#like how do you have such a deep misunderstanding of American history and cults

[demoisverysexy]

An Open Letter to the Person who Blocked Me for Being Mormon

For context:

If you’re reading this, I hope it finds you well.

This letter is mostly for me, so I can get my feelings out. I’ve already talked about this with a few of my friends, and I’m feeling better than I was than when you blocked me. I’m still upset. Mostly because of general trends I see on tumblr of hatred for Mormons. A lot of it comes from ignorance and misunderstanding. Some of it comes from a place of genuine hurt that can’t go unaddressed. I don’t want to be dismissive of those who have faced trauma at the hands of my church. I am one of those people, and I know how deeply pain associated with my church can be. After our interaction, I felt that talking about it would help me process this.

Before I go on, I must be clear that this is not an attempt to get you to unblock me. As nice as it would be to be able to see your blog again – you’re very witty, and I enjoy your content! – I can live without it. This is more a response to the trend on tumblr specifically of hatred against Mormons, and assuming that they’re all bad people who are complicit in every single bad thing that the church does. You just happened to force me to be a little introspective about my church and my relation to it. Thank you for that.

First, however, I would like to clear up some misconceptions:

Your initial joke that prompted me to tell you I was a Mormon was a joke about Mormons and polygamy. The largest two organizations that can be classified as “Mormon,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the Community of Christ (which incidentally allows for gay marriage and has female clergy, though I am of the LDS sect), both disavow polygamy. There are other, smaller offshoot Mormon groups who do still practice this, which is where horror stories of polygamists marrying teenagers arise. These people are also Mormons, though I wish they weren’t, in the same way that problematic Christian groups are Christian, though many Christians wish they weren’t.

I do recognize that mainstream Mormonism has been labeled as a cult by many people, though the reasons people provide generally don’t hold up. Often the proof that people provide of my church’s cult-like nature is to take note of corruption that can be found in almost every church. These issues – such as racism, homophobia, and misogyny, to name a few – while real and important to address do not a cult make. Sometimes the proof is to point towards practices that are demonized in my church, but are practiced in other religions with no comment, or even celebration. Other times people will point to their own experiences with toxic church congregations, and while those issues are very real, they are by no means universal. My experience growing up Mormon was a lucky one in many ways. I personally don’t think that most people who study my church from an academic vantage point would call it a cult. I would consult them on this matter. After all, someone in a cult is rather hard-pressed to be able to tell whether they are in one or not.

Another point often levied against Mormonism is how it leaves its queer members with religious trauma due to its homophobic teachings. I understand this well. I have experienced deep religious trauma associated with my political stances in favor of LGBTQ+ rights (though that wasn’t the whole story). I won’t go into detail about this right now, but suffice it to say, I had a very traumatic time on my mission that led me to a very dark place, and ended with me contemplating choices I would never be able to take back. I’m fine now of course, but I carry those memories with me.

So why would I stay despite all this? Is it because I’m brainwashed? You would have to ask a psychologist about that, but I would say probably not. I knew, and know now, that the ways I was being treated were unfair and wrong. I don’t have time to go point by point to address every grievance I or anyone else has with my church and explain my position on it, as much as I would like to clear the air once and for all on this topic so there is no misunderstanding. Here’s the reasoning that has kept me here so far:

I think that every person of faith must, at some point, deal with the problematic aspects of their church’s history and doctrine. This comes with the territory. Whether it be disturbing stories in scripture, imperialist tendencies, doctrines that chafe against us, or problematic leaders, no person of faith is exempt from wrestling with the history that accompanies their faith. I have studied my church’s history in depth. Many of the horror stories I heard were provably false. Many were true. Where does that leave me?

I believe that God is bigger and better than us. We make terrible, awful mistakes all the time. But I don’t think that makes God less willing to work with us. If anything, I think it means he wants to help us more. He wants to help us move past our histories and become better. My church has a long way to go in this regard. For too long we have been silent when it mattered, and people have been wounded by our silence. Or even the words we have said out loud! If you look at my Mormonism tag on my blog, you will see some examples of what I am talking about. I have been wounded by the things my church has said and not said. It hurts awfully, and I ache for those who have been wounded more deeply than I.

