This book addresses an important aspect of contemporary religious life in Colombia, and by extension anywhere that the “prosperity gospel” has taken root. Working with extensive data from interviews, case studies, and a lengthy experience of field work in Colombia, Bartel sheds light on the fact that many in these churches rely on credit (and credit cards now widely diffused in the country) to enable a self-presentation of prosperity. The unsurprising result is that many believers end up with crushing debt burdens. The author presents a wealth of original ethnographic data, and she knows both the general issues about religious change and the specifics of Colombian society and history very well. The result is a really fresh analysis, as well as a significant contribution to contemporary scholarship.
The analysis is anchored in the experience of specific people, institutions, and locales: Ursula, the MCI mega church, a neighborhood in Bogota, and one town in the Llanos (the plains to the east of the capital). The MCI (Misión Carismática Inernacional, International Charismatic Mission) is quite an institution, one of the most rapidly growing Pentecostal churches in the world: I have encountered it in scholarship in Africa. The central themes in the Colombian experience are promoting a link to God's grace, which is manifest in prosperity or, for many, its appearance. Credit cards are the link, and instead of collection plates, at church services ushers are ready with credit card machines whose glow lights up the room one transaction after another. Debt is both an expression and a validation of faith (through “financial resurrection” [11]). Debt is depicted as a covenant with God, and the key experience is one of becoming. We are a long way from Max Weber here.
The deregulation of religion and the deregulation of finance work together to create a fertile environment for pyramid/direct sales schemes tied closely to belief in prosperity as a sign of divine favor and to church membership. The central scheme described here comes with a company called Nu Skin. The chapters on church-run microfinance programs (Remedios and Opportunity International) and on Nu Skin, a direct marketing pyramid scheme, are fascinating. Nu Skin is a multinational, multilevel, direct marketing enterprise with connections to members of the Mormon church, which offers skin treatments, mostly for women. Women are the intended audience and also the prime agents for the enterprise. The operation works mostly through recruiting women who first pay a hefty fee for the products. These women then presumably make money through sales but above all by recruiting others. And so on. The arrangement recalls other pyramid schemes like Amway in the U.S. Gender issues are clearly prominent here, as throughout the book. The argument is that “debt disciplines the soul in a way specific to finance [and that] women and the family have become objects of financial desire as much as desired financial objects” (32).
As noted, the data are rich and varied, and all are made to fit into the author's overall scheme. This is difficult to summarize, so I quote briefly: “Religion in the Americas, as discipline and as object of study, operates and arises in in the interstices of colonialized histories and racialized hierarchies of power entangled with ‘historical assemblages’ . . . and within configurations of free market spiritualities that refuse discrete lines of denominational taxonomies or linear histories of origin and rupture” (196). The core of the argument is about financialization and faith. Thus, “financialization's intersection with believing comes into clearest relief when the trope of ‘believing in the self is deployed’” (201). In the process, consuming becomes the central vehicle for self-realization and credit card debt the means.
A few quibbles: at one point, the church building in Bogotá is described as housing 200,000, and later 20,000 (11, 20). Two-hundred thousand seems improbable: that is bigger than stadiums I know of. The author also tries to do a fair look at liberation theology as a Catholic alternative focused on the poor. But she is somewhat off the mark. Liberation theology does not to my knowledge promise “material salvation” (94); this is a misreading of “preferential option for the poor.”
These are minor reservations in what is a really original contribution. The author's rich ethnographic detail sheds new light on a prominent aspect of contemporary church experience—the gospel of prosperity and the related link between church, faith, credit cards, and debt. The author gets deeply into how this works for real, mostly poor, and mostly female people. The author is also theoretically ambitious with an all-encompassing scheme that folds everything from finance to religion to racism to transnational relations into a political/cultural frame of “late modernity.” This does not work as well, at least for this reader, because getting to the data and the relationships requires a strenuous effort to decode the text, which is written in a complex meta jargon of turgid prose and run-on sentences. Bartel's “post Foucauldian” scheme and vocabulary (209–210) deposit a cloud of fog over the analysis. Plain speech would do a lot to make the argument more accessible, and in this way to expand the audience and enhance the potential impact of this book.
