and reconceiving every border. At stake is our capacity to achieve the real freedom sold in advertisements but occupied rarely in human life. Bringing such romances to critical reckoning ought to be the primary political work in this age of consumer reports and corporate religion.

Acknowledgments This book began not as a book but as a hope to author what I had privately called a commodity triptych. This was my bid to have a Joseph Cornell career as a scholar, to take seemingly unrelated found objects and make something coherent from their jumble. I imagined that I would write three essays about three different generic products, soap, cubicles, and crack­ers, and then write something about the patterns found in their developmental emergence in the marketplace. Such an ambition has the kind of coherence that makes scholarship appear logical and deductive, when in fact thinking work is rarely the result of a savvy strategic plan. At least, when it is, the results should not be trusted. Those who pound into the archive, the text, the population, or the petri dish something they believe to be there are vulnerable to producing a lie. Over the course of the last seven years, my own inquiries into the social nature of consumption emerged in part due to specific prompts from immediate interlocutors. Whether it was Kevin O’Neill asking me to think about the will or Sally Promey pressing me to consider the sensory, Skip Stout telling me to think more about big banks or Diane Winston asking me to study the news media, I was pressed into certain topical and thematic enclaves because people whom I respect stopped me in my tracks and asked me to linger on a problem I hadn’t yet realized was one. Sometimes the word for the kind of writing that results from such prompts is occasional. This is a strange label to apply, since all writing, even if it occurs occasionally, exists for an occasion. The attribute occasional can seem an undercut, implying that there is a kind of writing that is something else. Something more like revelation, perhaps, pulled systematically from the mind and offered to the world as a confident articulation of a private blueprint. (One example: when a young woman imagines herself to be a

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scholarly Joseph Cornell.) To say that I now dissent from such a view isn’t strong enough. I work actively against it. Scholarship cannot continue if we do not realize the interconnectivity of our isolated moments of scholarly quiet with the disquieting, challenging work of critical encounter, including suggestions or even imperatives to think about this or that. Universities require scholarship, yes, but even more than that they need conversation; they need listening; they need seminars more than they need more lectures. And so I thank those people who gave me the gift of conversation that produced so many of the routes recorded in these pages. I’d like to thank the following individuals for hosting me in contexts in which I presented, and received thoughtful and tough engagement on, early versions of this material: Adam Becker at New York University; Stephanie Brehm and Robert Orsi at Northwestern University; Chip Callahan at the University of Missouri at Columbia; Mark Cladis and Matthew Guterl at Brown University; Jonathan Ebel at the University of Illinois, Urbana-­Champaign; David Hempton and Ahmed Ragab at Harvard Divinity School; R. Marie Griffith at the John C. Danforth Center in Religion and Politics at Washington University; David Morgan at Duke University; Charles Irons and Brian Pennington at Elon University; Gary Laderman at Emory University; Kevin Lewis O’Neill at the University of Toronto; Inken Prohl at Universität Heidelberg; S. Brent Plate at Hamilton College; Nora Rubel at the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, University of Rochester; Jonathan Sheehan at the Center for the Study of Religion at the University of California, Berkeley; Dale E. Soden at Whitworth University; Steven Weitzman and Kathryn Gin Lum at Stanford University; and Deborah Whitehead at the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I also spoke on these subjects at annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the International Society for Media, Religion and Culture, and the biennial meetings of the Conference on Religion and American Culture. As I worked through the subjects in this book, I was reminded time and again that working with Laurie Maffly-­Kipp, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Mark Valeri on the History of Christian Practice Project was the most thorough four-­year graduate seminar a person could ask to take. In addition to their teaching, the project also gave me the gift of person that is Sally Promey (who is also, unsurprisingly, great at giving gifts). I thank all of them for their commitment to our camaraderie well past that onetime collaboration. The people associated with Goldman Sachs with whom I spoke taught me repeatedly that I could speak faster, think faster, and solve bigger prob-

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lems if I just made it my job to do so. This is, indeed, a mimetic prepotency. I am continually grateful for the many lessons they imparted about organizational life, corporate practice, and economic reason. There are so many things I would treat with a lot less subtlety or equivocation had I not been humbled by intellectual engagements with students at Yale University. I wrote this work while in conversation with Kati Curts, Molly Greene, Lucia Hulsether, Emily Johnson, Alex Kaloyanides, Sarah Koenig, Michelle Morgan, Tina Post, and Shari Rabin. I thank as well those who enrolled in seminars on religion and popular culture in fall 2009, fall 2010, spring 2013, and spring 2015, as well as those undergraduates in the class of 2013 who shared geek time with me. Each of you changed my think­ ing  life, my working life, and my institutional commitments. I hope you find in these pages things to write against; I also hope you see the ways your excitements and your criticisms inspired my own. Special appreciation goes out to Isabelle Erb, Annie Kors, Ryan Mendias, and Kimberly Schisler, each of whom offered timely, precise, and good-­ humored research assistance at key moments of fact-­checking and article gathering. Much of this book was written in response to my own daily reckonings with Yale as a place of both profound possibility and ongoing critical renovation. The people with whom I share this labor are too many to name, from the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate, from those working in the University-­Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct and the Whitney Humanities Center to those in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Yale College Dean’s Office, and the programs and departments in which I teach. I thank you all for your commitment to intellectual excellence, rigorous debate, and the daily work of making a just community. I want to publicly acknowledge Skip Stout as the prime-­time consigliere whose own scholarly ambition and personal pugnacity gave me plenty of room to express mine. I want to sing the praises of Jon Butler for never once flagging in his significant institutional commitments and, in doing so, modeling what it would mean to do likewise. I want to thank Tisa Wenger for giving me the idea that led to my imagining this book. And I thank Daphne Brooks and Matt Jacobson, George Chauncey and Ron Gregg, Carolyn Dean and Francesca Trivellato, Chris Hayes and Michael Della Rocca, Caleb Smith and Jenny Mellon, as well as Vanessa Agard-­Jones, Steve Davis, Jackie Goldsby, Inderpal Grewal, Amy Hungerford, Noreen Khawaja, Joanne Meyerowitz, Alan Mikhail, and Michael Warner, for their companionship.

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John Lardas Modern, Alan G. Thomas, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen are the only reasons I would ever say yes to one more thing. I am, as ever, hesitant, technophobic, and excited about the next new venture. Meeting Marko Geslani and David Walker when I did was one of the best strokes of luck I’ve had as a nerd. They don’t know how much I chase the height of their call, embodied not merely in their scholarship but also in their practices of mutual criticism and uncompromising sodality. Thank you for calling me out and reeling me back in, time and again. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about what I learned through Sam See. The fact that he is not here to tell me what is wrong with these pages is the very least of our losses. He would be the first to say: mourning is relation. And so we relate, into and through words spoken and unspoken, through the pages that you pass me, saying, repeatedly: wait, what, why, no, and yes. Intellectuals slow everything down. This is irritating to outsiders, who invariably ask us to cut to the chase or get over it, already. To those intellectuals who share the slow-­down time with me, and never, ever tell me to get over it, I am grateful for every hour, every glass, every hike, every quick reading and sharp insight: Courtney Bender, Jennifer Connerley, Jason Earle, Tracy Fessenden, Dana Katz, Margrethe Kearney, Kathryn Louns­bery, Shanny Luft, Leeza Meksin, Mary Ellen O’Donnell, Chad Seales, and Archana Sridhar. Kinneret Magid does not like hikes, but she sees things rightly, and reminds me when I go too far astray from practical reason. Chapter 8 is for you, with love, admiration, and respect for your gifts of true perception. My parents and my siblings have been among my most insistent interlocutors on the question of how to make a life within the cracks of capital. I thank John Lofton and Susan Lofton for the overalls, homemade bread, and rants about moneyed interests, and I thank Lauren and Brian for the commentarial soundtrack in our rebellion against them. That my mother copyedited many of these pages is just one testimony to the precision she shares. Brian gets a special nod as the inspiration for anything I try to say about finance in the twenty-­first century. He lives with empirical precision and ethical grace what I fumble to describe in prose. Finally, I have been studying consumer culture for too long to think that anything truly evades its encompassing frame. If there were something that could slip between its cracks, it would have to be something that refused sentiment. It would have to be something that presumed no public recognition or private predictability. It would be something that remained

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within the precarious challenge of encounter, and something that was, quite often, unsettled. To the one with whom such love is made, to the one with whom life is remade, this book is dedicated. I remain, as ever, ready for the next reading, and incited to revise.

Parts of this book appeared previously in published form. The author thanks the following for permission to reproduce her work in this book. Portions of the introduction appeared previously in “Consider the Neoliberal in American Religion,” in Religion and the Marketplace in the United States, edited by Jan Stievermann, Philip Goff, and Detlef Junker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 269–­88, and “The Sigh of the Oppressed? Marxism and Religion in America Today,” New Labor Forum 21, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 58–­65. A portion of chapter 1 first appeared as “Technology,” in Key Terms in Material Religion, edited by S. Brent Plate (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 245–­51. An earlier version of chapter 2 first appeared as “The Spirit in the Cubicle: A Religious History of the American Office,” in Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice, edited by Sally Promey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 135–­58. An earlier version of chapter 3 first appeared as “Ritualism Revived: From Scientia Ritus to Consumer Rites,” Journal of Ritual Studies 28, no. 1 (2014): 65–­76. It is reproduced with permission from Dr. Pamela J. Stewart and Prof. Andrew J. Strathern. An earlier version of chapter 4 first appeared as “Purifying America: Rites of Salvation in the Soap Campaign,” in How Purity Is Made, edited by Udo Simon and Petra Rösch (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2012), 393–­412. A portion of chapter 5 first appeared as “Religion and the American Celebrity,” Social Compass 58, no. 3 (September 2011): 346–­52. An earlier version of chapter 6 first appeared as “The Celebrification of Religion in the Age of Infotainment,” in Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media, edited by Diane Winston (New York: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2012), 421–­35.

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An earlier version of chapter 7 first appeared as “Religion and the Authority in American Parenting,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84, no. 3 (September 2016): 1–­36. A portion of chapter 9 appeared previously in “Consider the Neoliberal in American Religion,” in Religion and the Marketplace in the United States, edited by Jan Stievermann, Philip Goff, and Detlef Junker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 269–­88.

Notes P r e fac e

1. Barbara Kruger, Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am) (1987), photographic silkscreen on vinyl. 2. Dearly Departed Tours website, accessed November 29, 2016, http://dearlydeparted tours.com/. 3. James Bartlett, “Moving Marilyn,” United Hemispheres (February 2015), http://old .hemimag.us/2015/02/01/moving-­marilyn/. 4. Debra Kamin, “Dance History,” United Hemispheres (February 2015), http://old.hemimag .us/2015/02/01/dance-­history/. 5. Ibid. 6. Bartlett, “Moving Marilyn.” 7. Here the writings of Émile Durkheim are provoking, even determining, of my arguments. Durkheim famously described religion as the central form by which morals and norms are socially reinforced. Religion provides social control, cohesion, and purpose for people, as well as another means of communication and gathering for individuals to interact and reaffirm social norms. For Durkheim, religion isn’t just one means of social control within society; it is the means. In his words: “The idea of society is the soul of religion.” Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964 ©1912), 419. 8. Nachman Ben-­Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).

I n tr o d u ct i o n

1. On the historical periodization of consumption and consumer culture, see Jean-­ Christophe Agnew, “Coming Up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective,”

296

2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

notes to the introduction

in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 19–­39; Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Frank Trentmann, “Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption,” Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 3 (2004): 373–­401. On the role of sociality in human identity, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). This is an openly normative turn by me in a project that may otherwise seem relentlessly, even compulsively, descriptive. My hope is that anyone who latches on to this claim for religion realizes quickly that the normative is buried in every descriptive venture; defining the distinction between the two has been a tediously unrevelatory argumentative venture in the humanities. You may not like my normative turn. But in order to argue against it, your recourse will not be to description. And so: we enter the inevitable and important naming of stakes. Let us please do so. Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 39. David Chidester, Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Phillip Luke Sinitiere, Salvation with a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church, and American Christianity (New York: New York University Press, 2015); John R. Presley and John Sessions, “Islamic Economics: The Emergence of a New Paradigm,” Economic Journal 104, no. 424 (1994): 584–­96. See also Gordon Lynch, Understanding Theology and Popular Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (London: Routledge, 2004); José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Nick Couldry, Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (London: Routledge, 2003); Kim Knott, “The Secular Sacred: In-­Between or Both/and?,’ in Social Identities between the Sacred and the Secular, ed. Abby Day, Giselle Vincett, and Christopher R. Cotter (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013); Gordon Lynch, The Sacred in the Modern World: A Cultural Sociological Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Johanna Sumiala, Media and Ritual: Death, Community and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2013). Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967); Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). Thomas S. Bremer, Blessed with Tourists: The Borderlands of Religion and Tourism in San Antonio (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Aliza Fleischer, “The Tourist behind the Pilgrim in the Holy Land,” International Journal of Hospitality

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Management 19, no. 3 (September 2000): 311–­26; Aaron K. Ketchell, Holy Hills of the Ozarks: Religion and Tourism in Branson, Missouri (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Troy Messenger, Holy Leisure: Recreation and Religion in God’s Square Mile (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel Olsen, eds., Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys (New York: Routledge, 2006). 10. Chad E. Seales, “Corporate Chaplaincy and the American Workplace,” Religion Compass 6, no. 3 (2012): 195–­203. 11. For three recent examples of excellent scholarship revealing this level of commiseration, see Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Jan Stievermann, Philip Goff, and Detlef Junker, with Anthony Santoro and Daniel Silliman, eds., Religion and the Marketplace in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); François Gauthier and Tuomas Martikainen, eds., Religion in Consumer Society: Brands, Consumers and Markets (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013). 12. Timothy B. Lee, “Why History Suggests That Today’s Wage Stagnation Is Temporary,” Vox.com (21 May 2015), http://www.vox.com/2015/5/21/8630771/software-­slow-­wage -­growth. 13. “Celebrating Christmas and the Holidays, Then and Now,” Pew Research Center (18 December 2013), http://www.pewforum.org/2013/12/18/celebrating-­christmas-­and -­the-­holidays-­then-­and-­now/. 14. Elena Holodny, “Here’s What Americans Actually Spend Money On during Christmas,” Business Insider (11 December 2015), http://www.businessinsider.com/what-­americans -­actually-­spend-­money-­on-­during-­christmas-­2015-­12. 15. Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 15. 16. Through his anthropological research in Indonesia, Daromir Rudnyckyj has described spiritual economies as spaces where religious ethics and business management knowledge converge. Daromir Rudnyckyj, “Spiritual Economies: Islam and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia,” Cultural Anthropology 24, no. 1 (February 2009): 104–­41. 17. Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 10. 18. Michael Storper, “Lived Effects of the Contemporary Economy: Globalization, Inequality, and Consumer Society,” Public Culture 12, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 390–­91. See also Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). 19. Louise Story, “Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad,” New York Times (15 January 2007). 20. Storper, “Lived Effects of the Contemporary Economy,” 392. 21. Karl Marx, “From the Paris Notebooks (1844),” in Marx: Early Political Writings, ed. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), 90. 22. Thomas Merton, “Marxism and Monastic Perspectives,” in The Asian Journal of  Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions Books, 1973), 341. 23. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in The Marx-­Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 54.

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notes to chapter one

24. Dwight B. Billings, “Religion as Opposition: A Gramscian Analysis,” American Journal of Sociology 96, no. 1 (July 1990): 6–­9. 25. Merton, “Marxism and Monastic Perspectives,” 329.

C hapt e r O n e

1. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964 [1912]), 10. 2. Ibid., 419. 3. Ibid., 430. 4. Michael Hsu, “How to Overcome a Binge-­Watching Addiction,” Wall Street Journal (26 September 2014), http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-­to-­overcome-­a-­binge-­watching -­addiction-­1411748602. 5. Stephen Cass, “How Much Does the Internet Weigh?,” Discover (29 May 2007), http:// discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/how-­much-­does-­the-­internet-­weigh. 6. Luke Baumgarten, “Elevator Going Down: The Story of Muzak,” Red Bull Music Academy Magazine (27 September 2012), http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/magazine /history-­of-­muzak. 7. Edward Marshall, “ ‘Americans Are Dull and Sleepy,’ Says Major Squier: Inventor of the Wireless Telephone Who Gave the Patent Free to the Public Tells His Remarkable Philosophy of Life—­conservation of the Mind Most Important,” New York Times (21 May 1911). 8. Emma Montgomery, “Why We Need to Rethink Millennial ‘Binge Viewing,’ ” Broadcasting & Cable (5 December 2013), http://www.broadcastingcable.com/mbpt-­spotlight -­why-­we-­need-­rethink-­millennial-­binge-­viewing/125532. 9. National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, “Eating Disorder Types and Symptoms,” accessed 29 November 2016, http://www.anad.org/get -­information/about-­eating-­disorders/eating-­disorder-­types-­and-­symptoms/. 10. Michael M. Grynbaum, “Ultra-­Orthodox Jews Rally to Discuss Risks of Internet,” New York Times (20 May 2012), http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/nyregion/ultra -­orthodox-­jews-­hold-­rally-­on-­internet-­at-­citi-­field.html. 11. The best recent scholarship in this vein is comparative work by the sociologist Rivka Neriya-­Ben Shahar exploring the rejection and adoption of new technologies in conservative communities through comparative analyses of ultra-­Orthodox and Amish women. See, for example, Rivka Neriya-­Ben Shahar and Azi Lev-­On, “Gender, Religion, and New Media: Attitudes and Behaviors related to the Internet among Ultra-­ Orthodox Women Employed in Computerized Environments,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 875–­95. 12. Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 11.

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13. Jeffrey Hadden and Anson Shupe, eds., Secularization and Fundamentalism Reconsidered (Saint Paul: Paragon House, 1989), 110. 14. On the role of apocalyptic thinking in twentieth-­century fundamentalism, see Matthew Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 15. Some of this discussion appears in Kathryn Lofton, “Fundamentalism,” in Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, ed. Fedwa Malti-­Douglas (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 590–­96. 16. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 41. 17. Some of this discussion appears in Kathryn Lofton, “Commonly Modern: Rethinking the Modernist-­Fundamentalist Controversies,” Church History 83, no. 1 (March 2014): 137–­44. 18. See Susan Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 19. Bruce Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 27. 20. Almond, Appleby, and Sivan, Strong Religion, 51. 21. See Lawrence, Defenders of God; William Portier, “Fundamentalism in North America: A Modern Anti-­modernism,” Communio 28 (Fall 2001): 581–­98. 22. Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 16. This is what Mark Juergensmeyer will call “satanization,” a term that describes how a movement could construct the enemy as the “other” who lacks the morals, ideals, and often religious beliefs of the group looking to justify its acts. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). See especially “Satanization and the Stages of Empowerment,” 185–­91. 23. Lincoln, Holy Terrors, 16–­17. 24. Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Ivan Strenski, Why Politics Can’t Be Freed From Religion (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2010). 25. Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 150. 26. See, in particular, Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Chad Seales, The Secular Spectacle: Performing Religion in a Southern Town (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 27. Michael Billig would encourage us to think, too, about how the passengers on the planes were practicing nationalism through their submission to certain forms of personal identification and particular business destinations. In his book Banal Nationalism (London: Sage Publications, 1995), Billig demonstrates how assumptions of nationhood are regularly conveyed, often through small familiar turns of phrase, and how these reminders operate mindlessly beyond the level of conscious awareness, like the flag, which hangs unnoticed outside a public building.

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28. Almond, Appleby, and Sivan, Strong Religion, 28–­29. The authors make reference to the writings of the Viennese Zionist Nathan Birnbaum (1864–­1937), who in 1884 published his first pamphlet, Die Assimilationsucht [The Assimilation Disease/Mania], and the Iranian social critic Jalal Al-­e-­Ahmad (1923–­1969), who authored Occidentosis: A Plague from the West (Jakarta: Mizan Press, 1984 [1962]). 29. Twentieth-­century critiques of religion invariably emphasized how religion is especially a problem because of the way it becomes a habit rather than a conscious choice. 30. “Terror Goes Cyber: Capabilities of ISIS,” BatBlue: The Cloud Security Company (12 May 2015), http://www.batblue.com/terror-­goes-­cyber-­capabilities-­of-­isis/. 31. Ben Taub, “Journey to Jihad,” New Yorker (1 June 2015), 41. 32. Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger, ISIS: The State of Terror (New York: Ecco, 2015), 125. 33. Rukmini Callimachi, “ISIS and the Lonely Young American,” New York Times (27 June 2015), http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/world/americas/isis-­online-­recruiting -­american.html. 34. Jeremy Stolow, “Technology,” in Keywords in Religion, Media and Culture, ed. David Morgan (New York: Routledge, 2008), 195. 35. Raj Devasagayam, “Media Bingeing: A Qualitative Study of Psychological Influences,” in Once Retro Now Novel Again: 2014 Annual Spring Conference Proceedings of the Mar­ keting Management Association, 40–­44, accessed 26 November 2016, http://www.mma global.org/publications/Proceedings/2014-­MMA-­Spring-­C onference-­Proceedings .pdf. 36. Carles, “Friday Night Lights, ‘Better Person,’ Becoming a Man,” Grantland (blog; 25 July 2011), http://grantland.com/features/friday-­night-­lights-­better-­person-­becoming -­man/. 37. Jim Pagels, “Stop Binge-­Watching TV, ” Slate.com (9 July 2012), http://www.slate.com /blogs/browbeat/2012/07/09/binge_watching_tv_why_you_need_to_stop_.html. 38. Shea Bennett, “Is Social Media Making Us Antisocial?” (15 June 2012), http://www .adweek.com/socialtimes/antisocial-­media/465663; Joseph Grenny, “Is Facebook Mak­ ing Us Antisocial?” (7 May 2013), http://www.forbes.com/sites/josephgrenny/2013/05/07 /is-­facebook-­making-­us-­antisocial/; Tim Stanley, “Is the Facebook Generation Anti-­ social?” (28 May 2013), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/social-­media/10084186 /Is-­the-­Facebook-­generation-­anti-­social.html. 39. Consider the questionnaire in this pamphlet, Am I an Addict?, published by Narcotics Anonymous World Services Inc., which emphasizes in its questions the extent to which you “avoid people,” the extent to which your drug-­taking affects “your job or school performance,” or how drug use has led to lying, dysfunctional sexual relations, or an unhappy home life: https://www.na.org/admin/include/spaw2/uploads/pdf/lit files/us_english/IP/EN3107.pdf, accessed 26 November 2016. 40. Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 13. 41. For another example of this kind of binge consumer practice, see Rick Wilks’s account of periodic bouts of extreme consumption practiced by workers in extractive industries in Belize. Wilks, “Consumer Culture and Extractive Industry on the Margins of

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the World System,” in Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges, ed. John Brewer and Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 123–­44.