But at the same time, I cannot deny the healing my faith has brought me. Whatever problems my church has – and it has many, deep and pressing issues – it is because of my faith that I am the person I am today. I can draw a straight line from my religion to the positions I hold today. Because I am a Mormon, I became a Marxist. Because I am a Mormon, I became nonbinary. Because I am a Mormon, I became a leftist. I cannot ignore that my religion, flawed as it may be, has led me to where I stand now. I am at the intersection of the hurt and healing the church offers. It is a difficult line to walk. But I hope that in walking it, I can bring healing and love to those who hurt in the ways I do. To let them know that they are not alone, and that they have a friend who can help them wherever they choose to go.

Yes I am queer. Yes I am a Mormon. I am here because I am trying to fix things. If at some point in the future I realize that I cannot change things, perhaps I will leave. I hope it does not come to that. And things are changing. They have changed before, and they can change now. I am confident that my God is willing to lead my church where it needs to go. I hope I can help speed things along. We shall see.

But spreading unequivocal hatred and disdain for Mormons does not help those of us who are Mormon who are trying to fix things. Yes, those who have left Mormonism due to trauma need a safe place to be away from that, and acknowledging the church’s many faults can be helpful to those people. I myself have criticized my church quite vocally. But refusing to listen to the stories of those of us who choose to stay, telling others that we are evil or stupid or what have you, is also quite traumatic to us. We are people too, with thoughts and feelings. It is easy to dismiss us out of hand if you assume we aren’t.

I try to be open about my religion and political stances on my tumblr. See for yourself: It’s a mix of Mormonism, LGBTQ+ activism, Marxism, and pretty much every other leftist political position you can find. Along with all the furry stuff, of course. But despite all this, I am still terrified every time someone follows me to tell them I am Mormon. More than I am to tell them that I’m queer. Tumblr is not representative of how things work in the “real world,” of course, but I have received hatred for being a Mormon there as well. And it’s mostly other Christians. So on the one hand I’m hated by LGBTQ+ folks, on the other hand I’m hated by my church for being queer, and on the third hand (as apparently I have three hands), I am hated by other Christians. I do not face hatred to the same degree from other Christians. I saw it most on my mission. But still, it exists.

(Incidentally, Evangelicals, who you seem to have problems with, and perhaps rightly so, though I have not done a study of the matter myself, largely despise Mormons, from what I have heard. Something to consider.)

I want allies. I want help. I want understanding. If I am to push back against bigotry in my church, I need your help. I need everyone’s help. Fighting bigotry wherever we see it is a worthy pursuit, I think. And if we can succeed, we can make the world a better, safer happier place. I want to fight off the ghosts that haunt my church. You don’t have to fight them with me, but I would appreciate it if I could have your support. It would make my job much easier.

We aren’t enemies. At least, I don’t think you’re my enemy. We both have been hurt by homophobia and bigotry. We live in a capitalist hellscape where police brutality and racism are on the rise. Fascism is looming over the political backdrop, along with the ongoing threat of ecological disaster. I think we would be better off helping each other than going after each other. I ask that you please listen to us when we say you are hurting us. The Mormons you blocked knowingly followed you, an openly queer person who calls out racism and bigotry and pedophilia. Yet you assume we are in favor of those things. Someone can at once be part of an institution while recognizing it’s flaws. (Aren’t we both Americans? Why not move if we hate it so much?) And perhaps we have used the “No true Scotsman” fallacy to justify why we stay. I don’t believe I have. I don’t feel I need to.

I hope that you consider what I’ve said here. I hope we can work together. And I hope that no matter what, you find peace wherever you end up.

