Card Carrying Christians: Debt and the Making of Free Market Spiritualities in Colombia
University of California Press, 2021
In the waning years of Latin America's longest and bloodiest civil war, the rise of an unlikely duo is transforming Colombia: Christianity and access to credit. In her exciting new book, Rebecca C. Bartel details how surging evangelical conversions and widespread access to credit cards, microfinance programs, and mortgages are changing how millions of Colombians envision a more prosperous future. Yet programs of financialization propel new modes of violence. As prosperity becomes conflated with peace, and debt with devotion, survival only becomes possible through credit and its accompanying forms of indebtedness. A new future is on the horizon, but it will come at a price.
"Financializing the Soul: Christian Microfinance and Economic Missionization in Colombia," Critical Research on Religion, 9(1): 31-47. 2021
Microfinance is the vanguard of financialization today. This is especially true in Colombia, where
microfinance rivals any other type of formal credit. Entangled with Colombia’s micro-financialization is the phenomenon of microfinance corporations in joint ventures with Christian organizations that broker their microfinance programs. These faith-based corporations temper the surge in microfinance with ascetic discipline and the infusion of an entrepreneurial spirit. Economic discipline, say the microfinanciers, is required for what is referred to as ‘financial literacy’ and ‘financial inclusion’ programs that instil a distinctly Christian corporate order. This article, based on 2 years of sustained fieldwork in Colombia, focuses on one such microfinance program run by a transnational Christian credit organization. With microfinance, souls are disciplined through debts and ideals of an ascetic prosperity. In the end, the article concludes that there is a Christian morality to financialized capitalism that is exercised at the level of the interior soul.
"Introduction to Classifying Capital," with Lucia Hulsether. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 87 (3): 581-595.
2019.
WHAT DOES the academic study of religion contribute to the study of capital and capitalism? What is the status of the field’s scholarship in these areas, and how can we further develop this work ? This roundtable considers these questions. Its genesis was an observation that scholars across subdisciplines and methodologies of religious studies have long identified capital as an item of concern. However, as processes of capital have shifted, scholarship in the study of religion has struggled to find coherent vocabulary for articulating how “capital” fits into the field as a whole. Is global capitalism a kind of stealth universalizing Protestantism? Is it a modern world religious tradition that deserves a place alongside Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and the other usual suspects of introductory surveys? Does capitalism produce religion, or does religion produce capitalism?
"Confession and the Anthropology of Forgiveness: Reflections on Colombia's Process of Transitional Justice," Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 24 (1): 145-161.
2018
In the waning years of Latin America's longest and bloodiest civil war, the rise of an unlikely duo is transforming Colombia: Christianity and access to credit. In her exciting new book, Rebecca C. Bartel details how surging evangelical conversions and widespread access to credit cards, microfinance programs, and mortgages are changing how millions of Colombians envision a more prosperous future. Yet programs of financialization propel new modes of violence. As prosperity becomes conflated with peace, and debt with devotion, survival only becomes possible through credit and its accompanying forms of indebtedness. A new future is on the horizon, but it will come at a price.