C hapt e r T w o

1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

Epigraph: News, Herman Miller Inc. Archive, Zeeland, MI. References to this research archive will be henceforth abbreviated to HMIA. The author would like to acknowledge Gloria Jacobs and Linda Baron at the Herman Miller Inc. Archive for their enthusiastic assistance with this research. Nathan Bomey, “Death to Cubicles, Menlo Innovations CEO Rich Sheridan Says,” AnnArbor.com, accessed 26 November 2016, http://www.annarbor.com/business-­review /death-­to-­cubicles-­menlo-­innovations-­rich-­sheridan-­says/#.UCaFnqNLfyI. Randall Braaksma, “ ‘Do Cubicles Kill?’ That Depends” (7 January 2010), http://www .hermanmiller.com/discover/do-­cubicles-­kill-­that-­depends/#more-­3319. Reprint of Robert L. Propst, “Change and Opportunity: The Action Office,” Contract, January 1965 (Pubs 7824, HMIA), n.p. Reprint of a conversation with Robert Propst, Architectural & Engineering News, 1965 (Pubs 7645, HMIA); Herman Miller news release, 25 January 1965 (News, HMIA). Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997), 120–­67. Richard J. Callahan Jr., Kathryn Lofton, and Chad E. Seales, “Allegories of Progress: Industrial Religion in the United States,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78, no. 1 (March 2010): 1–­39; Darren Dochuk, “Blessed by Oil, Cursed with Crude: God and Black Gold in the American Southwest,” Journal of American History 99, no. 1 (2012): 51–­61; Katherine Carté Engel, Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Sarah Hammond, “ ‘God Is My Partner’: An Evangelical Business Man Confronts Depression and War,” Church History 80, no. 3 (September 2011): 498–­519; Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Mark Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Hans Janssen, Mondrian/De Stijl (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2011); Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 205–­17; Maurice Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–­1985 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995); Barry Bergdoll et al., Bauhaus 1919–­1933: Workshops for Modernity, exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009). For an assessment of the history and anthropology of Levittown, Pennsylvania, see Dianne Harris, ed., Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).

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9. Judith A. Barter, “Designing for Democracy: Modernism and Its Utopias,” in Shaping the Modern: American Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1917–­65, Museum Studies (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2001), 16–­17. 10. In his manifesto on behalf of the study of things, Bill Brown defines his object this way: “The Thing becomes the most compelling name for that enigma that can only be encircled and which the object (by its presence) necessarily negates.” Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 5. See also Sherry Turkle, ed., Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 11. Herman Miller news release, 25 January 1965 (News, HMIA). 12. Ibid. 13. James Bratt and Christopher Meehan, Gathered at the River: Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Its People of Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Grand Rapids Area Council for the Humanities and William B. Eerdmans, 1993). 14. Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” in Abraham Kuyper, A Centennial Reader, ed. James D. Bratt (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), 488. On Kuyper, see James Bratt, Dutch Calvinism in Modern America: A History of a Conservative Subculture (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1984); James Bratt, “Abraham Kuyper’s Calvinism: Society, Economics, and Empire in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Calvin Rediscovered: The Impact of His Social and Economic Thought, ed. Edouard Dommen and James Bratt (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 79–­92. 15. From the time of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 to the beginning of the Great Depression, the Grand Rapids furniture community considered itself the center of the furniture universe. Christian G. Carron, Grand Rapids Furniture: The Story of America’s Furniture City (Grand Rapids, MI: Public Museum of Grand Rapids, 1998). 16. Phyllis Ross, “Merchandising the Modern: Gilbert Rohde at Herman Miller,” Journal of Design History 17, no. 4 (2004): 359–­96. 17. “Life Presents . . . Storage Wall,” Life (22 January 1945), 63–­7 1. 18. Joe Schwartz, How Design Happened at Herman Miller (Zeeland, MI: Herman Miller, 2006), 24. On the critical writings of George Nelson, see John Harwood, “The Wound Man: George Nelson and the ‘End of Architecture,’ ” Grey Room 31 (Spring 2008): 90–­115. 19. For an overview of Herman Miller design, see John R. Berry, Herman Miller: The Purpose of Design (New York: Rizzoli International, 2004). 20. Herman Miller news release, 25 January 1965 (News, HMIA). 21. Ibid. 22. Ann M. Morrison, “Action IS What Makes Herman Miller Climb,” Fortune (15 June 1981), 161–­77. 23. Iñaki Ábalos and Juan Herreros, Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 183. On Taylorism, see Stanley Abercrombie, “Office Supplies: Evolving Furniture for the Evolving Workplace,” in On the Job: Design and the American Office, ed. Donald Albrecht and Chrysanthe B. Broikos (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 80–­97. 24. Robert L. Propst, “The Action Office,” Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 8, no. 4 (August 1966): 299; Action Office 2 Workbook,

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1968–­72 (Pubs 9484, HMIA). Much of this research is available at the archives in Zeeland, including an elaborate questionnaire focused on soliciting replies to this set of basic queries: “What, for example, is the purpose of an office? What is the nature of work in offices? What are the factors that influence the health and productivity of peo­ ple who use offices? How can materials, designs, space, activities, and human factors be interrelated to improve the net result of their interaction?” Propst, “The Action Office,” 300. 25. The Action Office, Herman Miller brochure, 1964 (BROC Aoi6, HMIA). 26. Propst, “Change and Opportunity.” 27. Herman Miller brochure, 1978 (BROC A019, HMIA). 28. Propst, “Change and Opportunity.” Propst echoed his contemporary Eliot Noyes, who worked as Consultant Director of Design at IBM. IBM was not simply a maker of business machines, Noyes argued in a 1966 interview. Rather, it was in the business of controlling, organizing, and redistributing information: “If you get to the very heart of the matter, what IBM really does is to help man extend his control over his environment.” Quoted in John Harwood, “The White Room: Eliot Noyes and the Logic of the Information Age Interior,” Grey Room 12 (Summer 2003): 13. IBM would be among the first companies to invest in Action Office furnishings. 29. Robert Propst, “Human Productivity in Offices,” 1961 (BROC A062, HMIA). “The human body is no longer postulated as the agent of space in either pictorial or sculptural art,” Clement Greenberg asserted in 1958—­“now it is eyesight alone.” In Eyesight Alone, the art historian Caroline A. Jones considers this sensorial emphasis, encouraging analysis of modernism to take up its invitation to visualization. “At its narrowest, the modernist visibility might describe the aesthetic protocols required by a specific abstract painting—­what may and may not be seen there according to an art world expert. At its broadest, it involves the way cities are laid out in grids to manipulate urban light and shade, with streets widened to provide clear thoroughfares for managing fire and controlling urban unrest.” Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xvii. 30. Robert Propst, “Human Productivity in Offices: Research Division, Project #4,” 1962 (BROC A063, HMIA). 31. Propst, “Human Productivity in Offices,” 1961 (BROC A062, HMIA). 32. “Local Publicity Release,” Sales Aids Information, December 1964 (BROC Aoi5, HMIA). 33. Robert L. Propst, The Office: A Facility Built on Change (Elmhurst, IL: Business Press International, 1968), 25. 34. Propst, “Human Productivity in Offices.” 35. Joe Schwartz, How Design Happened at Herman Miller (Zeeland, MI: Herman Miller, 2006), 40. Schwartz details the emergence of the Action Office, see pp. 39–­58. 36. Herman Miller news release, 17 September 1968 (News, HMIA). 37. Herman Miller brochure, 1978–­80 (BROC A010, HMIA). 38. “Local Publicity Release,” Sales Aids Information, December 1964 (BROC Aoi5, HMIA). 39. “Hard N.Y. Drive Starting for Action Office II Line,” Home Furnishings Daily, 1969 (BROC A099, HMIA).

304

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40. Herman Miller news release, 17 September 1968 (News, HMIA). 41. Propst, The Office, 27. 42. Herman Miller news release, 17 September 1968 (News, HMIA). 43. Reprint of article from Progressive Architecture, November 1969, p. 108 (Pubs 7734, HMIA). 44. Action Office 2 Workbook, 1968–­72 (Pubs 9484, HMIA). 45. Yvonne Abraham, “The Man behind the Cubicle,” Metropolis (November 1998), http:// www.metropolismag.com/html/content_1198/n098man.htm. 46. Schwartz, How Design Happened at Herman Miller, 58. 47. Nearly every early promotion of the AO2 included this small advertisement: “This data is well defined and documented in an easy-­to-­read book entitled ‘The Office—­A Facility Based on Change’ written by Bob Propst and published by Business Press International. Hard Bound, single copy press in the USA is $9.95. Quantity prices are available by writing the publisher.” Action Office 2 Workbook, 1968–­72 (Pubs 9484, HMIA); Propst, The Office, 19. 48. Propst, The Office, 29. 49. Gropius quoted in Christopher Wilk, ed., Modernism 1914–­1939: Designing a New World (London: V&A Publications, 2006), 11. 50. The Action Office, Herman Miller brochure, 1964 (BROC Aoi6, HMIA). 51. Herman Miller brochure, 1973 (BROC A093, HMIA); Herman Miller brochure, 1969 (BROC A027, HMIA). 52. Herman Miller news release, 25 January 1965 (News, HMIA). 53. Propst, The Office, 71, 63. 54. The Action Office, Herman Miller brochure, 1964 (BROC Aoi6, HMIA). 55. Mark Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 6, 27. 56. Bruno Latour, “Technology Is Society Made Durable,” Sociological Review 38, no. 1 (May 1990): 129. 57. Abraham, “The Man behind the Cubicle.” 58. “The Numbers,” Spirit: Southwest Airlines Magazine (November 2011), 35. 59. Jeff Miller, “Things You Didn’t Know about Office Furniture Design,” Business of Furni­ ture (8 June 2016), 83–­85. The sale of cubicles have held steady since 2001. Rhoda Miel, “Cubicle Debacle: Office Furniture Sales Fall,” Plastics News 13, no. 29 (17 September 2001): 10. 60. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 304. 61. Abraham, “The Man behind the Cubicle.” 62. Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 19. 63. The origins of Oneida flatware can be found in the Oneida Perfectionists who settled in Upstate New York; the origins of Amana Refrigeration, Inc. are in the Amana Colony of eastern Iowa; Moravian cookies, available for sale from the Salem Baking Company, have their origin in a particular community of Pietists who moved from Europe to North Carolina in the seventeenth century. For more on the utopian communities

305

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that originated these commercial products, see Donald E. Pitzer, ed., America’s Communal Utopias (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 64. On spirituality and design at Ikea, see Lauren Collins, “House Perfect,” New Yorker (3 October 2011), 54–­65; at Apple, see Walter Isaacson, “Design Principles,” chap. 26 in Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 340–­47; at Wal-­Mart, see Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-­Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

C hapt e r T hr e e

1. Mark Oppenheimer, “ ‘Purity Balls’ Get Attention, but Might Not Be All They Claim,” New York Times (20 July 2012), http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/us/purity-­balls -­local-­tradition-­or-­national-­trend.html. 2. Generations of Light, accessed 26 November 2016, https://www.generationsoflight.com/. 3. Ibid. 4. Wilson quoted in Erin Emery, “Dads, Daughters Celebrate Bond: ‘Purity Ball’ in Colorado Springs Focuses on Healthy Relationships and Abstinence,” Denver Post (7 March 2002); Pamela Jean, “Tell Me—­what’s So Wrong with a ‘Purity Ball’?,” Digital Journal (16 March 2007), http://digitaljournal.com/article/141227; Ovetta Sampson, “Broadmoor Formal Aims to Reinforce Importance of Father-­Daughter Bond,” Colorado Springs Gazette (8 March 2001). 5. Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart, “Embodiment and Communication: Two Frames for the Analysis of Ritual,” Social Anthropology 6, no. 2 (1998): 245. 6. I discuss this in Kathryn Lofton, chap. 1 of Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 20–­50. 7. James Bentley, Ritualism and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Attempt to Legislate for Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); L. E. Ellsworth, Charles Lowder and the Ritualist Movement (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1982); Nigel Yates, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 8. Jack Goody, “Against ‘Ritual’: Loosely Structured Thoughts on a Loosely Defined Topic,” in Secular Ritual, ed. Sally Falk Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1977), 25–­35. 9. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 10. Louis Pope Gratacap, Apologia pro Ritu: Philosophy of Ritual (New York: J. Pott, 1887), 108. 11. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) 1:58, 68. 12. Ibid., 1:69, 71. 13. Charles H. Hall, True Protestant Ritualism: Being a Review of a Book Entitled “The Law of Ritualism” (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1867), 11.

306

notes to chapter three

14. John Henry Hopkins, The Law of Ritualism (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866), 2–­3. 15. As Jean Comaroff has said, “The whole point about the Protestant tradition is that Providence has given you not only the means, but the obligation to constantly test sovereign truths against the world, against experience, and thus to bring it up to date, to make it speak truth to the world in which you live. This was how the liberal humanist tradition emerged within Protestantism in Europe.” From an interview with Comaroff, “God Was on Everybody’s Side.” Jean Comaroff, “God Was on Everybody’s Side,” Immanent Frame (blog; 25 January 2010), http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/. 16. Anon., Conversations on Ritualism (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1867), 19. 17. Hopkins, The Law of Ritualism, 87. 18. Ibid., 92. 19. John Medley, A Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese of Fredericton: Delivered at His Eighth Triennial Visitation, in the Church of St. Paul’s, Portland, St. John, June 30th, 1868 (London: Macmillan, 1868), 18–­19. 20. Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6–­9. 21. Although Philippe Buc demonstrates that medieval churchmen worried about ritual excess, he also warns “against the use of the concept of ritual for the historiography of the Middle Ages,” and argues that “there can be no anthropological readings of rituals depicted in medieval texts.” Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 4. 22. The seven sacraments, made official in 1439, were baptism, confirmation, marriage, penance, communion, ordination, and extreme unction. The Protestant reformers gen­ erally reduced these to two—­baptism and communion—­but they disagreed to a con­ siderable degree on exactly what took place during a sacrament. Muir points us to the fifteenth-­century officiating of seven sacraments, and their sixteenth-­century disputation, as key historical facts in the modern instantiation of ritual. Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, x. 23. Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-­Century Lyon,” Past and Present 90, no. 1 (1981): 59. 24. Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 215, 299. 25. J. Milton Peck, What Are We to Understand by “Ritualism”? (Danville, PA: Montour American Office, 1874), 2–­3. 26. “Ritualistic Troubles,” Chicago Daily Tribune (30 March 1881). 27. Kai-­wing Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics, and Lineage Discourse (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 8. 28. Eugene R. Fairweather, ed., The Oxford Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 9. 29. Phoebe B. Stanton, The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture: An Episode in Taste, 1840–­1856 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), xx. 30. Bentley, Ritualism and Politics in Victorian Britain, 46–­79. 31. “Ritualism: Its Remarkable Growth in England,” Chicago Daily Tribune (2 January 1873). 32. “Religion versus Ritualism,” Washington Post (19 March 1896).

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33. Larry Crockett, “The Oxford Movement and the 19th-­Century Episcopal Church: Anglo-­Catholic Ecclesiology and the American Experience,” Quodlibet Journal 1, no. 5 (1999), http://www.quodlibet.net/articles/crockett-­oxford.shtml. 34. “Ritual Decried by Eliot,” Chicago Daily Tribune (22 January 1907). 35. Hall, True Protestant Ritualism, 187–­93. 36. Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 37. Anon., Conversations on Ritualism, 41. 38. Hopkins, The Law of Ritualism, 80. 39. David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 40. See, for example, “Gossip from New York,” Chicago Tribune (10 February 1868). 41. See, for example, “Religious News,” Chicago Tribune (22 February 1874). 42. “Our Ritualistic Brethren,” Washington Post (23 January 1881). 43. “The Future of Ritualism,” Chicago Tribune (28 February 1869). 44. Ryan K. Smith, Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti-­Catholicism and American Church Designs in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 5; see also Keya Catherine Kraft, “Gothic Mansions and Victorian Churches: Lit­ erary Discourses on Nineteenth-­Century Architecture” (PhD diss., Washington Uni­ versity, 2009). 45. Smith, Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses, 9. 46. “Ritualism: Trouble in a Detroit Church,” Chicago Daily Tribune (12 April 1875). 47. “The Ritualistic Controversy,” Chicago Tribune (23 April 1867). 48. “Religious,” Chicago Tribune (28 April 1867). 49. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 82. 50. Anon., Conversations on Ritualism, 42–­48. 51. Ibid., 16–­17. 52. Smith, Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses, 17; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–­1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 192. 53. Rita R. Wright, “Jane Ellen Harrison’s ‘Handmaiden No More’: Victorian Ritualism and the Fine Arts” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 2009); Margaret M. Armstrong, “Sacraments, Sacrifice, and Ritual: High Church Mysticism in the Letters of Jane Ellen Harrison and Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 2007). 54. Bentley, Ritualism and Politics in Victorian Britain, 34; see also Janna Smartt Chance, “Obeying God rather than Men: Protestant Individualism and the Empowerment of Victorian Women” (PhD diss., Rice University, 2008). 55. Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); David Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-­Catholicism and Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies 25, no. 2 (1982): 181–­200; Douglass Shand-­Tucci, Ralph Adams Cram: Life and Architecture, 2 vols. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996, 2005).

308

notes to chapter four

56. James C. Whisenant, “Anti-­ritualism and the Division of the Evangelical Party in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1998). 57. Lears, No Place of Grace, 196. 58. Scott deHart, “Anglo-­Catholics and the Vestment Controversy Literature in the Nineteenth Century, with Special Reference to the Question of Authority” (PhD diss., Coventry University, 1998); Sarah LaVigne, “Mending a Rupture: Vestment Revival in the Episcopal Church, 1870–­1930” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2011). 59. “The Ritualistic Controversy,” Chicago Tribune (28 March 1869).

C hapt e r F o u r

1. Rachel Stults and Natalia Mielczarek, “Hotel Ditches Nightstand Bibles,” Tennessean (Nashville; 25 March 2008). 2. Adelle M. Banks, “Beyond Gideon: Hotels Offer Expanded List of Religious Reading,” USA Today (7 April 2008). 3. RitualWell.org, “About Ritual,” accessed 26 November 2016, http://ritualwell.org/about -­ritual. 4. RitualWell.org, “About Us,” accessed 30 November 2016, http://ritualwell.org/aboutus. 5. Daniel Radosh, Rapture Ready! (New York: Scribner, 2008), 44–­45. 6. Neela Banerjee, “Americans Changes Faiths at Rising Rate, Report Finds,” New York Times (25 February 2008). “Religion in America: A Spiritual Marketplace,” Week (14 March 2008). 7. “The Spiritual Connection,” O, The Oprah Magazine (May 2008), 278. 8. On the role of personal development in contemporary spirituality, see Paul Heelas, Linda Woodhead, B. Seel, Karin Tusting, and B. Szerszynski, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). 9. Gary Cross, An All-­Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 22. 10. “Cleaning Up Everywhere: Many Forces Are at Work to Raise Standards,” Cleanliness Journal 2, no. 2 (January 1929): 15. 11. Even within Wesleyan lore, cleanliness was a minor theme, as Wesley’s own 1764 treatise, Primitive Physick, devoted no special part to bathing, despite its comprehensive discussion of home remedies for a variety of domestic issues. 12. Claudia Bushman and Richard Bushman, “The Early History of Cleanliness in America,” Journal of American History 74, no. 4 (1988): 1238. 13. Charles Goodrum and Helen Dalrymple, Advertising in America: The First 100 Years (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 49–­56. 14. Ibid., 51. 15. Ibid., 52. 16. Kerry Segrave, Endorsements in Advertising: A Social History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 7.