Yours truly,

Demo Argenti

#religion #leftism #mormonism #LGBTQ stuff #marxism #racism #misogyny #feminism #homophobia #queerstake #shouting into the void #ok to rb

[faithfulnews]

Misenchantment

Misenchantment

By David Bentley Hart

January 6, 2020

I come to praise Eugene McCarraher (rather lavishly, in fact), not to bury him. But I may as well begin with a complaint, if only so as to appear evenhanded. In the penultimate paragraph of his enormous and extraordinary new book The Enchantments of Mammon, McCarraher conflates Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous invocation of St. Benedict at the end of After Virtue with what has come misleadingly to be called the “Benedict Option,” rejecting both together as though they were identical in meaning—which is to say, as if both offered a counsel of Christian disengagement from modern society and issued a call to withdrawal into isolated communities. This is an error. The Benedict Option is the title of an earnest but intellectually confused book by a journalist whose ultimate recommendations are difficult to discern amid the turbulences of his passions and anxieties. By contrast, the figure of St. Benedict as MacIntyre employs it has a very precise meaning: Benedict represents a moment when—in the lengthening twilight of a dissolving classical and Christian civilization—the slow labor of rescuing, recovering, and even reconstructing a unified Christian ethos was inaugurated. That labor began under the shelter of new forms of association located at the very heart of culture. MacIntyre’s St. Benedict has nothing to do with disengagement, and everything to do with the preservation and redemption of communal memory and public reason.

The misunderstanding is unfortunate, since it strikes a discordant note just at the close of a book that might well be called symphonic in form, and in the course of which McCarraher sounds a great many McIntyrean themes of his own. Like MacIntyre, McCarraher is impatient with those tedious modern dogmatisms that masquerade as deliverances of enlightened and disinterested rationality. He too finds the modern displacement of any moral grammar based on the cultivation of virtues by a fragmentary ethos of private values, public platitudes, and voluntarist individualisms a depressing reality. He too laments the reduction of ethical reasoning to little more than assertions of the will and celebrations of private property as the supreme index of the good. He too refuses to consent to modern secularism’s claims for itself, even while eschewing the traditionalist’s politics of nostalgia. Above all, like MacIntyre, McCarraher both recognizes and detests capitalism’s spoliations of creation and disintegration of communities, and casts a fond, forlorn eye toward the possibility of restoring a rationality of genuine human life.

But let me start again.

The Enchantments of Mammon is a magnificent book. It is, before all else, a sheer marvel of patient scholarship, history on a grand scale and in the best tradition of historical writing: a comprehensive account of the rise and triumph of capitalism in the modern age, not only as an economics, but also as our most pervasive and dominant system of ultimate values. But the book is far more than that. It is also a work of profound moral insight: a searing spiritual critique of a vision of reality that reduces everything mysterious, beautiful, fragile, and potentially transcendent in human experience to instances of—or opportunities for—acquisition and personal power, and that seeks no end higher than the transformation of creation’s substantial goods into the lifeless abstraction of monetary value. It is, moreover, a work delightfully subversive of the standard story of how this vision of things progressively became the very shape of the world we all now share (or, I suppose it would be better to say, the world we do not really share at all).

In McCarraher’s telling, capitalism as it has taken shape over the past few centuries is not the product of any kind of epochal “disenchantment” of the world (the Reformation, the scientific revolution, what have you). Far less does it represent the triumph of a more “realist” and “pragmatic” understanding of private wealth and civil society. Instead, it is another kind of religion, one whose chief tenets may be more irrational than almost any of the creeds it replaced at the various centers of global culture. It is the coldest and most stupefying of idolatries: a faith that has forsaken the sacral understanding of creation as something charged with God’s grandeur, flowing from the inexhaustible wellsprings of God’s charity, in favor of an entirely opposed order of sacred attachments. Rather than a sane calculation of material possibilities and human motives, it is in fact an enthusiast cult of insatiable consumption allied to a degrading metaphysics of human nature. And it is sustained, like any creed, by doctrines and miracles, mysteries and revelations, devotions and credulities, promises of beatitude and threats of dereliction. McCarraher urges us to stop thinking of the modern age as the godless sequel to the ages of faith, and recognize it instead as a period of the most destructive kind of superstition, one in which acquisition and ambition have become our highest moral aims, consumer goods (the more intrinsically worthless the better) our fetishes, and impossible promises of limitless material felicity our shared eschatology. And so deep is our faith in these things that we are willing to sacrifice the whole of creation in their service. McCarraher, therefore, prefers to speak not of disenchantment, but of “misenchantment”—spiritual captivity to the glamor of an especially squalid god.

  The book tells not only of capitalism’s most buoyant apologists but also of its most caustic critics and dissidents—the anarchists, socialists, communists, distributists, and Christian recusants of every kind.