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17. Vincent Vinikas, “Lustrum of the Cleanliness Institute, 1927–­1932,” Journal of Social History 22, no. 4 (1989): 614. 18. Washington Gladden, Addresses of Washington Gladden, D.D. and Hon. Benjamin Butterworth on the Occasion of the Seventeenth Semi-­Annual Dividend Meeting at Ivory­ dale, Ohio, February 3, 1896 (Ivorydale, OH, 1896). 19. Ibid., 615. 20. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (London: Routledge, 1995), 226. 21. Ivory soap ad, Harper’s Weekly, 10 May 1902, p. 612. 22. On the role of hygiene in American missions, see Rennie B. Schoepflin, “The Mythic Mission Lands: Medical Missionary Literature, American Children, and Cultural Iden­ tity,” in Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America, ed. Charles L. Cohen and Paul S. Boyer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 72–­104. 23. Goodrum and Dalrymple, Advertising in America, 53. 24. Ibid., 51. 25. Leslie Fiedler, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,” in Five Approaches of Literary Criticism, ed. Wilbur S. Scott (New York: Collier, 1962), 309. 26. Jonathan Weinberg, Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), 33. 27. Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of  Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 37. 28. Bushman and Bushman, “The Early History of Cleanliness,” 1228. 29. Ibid., 1231. 30. “Comments of the Press,” Cleanliness Journal 1, no. 1(1927): 9. 31. Vinikas, “Lustrum of the Cleanliness Institute,” 613ff. 32. “Editors Enlist in the Cause of Cleanliness,” Cleanliness Journal 1, no. 2 (October 1927): 11. 33. Grace T. Hallock, After the Rain: Cleanliness Customs of Children in Many Lands (New York: Cleanliness Institute, 1927), 34, 41, 70. 34. C. Margaret Munson, Outline for Cleanliness Teaching Based on an Analysis of 100 Courses of Study (New York: Cleanliness Institute, 1931), 3. 35. Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 135. 36. Munson, Outline for Cleanliness Teaching, 6. 37. Frederick Houghton, First Lessons in English for Foreigners in Evening Schools (New York: American Book Company, 1911), 69. 38. Munson, Outline for Cleanliness Teaching, 8 and 14ff. 39. Gladys Spicer, “Next To Godliness: Many Faiths Require Clean Hands as Religious Symbols of Divine Acceptance,” Cleanliness Journal 4, no. 1 (November 1930): 14–­15. 40. John H. Finley, “Cleanliness Basic to Other Virtues,” Cleanliness Journal 1, no. 1 (July 1927): 7. 41. Grace T. Hallock, A Tale of Soap and Water: The Historical Progress of Cleanliness (New York: Cleanliness Institute, 1928), 43, 44, 49. 42. Tadasu Misawa, Modern Educators and Their Ideals (New York: D. Appleton, 1909), 7ff. 43. Hallock, A Tale of Soap and Water, 81.

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44. Antoinette Donnelly, “Cleanliness: Now an Important Topic of Editorial Comment,” Cleanliness Journal 1, no. 3 (December 1927): 11. 45. Betty Brainerd, “Cleanliness: Now an Important Topic of Editorial Comment,” Cleanliness Journal 1, no. 3 (December 1927): 11. 46. Dr. Alice G. Bryant, “Cleanliness: Now an Important Topic of Editorial Comment,” Cleanliness Journal 1, no. 3 (December 1927): 12. 47. Finley, “Cleanliness Basic to Other Virtues,” 7. 48. Hallock, A Tale of Soap and Water, 92. 49. Earnest Elmo Calkins and Ralph Holden, Modern Advertising (New York: D. Appleton, 1905), 7. 50. Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 147. 51. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 226. 52. This was, of course, part of a broader pattern of theological therapy: “Therapies became more theological, theologies more therapeutic.” T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 178. 53. Jacqueline S. Wilkie, “Submerged Sensuality: Technology and Perceptions of Bathing,” Journal of Social History 19, no. 4 (1986): 659. 54. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 308. 55. Ibid., 291. 56. Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 23.

C hapt e r F i v e

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

US Weekly 666 (19 November 2007), 14, 18, 20, 23. Ibid., 53, 77. Ibid., 55, 56–­57. P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Richard Schickel, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000); Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (London: Sage, 2004). Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979). Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 91. John Frow, “Is Elvis a God? Cult, Culture, Questions of Method,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (1998): 197–­210; Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2001). Stephen Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy’s Challenge to Materialism

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(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); William Kleinknecht, The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America (New York: Nation Books, 2009); Sarah A. Leavitt, From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Kathryn Lofton, “Public Confessions: Oprah Winfrey’s American Religious His­ tory,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 18, no. 1 (March 2008): 49–­67; Matthew Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Grant Wacker, “Billy Graham’s America,” Church History 78, no. 3 (2009): 489–­511. 9. Jeannette Walls, “Forget Kabbalah, Britney’s Baby Is Her Religion,” MSNBC (1 June 2006), http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12920032/. 10. Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 11. Elena Garcia, “Kentucky Megachurch to Send ‘Jesus Loves You’ Letters to Britney Spears,” Christian Today 30 (October 2007), http://www.christiantoday.com/article /kentucky.megachurch.to.send.jesus.loves.you.letters.to.britney.spears/14269.htm. 12. William Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 13. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jamestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 54–­56. 14. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986), 68. 15. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions, Midway reprint (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 16. Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), xxv. 17. Frits Staal, Ritual and Mantras: Rules without Meaning (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1996), 115. 18. Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever, xxvi. 19. Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chi­ cago Press, 1987), 201–­2. 20. Bataille, Erotism, 73. 21. J. Van Baal, “Offering, Sacrifice and Gift,” Numen 23, no. 3 (December 1976): 161–­78. 22. These descriptions rely on the summary thinking of Joseph Henninger, “Sacrifices,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 12:544–­ 57; Jill Robbins, “Sacrifice,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 285–­97. 23. Marcel Detienne and Jean-­Pierre Vernant, The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Charles Malamoud, Cooking the World: Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, French Studies on South Asian Culture and Society (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1996). 24. Sigmund Freud, quoted in Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever, 130. 25. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 67. 26. Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever, xxiii. 27. Ibid., 39.

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28. Burton Mack, “Introduction: Religion and Ritual,” in Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, ed. Robert G. Hamerton-­Kelly (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 8. 29. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 300. 30. Ibid., 4. 31. Ibid., 289–­90. 32. Mack, “Introduction,” 9. 33. Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 62. 34. Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1991). 35. Brian K. Smith, “Capital Punishment and Human Sacrifice,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68, no. 1 (March 2000): 12. 36. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 196. 37. Only two substantive studies of sacrifice in US culture currently exist, one addressing capital punishment as human sacrifice (B. Smith, “Capital Punishment and Human Sacrifice”), the other examining the 2004 destruction of the “Bartman Ball” by a Chicago restaurant. The sacrificed ball was the one fouled by the Florida Marlins’ Luis Castillo in Game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship Series. Cubs’ left fielder Moises Alou ran toward the wall and reached to catch the ball for out number two, when a fan, Steve Bartman, reached for the memorabilia, deflecting it from Alou’s glove. Eight Marlins’ runs later, the Cubs left the field, down 8–­3. They lost the game, the subsequent fame, and their shot at the Yankees in the World Series. Harry Caray’s restaurant chain enacted a “highly ritualized treatment” of the ball “as if it were headed for the electric chair,” “propped up on a pillow . . . treated to a last meal of steak and lobster . . . then exploded inside a transparent, bulletproof tank and reduced to shreds.” Jeffrey Scholes, author of the Bartman Ball study, suggests—­through readings of Victor Turner and Gregor Goethals—­that modern spectacles are conspicuous revisions of ancient sacrifices, something in between a religious event and an opportunistic made-­for-­TV special. Jeffrey Scholes, “The Bartman Ball and Sacrifice: Ambiguity in an American Ritual,” Journal of Religion and Society 7 (2005): 3. 38. On the moral dualisms that emerge from fandom, see Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002). 39. Jill Lawless, “Academics Debate Lure of Female Celebrity,” Toronto Star (26 June 2008). 40. “Virtual Friendship, Room Service,” Week (26 September 2008), 6. 41. John Demos and Virginia Demos, “Adolescence in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 31 (1969): 632–­38. 42. French observers would add a fourth element to any definition of adolescence as a modern developmental category, namely that it is characterized by idol worship. For more on the panic around the adolescent, see Frank F. Furstenberg, “The Sociology of Adolescence and Youth in the 1990s: A Critical Commentary,” Journal of Marriage and Family 62, no. 4 (November 2000): 896–­910. 43. Anita Harris, Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-­First Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 74.

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44. Diane Railton, “The Gendered Carnival of Pop,” Popular Music 20, no. 3 (October 2001): 327. 45. Ibid., 328. 46. Ibid., 329. 47. Rojek, Celebrity, 80. 48. Leonard Pitts, “Britney’s Cry for Help Is No Laughing Matter,” Chicago Tribune (13 March 2007). 49. Vanessa Grigoriadis, “The Tragedy of Britney,” Rolling Stone (21 February 2008), http:// www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-­tragedy-­of-­britney-­spears-­rolling-­stones-­2008 -­cover-­story-­20080221. 50. Joey Bartolomeo, “Britney Spears Goes Back to School—­for a Cause,” People (1 October 2008), http://people.com/celebrity/britney-­spears-­goes-­back-­to-­school-­for-­a-­cause/. 51. Rojek, Celebrity, 187. 52. Leah Greenblatt, “Demi Lovato: Disney’s New Princess,” Entertainment Weekly (29 September 2008), http://www.ew.com/article/2008/09/29/demi-­lovato-­disneys-­new-­princess. Lovato’s subsequent troubles included public struggles with depression, bipolar disorder, self-­harm, and cocaine addiction.

C hapt e r S i x

1. Mel Gussow, “Lustrous Pinnacle of Hollywood Glamour,” New York Times (24 March 2011). 2. Daniel Herwitz, The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 120–­22. 3. Gussow, “Lustrous Pinnacle of Hollywood Glamour.” 4. Jessica Ravitz, “Exploring Elizabeth Taylor’s Jewish Conversion,” CNN.com (24 March 2011), http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/24/making-­sense-­of-­elizabeth-­taylors-­jewish -­conversion/. 5. Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2001), 57, 58, 97. 6. Follow-­up stories indicate the vestigial quality of such crises. See Jack Kelley, “Tammy Bakker to Return—­when Bills Are Paid,” USA Today (30 October 1989); Lawrence Mc­ Quillan, “Ghosts of ’93 Still Found at Waco,” USA Today (31 August 2001). 7. Cathy Lynn Grossman, “Hindu Lite,” USA Today (16 February 2006). 8. Gary Strauss, “Stars Unleash Their Passion,” USA Today (5 July 2005). 9. Ibid. 10. For a further elaboration of the role of celebrities in contemporary media, see Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, eds., Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture (London: Routledge, 2006); Richard Schickel, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000). 11. David Croteau and William Hoynes, Media Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2003), 296.

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12. Walter T. Middlebrook, “Baldwin’s Journey Deserves Better Vehicle,” USA Today (14 Au­ gust 1989); Elizabeth Snead, “Howard Finster, Evangelist with a Paintbrush,” USA Today (7 August 1991). 13. John Pitts, “Lewis Lifts Heart in Testimony, Song,” USA Today (28 July 1989); Steve Wieberg, “High Standards; Records Not Utah QB’s Mission,” USA Today (12 September 1989); “Daily Prayers Are Ritual for Olajuwon,” USA Today (10 June 1994). 14. David Landis and Darren Summers, “Cruising with Scientology,” USA Today (14 May 1992); “Celebrities Celebrate Scientology,” USA Today (1 August 1994); Karen Thomas, “Scientology’s Stars,” USA Today (30 November 1994); Kitty Bean Yancey, “Celebrities Denounce Anti-­Scientology Stand,” USA Today (10 January 1997); Karen Thomas, “Church: A Hold over Travolta?,” USA Today (29 April 1991). 15. Paul Hoverstein, “More People Opting to Be Buried at Sea,” USA Today (23 July 1999); Cesar G. Soriano, “Celebs Know How to Throw a Good Christening,” USA Today (27 December 2004. 16. Deirdre Donahue, “Giving a Bow to the Sanctity of Elvis,” USA Today (7 July 1989); Arlene Vigoda, “King of Kings?,” USA Today (29 April 1993); Jerry Shriver, “Rites and Relics of Elvis,” USA Today (15 August 1997). 17. Cathy Lynn Grossman, “The Gospel of Billy Graham,” USA Today (16 May 2005); Cathy Lynn Grossman, “This Evangelist Has a ‘Purpose,’ ” USA Today (21 July 2003). 18. Jeannie Williams, “Sinead Has Christmas Spirit,” USA Today (28 October 1992). 19. Daya Kishan Thussu, News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment (Los Angeles: Sage, 2007), 7; Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney, The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism (London: Continuum, 1997), 144. See also James L. Baughman, “Century’s End, 1993–­2005,” chap. 10 in The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America since 1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 226–­56. 20. Thussu, News as Entertainment, 3. 21. Andie Tucher, “You News,” Columbia Journalism Review 36 (May/June 1997): 26–­31. 22. For just one example, see this description of the changes at the Los Angeles Times: Croteau and Hoynes, Media Society, 171–­74. 23. Anita Manning, “Holy Best Sellers! Christian Mysteries Are Hot,” USA Today (28 November 1989); Deirdre Donahue, “The ‘Celestine Prophecy’ Karma: Spiritual Thriller Is an Unlikely Success,” USA Today (21 April 1994). 24. Cathy Lynn Grossman, “Faith’s Purchasing Power,” USA Today (13 December 2006); Tom Krattenmaker, “Faith Embraces Pop Culture, Technology,” USA Today (9 October 2006). 25. Interestingly, such a dichotomy has been portrayed throughout US religious history as a profoundly gendered one, in which the Calvinist masculine leadership is poised against the sentimental evangelical readership; it is inviting to consider how this historical processing of the news might coordinate the historical processing of the religious twentieth century, as narratives describing the end of the mainline conclude with the rise of nondenominational Christianities. 26. Amanda Porterfield, The Transformation of American Religion: The Story of a Late-­ Twentieth Century Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 22.

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27. Rojek, Celebrity, 186–­87. 28. Edna Gunderson, “Madonna’s Video ‘Prayer’ Is No Sin,” USA Today (8 March 1989). 29. James Cox, “Boycott Aim: Pepsi; Madonna ‘Ridicules Christianity,’ ” USA Today (9 March 1989). 30. “Madonna Still Justifying Her Song,” USA Today (7 January 1991). 31. Jeannie Williams, “Madonna: Catholicism Is ‘Mean,’ ” USA Today (1 May 1991). 32. Edna Gunderson, “Daring Madonna Is All Show,” USA Today (7 May 1990). 33. Jack Kelley, “Michael Jackson Kept Away from Wailing Wall,” USA Today (20 September 1993). 34. For an article typical of megachurch coverage, see Nanci Hellmich, “Kids Bringing Parents Back to the Faith,” USA Today (24 March 1989). Coverage of the actor Richard Gere’s comeback seems in part spirited by his new awareness as a Buddhist. See Ann Trebbe, “Gere Is Moving Back into Limelight,” USA Today (24 November 1989); “Gere Rebounds without Baring All,” USA Today (12 April 1990); Jeannie Williams, “Richard Gere’s World beyond Camelot,” USA Today (25 July 1995). 35. Steve Jones, “Talent That Grabs Grammy’s Attention: Gospel’s McClurkin Places Ministry First,” USA Today (24 February 1998); “Madonna Incarnation Offends,” USA Today (14 September 1998); Sue Factor, “Celebs Get Wrapped Up in Red String,” USA Today (26 November 2002); Edna Gunderson, “Madonna’s Epiphany,” USA Today (18 April 2003). 36. Kim Painter, “Madonna Tops Chart as Positive Sex Voice,” USA Today (5 April 1999); Olivia Barker, “Madonna Has Faith on a String,” USA Today (26 May 2004). 37. Steve Jones, “Mase: Why I Chose God,” USA Today (26 April 1999); Matthew Kalman, “Roseanne’s Mystic Journey,” USA Today (24 June 1999); Jeannie Williams, “Fonda’s Not Fond of Born-­Again Talk,” USA Today (13 January 2000). 38. Jeannie Williams, “ ‘Apostle’ Duvall Not Holier than Bill,” USA Today (27 January 1998); Mike Clark, “Duvall’s Divine Performance,” USA Today (20 January 1998). 39. Ann Oldenburg and Kevin V. Johnson, “Oprah’s Optimism Seems More Like Opportunism and Is Growing Oppressive, Opposition Says,” USA Today (23 October 1998). 40. Deirdre Donahue, “Live Your Best Life, with Oprah Workshop Connects with 1,600, and Me,” USA Today (2 June 2001). 41. She was the emblem of anti-­Islam in her role as emcee and master of ceremonies for “A Prayer for America,” an interfaith service for the families of 9/11 victims. Jill Liever and Traci Watson, “Interfaith Service Stresses Life, Hope,” USA Today (24 September 2001). 42. Matthew Kalman, “Arab Pop Star: Foes Barking up Wrong Tree,” USA Today (15 March 1999). 43. Ann Oldenburg, “The Divine Miss Winfrey?,” USA Today (11 May 2006); see also Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 44. Michael Medved, “ ‘Passion’ Will Inspire Other Religious Films,” USA Today (15 March 2004). 45. Gary Strauss, “Stars Unleash Their Passion,” USA Today (5 July 2005). 46. Mary Zeiss Stange, “Obama’s Believers,” USA Today (7 April 2008).

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47. John Avlon, “A 21st Century Statesman,” Newsweek (21 February 2011), http://www.news week.com/2011/02/20/a-­21st-­century-­statesman.html. 48. Quoted in Edna Gunderson, “Bono: You Too Can Make Y2K Better for 3rd World,” USA Today (7 October 1999). For additional coverage of Bono in USA Today, see Laura Ingraham, “U2’s Bono Sells Relief Effort,” USA Today (20 June 2001); “Bono: Appeal to America’s Greatness to Aid Africa,” USA Today (16 September 2003).

C hapt e r S e v e n

1. Danielle Teller and Astro Teller, “How American Parenting Is Killing the American Marriage,” Quartz (30 September 2014), http://qz.com/273255/how-­american-­parenting -­is-­killing-­the-­american-­marriage/. 2. Danielle Teller and Astro Teller, Sacred Cows: The Truth about Divorce and Marriage (New York: Diversion Books, 2014). 3. Charlotte Faircloth, Militant Lactivism? Attachment Parenting and Intensive Motherhood in the UK and France (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013); Ellie Lee et al., eds., Parenting Culture Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Elinor Ochs and Tamar Kremer-­Sadlik, eds., Fast-­Forward Family: Home, Work, and Relationships in Middle-­ Class America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 4. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., Rethinking Secularism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-­Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007); Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, eds., Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 5. William Arnal and Russell T. McCutcheon, The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 6. Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Nigel Parton, Governing the Family: Child Care, Child Protection, and the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). 7. The increasing usage of parent to refer to either the mother or the father can be seen in the October 1926 launch of Parents magazine, which was advertised as a monthly magazine that featured scientific information on child development geared to help parents in raising their children. Scholars interpret this magazine as the pinnacle of the booming parent education movement of the 1920s. Within a year of its founding,

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the magazine was selling 100,000 copies a month. Circulation reached 400,000 subscribers at ten years and almost a million by the magazine’s twentieth anniversary in 1946. By then, the publishing company had created a series of child-­care books and children’s magazines. The magazine achieved acclaim as the most popular educational periodical in the world. On the parent education movement, see Ann Johnson and Elizabeth Johnston, “Up the Years with the Bettersons: Gender and Parent Education in Interwar America,” History of Psychology 18, no. 3 (August 2015): 252–­69. 8. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin Books, 2006); Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 9. Lara Vapnek, Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–­1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 10. Ralph LaRossa, The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 11. Vern L. Bengtson, Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down across Generations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 195–­96. 12. One could understand the entire labor to name “family values” as an effort to break the neutrality of the parent, and remind us about an imagined-­to-­be requisite gender duo within that work. Ludger H. Viefhues-­Bailey, Between a Man and a Woman?: Why Conservatives Oppose Same-­Sex Marriage (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 13. John Demos and Virginia Demos, “Adolescence in Historical Perspective,” in The American Family in Social-­Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Gordon (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), 211. 14. Alexis de Tocqueville, Tocqueville: Democracy in America (New York: Library of Amer­ ica, 2004), 687–­88. 15. To be clear, though a nationalist and hierarchical inscription, it was not implying a you of undifferentiated neutrality. Not all racial, gendered, or religious authorities would be equal in this new nation. 16. G. Stanley Hall, “The Moral and Religious Training of Children,” Princeton Review 34 (1882): 34. Hall would elaborate this thinking in chapter 12 of G. Stanley Hall, Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene (New York: D. Appleton, 1907), 324–­66. 17. Elizabeth Harrison, When Children Err: A Book for Young Mothers (Chicago: National Kindergarten College, 1916), 88–­130; quotation is from p. 107. 18. Tolbert McCarroll, “Where Does God Live?,” Parents (December 1987): 104; emphasis mine. 19. Pamela Klassen, Blessed Events: Religion and Home Birth in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 20. Of particular note are the commentaries reflecting on the history of American women in their capacities as mothers. A marvelous contribution to this conversation that also includes significant thinking about the ruminations of a particular eighteenth-­century evangelical mother is Catherine A. Brekus, Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangel­ ical Christianity in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). For further analysis of the mother as an icon and activist within US religious history,

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see Elizabeth H. Flowers, Into the Pulpit: Southern Baptist Women and Power since World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 54–­67; R. Marie Griffith, God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 169–­98; Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 139–­47; Susanna Morrill, White Roses on the Floor of Heaven: Nature and Flower Imagery in Latter-­Day Saints Women’s Literature, 1880–­1920, Religion in History, Society and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006), 113–­40; Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 244–­74. With the exception of the Brekus, the foregoing studies do not address parenting practices as much as they take up the maternal figure as a moral subject for religious ideation and discourse. For studies that grapple more directly with parenting practices in American religion, see Philip Greven’s examination of child-­rearing differences in the colonial period; Colleen McDannell’s brilliant analysis of the relationship between Victorian material culture and parental styles; and Margaret Bendroth’s wonderful analysis of the parental ethos of American Protestants. Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-­Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 151–­91; Colleen McDannell, The Christian Home in Victo­ rian America, 1840–­1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Margaret Lam­ berts Bendroth, Growing Up Protestant: Parents, Children, and Mainline Churches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 21. For the most recent examples, see Paula S. Fass and Mary Ann Mason, eds., Childhood in America (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Rebecca Jo Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America (New York: New York University Press, 2003). 22. Bendroth, Growing Up Protestant, 2. 23. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of Ameri­ can Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 24. Henry Jenkins, “The Innocent Child and Other Modern Myths,” in The Children’s Culture Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 8. This formulation presupposes that the primary threat to children comes from outside, while most cases of violence against children can be traced to family members. See Eric Freedman, “ ‘Have You Seen This Child?’: From Milk Carton to Mise-­en-­Abyme,” in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 689–­99. 25. Seth Dowland, Family Values: Gender, Authority, and the Rise of the Christian Right (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Heather Hendershot, “Endan­ gering the Dangerous: The Regulation and Censorship of Children’s Television Programming, 1968–­1990” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 1995); Emily Johnson, “Activists, Authors, Apostles: Women’s Leadership in the New Christian Right” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2014); W. Bradford Wilcox, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

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26. Benjamin Wadsworth, The Well-­Ordered Family; or, Relative Duties (Boston, 1712), excerpted in America’s Families: A Documentary History, ed. Donald M. Scott and Bernard Wishy (New York Harper & Row, 1982), 5. 27. The School of Good Manners (Boston, 1768), 5, excerpted in America’s Families: A Documentary History, ed. Donald M. Scott and Bernard Wishy (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 133. 28. Elaine Tyler May, Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 30. On the religious elements of colonial parenting, see Catherine A. Brekus, “Children of  Wrath, Children of Grace: Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan Culture of Child Rearing,” in The Child in Christian Thought, ed. Marcia J. Bunge (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 300–­328. 29. Philip J. Greven, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse (New York: Vintage, 1992). 30. Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), 4. 31. Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home; or, Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Eco­ nomical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes (New York: J. B. Ford, 1869); Lydia Maria Child, The Mother’s Book, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1831), 1. On republican motherhood, see Mark David Hall, “Beyond Self-­Interest: The Political Theory and Practice of Evan­ gelical Women in Antebellum America,” Journal of Church and State 44, no. 3 (2002): 477–­99; Linda K. Kerber, “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment— ­an American Perspective,” American Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1976): 187–­205; Sarah Robbins, “ ‘The Future Good and Great of Our Land’: Republican Mothers, Female Authors, and Domesticated Literacy in Antebellum New England,” New England Quarterly 75, no. 4 (2002): 562–­91; Rosemarie Zagari, “Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1992): 192–­95. 32. Wishy, The Child and the Republic, 6. The economic backdrop for these dramatic shifts in the American family is vividly examined by Mary Ryan in her book Cradle of the Middle Class. In that work, Ryan explains that for the emerging middle class, it was critically important to develop an internal moral order, and that “a good character must be . . . built by our individual exertions.” Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 147. 33. Glen Davis, Childhood and History in America (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1976), 28, 45. Rejecting the earlier Calvinist practice of “breaking the child’s will,” these authors urged parents instead to “bend the child’s will” gently and patiently, vouching for the success of the new techniques because of the child’s innate preference for goodness. See the profile of Moderate mode of child rearing (Philip Greven identifies three distinct Protestant temperaments prevailing among Americans: Moderate, General, and Evangelical) in Greven, The Protestant Temperament, 151–­91. 34. M. L. Weems, Hymen’s Recruiting Sargeant; or, The New Matrimonial Tat-­Too for the Old Bachelors (Hartford, CT: D. Anders, 1845 [1821]), 12–­14.

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35. May, Barren in the Promised Land, 36. On the subject of evangelical authority in the antebellum era, see John Lardas Modern, “Evangelical Secularism and the Measure of Leviathan,” Church History 77, no. 4 (2008): 801–­76. 36. Bendroth, Growing Up Protestant, 5. 37. Beecher and Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home, 19. 38. Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-­Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 3. 39. Jadviga M. Da Costa Nunes, “The Naughty Child in Nineteenth-­Century American Art,” Journal of American Studies 21, no. 2 (1987): 225–­47. For a broad examination of the motif of the biblical “evil” child, see Eric Ziolkowski, Evil Children in Religion, Literature, and Art (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 40. Adam G. De Gurowski, America and Europe (New York: D. Appleton, 1857), 361. 41. My conception of this era of parenting was informed by the work of Amy Laura Hall, Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2007). 42. George Walter Fiske, The Christian Family (New York: Abingdon, 1929), 38–­40; quoted in Bendroth, Growing Up Protestant, 61–­62. 43. Demos, “Adolescence in Historical Perspective,” 214. 44. Ernest Hamlin Abbott, On the Training of Parents (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 15. 45. David Pivar, Purity and Hygiene: Women, Prostitution, and the “American Plan,” 1900–­ 1930 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001). See also Aaron M. Powell, ed., The National Purity Congress: Its Papers, Addresses, Portraits (New York: American Purity Alliance, 1896). 46. For an account of the religious dynamics of the Comstock Law, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 47. Ellen Key, The Century of the Child (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909). 48. Stearns, Anxious Parents, 1. 49. Henry F. Cope, preface to Religious Education in the Family (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1915). 50. Abbott, On the Training of Parents, 23. 51. Martha Wolfenstein, “Fun Morality: An Analysis of Recent Child-­Training Literature,” in Childhood in Contemporary Cultures, ed. Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 170. 52. Ibid., 174–­75. 53. Michelle Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 54. Louisa Randall Church, “Parents: Architects of Peace,” American Home (November 1946): 18–­19. 55. Ronald R. Rindfuss and James A. Sweet, Postwar Fertility Trends and Differentials in the United States (New York: Academic Press, 1977). 56. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 235.

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57. Margo Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-­Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 137–­213. 58. May, Barren in the Promised Land, 129. Indeed, in some sense it was easier to be childless in the nineteenth century than the twentieth century. The postwar period was one of compulsory parenthood in which children became a requisite accessory for honorable citizenship. In the nineteenth century, childless women could achieve respectability and contribute to the community. “Ironically, the ideology of republican motherhood actually made room for women without children,” Elaine Tyler May explained. “If women were naturally suited to be the moral guardians of the society, they could provide that function whether or not they had biological offspring.” Ibid., 49. See also Lee Virginia Chambers-­Schiller, Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America, the Generations of 1780–­1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984). 59. Benjamin Spock, Problems of Parents (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 21. 60. Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice about Children (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 13. 61. Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care, 7th ed. (New York: Pocket Books, 1998 [1946]), 4. 62. Ibid., 488. 63. Thomas Maier, Dr. Spock: An American Life (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 202. 64. Ibid., 321. 65. Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (New York: Prentice Hall, 1952). 66. Maier, Dr. Spock: An American Life, 321. 67. For representative texts by twenty-­first-­century academic and pop psychologists, see Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008); Hara Estroff Marano, A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting (New York: Broadway Books, 2008); Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—­and More Miserable than Ever Before (New York: Free Press. 2007); Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New York: Free Press, 2009). 68. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Spoiled Rotten: Why Do Kids Rule the Roost?,” New Yorker (2 July 2012). 69. Madeline Levine, Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), xix. 70. Carolyn Hoyt, “Giving Your Child a Spiritual Life,” Parents (February 1995): 95–­96. 71. Richard Louv, “How Religion Reaches Out to Parents,” Parents (May 1993), 161, 163. 72. Hulbert, Raising America, 13. 73. John P. Bartkowski and Christopher G. Ellison, “Divergent Models of Childrearing in Popular Literature: Conservative Protestant vs. the Mainstream Experts,” Sociology of Religion 56 (1995): 21–­34; Gordon Bauer et al., “Corporal Punishment and the Schools,” Education and Urban Society 22 (1990): 285–­99. See recent exchanges between Robert E. Larzelere, “Should the Use of Corporal Punishment by Parents Be Considered Child Abuse? No,” in Debating Children’s Lives: Current Controversies on Children and Adolescents, ed. Mary Ann Mason and Eileen D Gambrill (London: Sage, 1994), 204–­9, 217–­18; John K. Rosemond, “Should the Use of Corporal Punishment by

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Parents Be Considered Child Abuse? No,” in ibid., 210–­16; Murray A. Straus, “Should the Use of Corporal Punishment by Parents Be Considered Child Abuse? Yes,” in ibid., 197–­203, 219–­22. See also James Dobson, Parenting Isn’t for Cowards (Dallas: Word, 1987); Thomas Gordon, Discipline That Works (New York, NY: Plume, 1989); Demie Kurz, “Corporal Punishment and Adult Use of Violence: A Critique of ‘Discipline and Deviance,’ ” Social Problems 38 (1991): 155–­61; Donileen R. Loseke, “Reply to Murray A. Straus: Readings on ‘Discipline and Deviance,’ ” Social Problems 38 (1991): 162–­66; Joan McCord, “Questioning the Value of Punishment,” Social Problems 38 (1991): 167–­79. 74. Bartkowski and Ellison, “Divergent Models of Childrearing in Popular Literature.” 75. Philip Greven, Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Child Abuse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 222. For proof of this ar­ gument within Christian child-­rearing manuals, see James Dobson, Dare to Discipline (Carol Stream, IL: Living Books/Tyndale House, 1970), 197; James Dobson, The Strong-­ Willed Child: Birth through Adolescence (Carol Stream, IL: Living Books/Tyndale House, 1976), 234–­35; J. Richard Fugate, What the Bible Says about . . . Child-­Training (Tempe, AZ: Alpha/Omega, 1980), 262–­63; Beverly LaHaye, How to Develop Your Child’s Temperament (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1977), 145. 76. Carol J. Boggs, “An Analysis of Selected Christian Child-­Rearing Manuals,” Family Relations 32 (1983): 73–­80; Henry Danso, Bruce Hunsberger, and Michael Pratt, “The Role of Parental Religious Fundamentalism and Right-­Wing Authoritarianism in Child-­Rearing Goals and Practices,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36, no. 4 (1997): 496–­511; Christopher G. Ellison, “Conservative Protestantism and the Cor­poral Punishment of Children: Clarifying the Issues,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35, no. 1 (1996): 1–­16; Christopher G. Ellison and John P. Bartkowski, “Religion and the Legitimation of Violence: The Case of Conservative Protestantism and Corporal Punishment,” in The Web of Violence: From Interpersonal to Global, ed. Lester R. Kurtz and Jennifer Turpin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 45–­68; Christopher G. Ellison, John P. Bartkowski, and Michelle L. Segal, “Conservative Protestantism and the Parental Use of Corporal Punishment,” Social Forces 74, no. 3 (1996), 1003–­28; Christopher G. Ellison and Darren E. Sherkat, “Conservative Protestantism and Support for Corporal Punishment,” American Sociological Review 58 (1993): 131–­ 44; Michael Lienesch, “ ‘Train Up a Child’: Conceptions of Child-­Rearing in Christian Conservative Social Thought,” Comparative Social Research 13 (1991): 203–­24. 77. Ellison, Bartkowski, and Segal, “Conservative Protestantism and the Parental Use of Corporal Punishment”; Ellison and Sherkat, “Conservative Protestantism and Support for Corporal Punishment”; Harold Grasmick, Robert Bursik, and M’lou Kimpel, “Protestant Fundamentalism and Attitudes toward Corporal Punishment of Children,” Violence and Victims 6 (1991): 283–­97. 78. Edwina D. Frank, “Effects of Parental Disciplinary Practices on Characteristics of Children: A Review of the Literature,” Southern Psychologist 1 (1983): 77–­83. 79. Gerald T. Hotaling, Murray A. Straus, and A. J. Lincoln, “Intrafamily Violence and Crime and Violence outside the Family,” in Physical Violence in American Families: Risk Factors and Adaptations to Violence in 8,145 Families, ed. Murray A. Straus and Richard J. Geiles (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990), 431–­70; Murray A. Straus,

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“Discipline and Deviance: Physical Punishment of Children and Violence and Other Crime in Adulthood,” Social Problems 38 (1991): 133–­54. 80. K. Herbert Hardwick and Augustine Brannigan, “Self-­Control, Child Effects, and Informal Social Control: A Direct Test of the Primacy of Sociogenic Factors,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 50, no. 1 (2008): 16. 81. Dean R. Hoge, Benton Johnson, and Donald A. Luidens, Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 57, 109. 82. Kenneth Miller, “The Gift of Faith,” Parents (April 2007), 116. 83. Roberta Israeloff, “Finding a Spiritual Home,” Parents (December 1996), 146–­48. 84. “Rosen’s Words about Ann Romney Fuel ‘Mommy Wars,’ ” NPR (17 April 2012), http:// www.npr.org/2012/04/17/150803660/rosens-­words-­about-­ann-­romney-­fuel-­mommy -­wars. 85. Diane Johnson, “Mothers Beware!,” New York Review of Books (21 June 2012), http:// www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/21/mothers-­beware/; Anne-­Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” Atlantic (July–­August 2012), http://www.theatlantic.com /magazine/archive/2012/07/why-­women-­still-­cant-­have-­it-­all/309020/; Rebecca Traister, “Can Modern Women ‘Have It All’?,” Salon.com (21 June 2012), http://www.salon.com /2012/06/21/can_modern_women_have_it_all/. 86. Molly Ladd Taylor and L. Umansky, eds., “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-­Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 87. Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, “Teaching Values,” Parents (June 1995), 34–­36. 88. May, Barren in the Promised Land, 258.

C hapt e r E i g ht

1.

2.

3. 4.

Epigraph: Rich Juzwiak, “Imagining a World without the Kardashians,” Washington Post (19 August 2011), https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/imagining-­a-­world -­without-­the-­kardashians/2011/08/18/gIQAsdANQJ_story.html. Peter Holley, “Missouri Student Says He Doesn’t Accept Professor’s Apology for Confrontation,” Washington Post (11 November 2015), https://www.washingtonpost.com /news/grade-­point/wp/2015/11/11/mizzou-­student-­says-­he-­doesnt-­accept-­professors -­apology-­for-­confrontation/. Aamer Madhani, “GOP Lawmakers Call for Firing of Mizzou Professor Who Called for ‘Muscle,’ ” USA Today (5 January 2016), http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016 /01/04/gop-­lawmakers-­call-­firing-­mizzou-­professor-­who-­called-­muscle/78290176/. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 81. Susan Sviuga, “More than 100 Lawmakers Demand That Professor Who Ordered Journalists Away from Mizzou Protesters Get Fired,” Washington Post (5 January 2016), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-­point/wp/2016/01/05/more-­than-­100

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-­lawmakers-­demand-­that-­melissa-­click-­the-­professor-­who-­ordered-­journalists-­away -­from-­mizzou-­protesters-­get-­fired/. 5. Madhani, “GOP Lawmakers Call for Firing of Mizzou Professor.” 6. Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), 16. 7. Melissa Click faculty web page, Department of Communication, University of Missouri, https://communication.missouri.edu/faculty/click. Last accessed on 10 January 2016, this site is now defunct. 8. Here I have been informed by Misha Kavka’s description of reality TV as a kind of duplicity machine: “No genre has been more in the firing line than reality TV, which commits a double crime of conflation: on the one hand, it blurs television’s promise of information with its penchant for entertainment; on the other hand, it highlights the paradox central to television itself that actuality may seem most real when mediated. Offering a kind of ‘best of the worst’ showcase of television as apparatus, reality TV programmes produce a sense of reality as an effect of seemingly direct transmission. They are thus sites of ‘constructed unmediation,’ where the technology involved in both production and post-­production shapes a final product that comes across as unmediated, or real.” See Misha Kavka, “Love ’n the Real; or, How I Learned to Love Reality TV, ” in The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to “Reality” TV and Beyond, ed. Geoff King (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2005), 94. 9. Elizabeth Benedict, Me, My Hair, and I: Twenty-­Seven Women Untangle an Obsession (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Press, 2015), xv. 10. Scott Carney, “The Temple of Do,” Mother Jones (March/April 2010), http://www .motherjones.com/politics/2010/02/remy-­hair-­extensions-­india. 11. At the time, Kim was dating Tito Joe Jackson, the son of Michael’s older brother Tito. 12. Nathan Heller, “The Multitasking Celebrity Takes Center Stage,” New Yorker (23 June 2016), http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-­comment/the-­organizational-­celebrity. 13. For a survey of creation myths, see Barbara C. Sproul, Primal Myths: Creation Myths around the World (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). 14. Harriet Ryan and Adam Tschorn, “The Kardashian Phenomenon,” Los Angeles Times (19 February 2010), http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/19/entertainment/la-­et-­kardashian 19-­2010feb19. 15. Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 275. 16. Writing of the consequences of this kind of work, the historian Kristin L. Hoganson notes, “The imaginary world they conjured up centered on self-­gratification and fantasy fulfillment. It deflected attention from the real world with its real conflicts, real inequities, and real commercial, social, political, and military interconnections. Despite the self-­centered nature of these geographies, they had significant implications for global consciousness. They contributed to the illusion that the world could be known through an assortment of decontextualized things. They advance the tendency to see the world as an imperial bazaar, as a global midway that existed for the pleasure of entitled consumers.” Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–­1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 254.

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17. Procter & Gamble press release, “Kim Kardashian Opens New Charmin Restrooms Location in the Heart of New York City,” PG.com (23 November 2010), http://news .pg.com/press-­release/pg-­corporate-­announcements/kim-­kardashian-­opens-­new -­charminr-­restrooms-­location-­heart-­. 18. Maria Pramaggiore and Diane Negra, “Keeping Up with the Aspirations: Commercial Family Values and the Kardashian Brand,” in Reality Gendervision: Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality Television, ed. Brenda Weber (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 84. 19. Amanda Scheiner McClain, Keeping Up the Kardashian Brand: Celebrity, Materialism, and Sexuality (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 37–­38. 20. “I’m Watching You,” Keeping Up with the Kardashians (Season 1, Episode 1), aired on 14 October 2007. 21. Kim Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian, and Khloé Kardashian, Kardashian Konfidential (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 27. 22. Ibid., 116. 23. McClain, Keeping Up the Kardashian Brand, 88. 24. In my earlier work, I emphasized the extent to which contemporary womanhood is articulated through brand-­oriented shopping. Here I expand this perspective to the frame of the family. See Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), chaps. 1 and 3. 25. McClain, Keeping Up the Kardashian Brand, 14. 26. Harriet Ryan and Adam Tschorn, “The Kardashian Phenomenon,” Los Angeles Times (19 February 2010). 27. McClain, Keeping Up the Kardashian Brand, 115. 28. Alyssa Pereira, “Kim Kardashian-­West Talks Sexuality, Family Life, Caitlyn Jenner in San Francisco Commonwealth Club Interview,” CBS SF Bay Area (1 July 2015). 29. Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Work Ethic, Then and Now,” Journal of Labor Research 13, no. 1 (1992): 45–­54. 30. Pramaggiore and Negra, “Keeping Up with the Aspirations,” 83. Khloé Kardashian quoted in Judith Newman and Leslie Bruce, “How the Kardashians Made $65 Million Last Year,” Hollywood Reporter (16 February 2011), http://www.hollywoodreporter .com/news/how-­kardashians-­made-­65-­million-­100349. 31. Daisy Jones, “Grace Jones: ‘Kim Kardashian Is a Basic Commercial Product,’ ” Dazed, accessed 26 November 2016, http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/26644/1/grace -­jones-­goes-­hard-­on-­kim-­kardashian-­in-­new-­memoir. 32. Helena de Bertodano, “Kim Kardashian: The Woman Who Mistook Her Life for a Brand,” Times (London; 25 June 2011), http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/celebrity/ar ticle 3067827.ece. 33. L.V. Anderson, “Everblasting Life,” Slate.com (28 June 2015), http://www.slate.com /articles/life/food/2015/06/nutribullet_review_does_the_infomercial_star_deserve_its _breakout_blender.html. 34. Charles F. McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–­1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 91. 35. Several Kardashian promotions have resulted in lawsuits. In 2012, Skechers came to a

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$40 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission after a group of consumers complained that the shoes did not produce the physical results promised by the Kardashians in their endorsements; groups of consumers also sued Kim, Khloé, and Kourtney for misrepresenting the effects of QuickTrim diet pills. And the Connecticut attorney general said the Kardashian Kard’s fees were “outrageous,” leading the lender to drop that program in 2010. 36. Harriet Ryan and Adam Tschorn, “Topping the List of Kardashian Family Values: Fame and Fortune,” Washington Post (7 March 2010). 37. Product description for Kardashian Glow Natural Bronzer listed on the Tan-­N-­Go website, accessed 26 November 2016, http://tan-­n-­go.com/shop/product/43-­kardashian -­glow-­natural-­bronzer. 38. Pramaggiore and Negra, “Keeping Up with the Aspirations,” 86. 39. Alexandra Sastre, “Hottentot in the Age of Reality TV: Sexuality, Race and Kim Kardashian’s Visible Body,” Celebrity Studies 5, nos. 1–­2 (2014): 129–­30. 40. Rachel McRady, “Kim Kardashian Cried When Kanye West Gave Her Closet a Makeover,” US Weekly (26 May 2015), http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-­style/news/kim -­kardashian-­cried-­kanye-­west-­closet-­makeover-­2015265. 41. David M. Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984). 42. On the role of kinship in anthropology, see Adam Kuper, The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth (London: Routledge, 2005); Ladislav Holy, Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Janet Carsten, After Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 43. Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 44. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 157. 45. Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 63–­64. 46. John Ferguson McLennan, Primitive Marriage: An Inquiry into the Origin of the Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies (Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1865); James George Frazer, Totemism (Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1887); Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1919). On the importance of totemism for the colonial project, see John Cinnamon, “Of Fetishism and Totemism: Missionary Ethnology and Academic Social Science in Early-­Twentieth-­Century Gabon,” in The Spiritual in the Secular: Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa, ed. Patrick Harries and David Maxwell (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), 100–­134. 47. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964 [1912]), bk. 2, chaps. 1–­7. 48. Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 197. 49. Kardashian et al., Kardashian Konfidential, 36.