It all began, of course, as a Christian heresy. Even if McCarraher rejects the notion that ours is an age of disenchantment, he recognizes that its intrinsic hostility to everything genuinely enchanting is itself a kind of rapture of the soul toward impalpable realms and unseen divinities. And this is partly because our age inherited all the sacred intuitions and longings for glorious transformation that earlier ages had directed toward a Kingdom supposedly not of this world. The dreams of one epoch inevitably yield to the disappointments of another. Still, the hunger for the sacred always persists, even as one way of life grows old, suppressed forces reassert themselves, and new ideas arise to fill in the spaces vacated by discarded certitudes. A great part of capitalism’s power over our imaginations, McCar-raher suggests, is derived from the authority it borrowed from a Christian language that had become detached from the larger rationality of the sacramental love of the world. And, while McCarraher holds no particular variety of Christian wholly responsible for these developments, he does not hesitate to assign particular blame where he thinks it just to do so.

He devotes, for instance, many extremely illuminating pages to the Puritan ethic, as it took shape first in Britain and then in the American colonies, and to the ways in which Puritan homiletics and moral discourse provided an empty rhetoric denouncing Mammon’s seductions while quietly laying a firm basis for Mammon’s reign. Above all, he shows how pernicious the Puritan language of godly “improvement” proved when used to justify—even to sanctify—what otherwise would have been called avarice and plunder. What began as a destructive heresy in Britain—as factory manufacture displaced free artisanal production, and as enclosure of the commons progressively destroyed communal usufructs—was only made all the more pernicious by its transplantation to the New World. Here, bright with the luster of holiness but unencumbered by the cultural traces of older orders of spiritual value, it took deep root and flourished without hindrance. And, of course, it was this evangelical fervor for “improving” the land and the people who worked it that became the chief justification for displacing the native peoples of the New World, and for condemning them as lazy, unenterprising, sybaritic, and positively wicked in their preference for living off the land’s bounty rather than transforming the wilds into fixed forms of private property. (McCarraher’s treatment of John Winthrop’s “theology of ethnic cleansing” is especially harrowing.)

Hence American Puritanism’s ghastly combination of the unappeasable pursuit of ever-greater profit with a private ethos not of holy poverty, but of pious drabness. Hence too, America’s historically unique fusion of the opulent and the barbaric, the devout and the rapacious. In a sense, America was born out of the transition from a Christian to a capitalist religious sensibility, mediated through the Puritan’s odd inversion of Christianity’s celebration of sacred dispossession into an ethos of unostentatious wealth. The baptismal waters of the Atlantic washed away the last lingering traces of a genuinely Christian vision of things, and what reached our shores was an altogether new religion. From the first, the nation was already set on its course toward consumer culture’s counterfeit beatific vision, its zealous devotion to the technological domination of creation, and its unconquerable faith in the redemptive power of possessions righteously obtained and vigilantly protected. But only the most earnestly zealous of the apostles of this new faith could have imagined that theirs would one day become the sole unchallenged religion of the entire globe.

  This, though, is only a small part of McCarraher’s narrative, which is too vast to distill into a summary in this space. And the value of the book lies not just in that grand overarching story, but also in the countless incidental details that throng the plot. On every page, there are poignant clarifications and illuminations and aperçus—the account of the Lockean elevation of monetary value over use-value, say, or observations of the legal personhood progressively ceded to joint-stock and limited-liability corporations, or bitter commentary on the rise of management theory and advertising strategies, and so forth. Moreover, as much as McCarraher’s is a history of capitalism’s slow but inexorable triumph, both as a concrete reality and as a transcendental ideal, it is also a more heartening history of resistance. The book tells not only of capitalism’s most buoyant apologists but also of its most caustic critics and dissidents—the anarchists, socialists, communists, distributists, and Christian recusants of every kind. And even these critics and dissidents are scrupulously differentiated from one another in McCarraher’s account, as are the varying degrees to which they either succeeded or failed in rejecting Mammon’s enchantments to the end.