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50. Kris Jenner, Kris Jenner . . . and All Things Kardashian (New York: Gallery Books, 2011), viii. 51. Alice Leppert, “Momager of the Brides: Kris Jenner’s Management of Kardashian Romance,” in First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics, ed. Shelley Cobb and Neil Ewen (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 134. 52. “I’m Watching You,” Keeping Up with the Kardashians (Season 1, Episode 1), aired on 14 October 2007. 53. Misha Kavka, “Reality TV and the Gendered Politics of Flaunting,” in Reality Gendervision: Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality Television, ed. Brenda Weber (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 58. 54. “Remembering Dad,” Keeping Up with the Kardashians (Season 1, Episode 5), aired on 11 November 2007. 55. “Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian Reportedly ‘Bond over Religion,’ ” theGrio.com (6 July 2012), http://thegrio.com/2012/07/06/beyonce-­and-­kim-­kardashian-­reportedly-­bond -­over-­religion/. 56. David Caplan, “Kourtney Kardashian Agonized over Whether to Keep Her Baby,” People .com (19 August 2009), http://people.com/babies/kourtney-­kardashian-­agonized-­over -­whether-­to-­keep-­her-­baby/. 57. Scott Roxborough, “Kim Kardashian’s ‘Pope Is Dope’ Tweet Sparks Outrage in Argentina,” Hollywood Reporter (25 September 2015), http://www.hollywoodreporter.com /news/kim-­kardashian-­pope-­tweet-­argentina-­827188. 58. “The Man in the Memoir,” Keeping Up with the Kardashians (Season 7, Episode 5), aired on 17 June 2012. 59. Emily Strohm, “Watch Kim and Kanye’s Pastor Give Religion a Sexy Makeover in His New Reality Show,” People.com (27 August 2015), http://www.people.com/article/kim -­kardashian-­kanye-­west-­pastor-­rich-­wilkerson-­jr-­reality-­show. 60. “Helping Hand,” Keeping Up with the Kardashians (Season 1, Episode 7), aired on 25 November 2007. 61. “Swearing by the Kardashian Bible,” E! News (20 April 2014), http://www.eonline.com /shows/kardashians/videos/220652/swearing-­by-­the-­kardashian-­bible. 62. Alice Kessler-­Harris, A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990); Weeks, The Problem with Work, 64.

C hapt e r N i n e

Epigraphs: Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. 1, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 224; “Finale,” The Office (Season 9, Episode 23), aired on 16 May 2013. 1. Bergdahl was a private first class when captured; he was promoted in absentia to specialist on 19 June 2010, and to sergeant on 17 June 2011.

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2. Jim Michaels, “Bergdahl Charged with Desertion,” USA Today (26 March 2015). 3. Associated Press, “Donald Trump Says Bowe Bergdahl Should Have Been Executed,” FoxNews.com (9 October 2015), http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/10/09/donald -­trump-­says-­bowe-­bergdahl-­should-­have-­been-­executed.html. 4. Alan Blinder and Richard Pérez-­Peña, “Kentucky Clerk Denies Same-­Sex Marriage Licenses, Defying Court,” New York Times (1 September 2015), http://www.nytimes.com /2015/09/02/us/same-­sex-­marriage-­kentucky-­kim-­davis.html. 5. Abby Ohlheiser, “Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis on Gay Marriage Licenses: ‘It Is a Heaven or Hell Decision,’ ” Washington Post (1 September 2015). 6. Mike Wynn, “Poll: Kentucky Voters Say Kim Davis Should Do Her Job,” USA Today (1 October 2015). 7. Suzanne Garment, “Welcome Back to Work Kim Davis, Now Just Do Your Job,” Reu­ ters (14 September 2015), http://blogs.reuters.com/great-­debate/2015/09/13/welcome -­back-­to-­work-­kim-­davis-­now-­just-­do-­your-­job/. 8. Luke Harding, “How Edward Snowden Went from Loyal NSA Contractor to Whistleblower,” Guardian (Manchester; 1 February 2014), http://www.theguardian.com/world /2014/feb/01/edward-­snowden-­intelligence-­leak-­nsa-­contractor-­extract. 9. Benny Johnson, “America’s Spies Want Edward Snowden Dead,” Buzzfeed.com (16 January 2014), https://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/americas-­spies-­want-­edward-­snow den-­dead?utm_term=.ajNZB55Z#.gfr9Ryy9. 10. Jeffrey Toobin, “Edward Snowden Is No Hero,” New Yorker (10 June 2013), http:// www.newyorker.com/news/daily-­comment/edward-­snowden-­is-­no-­hero; Ann Comp­ ton, “NSA Leaker Edward Snowden a ‘National Hero’ on White House Petition,” ABC News (10 June 2013), http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/06/nsa-­leaker-­edward -­snowden-­a-­national-­hero-­on-­white-­house-­petition/. 11. For a summary of the legal distinctions, see “Conscientious Refusals Fact Sheet,” authored by the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding (2014), https:// tanenbaum.org/tanenbaum_conscientious-­refusals/. 12. An overview of this emerging conversation can be found in Micah Schwartzman, Chad Flanders, and Zoё Robinson, eds., The Rise of Corporate Religious Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 13. Amy Sepinwall, “Can a Corporation Have a Conscience?,” Washington Post (21 March 2014), https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/can-­a-­corporation-­have-­a-­conscience /2014/03/21/951fd6b4-­af  76–­11e3-­a49e-­76adc9210f19_story.html. 14. Ronald B. Flowers, To Defend the Constitution: Religion, Conscientious Objection, Naturalization, and the Supreme Court, ATLA Monograph Series, no. 48 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003); Rachel Waltner Goossen, Women against the Good War: Conscientious Objection and Gender on the American Home Front, 1941–­1947 (Chapel Hill: University of  North Carolina Press, 1997); Joseph Kip Kosek, Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Charles C. Moskos and John Whiteclay Chambers, eds., The New Conscientious Objection: From Sacred to Secular Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Lillian Schlissel, ed., Conscience in America: A Documentary History of

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Conscientious Objection in America, 1757–­1967 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968); Steven Taylor, Acts of Conscience: World War II, Mental Institutions, and Religious Objectors (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009). 15. See Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder, eds., The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), especially Michael V. Tueth’s essay, “Breaking and Entering: Transgressive Comedy on Television,” pp. 25–­34. 16. Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed (West Sussex: Capstone, 2005), 101. 17. “What America Does for Work,” Planet Money (23 March 2012), http://www.npr.org /sections/money/2012/03/20/149015363/what-­america-­does-­for-­work. The source of those statistics is the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You can see the historical data on American employment at the bureau’s website: http://www.bls.gov/ces/cesbtabs.htm. 18. However, because of its international reach, only 1.3 million of those Wal-­Mart workers were actually employed in the United States. 19. “Big Business, Corporate Profits, and the Minimum Wage,” National Employment Law Project (July 2012), http://nelp.3cdn.net/24befb45b36b626a7a_v2m6iirxb.pdf. 20. Ruth H. Bloch and Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Voluntary Associations, Corporate Rights, and the State: Legal Constraints on the Development of American Civil Society, 1750–­ 1900,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 21153 (May 2015), 4, 6. 21. Ibid., 38. 22. My summary of Gilded Age business history relies on Glenn Porter, The Rise of Big Business: 1860–­1920 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2006). 23. Naomi R. Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–­1904 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 24. “Statistics of Religions in the United States,” Tablet (UK) 113, no. 3588 (13 February 1909), 25. 25. H. K. Carroll, The Religious Forces of the United States Enumerated, Classified, and Described on the Basis of the Government Census of 1890 (New York: Christian Literature, 1893), xiv. 26. For a classic account, see Edwin S. Gaustad and Leigh E. Schmidt, “Cities and Social Gospels,” chap. 11 in The Religious History of America (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2002), 231–­54. For two excellent recent updates to the standard historiography, see Heath W. Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chi­ cago (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Edward T. O’Donnell, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 27. Lyman Beecher, A Sermon, Addressed to the Legislature of Connecticut; at New-­Haven, on the Day of the Anniversary Election, May 2nd, 1826 (New Haven, CT, 1826), 16. 28. Porter, The Rise of Big Business, 1860–­1920, 43–­48. 29. George B. Cheever, God’s Hand in America, Library of American Civilization (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1841), 135. 30. Philip Schaff, Church and State in the United States (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1888), 15.

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31. Ibid., 69. 32. Leonard Woolsey Bacon, A History of American Christianity (New York: Christian Literature, 1897), 373). 33. Daniel Dorchester, Christianity in the United States from the First Settlement down to the Present Time (New York: Hunt & Eaton, 1895), 575. For more on Sabbatarianism and its transformation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Alexis McCrossen, Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 34. George Lewis, Impressions of America and the American Churches from the Journal of Rev. G. Lewis (Edinburgh: W. P. Kennedy, 1845), 389. 35. Winfred Ernest Garrison, The March of Faith: The Story of Religion in America since 1865 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1933), 63. Later, Garrison will remark, “The church as a whole showed more resourcefulness and achieved more success in meeting the financial responsibilities of this new age than in other respects.” Ibid., 233. 36. Paul A. Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971). 37. Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 38. William Arnal, “The Segregation of Social Desire: ‘Religion’ and Disney World,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69, no. 1 (2001): 4, 5. 39. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming,” Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 333. 40. Andrew Strombeck, “Invest in Jesus: Neoliberalism and the Left Behind Novels,” Cultural Critique 64 (Fall 2006): 184. 41. “Augmented Reality Makes Shopping More Personal,” accessed 26 November 2016, IBM Research, http://www.research.ibm.com/articles/augmented-­reality.shtml. 42. Sean Patterson, “IBM’s New Augmented Reality App Will Track Your Grocery Shopping,” WebProNews (2 July 2012), http://www.webpronews.com/ibms-­new-­augmented -­reality-­app-­will-­track-­your-­grocery-­shopping-­2012-­07. 43. “What’s New on a Smarter Planet?,” IBM.com, accessed 26 November 2016, http:// www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/index.html. 44. “Exemption Requirements—­501(c)(3) Organizations,” IRS.gov, accessed 26 November 2016, https://www.irs.gov/Charities-­&-­Non-­Profits/Charitable-­Organizations/Exemption -­Requirements-­Section-­501%28c%29%283%29-­Organizations. 45. “Measuring Lobbying Activity: Expenditure Test,” IRS.gov, accessed 26 November 2016, https://www.irs.gov/Charities-­&-­Non-­Profits/Measuring-­Lobbying-­Activity:-­Ex penditure-­Test. 46. Garrett Epps, Peyote vs. the State: Religious Freedom on Trial (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009); Greg Johnson, Sacred Claims: Repatriation and Living Tradition (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Thomas C. Maroukis, The Peyote Road: Religious Freedom and the Native American Church (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010); Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Tisa Wenger, We Have a

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Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 47. Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 48. David Green with Dean Merrill, “This Is Not a ‘Secular’ Business,” in More than a Hobby: How a $600 Startup Became America’s Home and Craft Superstore (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005) 159–­70. 49. Hobby Lobby, “Our Story,” accessed 26 November 2016, http://www.hobbylobby.com /about-­us/our-­story. 50. Supreme Court of the United States, syllabus, Burwell, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., et al. (OT 2013), 14. For references to the plaintiffs being “closely held,” see pages 12, 14, 20, 29, 30, 31, 46. See, finally, on page 49: “The contraceptive mandate, as applied to closely held corporations, violates RFRA [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act].” 51. In her legal appraisal of the Hobby Lobby decision, Amy Sepinwall does not think proving the sincerity of Hobby Lobby’s religious commitments was especially important; I dissent strongly from this view. However, I agree with Sepinwall’s general sense that the court had grounds to award religious freedom to Hobby Lobby and her interest in the way religious accommodations affect third parties, as well as her hope to reform our legal definitions of the corporations. Amy J. Sepinwall, “Conscience and Complicity: Assessing Pleas for Religious Exemptions after Hobby Lobby,” University of Chicago Law Review 82, no. 4 (2015), http://ssrn.com/abstract=249621; Amy J. Sepinwall, “Corporate Piety and Impropriety: Hobby Lobby’s Extension of RFRA Rights to the For-­Profit Corporation,” Harvard Business Law Review 5 (Spring 2015): 173–­204. 52. Goldman Sachs, “Business Principles and Standards: Goldman Sachs Business Principles,” accessed 26 November 2016, http://www.goldmansachs.com/who-­we-­are/business -­standards/business-­principles/index.html. 53. Kevin Roose, Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-­Crash Recruits (New York: Grand Central, 2014), 58, 57. 54. Caron Beesley, “Top 10 Questions about Small Business Incorporation Answered,” US Small Business Administration (24 October 2012), https://www.sba.gov/blogs/top-­10 -­questions-­about-­small-­business-­incorporation-­answered. 55. Department of Treasury, Tax Guide for Churches and Religious Organizations, accessed 26 November 2016, https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-­pdf/p1828.pdf. For a review of the criteria, see a Power Point presentation at IRS.gov, “Churches and Religious Organizations: Dos and Don’ts,” accessed 26 November 2016, http://www.visualwebcaster.com /files/87466/Powerpoint_Presentation.pdf. 56. Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell, “The Truth about Lobbying: 10 Ways Big Business Controls Government,” Guardian (Manchester; 12 March 2014), http://www.theguardian .com/politics/2014/mar/12/lobbying-­10-­ways-­corporations-­influence-­government. 57. Small Business Administration, “Choose Your Business Structure,” accessed 26 November 2016, https://www.sba.gov/starting-­business/choose-­your-­business-­structure.

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58. Dean Schabner, “Americans Work More Than Anyone,” ABC News (1 May 2016), http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=93364.

C hapt e r T e n

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

This chapter offers a critical view of the formation of corporate culture. I benefited enormously from the more prescriptive writings of the economist Eric J. Van den Steen, who has several excellent papers reflecting the importance of developing a strong culture within corporations. In general, his work seeks to emphasize how shared beliefs within a corporation lead to more delegation, less monitoring, higher utility (or satisfaction), higher execution effort (or motivation), faster coordination, less influence activities, and more communication, but also to less experimentation and less information collection. In this sense, Van den Steen is the contemporary analogue to the management gurus discussed in what follows. See Eric J. Van den Steen, “On the Origin of Shared Beliefs (and Corporate Culture),” RAND Journal of Economics 41, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 617–­48; “Culture Clash: The Costs and Benefits of Homogeneity,” Management Science 56, no. 10 (October 2010): 1718–­38; “Interpersonal Authority in a Theory of the Firm,” American Economic Review 100, no. 1 (March 2010): 466–­90. Bérubé and Ruth propose a solution to the “deprofessionalization” of the professorate: a teaching-­intensive tenure track that would grandfather long-­serving adjuncts, but for everyone else prioritize the competitive hiring of those with terminal degrees. Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, The Humanities, Higher Education and Academic Freedom (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). For more on the labor crisis in the humanities and the university more broadly, see Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). “The Endless Crisis as an Instrument of Power: In Conversation with Giorgio Agamben,” VersoBooks (blog; 4 June 2013), http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1318-­the-­endless -­crisis-­as-­an-­instrument-­of-­power-­in-­conversation-­with-­giorgio-­agamben. For a so­ phis­ticated account of crisis as a theme in twentieth-­century literature, see Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–­1973 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). On the interpretive origins of the financial crisis, see Craig Calhoun and Georgi Der­ luguian, eds., Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown (New York: New York University Press, 2011). “The Origins of the Financial Crisis,” Economist (7 September 2013), http://www .economist.com/news/schoolsbrief/21584534-­effects-­financial-­crisis-­are-­still-­being -­felt-­five-­years-­article. Arjun Appadurai, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). I grapple more with the distinctions between my analysis and Appadurai’s in chapter 11. See also Anna Kornbluh,

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Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Leigh Claire La Berge, Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison: University of  Wisconsin Press, 1998). 6. Emily Glazer and Christina Rexrode, “As Regulators Focus on Culture, Wall Street Struggles to Define It,” Wall Street Journal (1 February 2015), http://www.wsj.com/articles /as-­regulators-­focus-­on-­culture-­wall-­street-­struggles-­to-­define-­it-­1422838659. 7. I learned a great deal from George Yúdice’s critical reflections on the role of culture in the contemporary political economy in his The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 8. Glazer and Rexrode, “As Regulators Focus on Culture, Wall Street Struggles to Define It.” 9. As Michael Lewis argued in The Big Short (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), the culture of Wall Street has not altered; it has always been greedy. The failure lay in the rating agencies. Because the rating agencies were effectively bought off, there was no check between the reality of the cultural system of the bankers and the reality of the financial state of consumers. For a scholarly treatment of the ratings agencies and their involvement in the crisis, see Efraim Benmelech and Jennifer Dlugosz, “The Credit Rating Crisis,” NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2009, vol. 24, ed. Daron Acemoglu, Kenneth Rogoff, and Michael Woodford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 161–­207. 10. Glazer and Rexrode, “As Regulators Focus on Culture, Wall Street Struggles to Define It.” 11. Thomas C. Baxter, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, “The Rewards of an Ethical Culture,” remarks at the Bank of En­ gland, London (20 January 2015), http://www.newyorkfed.org/newsevents/speeches /2015/bax012015.html. 12. Merriam-­Webster.com, Words at Play, “2014 Word of the Year, “#1: Culture,” accessed 26 November 2016, http://www.merriam-­webster.com/top-­ten-­lists/2014-­word-­of-­the -­year/culture.html. 13. Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 12. 14. For a critique of the culture concept from within the study of religion, see Tomoko Masuzawa, “Culture,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 70-­93. See also Robert Ford Campany, “On the Very Idea of Religions (in the Modern West and in Early Medieval China),” History of Religions 42, no. 4 (May 2003): 287–­319; Michael L. Satlow, “Defining Judaism: Accounting for ‘Religions’ in the Study of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 4 (December 2006): 837–­60. 15. Stanley M. Davis, Managing Corporate Culture (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1984), xiii. 16. Ibid., 1. 17. The textbook authors refer to two best-­selling volumes: Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr., In Search of Excellence (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); and Terrence E. Deal and Allan A. Kennedy, Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life (Reading, MA: Addison-­Wesley, 1982).

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18. See Bro Uttal, “The Corporate Culture Vultures,” Fortune (17 October 1983), 66–­72. 19. John R. Schermerhorn, James G. Hunt, and Richard N. Osborn, Managing Organizational Behavior, 2nd ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1985 [1982]), 103. 20. Benito Teehankee, “Organizational Culture: A Critical Review of Literature,” DLSU Dialogue: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Cultural Studies 27, no. 1 (1994): 67–­92. 21. Special issue, Administrative Science Quarterly 28 (September 1983): 331. 22. “Management gurus play a critical role in the development of the managerial self-­ concept,” a later textbook explains. “Since the early 1980s, particularly in the United States, we have seen an increasing number of management gurus writing books, appearing on television, conducting seminars, appearing as keynote speakers at conferences, and consulting to organizations. . . . Management gurus help us feel important and proud of our managerial work by giving us a sense of purpose and emphasizing the moral imperative of managerial work. . . . Although management gurus may not solve all our business problems, they help us fulfill our fundamental needs to be somebody, to feel competent at our work, to feel like we have control over our increasingly complex environment, to find meaning in our everyday lives as managers, and to enjoy the pleasure that comes from watching an engaging presentation.” In Paula J. Caproni, Management Skills for Everyday Life, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson-­ Prentice Hall, 2005 [2001]), 57. 23. Robert F. Allen and Charlotte Kraft, The Organizational Unconscious: How to Create the Corporate Culture You Want and Need (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1982); Deal and Kennedy, Corporate Cultures; Craig R. Hickman and Michael A. Silva, Creating Excellence: Managing Corporate Culture, Strategy, and Change in the New Age (New York: New American Library, 1984); Lawrence M. Miller, American Spirit: Visions of a New Corporate Culture (New York: W. Morrow, 1984); Peters and Waterman, In Search of Excellence; Edgar H. Schein, Corporate Culture: What It Is and How to Change It (Cambridge, MA: Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1983). 24. Miller, American Spirit, 13. 25. Stephen Pattison, “Management as Religion,” chap. 2 in Faith of the Managers: When Management Becomes Religion (London: Wellington House, 1997), 26–­40. 26. Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1960). 27. Robert F. Hurley, “The Decision to Trust,” Harvard Business Review (September 2006), https://hbr.org/2006/09/the-­decision-­to-­trust. 28. Emma Green, “The Origins of Office Speak,” Atlantic (24 April 2014), http://www .theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/business-­speak/361135/. Green quotes from Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), 3. 29. Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Practices, Responsibilities (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 74. 30. Stephen M. Downey, “The Relationship between Corporate Culture and Corporate Identity,” Public Relations Quarterly (Winter 1986/87): 12. 31. Christopher Layne, “The End of Pax Americana: How Western Decline Became Inev­ itable,” Atlantic (26 April 2012), http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012 /04/the-­end-­of-­pax-­americana-­how-­western-­decline-­became-­inevitable/256388/.

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32. Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 57. 33. Alejandro Reuss, “That ’70s Crisis,” Dollars & Sense: Real World Economics (November/ December 2009), http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/1109reuss.html. On the economic recession of the 1970s and the cultural transformations of that decade, see Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2012); Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-­Sixties America (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2007); Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001); Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 34. Green, “The Origins of Office Speak.” 35. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 7–­8. 36. Ibid., 29. 37. Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-­Related Values (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1980). Hofstede focuses on how work-­related values vary across national cultures. To understand these differences, he studied 116,000 personnel from a large multinational corporation that operated in forty countries. 38. Christophe Volonté, “Culture and Corporate Governance: The Influence of Language and Religion in Switzerland,” Management International Review 55, no. 1 (February 2015): 79. Volonté cites Rene M. Stulz and Rohan Williamson, “Culture, Openness, and Finance,” Journal of Financial Economics 70, no. 3 (2003): 313–­49. 39. Golnaz Sadri, “High-­Performance Corporate Culture,” Industrial Management (November/December 2014): 21. 40. Josh Bersin, “Culture: Why It’s the Hottest Topic in Business Today,” Forbes.com (13 March 2015), http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2015/03/13/culture-­why-­its -­the-­hottest-­topic-­in-­business-­today/. 41. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System” (1965), in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 90. 42. Talal Asad, “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,” Man 18, no. 2 (June 1983): 237–­59. 43. Thomas O. Davenport, “Thriving at Work: How Organizational Culture Affects Workplace Fulfillment,” People & Strategy 38, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 39. 44. “Are you ready to learn about the ‘secret sauce’ that keeps Quicken Loans competitive and an awesome place to work? Well, we hate to disappoint you, but there is no secret sauce. There are ingredients, however! We call our ingredients ISMs.” See http://www .quickenloanscareers.com/about-­us/culture/, accessed 26 November 2016. 45. Bersin, “Culture.” 46. Emily Glazer and Christina Rexrode, “As Regulators Focus on Culture, Wall Street Struggles to Define It,” Wall Street Journal (1 February 2015), http://www.wsj.com/articles /as-­regulators-­focus-­on-­culture-­wall-­street-­struggles-­to-­define-­it-­1422838659. 47. Ibid. 48. Caproni, Management Skills for Everyday Life, 331.

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49. Andrew Rahman, “Intentional Crafting of Culture,” TD: Talent Development (August 2015): 53. 50. Julie Creswell and Ben White, “The Guys from ‘Government Sachs,’ ” New York Times (19 October 2008). 51. Ibid. 52. Susan Pulliam, Kate Kelly, and Matthew Karnitschnig, “Buffett Drove Hard Bargain with Goldman,” Wall Street Journal (25 September 2008). 53. Charles D. Ellis, The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs (New York: Penguin, 2008), 555. 54. Joe Bel Bruno and Brett Philbin, “Blankfein Tells Clients That They Come First,” Wall Street Journal (6 May 2010). 55. Caproni, Management Skills for Everyday Life, 284. 56. Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times (15 August 2015). 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. In her ethnography of Wall Street banks, Karen Ho describes a contemporary corporate landscape in which employees “located outside the corporation’s central purpose, are readily liquidated in the pursuit of stock price appreciation.” She interprets this as a serious change from even a quarter century ago, when “the public corporation . . . was mainly viewed as a stable social institution.” This traditional capitalist entity, the corporation, has been eliminated. Employees are inherently precarious in their relationship to their institution, subject to the whims of stockholder profit. Stability is not the defining positive attribute of a corporation; profitability is. “In the late twentieth century, the attempt at reconciling shareholder interests with managerial practices ended,” Ho concludes. “The new logic was simply that shareholder rights effectively trumped, subsumed, or even incorporated all other claims.” Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 3, 211. The language of culture is, again, a strategic false front to this liquidity (to borrow from Ho’s use of that term). Culture is something seemingly stable and unified, but open to the instability of individual interpretation and individual management of it. 60. Tim Wu, “You Don’t Really Need to Work So Much,” New Yorker (21 August 2015), http:// www.newyorker.com/news/daily-­comment/you-­really-­dont-­need-­to-­work-­so-­much. 61. James Surowiecki, “The Cult of Overwork,” New Yorker (27 January 2014), 23. 62. Ibid. 63. Robert Kuttner, “Why Work Is More and More Debased,” New York Review of Books (23 October 2014), 52. 64. Michelle Chihara, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Finance,” Los Angeles Review of Books (18 September 2015), https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/what-­we -­talk-­about-­when-­we-­talk-­about-­finance. 65. Ibid. 66. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory, 18. 67. Ibid., 113.

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C hapt e r E l e v e n

Epigraph: conversation with the author, 4 May 2016. 1. In Karen Ho’s ethnography, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), she makes the same point, citing a Yale Daily News article that says, “If you go to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, there are really only two career fields presented: banking and consulting” (p. 43). See also Josh Duboff, “Six College Students Create Job-­Search Site,” Yale Daily News (11 February 2005), http://yaledaily news.com/blog/2005/02/11/six-­college-­students-­create-­job-­search-­site/. 2. Charles T. Mathewes, “Religion and Secrecy,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 2 (June 2006): 274. 3. Julius H. Bailey, “The Final Frontier: Secrecy, Identity, and the Media in the Rise and Fall of the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 2 (June 2006): 302–­23; Alex Owen, “Magicians of the New Dawn,” chap. 2 in The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 51–­84; Bethany E. Moreton, “Opus Dei and the Transnational Catholic Cold War,” unpublished paper given at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, 6 January 2013. 4. Ho, Liquidated, 13. 5. Arjun Appadurai, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 46. 6. Karen Ho’s remarkable Liquidated, the single best ethnography of financial life, exhibits the extraordinary analytic opportunities for ethnographic research in this arena. Her work also reiterates the contexts of privilege that make conceivable an intimate access to this industry. In a considerable opening discussion of her method, Ho describes how she cultivated a broad range of informants for her work. She took a leave from her graduate work at Princeton and got a job at a Wall Street investment bank, Bankers Trust New York Corporation, where she would ultimately work for one year. Her job focused on workflow efficiency, allowing her access to the multiple departments of that bank in her effort to improve operations. During this time, she extended her alumni networks—­already existing from her undergraduate days at Stanford and her graduate work at Princeton—­among multiple institutions on Wall Street. After six months at that job, she was downsized, though would continue to work on a particular downsizing project, focused again on worker efficiency, for another six months. After a year off (during which time she returned to Princeton to write grant proposals, defend her dissertation prospectus, and garner human subjects’ approval), she engaged in seventeen months of fieldwork from February 1998 until June 1999. She describes this fieldwork as one specifically not defined by a single-­site immersion but instead was one of “polymorphous engagement” (a conceit borrowed from Hugh Gusterson’s work). The sites of this fieldwork were therefore quite many: she relied on many interviews with contacts already established, and she expanded and deepened these connections

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by “shadowing” individual bankers and attending industry conferences, panel discussions, and networking events. She reports that she had “little trouble” creating a “sizeable network of informants, especially through the process of direct referral.” Through her undergraduate connections, for example, she had a “fairly close relationship” with a former senior vice president at Lehman Brothers. Her identity politics and activist interests (involved as she was with ethnic studies organizing at Stanford, as well as Sponsors for Educational Opportunity at Princeton) allowed her particular access to nonwhite bankers and other financial workers. All her informants were given pseudo­ nyms, but the institutions for which they worked were not. Ho, Liquidated, 13–­22. 7. Ibid., 27. 8. Ibid., 12. 9. The only publicly available archival materials related to Goldman Sachs are not archives of their operations. They are, rather, a collection of public statements by Goldman or an assemblage of newspaper clippings about Goldman. Of the former variety, there is the Goldman Sachs Foundation archive, a small sheaf of materials in the Ruth Lilly Special Collections at Indiana University–­Purdue University Indianapolis that includes the public statements Goldman has made since 2002 about its philanthropic arm. The Brooklyn Museum of Art archive also holds one folder of materials that include announcements, clippings, photographs, press releases, brochures, reviews, invitations, and small exhibition catalogs for those events sponsored by Goldman Sachs. In addition to these two minor archival collections, oral histories from Walter Edward Sachs (partner at Goldman starting in 1928) and Edward Schrader (partner at Goldman starting in 1936) are available at Columbia University. The Museum of Modern Art and Harvard University Art Museums Archives contain papers of Paul J. Sachs, grandson of Goldman’s founder, who himself became a partner at Goldman and director of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. 10. Lisa Endlich’s Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success (New York: Touchstone, 1999) is written by a former vice president at Goldman, and offers an especially enthusiastic look at how the culture at Goldman has contributed to its persistent leadership position in the market; Charles D. Ellis’s The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs (New York: Penguin, 2008) is written by a leading American investment consultant and the founder of Greenwich Associates, a research firm that offers market consulting for financial services. With overt admiration for the firm, these works function quite analogously to denominational histories: extremely useful for their historical data, and quite telling in the aspects they choose to promote as especially consequential to Goldman’s endurance. 11. Ellis, The Partnership, 659. 12. Vernon L. Bates, “Rhetorical Pluralism and Secularization in the New Christian Right: The Oregon Citizens Alliance,” Review of Religious Research 37 (1995): 46–­64. 13. Karen Ho describes well this “culture of smartness” on Wall Street, which—­she argues—­is “not simply a quality of Wall Street, but a currency, a driving force productive of both profit accumulation and global prowess.” Ho, Liquidated, 40. 14. Clifford Geertz, “From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological

notes to chapter eleven

339

Understanding,” in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, ed. Richard Shweder and Robert A. LeVine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 123–­ 36; Renato Rosaldo, “From the Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 77–­97; Kirin Narayan, “How Native Is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?,” American Anthropologist, 95, no. 3 (September 1993): 671–­86; John Tresch, “On Going Native: Thomas Kuhn and Anthropological Method,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 31 (2001): 302–­22. 15. Bruno Latour, “fetish-­factish,” Material Religion 7, no. 1 (2011): 47. 16. Endlich, Goldman Sachs, 34. 17. Ibid., 32. 18. Jack Barbalet, “Max Weber and Judaism: An Insight into the Methodology of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Max Weber Studies 5.2 / 6.1 (July 2005 / January 2006), 51–­67. 19. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 43. 20. Ibid., 45. 21. Max Stackhouse, foreword to Economics as Religion from Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond, by Robert H. Nelson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), ix. 22. June Breton Fisher, chap. 5 in When Money Was in Fashion: Henry Goldman, Goldman Sachs, and the Founding of Wall Street (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 89–­118; William D. Cohan, Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World (New York: Anchor Books, 2011), 37–­40; Ellis, The Partnership, 14–­15. 23. For an excellent example of the kind of work that queries overconfident claims about the relationship between Jews and capitalism, see Francesca Trivellato, “Credit, Honor, and the Early Modern French Legend of the Jewish Invention of Bills of Exchange,” Journal of Modern History 84, no. 2 (2012): 289–­334. There have been very good recent studies that explore caricatures of Jewish economic practice, most of which conclude that economic history never is a simple story of ethnic innovation or unified triumph. Rebecca A. Kobrin, ed., Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (New Bruns­ wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Rebecca A. Kobrin and Adam Teller, Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Rebecca A. Kobrin, “Destructive Creators: Sender Jarmulowsky and Financial Failure in the Annals of American Jewish History,” American Jewish History 97, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 105–­37; Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Immigrants and American Capital­ ism, 1880–­1920: From Caste to Class (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 24. Janine Giordano Drake, “ ‘Working Class Religion’: A Thing unto Itself?,” Religion in American History (blog; 9 February 2014), http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2014/02 /working-­class-­religion-­thing-­unto-­itself.html. 25. Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949); Thomas Rzeznik, Church and Estate: Religion and Wealth in Industrial-­Era Philadelphia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013). 26. Fisher, When Money Was in Fashion, 19, 153.

340

notes to chapter eleven

27. Ibid., 204. 28. Glassdoor.com, “I Didn’t Drink the Kool-­Aid,” accessed 26 November 2016, https:// www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-­Review-­Goldman-­Sachs-­RVW7823198.htm. 29. Greg Smith, Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story (New York: Grand Central, 2012), 22. 30. Michael J. Mandel, The High-­Risk Society: Peril and Promise in the New Economy (New York: Times Business, 1996), 8, quoted in Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 34. 31. Martin, Financialization of Daily Life, 194. 32. Stackhouse, foreword to Nelson, Economics as Religion from Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond, x. 33. Nelson, Economics as Religion from Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond, xxv. 34. Fisher, When Money Was in Fashion, 25. 35. “Goldman Sachs,” accessed 26 November 2016, SourceWatch: The Center for Media and Democracy, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Goldman_Sachs. 36. Michael Lewis, “The Secret Goldman Sachs Tapes,” BloombergView (26 September 2014), https://origin-­www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-­09-­26/the-­secret-­goldman -­sachs-­tapes. 37. Endlich, Goldman Sachs, 194. 38. Cohan, Money and Power, 1. 39. Russell J. Dalton, Manfred Kuechler, and Wilhelm Bürklin, “The Challenge of New Movements,” in Challenging the Political Order: New Social Movements in Western De­ mocracies, ed. Russel J. Dalton and Manfred Kuechler (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 3–­20; Paolo R. Donati, “Organization between Movement and Institution,” Social Science Information 23 (1984): 837–­59; Hyojoung Kim and Peter S. Bearman, “The Structure and Dynamics of Movement Participation,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 1(1997): 70–­93; Thomas Robbins, “Cults, Converts and Charisma: The Sociology of New Religious Movements,” Current Sociology 36 (1988): 1–­255; Fred Rose, “Towards a Class-­Cultural Theory of Social Movements: Reinterpreting New Social Movements,” Sociological Forum 12, no. 3 (1997): 461–­92; Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, “Networks of Faith: Interpersonal Bonds and Recruitment to Cults and Sects,” American Journal of Sociology 85 (1980): 1376–­95. 40. Rachel Abrams, “Goldman Awards Blankfein $14.7 Million in Stock Bonus,” New York Times (30 January 2014), http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/goldman-­awards -­blankfein-­14-­7-­billion-­in-­stock-­bonus/. 41. As one journalist explains, “Nothing in the financial world happens in a vacuum these days, given the exponential growth of trillions of dollars of securities tied to the value of other securities—­known as ‘derivatives’—­and the extraordinarily complex and internecine web of global trading relationships. Accounting rules in the industry promote these interrelationships by requiring firms to check constantly with one another about the value of securities on their balance sheets to make sure that value reflected as accurately as possible. Naturally, since judgment is involved, especially with ever more complex securities, disagreements among traders about values are common.” Cohan, Money and Power, 4.

notes to chapter eleven

341

42. Constance Furey has authored a probing consideration of relationships as a central trope of the study of religion. “It is my contention that religionists, who know well that divine–­human relationships can be as potent as human–­human affiliations, are well positioned to appreciate that there is no subjectivity without intersubjectivity and no religious subject without socially defined and subjectively meaningful relationships,” she writes. “Relationships enact meaning.” Constance Furey, “Body, Society, and Subjectivity in Religious Studies,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80, no. 1 (March 2012): 10. 43. Endlich, Goldman Sachs, 17. 44. Smith, Why I Left Goldman Sachs, 5–­6. 45. Ellis, The Partnership, 704. 46. Smith, Why I Left Goldman Sachs, 16. 47. William D. Cohan, “The Tame Truth about the Wolves of Wall Street,” New York Times (15  February  2014), http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/the-­tame-­truth -­about-­the-­wolves-­of-­wall-­street.html. 48. Cohan, Money and Power, 4. 49. Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis (New York: Portfolio / Penguin, 2010), 268. 50. William Cohan, “How Goldman Sachs Made Money Mid-­Crisis,” Bloomberg Businessweek (12 September 2013), http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-­09-­12/how -­goldman-­sachs-­made-­money-­mid-­crisis. 51. “Golden Fetters,” Financial Times (14 April 2009); Lucas van Praag, “Goldman Sachs Changed Status before TARP,” Financial Times (17 April 2009). 52. McLean and Nocera, All the Devils Are Here, 271. 53. Ibid., 273. 54. Marianne Jennings, Business Ethics (Mason, OH: South-­Western Cengage Learning, 2012), 77. 55. Alain Sherter, “Ethics, Schmethics: Bankers Identify Goldman Sachs as Most Admired Firm,” CBS News: Moneywatch (14 September 2010), http://www.cbsnews.com/news /ethics-­schmethics-­bankers-­identify-­goldman-­sachs-­as-­most-­admired-­firm/. 56. Sheen S. Levine, Evan P. Apfelbaum, Mark Bernard, Valerie L. Bartelt, Edward J. Zajac, and David Stark, “Ethnic Diversity Deflates Price Bubbles,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111, no. 52 (2014): 18524–­29. 57. John P. Watkins, “Banking Ethics and the Goldman Rule,” Journal of Economic Issues 45, no. 2 (June 2011): 363. 58. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 40. 59. Simon Clark and Caroline Binham, “Profit ‘Not Satanic,’ Barclays Says, after Goldman Invokes Jesus,” Bloomberg Businessweek (4 November 2009). Original URL no longer active. 60. John Arlidge, “I’m Doing ‘God’s Work’: Meet Mr. Goldman Sachs,” Sunday Times (London; 8 November 2009). 61. Bethany McLean, “Meet the Real Villain of the Financial Crisis,” New York Times (26 April 2010).

342

notes to chapter eleven

62. Matt Taibbi, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” Rolling Stone (5 April 2010), http:// www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-­great-­american-­bubble-­machine-­20100405. 63. The Geneva and Zurich offices are the only exceptions to this rule. Swiss law requires that every bank identify itself on its exterior. 64. Kevin Roose, Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-­Crash Recruits (New York: Grand Central, 2014), 49. 65. Ellis, The Partnership, 554. 66. “Why Goldman Sachs? Our Culture,” accessed 26 November 2016, http://www.gold mansachs.com/careers/why-­goldman-­sachs/our-­culture/. 67. Ellis, The Partnership, 559. 68. See Hayyim of Volozhin, Ruach ha-­Hayyim (Vilna, 1859), 1:4. 69. Smith, Why I Left Goldman Sachs, 2. 70. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 61. 71. Jennings, Business Ethics, 76. 72. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957), 451. 73. McLean and Nocera, All the Devils Are Here, 268. 74. Cohan, Money and Power, 604. 75. Goldman Sachs, “Business Principles and Standards: Goldman Sachs Business Principles,” accessed 26 November 2016, http://www.goldmansachs.com/who-­we-­are/business -­standards/business-­principles/index.html. 76. Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story, “Clients Worried about Goldman’s Dueling Goals,” New York Times (18 May 2010), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/business /19client.html. 77. US Congress, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: The Role of Investment Banks; Hearing before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 111th Cong., 2d sess., 27 April 2010 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2011), 4:134–­35. 78. Goldman Sachs, “Executive Summary,” Business Principles and Standards Committee Report (January 2011), http://www.goldmansachs.com/who-­we-­are/business-­standards /committee-­report/business-­standards-­committee-­report.html. 79. Ronald W. Melicher and Edgar A. Norton, Introduction to Finance, 14th ed. (Danvers, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 19. 80. Jodi Dean, “Complexity as Capture—­neoliberalism and the Loop of Drive,” new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics 80–­81 (2013): 139. 81. Goldman Sachs document, “Executive Summary,” in Goldman Sachs: Risk Management and the Residential Mortgage Market, p. 11, accessed 26 November 2016, http:// documents.nytimes.com/goldman-­sachs-­internal-­emails#document/p11. 82. Ibid., 12. 83. Dean, “Complexity as Capture,” 149. 84. Gael O’Brien, “The Week in Ethics: Goldman Sachs, Not Criminal, Just ‘Deceptive and Immoral,’ ” (13 August 2012), http://theweekinethics.wordpress.com/tag/goldman -­sachs/; MJ Lee, “Levin Not Letting Up on Goldman,” Politico.com (10 August 2012), http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79566.html.

343

notes to the conclusion

85. John Cassidy, “After the Blowup,” New Yorker (11 January 2010), 28. 86. Testimony of Steven H. Strongin, Managing Director, Goldman, Sachs & Co., US House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises, “Recent Innovations in Securitization” (4 September 2009), http://archives.financialservices.house.gov/media /file/hearings/111/goldman_sachs_-­_strongin.pdf. 87. Ibid. 88. Randy Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 17. 89. Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 160.

C o n c lu s i o n

1. Gautham Rao, National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 168. 2. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 198. 3. Jason Chambers, Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Arlene Dávila, Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); James C. Davis, Commerce in Color: Race, Consumer Culture, and American Literature, 1893–­1933 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007); Katherine J. Parkin, Food Is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Jennifer R. Scanlon, ed., The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Gary Totten, “ ‘Inhospitable Splendour’: Spectacles of Consumer Culture and Race in Wharton’s Summer,” Twentieth-­Century Literature 58, no. 1 (2012): 60–­89. 4. On the problem of blood and genetic evidence for relation, see Arthur Daemmrich, “The Evidence Does Not Speak for Itself: Expert Witnesses and the Organization of DNA-­Typing Companies,” Social Studies of Science 28, nos. 5–­6 (October 1998), 741–­72; Jenny Reardon, “The Human Genome Diversity Project: A Case Study in Coproduction,” Social Studies of Science 31, no. 3 (June 2001): 357–­88. 5. Patrick Lencioni, “10 Business Strategies to Organize Your Family Life,” accessed 29 November 2016, Real Simple, http://www.realsimple.com/work-­life/family/business -­strategies-­organize-­family-­life. 6. Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 9 (1906–­8), Jensen’s “Gradiva” and Other Works, Vintage Classics (London: Vintage, 2001), 237, 239, 240. 7. Elizabeth A. Clark, “Antifamilial Tendencies in Ancient Christianity,” Journal of the

344

notes to the conclusion

History of Sexuality 5, no. 3 (January 1995): 356–­80; Shayne Clark, Family Matters in Indian Buddhist Monasticisms (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013). 8. Clark, Family Matters in Indian Buddhist Monasticisms, 24. 9. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic Books, 2008), 19. 10. Ibid., 59. 11. Ibid., 358.

Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Ábalos, Iñaki, 43

rate culture in, 231; global advertis-

abortion, 153

ing, 9; by IBM, 212–­13; infomercials,

Action Office: AO1, 45–­47, 46; AO2, 47,

179–­80; links with Episcopalianism,

47–­52, 53, 54; awards for, 54; change

92; of soap, 85, 87–­88, 89–­90, 90, 96,

and, 53–­54; decoration of, 51–­52; de-

247. See also marketing

sign of, 34–­36, 38–­39, 45–­52, 54–­55;

Aeron chair, 54

modularity of, 48, 49, 53, 55; product

Aetna, 235

development of, 37, 45–­52; promo-

Agamben, Giorgio, 221

tion and advertising of, 35, 39, 45, 46,

AIG. See American International Group

47, 49, 50, 51, 52–­54, 304n47; purpose

(AIG)

of, 34–­36; sensory experience and,

airline magazines, ix–­xii, 12

35–­36; use of computers in, 51. See

Al-­e Ahmad, Jalal, 28

also office cubicles

Allen, Robert F., 227

Adams, Scott, 56

All in the Family, 285

Adamson, Sydney, 89

Almond, Gabriel A., 23, 28

addiction, 19, 21, 22, 28, 30, 31, 33, 300n39

Al Qaeda, 27

Adler, Felix, 258

Alsop, Stewart, 158

Administrative Science Quarterly, 227

Amana Colony, 304n63

adolescence, 117–­18, 312n42

Amana refrigerators, 57, 304n63

Adorno, Theodor, 167

Amazon.com, 238–­39

advertising: of the Action Office, 35, 39,

American Family Association, 132

45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52–­54, 304n47;

American Federation of Labor, 207

ambient advertising, 9–­10; creation

American International Group (AIG),

of newness in, 97; critique of corpo-

236

346

index

Amish, 23, 128

Bauman, Zygmunt, 115

Andrejevic, Mark, 186–­87

Baxter, Thomas C., 223–­24, 241–­42

Anglicanism: High Church vs. Low Church,

Bear Stearns, 268

67–­69; Ritualism in, 67–­73. See also

beauty pageants, 168

Episcopalianism; Protestantism

Beckham, David, 105

Anglo-­Catholicism, 71–­72, 75. See also Oxford movement

Beckham, Victoria, 105 Beckhard, Richard, 228

animals, cleanliness of, 95

Beecher, Catherine, 149, 150, 151

antisociality of social media, 32

Beecher, Lyman, 76, 208

Apostle, The, 134–­35

Bell, Catherine, 77

Appadurai, Arjun, 248–­49

Bendroth, Margaret, 151

Apple, 58

Benedict, Elizabeth, 171

Appleby, R. Scott, 23, 28

Bentley, James, 79

Aquinas, Thomas, 261

Ben-­Yehuda, Nachman, xi–­xii

architecture: influence of Ritualism on,

Bergdahl, Bowe, 197–­98, 199, 200, 201,

71–­72, 73, 75–­76, 78, 79; modernist, 37–­38

213, 218 Berger, J. M., 29

Arnal, William, 211, 213

Berger, Peter, 6

Asad, Talal, 27, 234, 238

Bertoia, Harry, 41

Association of American Soap and Glyc-

Bertolini, Mark, 235

erin Producers, 92

Bérubé, Michael, 220

atheism, 68

Better Banking Project, 236

Atta, Mohamed, 26–­27, 28

Bezos, Jeff, 239

authenticity, 57

Bibles, 82, 83

authority: parenting and, 145–­48, 149–­52,

Billboard, 111

157–­58, 159–­61, 319n33; ritual and,

Billig, Michael, 299n27

62–­64, 66–­67, 69, 76–­77

binge-­eating, 22–­23 binge religion, 27

Babbitt, B. T., 88 baby boom, 155

binge-­watching of television shows, 6, 19–­20, 21–­23, 22, 30–­32, 33

Bacon, Leonard Woolsey, 209

Birnbaum, Nathan, 28, 300n28

Baldwin, James, 127

birth control, 153

banking careers, 244, 245–­47, 337n1. See

Black Lives Matter movement, 3

also Goldman Sachs Barr, Roseanne, 134

Blankfein, Lloyd C., 237–­38, 266, 268, 270, 275–­77, 279

Barter, Judith A., 38

Bloch, Maurice, 115

Bartman Ball, 312n37

Bloch, Ruth H., 204

Bataille, Georges, 113

Bloomberg, 272

Bauhaus school, 38, 41

Blumenberg, Hans, 6

347

index

Boesky, Ivan, 248

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 122

Bono, 138

celebrification, 130–­31

Borges, Jorge Luis, 262

celebrity: adolescent celebrities, 117–­18,

Brazelton, T. Berry, 159

120–­21; celebrities’ religion, 11, 108–­9,

Brown, Capability, 48

122–­24, 125–­26, 127–­28, 131, 134, 135–­36,

Brown, Peter, 108

137; consumption of the, 105–­9, 112,

Bryant, Alice G., 97

120, 128; gender and, 117; news cov-

Bryant, Anita, 190

erage of, 124, 125–­34, 135–­38; as reli-

Buc, Philippe, 306n21

gion, 3, 108, 112; religious re­sponses

Buffett, Warren, 237

to, 111–­12, 132–­33; sacrifice of, 113,

Bürolandschaft, 48

116–­17, 119–­21; status-­stripping, 118–­

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 199–­200

19; transformation from human to,

Bush, George W., 111

107–­8. See also Kardashians; Spears,

Bushman, Claudia, 86

Britney

Bushman, Richard, 86

Celebrity Mole Hawaii, 187

business: religion and, 37, 41–­42, 57–­58;

Central Conference of American Rabbis,

ritual and, 62, 64, 80–­81. See also corporations

205 charitainment, 129

Business Insider, 272

Cheever, George B., 209

Business Week, 227

Chihara, Michelle, 241

Buzzfeed, 30

Child, Lydia Maria, 150 childlessness, 321n58

Calkins, Earnest, 97 Calvinism, 150, 152 Cambridge Camden Society, 71–­72

child-­rearing manuals, 145, 146–­47, 150, 152, 153–­54, 156–­58, 160 children: cleanliness of, 93–­95; education

Camp Rock, 120

reform, 143; labor regulations for,

Canclini, Néstor García, 4, 282

143; naughty child symbolism, 151–­

Cantwell, Chris, 257 capitalism: captivity and, 278; desire and,

52. See also parenting Children’s Aid Society, 91

273–­74, 278; in popular culture, 286,

child-­study movement, 152–­53

287–­88. See also corporations

choice: consumption and, 1; of religions,

capital punishment, 312n37 captivity: capitalism and, 278; regulatory capture, 254

82–­84, 88, 136, 206–­7 Christian Socialism, 207 Christmas celebrations, 8

Carroll, H. K., 206–­7

Churchman, 90

Carter, Heath, 257

Church of Scientology (SCI), 25, 108, 122,

Cass, Stephen, 298n5 Catholic Young Men’s National Union, 205

127, 128 citizenship, 150–­51 Clark, Elizabeth, 287

348

index

Clarke, Shayne, 287

284–­85; as loss, 1; popular culture

class, 91, 99

and, 4–­5; religion and, xi, 2, 5, 6–­8,

Clayton Antitrust Act, 205

13, 284; ritual and, 62, 64; and US

cleanliness: of animals, 95; of children,

Customs, 284

93–­95; class and, 91; gender and, 89–­

corporal punishment, 159–­61

91; nationalism and, 85, 94; race

corporate culture: advertising critique of,

and, 89; religion and, 85, 87–­88, 93,

231; emergence of, 225–­34; at Gold-

96–­97; ritual and, 99–­100; role of

man Sachs, 3, 237–­38, 239–­40, 243,

civilization in, 93, 95–­96; soap and,

252–­67, 268, 270–­7 1, 272–­73, 280–­82,

85–­86, 87, 89–­90, 91, 92–­97; white-

338n10; management gurus on, 226–­

ness and, 87, 89

29; national culture and, 231–­32; over­

Cleanliness Institute, 92–­97

working as part of, 238–­39; religion

Cleanliness Journal, The, 92, 95, 97

and, 232, 235; retention of workers

Cleopatra, 123

and, 235; risk taking as, 222–­23, 235–­

Click, Melissa, 165–­69, 191–­93

36; role of in financial crisis, 222–­24,

Clifford, Max, 117

235–­38, 241–­42; symbols and rituals

Clinton, Bill, 134

in, 235

Clooney, George, 137–­38

corporate governance, 211

CNN, 28

corporations: in American history, 204–­6;

Coffin, Henry Sloane, 258

conscience and, 200–­201; definition

Cohan, William D., 266, 340n41

of, 203, 218; individuality and, 212–­

Cold War, 131, 155

13; mergers of, 205, 206; personhood

Colgate and Co., 85

of, 218–­19; religious nature of, 7,

Collins, Suzanne, 287–­88

215–­16; right to incorporate, 204–­5;

Columbia Records, 231

as sects, 203–­4, 215–­16; size of, 215–­

Comaroff, Jean, 306n15

17; statistics on work sectors, 202–­3.

commercial paper, 256, 261

See also business; corporate culture;

communism, fall of, 7

Goldman Sachs; Herman Miller

Comstock Law, 153

Inc.; Procter & Gamble; work

Congress of Jewish Women, 205

Cory, Fanny Y., 89

conscience in the workplace, 197–­201,

counterculture, 54, 231

213–­14, 218

Cowley Fathers, 79

consulting careers, 244–­45, 337n1

Cram, Ralph Adams, 80

consumerism: gender and, 176; Kardashi-

Crawford, Cindy, 174

ans and, 176, 179–­84; parenting and, 155–­58; Ritualism and, 79 consumption: of the celebrity, 105–­9, 112,

crisis: definition of, 221; in higher education, 220–­21, 241, 242, 282. See also financial crisis

120, 128; choice and, 1; class and,

criticism within institutions, 271–­73

99; descriptions of, 1; family and,

Cross, Gary, 85

349

index

Croteau, David, 127

Dobson, James, 149, 158, 159

Cruise, Tom, 109, 137

Dorchester, Daniel, 209–­10

culture: in anthropology, 224–­25; defi­

Dowland, Seth, 148

nition of, 224, 238; religion and,

Downey, Stephen, 229

225, 226, 228, 232, 233–­34, 238; in

Drake, Janine Giordano, 257

universities, 241. See also corporate

Drucker, Peter, 229

culture

Dudley, William, 235–­36

Curry, John Steuart, 90

Durkheim, Émile, 18–­19, 24–­25, 29, 33, 186, 269, 295n7

Dalrymple, Helen, 87

Dutch Reformed Church, 40–­42

Damon, William, 159

Duvall, Robert, 134–­35

DASH stores, 174, 175, 176, 181 Davis, Glen, 150

Eakins, Thomas, 90

Davis, Kim, 198, 199, 200, 201, 213, 218

Eames, Charles, 41

Davis, Stanley M., 226, 227

Eames, Ray, 41

Deal, Terrence E., 227

Eames chair, 57

Dean, Jodi, 278, 279

Ecclesiological Society, 72

de Goode, Marieke, 280

economics: as a humanistic discipline,

Demos, John, 145

240–­41; religion and, 7–­9

Demos, Virginia, 145

Eddy, Mary Baker, 109

De Pree, D. J., 41–­42, 57

education reform, 143

De Pree, Hugh, 41, 45

Eliot, Charles William, 74

De Pree, Max, 41

Elizabeth Arden, 119

design: of the Action Office, 34–­36, 38–­

Ellis, Charles D., 237, 252, 272, 338n10

39, 45–­52, 54–­55; landscape design,

Emergent Church, 63

48, 50, 55; midcentury modern, 38,

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 166

41; modernism, 37–­39, 53. See also

Endlich, Lisa, 256, 262, 338n10

architecture; office design

endurance: of Goldman Sachs, 262–­64;

De Stijl, 37–­38 Detroit Free Press, 93

of institutions, 263–­64; of religion, 262–­63

Deutsche Bank, 272

Entertainment Weekly, 120–­21

Devasagayam, Raj, 31

Episcopalianism: links with advertising,

Dilbert, 56

92; Proctor & Gamble’s links with,

Discover, 20

91–­92; Ritualism in, 67, 73, 79. See

Disick, Mason Dash, 175–­76

also Anglicanism

Disick, Scott, 170, 189

Epps, Garrett, 214

Disney, 213

ergonomics, 54

Disraeli, Benjamin, 72

Esalen Institute, 229

Dobkin, Eric, 243

Ethical Culture movement, 258

350

index

ethnographies of Wall Street, 249–­50, 253–­54, 336n59, 337n6

Financial Times, 267 Finster, Howard, 127

eugenics, 153

Fisher, Eddie, 122

evangelicalism: pro-­chastity movement,

Fiske, George Walter, 152

111; Purity Balls, 61–­62, 80–­81;

Flavius, Joseph, xii

response to Britney Spears, 111–­

Focus on the Family, 62

12; ritual in, 61–­62, 68. See also

Fonda, Jane, 134

Protestantism

Forbes, 235, 272

extremity, 23, 28. See also fundamentalism

Fortune, 227, 272

Facebook, 10, 29, 32

Frank, Thomas, 231

Facial Purity League, 88

Frazer, James G., 93, 186

Faircloth, Charlotte, 141

Freud, Sigmund, 114, 146, 285–­86

Falwell, Jerry, 190

Full, Cody, 198

family: consumption and the, 284–­85;

Fuller, Bonnie, 178

Foucault, Michel, 56, 65–­66

definition of, 284–­85; family busi-

fundamentalism, 23–­24, 25–­30, 32, 33

nesses, 7, 256–­59, 284, 285; family

Furey, Constance, 341n42

status for US Customs, 283–­84; Freud on the, 285–­86; Goldman

Gamble, David Berry, 92

Sachs as a family business, 256–­59,

Gamble, James, 91

284; in popular culture, 285; religion

Gamble, William S., 92

and, 286–­87. See also Kardashians

gambling, 33

family values: business values and, 285;

Garfield, Andrew, 3

of the Kardashians, 169–­70, 177–­79,

Garrison, Winfred Ernest, 330n35

184, 188–­91, 192; parenting and, 142,

gay marriage, 198

148, 317n12 Federal Reserve, 222

Geertz, Clifford, 233–­34, 235, 238 gender: celebrity and, 117; cleanliness and,

Federline, Kevin, 118, 119

89–­91; consumerism and, 176; par-

Feininger, Lyonel, 38

enting and, 144, 150, 316n7, 317n12;

Fessenden, Tracy, 74, 211

popular culture and, 168; Ritualism

Fiedler, Leslie, 90

and, 78–­79; soap and, 89–­91; in the

Fifty Shades of Grey, 166, 167 financial crisis: Goldman Sachs and, 263,

workplace, 181–­82, 192 General Electric, 203

267–­70, 274–­77, 278–­80; humanistic

General Union for Promoting the Obser-

account of, 221–­22, 225–­26; reasons

vance of the Christian Sabbath, 208

for, 277–­80; role of corporate culture

Generations of Light Ministry, 62

in, 222–­24, 235–­38, 241–­42; role of

Gene Simmons Family Jewels, 187

ratings agencies in, 333n9

Giant, 122

financialization of everyday life, 260

Gibson, Mel, 137

351

index

Gideon Bible, 82

Grant, Duncan, 90

Ginsu Knife, 180

Grazia magazine, 188

Girard, René, 114–­15

Great Railroad Strike, 207

Gladden, Washington, 88

Green, David, 199, 215

Gladstone, William, 72

Greenberg, Clement, 303n29

Goldman, Henry, 256, 257, 258

Greenblatt, Leah, 120–­21

Goldman, Julius, 258

Greven, Philip, 149, 160

Goldman, Marcus, 256, 258, 261

Griffiths, Brian, 269–­70

Goldman Sachs: comparisons with

Gropius, Walter, 38, 53

universities, 243–­44, 248–­49, 250–­51,

Gunderson, Edna, 132

254; corporate culture at, 3, 237–­38,

Gussow, Mel, 122

239–­40, 243, 252–­67, 268, 270–­7 1, 272–­73, 280–­82, 338n10; encourage-

Hadden, Jeffrey, 24

ment of criticism at, 272–­73; endur-

Hadley, Tessa, 167

ance of, 262–­64; financial crisis and,

Haggard, Ted, 190

236–­38, 263, 267–­70, 274–­77, 278–­80;

hair and the Kardashians, 170–­72, 176

information management at, 249,

Hall, Charles, 74

255, 264–­67, 268, 270–­7 1, 275; Jewish

Hall, G. Stanley, 146, 149, 152

history of, 256–­59; mentoring at, 259;

Hall, Jerry, 127

Midnight Madness, 265–­66; public

Hallock, Grace T., 93–­94, 96, 97, 98

information about, 251–­52, 338n9;

Haqq, Malika, 170

recruitment strategy at, 237, 259–­60,

Harris, Anita, 118

272, 273; relationships at, 246, 259,

Harris, Susan, 145

260, 264, 340n41; as a religion, 3, 7,

hate in popular culture, 164, 168, 177

246–­48, 249–­50, 252, 255–­56, 259–­61,

Haymarket Riot, 207

264, 269–­7 1, 279, 280–­82; secrecy

Hayyim of Volozhin, 273

at, 251, 253, 262; self-­preservation at,

Heath, Joseph, 202

274–­75; services offered by, 261–­62,

Hefner, Hugh, x

264, 266–­67; size of, 216; use of

Heller, Nathan, 174

language at, 252–­53; work hours at,

Hendershot, Heather, 148

239–­40

Herman Miller Inc., 7, 34–­36, 37, 38, 39–­

Good Night, and Good Luck, 138

42, 43–­58. See also Action Office

Goodrum, Charles, 87

Herreros, Juan, 43

Goody, Jack, 64

Hewlett-­Packard, 203

Google, 235

Hickman, Craig R., 227

Gordon, Sarah Barringer, 214

hierarchy of needs, 229

Gothic Revival, 72, 79

Hierurgia Anglicana, 71

Graham, Billy, 109, 126, 128

higher education. See universities

Gramsci, Antonio, 11

Hilton, Paris, 174

352

index

Hinduism, 147

Instagram, 29, 181

Ho, Karen, 248, 250, 251, 336n59, 337n1

institutions: criticism within, 271–­73;

Hobby Lobby, 199–­201, 204, 213–­14, 215–­ 16, 217, 331n51 Hoganson, Kristin L., 324n16

endurance of, 263–­64 Internal Revenue Service, 501(c)(3) organizations, 214, 215, 217

Hoge, Dean R., 161

Internet, weight of, 20–­21

Holden, Ralph, 97

Iraq War, 129

Hollywood Walk of Fame, x

ISIS, 28–­30

Holt, L. Emmett, 152

Islam, 28

Home Furnishings Daily, 47

Ivry, Benjamin, 123

Homestead Steel Strike, 207 homoeroticism, 90–­91

Jackson, Michael, 133, 173

homosexuality, 155

Jagger, Mick, 127

hotels, spiritual menus in, 82–­83, 84

Jakes, T. D., 109

Houghton, Frederick, 95

Jay, Nancy, 113, 114

Hoynes, William, 127

Jenkins, Henry, 148

Hsu, Michael, 19–­20, 21, 22–­23, 28, 30–­31

Jenner, Brandon, 173

Hubert, Henri, 115

Jenner, Brody, 173

Hulu, 21

Jenner, Burt, 173

Human Potential Movement, 229

Jenner, Caitlyn (Bruce), 170, 171, 173,

Hunger Games, The, 287–­88 Hyper-­Covenantism, 40

176, 177 Jenner, Casey, 173 Jenner, Kendall, 171, 173, 176, 181, 182

IBM, 203, 212–­13, 303n28 identity, 62, 69

Jenner, Kris, 171, 173, 175, 176, 178, 181, 188, 192

IKEA, 58

Jenner, Kylie, 171, 173, 176, 181, 182

immersion, 31, 32

John H. Woodbury Company, 88

Independent, 88

Johnson, Emily, 148

individuality, 211–­13

Johnson, Greg, 214

Industrial Designers Society of America,

Jolie, Angelina, 108

54

Jon and Kate Plus 8, 187

Industrial Management, 232–­33

Jonas Brothers, 120

Industrial Workers of the World, 207

Jones, Caroline A., 303n29

infidels, 28

Jones, Grace, 180

infomercials, 179–­80

JPMorgan Chase, 272

information management at Goldman

Judaism: Beth Din of America, 271; ce-

Sachs, 249, 255, 264–­67, 268, 270–­7 1,

lebrities’ embrace of, 111, 122–­24, 134;

275

haggadot, 63; Jewish history of Gold-

infotainment, 128–­31

man Sachs, 256–­59; Kabbalah Centre

353

index

in Los Angeles, 111, 123, 134; Karaite

Keane, Webb, 100

Judaism, 263; rabbinical councils,

Keeping Up with the Kardashians, 172, 175,

263, 271; ritual in, 83; RitualWell.org, 83; ultra-­Orthodox Jews, 23 Judge Advocate General’s Corp (JAG Corps), 271 Juergensmeyer, Mark, 27–­28, 299n22

177–­78, 180, 181, 182, 183, 187, 188. See also Kardashians Kelley, Jack, 133 Kennedy, Allan A., 227 Key, Ellen, 153 Khaos store, 181

Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles, 111, 123, 134

Khloé & Lamar, 175 Khurana, Rakesh, 231

Kalman, Matthew, 136

kinship, 175, 184–­87, 248

Karam, Najwa, 136

Klassen, Pamela, 147

Kardashian, Khloé, 170, 171, 173, 174, 176,

Knights of Columbus, 205

179, 182, 188, 189 Kardashian, Kim, 5, 164, 171, 172–­75, 176,

Knights of Labor, 205 Knorr, Donald, 41

177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183–­84,

Knowles, Beyoncé, 188

188, 189

Kourtney and Kim Take Miami, 175

Kardashian, Kourtney, 171, 173, 174, 175–­ 76, 182, 189

Kourtney and Kim Take New York, 175 Kraft, Charlotte, 227

Kardashian, Rob, 170, 173, 176, 188, 189, 191

Kroger, 203

Kardashian, Robert, 172–­73, 188–­89

Kruger, Barbara, ix

Kardashians, 169–­93; consumerism and,

Kuyper, Abraham, 40, 41

176, 179–­84; DASH stores, 174, 175, 176, 181; endorsements and product

labor protests, 207–­8

lines, 180–­84, 325n35; family values

labor regulations for children, 143

of the, 169–­70, 177–­79, 184, 188–­91,

lactivism, 141–­42

192; hair of the, 170–­72, 176; Keeping

Lady Gaga, 166, 167

Up with the Kardashians, 172, 175,

Lamoreaux, Naomi R., 204, 205, 206

177–­78, 180, 181, 182, 183, 187, 188;

landscape design, 48, 50, 55

Khaos store, 181; Khloé & Lamar,

language, 252–­53

175; kinship and, 184–­85; Kourtney

Last Temptation of Christ, The, 132

and Kim Take Miami, 175; Kourtney

Latour, Bruno, 55, 255

and Kim Take New York, 175; race and,

Latter-­day Saints. See Mormonism

172–­73, 183–­84; religion and the, 170,

Lawrence, Bruce, 26

172, 176, 188–­89; shame and, 177, 179;