For instance, McCarraher is pitilessly honest about those forms of traditional socialism and communism that have all too often recapitulated the superstitions of industrial production and management, routinized labor, the technological conquest of nature, and the mechanisms of the modern nation-state. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, McCarraher recognizes that the Marx who wrote the third volume of Das Kapital—with its elevation of unremitting labor over festal leisure, its fantasies of limitless manufacture and exploitation of the earth’s resources, and its insistence on a total central control of production��was at the end of the day the most monstrously ambitious corporatist in human history, one whose ideas, if realized, would have changed all of life and the whole of the world into one gigantic factory, human labor transformed into a machine of relentless and joyless production. In fact, much of the secular left comes across in these pages as, at best, naïve about capitalism’s power to absorb everything into the logic of the market and, at worst, complicit in that logic. One thing a reader will certainly take away from McCarraher’s treatment of many forms of classical socialism is that capitalism’s capacity for translating everything—even dissent from capitalism—into a kind of bourgeois commodity is all but infinite. And so his sympathies lie elsewhere.

McCarraher’s is an essentially Christian Romantic vision. For him, the only true path of resistance to capitalism’s destructive energies is one that leads away from the logic of the market: away, that is, from the idea that wealth-creation should be the highest constitutive good of any culture, and from the notion that technological power over nature should be the moral ideal of a sane human society. He longs instead for a truly sacral view of creation, approached with a sensibility open to transcendence. He longs for a culture that would treat nature not as a reservoir of morally neutral resources waiting to be converted into private affluence, but rather as an abundance freely given and freely shared within the embrace of a spiritual order of participation. Such a culture would treat the good things of creation as sacramental mediations and signs of the divine mystery upholding all things. McCarraher’s heroes are not so much Marx and Engels as John Ruskin and William Morris and others of similar disposition. And he has the discernment to recognize the potentially radical political philosophies latent in many places we might typically regard as lying altogether outside the political, such as John Muir’s nature-mysticism. The common ethos to which he is principally devoted is one that relies first upon God’s grace and love, as expressed in creation’s heedless generosity, and that presumes a kind of immanent sacredness in the world available only to those who are willing to receive it as a common inheritance. What he desires is an ethics of personal wonder and of the cultural hunger for God’s presence in the depths of things. It is an ethics, before all else, of the commons, permitted once again to flourish, to run to seed, to overflow, and to offer shelter to all.

So, in the end, while the story McCar-raher tells is principally one of alienation and loss, idolatry and willful blindness to beauty, it is also a tale about all those lingering sparks of an older metaphysics of creation as divine glory that might still be gathered up and kindled into a full flame. Perhaps there might arise a new St. Benedict or two, or a few million, who could strive to overcome the ethics of sanctified greed that separates human beings from one another and from the rest of the -natural world, and who might inspire a renewed awareness that the holiness of living things far surpasses the charms of lifeless wealth. McCarraher clearly believes that it is still possible to revive in ourselves, as late modern persons, a longing for the sort of abundance that is waiting for us when we do not seek to reduce everything into mere property. But this is an abundance visible only to love.

  I risk making McCarraher’s book sound more rhapsodic than practical, and that would be an injustice. He understands that his is also a vision that requires a certain pragmatic economics, and he does not neglect material theory in recommending the spiritual values he believes in.

Of course, no story—or none worth telling—really has a single discrete beginning or a single definitive conclusion. Enormous as The Enchantments of Mammon is, it could well have been longer still. It might, if nothing else, have dwelt a little less exclusively on capitalism’s “Anglo-Saxonism” (as the French would say), and perhaps explored at greater length the rise of capitalism in the late-medieval and early-modern Italian city-states, or the occult ties between early capitalist economics and Iberian colonialism in the Americas and the rebirth of chattel slavery. There are Catholic chapters perhaps yet to be added to the predominantly Protestant story that McCarraher tells. But no book can do everything and this one is already a majestic achievement. It will enjoy a long posterity, I think, in both the academic world and the world of the general readership. It is exhaustive, precise, and rich. But more important still, it is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.

The Enchantments of Mammon How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity Eugene McCarraher Harvard University Press, $39.95, 816 pp.

Issue: 

January 2020

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[faithfulnews]

Misenchantment

Misenchantment

By David Bentley Hart

December 21, 2019

I come to praise Eugene McCarraher (rather lavishly, in fact), not to bury him. But I may as well begin with a complaint, if only so as to appear evenhanded. In the penultimate paragraph of his enormous and extraordinary new book The Enchantments of Mammon, McCarraher conflates Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous invocation of St. Benedict at the end of After Virtue with what has come misleadingly to be called the “Benedict Option,” rejecting both together as though they were identical in meaning—which is to say, as if both offered a counsel of Christian disengagement from modern society and issued a call to withdrawal into isolated communities. This is an error. The Benedict Option is the title of an earnest but intellectually confused book by a journalist whose ultimate recommendations are difficult to discern amid the turbulences of his passions and anxieties. By contrast, the figure of St. Benedict as MacIntyre employs it has a very precise meaning: Benedict represents a moment when—in the lengthening twilight of a dissolving classical and Christian civilization—the slow labor of rescuing, recovering, and even reconstructing a unified Christian ethos was inaugurated. That labor began under the shelter of new forms of association located at the very heart of culture. MacIntyre’s St. Benedict has nothing to do with disengagement, and everything to do with the preservation and redemption of communal memory and public reason.

The misunderstanding is unfortunate, since it strikes a discordant note just at the close of a book that might well be called symphonic in form, and in the course of which McCarraher sounds a great many McIntyrean themes of his own. Like MacIntyre, McCarraher is impatient with those tedious modern dogmatisms that masquerade as deliverances of enlightened and disinterested rationality. He too finds the modern displacement of any moral grammar based on the cultivation of virtues by a fragmentary ethos of private values, public platitudes, and voluntarist individualisms a depressing reality. He too laments the reduction of ethical reasoning to little more than assertions of the will and celebrations of private property as the supreme index of the good. He too refuses to consent to modern secularism’s claims for itself, even while eschewing the traditionalist’s politics of nostalgia. Above all, like MacIntyre, McCarraher both recognizes and detests capitalism’s spoliations of creation and disintegration of communities, and casts a fond, forlorn eye toward the possibility of restoring a rationality of genuine human life.

But let me start again.

The Enchantments of Mammon is a magnificent book. It is, before all else, a sheer marvel of patient scholarship, history on a grand scale and in the best tradition of historical writing: a comprehensive account of the rise and triumph of capitalism in the modern age, not only as an economics, but also as our most pervasive and dominant system of ultimate values. But the book is far more than that. It is also a work of profound moral insight: a searing spiritual critique of a vision of reality that reduces everything mysterious, beautiful, fragile, and potentially transcendent in human experience to instances of—or opportunities for—acquisition and personal power, and that seeks no end higher than the transformation of creation’s substantial goods into the lifeless abstraction of monetary value. It is, moreover, a work delightfully subversive of the standard story of how this vision of things progressively became the very shape of the world we all now share (or, I suppose it would be better to say, the world we do not really share at all).

In McCarraher’s telling, capitalism as it has taken shape over the past few centuries is not the product of any kind of epochal “disenchantment” of the world (the Reformation, the scientific revolution, what have you). Far less does it represent the triumph of a more “realist” and “pragmatic” understanding of private wealth and civil society. Instead, it is another kind of religion, one whose chief tenets may be more irrational than almost any of the creeds it replaced at the various centers of global culture. It is the coldest and most stupefying of idolatries: a faith that has forsaken the sacral understanding of creation as something charged with God’s grandeur, flowing from the inexhaustible wellsprings of God’s charity, in favor of an entirely opposed order of sacred attachments. Rather than a sane calculation of material possibilities and human motives, it is in fact an enthusiast cult of insatiable consumption allied to a degrading metaphysics of human nature. And it is sustained, like any creed, by doctrines and miracles, mysteries and revelations, devotions and credulities, promises of beatitude and threats of dereliction. McCarraher urges us to stop thinking of the modern age as the godless sequel to the ages of faith, and recognize it instead as a period of the most destructive kind of superstition, one in which acquisition and ambition have become our highest moral aims, consumer goods (the more intrinsically worthless the better) our fetishes, and impossible promises of limitless material felicity our shared eschatology. And so deep is our faith in these things that we are willing to sacrifice the whole of creation in their service. McCarraher, therefore, prefers to speak not of disenchantment, but of “misenchantment”—spiritual captivity to the glamor of an especially squalid god.