Lawrence Textile Strike, 207

work and, 169, 178, 179, 181, 191. See

Leach, Penelope, 159

also names of individual Kardashian

Lears, Jackson, 79–­80

family members

Lehman Brothers, 221, 268

Kavka, Misha, 188, 324n8

Leonard, George, 229

354

index

Leppert, Alice, 188

May, Elaine Tyler, 163, 321n58

Levin, Carl, 275–­77, 279

Mayer, Melissa, 162

Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 114, 186

McCarthy, Eugene, 138

Levitt, William Jaird, 38

McClintock, Anne, 89, 99

Levy, Gus, 237

McCloskey, Deirdre, 240–­41

Lewis, Carl, 127

McGovern, Charles F., 180

Lewis, George, 330n34

McGregor, Douglas, 228

Lewis, Michael, 262

McInerney, Joe, 82–­83

Leyendecker, J. C., 96

McLean, Bethany, 267, 274–­75

Life magazine, 41

McLennan, John Ferguson, 185–­86

Lincoln, Bruce, 27, 28

McPherson, Aimee Semple, 109

LinkedIn, 235

Mead, Margaret, 154

Look magazine, 229

Melicher, Ronald W., 342n79

Lopez, Jennifer, 105, 174

Melville, Herman, 90

Lovato, Demi, 120–­21

Merrill Lynch, 272

Lowder, Charles, 71

Merton, Thomas, 10, 11–­12

Luther, Martin, 261

Mevlevi Order of America, 63 Michaels, Scott, ix, x, xi, 12

Mack, Burton, 115

Michel, Alexandra, 239

MacKenzie, Tod, 132

Michigan Star Furniture Company, 41

MacLaine, Shirley, 125–­26

midcentury modern, 38, 41

Madoff, Bernie, 248

militainment, 129

Madonna, 111, 128, 131–­33, 134

Milken, Michael, 248

Mahmood, Saba, 8

Miller, Lawrence M., 227, 228

management gurus, 226–­29, 334n22

Minneapolis Tribune, 93

management science, 228

Misawa, Tadasu, 96

Mandel, Michael J., 260

Missouri state legislators, 165–­67, 169

marketing: of Bibles, 83; of religious

Mitchell, Scott, 127

pluralism, 82–­84; of soap, 86, 87, 88,

modernism, 37–­39, 53

92–­93. See also advertising

modernity: fundamentalism and, 26–­27,

Maroukis, Thomas C., 214

32; individuality and, 211–­12; ritual

Married . . . With Children, 285

and, 68, 70; Ritualism and, 77; secu-

Martin, Randy, 260

larization and, 125, 142; soap and, 85,

Marx, Karl, 10–­12, 257 Masada, x, xi–­xii Mase, 134

89, 98 modularity of the Action Office, 48, 49, 53, 55

Maslow, Abraham, 229

monasticism, 11–­12

Mauss, Marcel, 115

Mondrian, Piet, 37

maximalism, 27–­28

monopolies, 205

355

index

Monroe, Marilyn, x, xi

Nishioka, Dina, 82

Montgomery, Emma, 22

Nocera, Joe, 267, 275

Moravian cookies, 57, 304n63

Noguchi, Isamu, 41

Mormonism, 25, 147, 151, 263

Noguchi table, 57

Muir, Edward, 70, 71

Norton, Edgar A., 342n79

Murphy, Michael, 229

Norwood, Brandy, 174

Murrow, Edward R., 129–­30, 138

Noyes, Eliot, 303n28

Muslim Brotherhood, 23

Noyes, John Humphrey, 272

Muzak, 21

Nussbaum, Max, 123 NutriBullet, 180

Naked and Afraid, 187 Nash, William, 92

Obama, Barack, 137

National Catholic Welfare Conference, 205

Ochs, Susan, 236

National Child Labor Committee, 143

O’Connor, Sinead, 128

nationalism, 85, 94, 299n27

Odom, Lamar, 171, 188

National Jewish Welfare Board, 205

Office, The, 197, 201–­2

National Security Administration (NSA),

office cubicles: criticisms of, 34, 35, 37, 39,

199 Nawaz, Masjid, 29 Negra, Diane, 117, 177–­78, 183 Nelson, George, 41, 42, 45, 47

55; decoration of, 51–­52, 56; religion and, 36–­37, 39, 57–­58. See also Action Office office design: Bürolandschaft, 48; design

Nelson, Robert H., 260–­61

of the Action Office, 34–­36, 45–­52,

Neo-­Calvinism, 40, 57

54–­55; effect of change in work activ-

neoliberalism, 7, 9, 12, 211, 218

ity, 43–­44; influence of Taylorism on,

Netflix, 19, 20, 21, 29

42–­43; reformation of the office, 53;

New America Foundation, 236

sensory experience and, 35–­36, 44;

New Mickey Mouse Club, The, 109–­10

social engagement and, 44

news coverage: celebrity news, 124,

Office Space, 56

125–­34, 135–­38; charitainment, 129;

Olajuwon, Hakeem, 127

corporatism and, 129; infotainment,

Olalquiaga, Celeste, 57

128–­31; militainment, 129; politain-

O’Leary, Kevin, 106

ment, 129; of religion, 124, 125–­28,

Oneida flatware, 57, 304n63

130–­38

Oneida Perfectionists, 151, 271–­72, 304n63

Newsweek, 138

Oppenheimer, Mark, 54

New Yorker, 240

Order of the Holy Cross, 79

New York Times, 30, 122, 206, 235, 238–­39,

O’Reilly, Bill, 130

275 Nickerson, Michelle, 155 19 and Counting, 187

organizational culture. See corporate culture Ortner, Sherry, 224–­25, 241

356

index

Osbournes, The, 187 Osteen, Joel, 6 Oxford movement, 71–­72. See also Anglo-­ Catholicism

Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 83 pilgrimage sites, 6 Pitts, Leonard, Jr., 119 politainment, 129

Pagels, Jim, 32

political governance, 142

Palin, Sarah, 129, 178

Popeil Automatic Pasta Maker, 180

Pandora, 21

popular culture: academic study of,

parenting: authority and, 145–­48, 149–­52,

165–­69; capitalism in, 286, 287–­88;

157–­58, 159–­61, 319n33; child-­rearing

consumption and, 4–­5; family in,

manuals, 145, 146–­47, 150, 152, 153–­

285; gender and, 168; hate and, 164,

54, 156–­58, 160; child-­study move-

168, 177; power of, 167; religion and,

ment, 152–­53; citizenship and, 150–­51;

5; sitcoms, 202; Wall Street in, 249.

connection with American history,

See also celebrity; Kardashians

145–­46, 148–­52; and consumerism,

pornography, 23

155–­58; definitions of, 142–­44; dis­

Porterfield, Amanda, 130

cipline and, 146, 159–­61; family val­

Posner, Richard, 279

ues and, 142, 148, 317n12; gender

Potter, Andrew, 202

and, 144, 150, 316n7, 317n12; parent

Pramaggiore, Maria, 177–­78, 183

as religious agent, 144–­47, 150, 151–­

Presley, Elvis, 128

52, 159–­61; pleasure of, 154–­55; as a

Price, Dick, 229

religion, 141–­42, 161–­63; science of,

pro-­chastity movement, 61–­62, 80–­81,

152–­55 Parents magazine, 147, 159, 161, 162–­63, 316n7 Parker, Sarah Jessica, 105 Passion of the Christ, The, 137 Pattison, Stephen, 228 Paulson, Henry M., Jr., 236

111, 121 Procter, Harley, 88 Procter, William, 91 Procter & Gamble, 5, 7, 85, 86–­87, 88, 89–­ 90, 91–­92, 93, 96 product development of the Action Office, 37, 45–­52

Peale, Norman Vincent, 157–­58

professionalization in higher education, 241

Peck, Abe, 231

Propst, Robert, 34, 35–­36, 43–­54, 55–­57

People, 119

Protestantism: economic life and, 258;

Pepsi, 132

fundamentalism in, 24, 25; individu-

Peretti, Frank, 130

ality in, 211; Protestant work ethic,

personal data, 212–­13

185; Reformation, 53, 68, 70, 71, 96;

Peter, W. W., 97

ritual in, 63–­64, 66. See also Angli-

Peters, Shawn Francis, 214

canism; evangelicalism

Peters, Thomas J., 227

Puar, Jasbir, 284

357

index

Public Worship Regulation Act, 72

of, 2–­8, 10–­12; economics and, 7–­9;

Pullman Railroad Strike, 207

endurance of, 262–­63; family and,

Purity Balls, 61–­62, 80–­81

286–­87; Goldman Sachs as a, 3, 246–­

Putney, Norella M., 145

48, 249–­50, 252, 255–­56, 259–­61, 264, 269–­7 1, 279, 280–­82; Kardashians

Quakers, 150

and, 170, 172, 176, 188–­89; language

Quartz, 141

and, 252–­53; news coverage of, 124,

Quickborner Team, 48

125–­28, 130–­38; office cubicles and, 36–­37, 39, 57–­58; organizing aspect

race: cleanliness and, 89, 91; Kardashians and, 172–­73, 183–­84; soap and, 91

of, 3–­4; parent as religious agent, 144–­47, 150, 151–­52, 159–­61; parenting

Railton, Diane, 118

as a, 141–­42, 161–­63; political gover-

Rand, Ayn, 274

nance and, 142; popular cul­ture and,

Rao, Gautham, 284

5; relationships and, 341n42; religious

Rappites, 151

history of soap, 86, 87–­89, 91–­93; re-

ratings agencies, 333n9

ligious responses to celebrity, 111–­12,

Ray J, 174–­75

132–­33; sociality and, xi, 3, 6, 32–­33;

Reagan, Ronald, 109

socialization and, 18–­19; social space

reality television, 136, 168, 169, 186–­88,

and, 211–­12; status quo and, 12;

324n8. See also Kardashians Real Simple, 285 Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, 83 Reformation, 53, 68, 70, 71, 96 regulatory capture, 254 relationships: at Goldman Sachs, 246, 259, 260, 264, 340n41; religion and, 341n42 religion: business and, 37, 41–­42, 57–­58;

survey statistics, 206–­7; technology and, 23, 29–­30, 31–­32 religious freedom, 74–­75, 81, 198, 199–­ 200, 204, 209, 213–­16, 217–­18, 331n51 religious organizations, 204, 205–­6, 214, 215, 217, 228 religious studies: academic discipline of, 17–­18; vs. theology, 18 religious toleration, 69

celebrities’ religion, 11, 108–­9, 122–­

R.E.M., 127

24, 125–­26, 127–­28, 131, 134, 135–­36,

Remote Survival, 187

137; celebrity as, 3, 108, 112; choice

revivalism, 63, 73, 75

of, 82–­84, 88, 136, 206–­7; cleanli-

Rich in Faith, 189

ness and, 85, 87–­88, 93, 96–­97;

Riis, Jacob, 91

consumption and, xi, 2, 5, 6–­8, 13,

risk taking, 222–­23, 235–­36, 260, 264, 277,

284; corporate culture and, 232, 235; corporations as sects, 203–­4, 215–­16;

278 ritual: authority and, 62–­64, 66–­67, 69;

culture and, 225, 226, 228, 232, 233–­

business and, 62, 64, 80–­81; for ce­leb­

34, 238; descriptions and definitions

rities, 127; cleanliness and, 99–­100;

358

index

ritual (cont.)

sacraments, 70, 73, 76, 306n22

consumption and, 62, 64; in corpo-

sacrifice, 112–­17, 119–­21, 164, 312n37

rate culture, 235; definition of, 64–­65,

Sadri, Golnaz, 335n39

67, 99, 112; invention of, 62–­63, 80–­

Saint Nicholas, 7–­8

81; in Judaism, 83; modernity and, 68,

Salesforce, 235

70; Purity Balls, 61–­62, 80–­81; reli­

Salvation Army, 205

gious toleration and, 69; sac­rifice,

Sandel, Michael J., 9

112–­17, 119–­21; scientia ritus, 65–­67,

Sands, Michael, 126

74, 77, 80; soap and, 93

San Francisco Bulletin, 93

Ritualism: authority and, 66–­67, 69, 76–

Santa Claus, 7–­8

­77; in Britain, 65, 67–­73, 79; consum­

Sastre, Alexandra, 183

erism and, 79; definition of, 65, 67,

satanization, 299n22

70–­7 1; and expanding landscape of

Schaff, Philip, 209

beliefs, 80; gender relations and, 78–­

Schein, Edgar H., 227, 228

79; Hierurgia Anglicana, 71; influ­

Schierbecker, Mark, 165

ence on architecture, 71–­72, 73, 75–

Schneider, David, 184

­76, 78, 79; modernity and, 68, 77;

Scholes, Jeffrey, 312n37

Public Worship Regulation Act, 72;

Schüll, Natasha Dow, 33

religious liberty and, 74–­75, 81; secu-

Schultz, Richard, 41

larization and, 67–­68; as a tool for

Schwartz, Joseph N., 42, 47

conversions, 78; in the United States,

scientia ritus, 65–­67, 74, 77, 80

65, 67, 73–­78

scientia sexualis, 65–­66

RitualWell.org, 83

sects, corporations as, 203–­4, 215–­16

Roberts, Julia, 109

secularism, 28, 64

Robert W. Baird & Co., 235

secularization, 67–­68, 124–­25, 142, 147

Rohde, Gilbert, 41

Sehat, David, 214

Rojek, Chris, 118, 120, 124, 130–­31

sensory experience in office design, 35–­

Rolling Stone, 119, 270 Roman Catholicism, 25, 53, 62, 75, 76, 96, 132, 228, 263

36, 44 Sepinwall, Amy J., 200–­201, 331n51 September 11, 26–­27, 28, 129

Romney, Ann, 149, 162

sex, 65–­66

Roose, Kevin, 271

Shakers, 151

Roosevelt, Theodore, 129

shame, 177, 179

Rosen, Hilary, 162

Sheridan, Rich, 34, 35, 39

Run’s House, 187

Shupe, Anson, 24

Ruth, Jennifer, 220

sight, 303n29 Silva, Michael A., 227

Sabbatarianism, 208–­10

Simpson, Nicole Brown, 173

Sachs, Sam, 256, 257

Simpson, O. J., 172–­73

359

index

Simpsons, The, 285

Sony Music, 111

Sister Wives, 187

Southern Baptists, 111

sitcoms, 202

Spears, Britney, 105–­7, 109–­12, 110, 113, 116,

Sivan, Emmanuel, 23, 28

117–­20, 247

Slate, 32

Spears, James, 119

Slezkine, Yuri, 256–­57

Spears, Lynne, 117

Small Business Administration (SBA),

Spiritualists, 151

218

spirituality, 83–­84, 159

Smith, Brian K., 115

spiritual menus in hotels, 82–­83, 84

Smith, Greg, 265

Spock, Benjamin, 156–­58

Smith, Jessie Wilcox, 89

Spotify, 21

Smith, Jonathan Z., 99–­100, 112, 113

Squier, George Owen, 21, 31

Snoop Dog’s Fatherhood, 187

Staal, Frits, 113

Snowden, Edward, 198–­99, 200, 201, 213,

Star Search, 109

218 soap: advertising of, 85, 87–­88, 89–­90, 90,

state governance, 68, 72 status-­stripping, 118–­19

96, 247; Babbitt’s Best Soap, 88; class

Steelcase, 54

and, 91; cleanliness and, 85–­86, 87,

Stern, Eliyahu, 273

89–­90, 91, 92–­97; connection with

Stern, Jessica, 29

virtue, 88; development of modern

Stewart, Martha, 109

soap, 86–­87; gender and, 89–­91;

Stewart, Pamela J., 63

Ivory, 86, 88, 89–­90, 90, 91; Lifebuoy,

Stockholm syndrome, 254

87; marketing of, 86, 87, 88, 92–­93;

Stolow, Jeremy, 31

modernity and, 85, 89, 98; Pears, 87,

Storper, Michael, 10

89; race and, 91; religious history

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 151

of, 86, 87–­89, 91–­93; ritual and, 93;

Strathern, Andrew, 63

Wool Soap, 88

streaming media: Hulu, 21; Netflix, 19, 20,

social engagement, 44

21, 29; Pandora, 21; Spotify, 21

Social Gospel, 207, 210

Strenski, Ivan, 27

Social Hygiene movement, 153

Strongin, Steven, 279–­80

sociality, xi, 3, 6, 32–­33

Stulz, R. M., 232

socialization, 18–­19

Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers, 214

social media: antisociality of, 32; Face-

Surowiecki, James, 240

book, 10, 29, 32; Instagram, 29, 181;

Survivor, 186

Tumblr, 29; Twitter, 29, 181 Social Purity movement, 152–­53

Taibbi, Matt, 270

social space, 211–­12

Tait, Archibald Campbell, 72

Solomon, David, 239–­40

Talking Heads, 127

Somerville, Siobhan, 91

Target, 203

360

index

Taylor, Charles, 6

eral’s Corp (JAG Corps), 271; postwar

Taylor, Elizabeth, 105, 122–­24, 137

economy of, 229–­30; US Army, 197–­

Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 42–­43

98, 199; US Customs and Border Pro­

Taylorism, 42–­43 technology: definitions of, 20; fundamentalism and, 24, 27, 29–­30; immersion

tection, 283–­84 Unity Church, 109 universities: comparisons with Goldman

and, 31, 32; religion and, 23, 29–­30,

Sachs, 243–­44, 248–­49, 250–­51, 254;

31–­32; society and, 55. See also social

crisis in, 220–­21, 241, 242, 282; cul-

media; streaming media

ture in, 241; employment insecurity

television: binge-­watching of, 6, 19–­20, 21–­23, 22, 30–­32, 33; reality televi-

in, 220, 250–­51; professionalization in, 241

sion, 136, 168, 169, 186–­88, 324n8. See

University of Missouri, 165–­69, 191–­92

also Kardashians

USA Today, 124, 125, 126, 127–­28, 130, 132–­

Teller, Astro, 141

33, 135–­36, 137

Teller, Danielle, 141

US Weekly, 105–­7

Temptation Island, 187

utopian communities, 57, 304n63

terrorism, 26–­27, 28 theology vs. religious studies, 18

Van den Steen, Eric J., 332

Theosophy, 38

Vanity Fair, 270

This American Life, 254

van Praag, Lucas, 267

Thomas Nelson Publishers, 83

Victoria, Queen, 72

Thussu, Daya, 129

Vinikas, Vincent, 92

Tillinghost, Mr., 76

Volonté, Christophe, 335n38

Time magazine, 162 TiVo, 21

Wadsworth, Benjamin, 149

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 145

Waldman, Steve, 126

totemism, 114, 185–­88

Wallace, David Foster, 56

Tractarianism, 71

Wallete, Andrew, 119

traditions, 62–­63. See also ritual

Wall Street: depictions of financial

tribalism, 186–­88

workers, 248–­49; ethnographies of,

Trump, Donald, 168–­69, 191, 198, 247,

249–­50, 253–­54, 336n59, 337n6. See

281

also Goldman Sachs

Tumblr, 29

Wall Street Journal, 19, 30, 124, 252

Twain, Mark, 90

Wal-­Mart, 58, 203

Twilight, 166

Warren, Rick, 128

Twitter, 29, 181

Washington Post, 75 water and homoeroticism, 90–­91

United States: Internal Revenue Service, 214, 215, 217; Judge Advocate Gen-

Waterman, Robert H., Jr., 227 Watkins, John P., 269

361

index

Watson, John Broadus, 152

Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 205

Weber, Max, 185, 197, 248, 256, 257

work: conscience in the workplace,

Weeks, Kathi, 190–­91

197–­201, 213–­14, 218; dominance of,

Weil, David, 240

201–­3, 218, 238–­40; employment

Weinberg, Jonathan, 91

insecurity, 220, 250–­51, 336n59;

Wenger, Tisa, 214

and the Kardashians, 169, 178, 179,

Wesley, John, 85

181, 191; Protestant work ethic, 185;

West, Kanye, 171, 176, 183–­84, 188, 189

Sabbatarianism, 208–­10. See also

Whitehead, John, 272

corporate culture; corporations;

whiteness, 87, 89

Goldman Sachs

Whitman, Walt, 90

working class dissent, 257–­58

Wilcox, W. Bradford, 148

World Health Organization, 117

Wildmon, Donald, 132

World’s Parliament of Religions, 88

Wilkerson, Rich, Jr., 189 Wilkie, Jacqueline, 99

Yanagisako, Sylvia, 185

Williams, Serena, 174

Yossef, Avi, ix, x, 12

Williamson, Marianne, 109

Young Men’s Christian Association, 91,

Williamson, Rohan, 232

205

Wilson, Lisa, 62

Young Men’s Hebrew Association, 205

Wilson, Randy, 62

Young Women’s Christian Association,

Winfrey, Oprah, 109, 135–­36, 137, 247 Wired Radio, 21

205 Young Women’s Hebrew Association, 205

Wishy, Bernard, 150 Wolfe, David, 180

Žižek, Slavoj, 273, 278

Wolfenstein, Martha, 154

Zomba Label Group, 111