  The book tells not only of capitalism’s most buoyant apologists but also of its most caustic critics and dissidents—the anarchists, socialists, communists, distributists, and Christian recusants of every kind.

It all began, of course, as a Christian heresy. Even if McCarraher rejects the notion that ours is an age of disenchantment, he recognizes that its intrinsic hostility to everything genuinely enchanting is itself a kind of rapture of the soul toward impalpable realms and unseen divinities. And this is partly because our age inherited all the sacred intuitions and longings for glorious transformation that earlier ages had directed toward a Kingdom supposedly not of this world. The dreams of one epoch inevitably yield to the disappointments of another. Still, the hunger for the sacred always persists, even as one way of life grows old, suppressed forces reassert themselves, and new ideas arise to fill in the spaces vacated by discarded certitudes. A great part of capitalism’s power over our imaginations, McCar-raher suggests, is derived from the authority it borrowed from a Christian language that had become detached from the larger rationality of the sacramental love of the world. And, while McCarraher holds no particular variety of Christian wholly responsible for these developments, he does not hesitate to assign particular blame where he thinks it just to do so.

He devotes, for instance, many extremely illuminating pages to the Puritan ethic, as it took shape first in Britain and then in the American colonies, and to the ways in which Puritan homiletics and moral discourse provided an empty rhetoric denouncing Mammon’s seductions while quietly laying a firm basis for Mammon’s reign. Above all, he shows how pernicious the Puritan language of godly “improvement” proved when used to justify—even to sanctify—what otherwise would have been called avarice and plunder. What began as a destructive heresy in Britain—as factory manufacture displaced free artisanal production, and as enclosure of the commons progressively destroyed communal usufructs—was only made all the more pernicious by its transplantation to the New World. Here, bright with the luster of holiness but unencumbered by the cultural traces of older orders of spiritual value, it took deep root and flourished without hindrance. And, of course, it was this evangelical fervor for “improving” the land and the people who worked it that became the chief justification for displacing the native peoples of the New World, and for condemning them as lazy, unenterprising, sybaritic, and positively wicked in their preference for living off the land’s bounty rather than transforming the wilds into fixed forms of private property. (McCarraher’s treatment of John Winthrop’s “theology of ethnic cleansing” is especially harrowing.)

Hence American Puritanism’s ghastly combination of the unappeasable pursuit of ever-greater profit with a private ethos not of holy poverty, but of pious drabness. Hence too, America’s historically unique fusion of the opulent and the barbaric, the devout and the rapacious. In a sense, America was born out of the transition from a Christian to a capitalist religious sensibility, mediated through the Puritan’s odd inversion of Christianity’s celebration of sacred dispossession into an ethos of unostentatious wealth. The baptismal waters of the Atlantic washed away the last lingering traces of a genuinely Christian vision of things, and what reached our shores was an altogether new religion. From the first, the nation was already set on its course toward consumer culture’s counterfeit beatific vision, its zealous devotion to the technological domination of creation, and its unconquerable faith in the redemptive power of possessions righteously obtained and vigilantly protected. But only the most earnestly zealous of the apostles of this new faith could have imagined that theirs would one day become the sole unchallenged religion of the entire globe.

  This, though, is only a small part of McCarraher’s narrative, which is too vast to distill into a summary in this space. And the value of the book lies not just in that grand overarching story, but also in the countless incidental details that throng the plot. On every page, there are poignant clarifications and illuminations and aperçus—the account of the Lockean elevation of monetary value over use-value, say, or observations of the legal personhood progressively ceded to joint-stock and limited-liability corporations, or bitter commentary on the rise of management theory and advertising strategies, and so forth. Moreover, as much as McCarraher’s is a history of capitalism’s slow but inexorable triumph, both as a concrete reality and as a transcendental ideal, it is also a more heartening history of resistance. The book tells not only of capitalism’s most buoyant apologists but also of its most caustic critics and dissidents—the anarchists, socialists, communists, distributists, and Christian recusants of every kind. And even these critics and dissidents are scrupulously differentiated from one another in McCarraher’s account, as are the varying degrees to which they either succeeded or failed in rejecting Mammon’s enchantments to the end.

For instance, McCarraher is pitilessly honest about those forms of traditional socialism and communism that have all too often recapitulated the superstitions of industrial production and management, routinized labor, the technological conquest of nature, and the mechanisms of the modern nation-state. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, McCarraher recognizes that the Marx who wrote the third volume of Das Kapital—with its elevation of unremitting labor over festal leisure, its fantasies of limitless manufacture and exploitation of the earth’s resources, and its insistence on a total central control of production—was at the end of the day the most monstrously ambitious corporatist in human history, one whose ideas, if realized, would have changed all of life and the whole of the world into one gigantic factory, human labor transformed into a machine of relentless and joyless production. In fact, much of the secular left comes across in these pages as, at best, naïve about capitalism’s power to absorb everything into the logic of the market and, at worst, complicit in that logic. One thing a reader will certainly take away from McCarraher’s treatment of many forms of classical socialism is that capitalism’s capacity for translating everything—even dissent from capitalism—into a kind of bourgeois commodity is all but infinite. And so his sympathies lie elsewhere.

McCarraher’s is an essentially Christian Romantic vision. For him, the only true path of resistance to capitalism’s destructive energies is one that leads away from the logic of the market: away, that is, from the idea that wealth-creation should be the highest constitutive good of any culture, and from the notion that technological power over nature should be the moral ideal of a sane human society. He longs instead for a truly sacral view of creation, approached with a sensibility open to transcendence. He longs for a culture that would treat nature not as a reservoir of morally neutral resources waiting to be converted into private affluence, but rather as an abundance freely given and freely shared within the embrace of a spiritual order of participation. Such a culture would treat the good things of creation as sacramental mediations and signs of the divine mystery upholding all things. McCarraher’s heroes are not so much Marx and Engels as John Ruskin and William Morris and others of similar disposition. And he has the discernment to recognize the potentially radical political philosophies latent in many places we might typically regard as lying altogether outside the political, such as John Muir’s nature-mysticism. The common ethos to which he is principally devoted is one that relies first upon God’s grace and love, as expressed in creation’s heedless generosity, and that presumes a kind of immanent sacredness in the world available only to those who are willing to receive it as a common inheritance. What he desires is an ethics of personal wonder and of the cultural hunger for God’s presence in the depths of things. It is an ethics, before all else, of the commons, permitted once again to flourish, to run to seed, to overflow, and to offer shelter to all.

So, in the end, while the story McCar-raher tells is principally one of alienation and loss, idolatry and willful blindness to beauty, it is also a tale about all those lingering sparks of an older metaphysics of creation as divine glory that might still be gathered up and kindled into a full flame. Perhaps there might arise a new St. Benedict or two, or a few million, who could strive to overcome the ethics of sanctified greed that separates human beings from one another and from the rest of the -natural world, and who might inspire a renewed awareness that the holiness of living things far surpasses the charms of lifeless wealth. McCarraher clearly believes that it is still possible to revive in ourselves, as late modern persons, a longing for the sort of abundance that is waiting for us when we do not seek to reduce everything into mere property. But this is an abundance visible only to love.

  I risk making McCarraher’s book sound more rhapsodic than practical, and that would be an injustice. He understands that his is also a vision that requires a certain pragmatic economics, and he does not neglect material theory in recommending the spiritual values he believes in.

Of course, no story—or none worth telling—really has a single discrete beginning or a single definitive conclusion. Enormous as The Enchantments of Mammon is, it could well have been longer still. It might, if nothing else, have dwelt a little less exclusively on capitalism’s “Anglo-Saxonism” (as the French would say), and perhaps explored at greater length the rise of capitalism in the late-medieval and early-modern Italian city-states, or the occult ties between early capitalist economics and Iberian colonialism in the Americas and the rebirth of chattel slavery. There are Catholic chapters perhaps yet to be added to the predominantly Protestant story that McCarraher tells. But no book can do everything and this one is already a majestic achievement. It will enjoy a long posterity, I think, in both the academic world and the world of the general readership. It is exhaustive, precise, and rich. But more important still, it is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.

The Enchantments of Mammon How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity Eugene McCarraher Harvard University Press, $39.95, 816 pp.

Issue: 

January 2020

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