“Money, Sex And God: The Critical Logic of Religious Nationalism”
Roger Friedland
Departments of Religious Studies and Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara
God is once again afoot in the public sphere. Politics become a religious
obligation. For an apparently new breed of religious nationalists the nation-state is a
vehicle of the divine. Religious nationalism has a semiotic structure, a symbolic order. It
is a critical discourse, a project deployed against global capitalism, not as an order of
distribution, but as an order of collective representation. Religious nationalisms invest the
human body, its erotic and generative qualities, with enormous import. It is a body and
particularly a sexual politics. Religious nationalists direct the bulk of their fierce
attention to the bodies of women--covering, separating, and regulating their erotic flesh.
Religious nationalists also accord considerable symbolic importance to money, to foreign
money, to money out of control. Is there an order that joins the two?
Religious Nationalism as a Family Politics
Religious nationalists are everywhere preoccupied with a return to public
modesty, to clean the public space, both the city’s and the televisual square, of naked
bodies, particularly those of women, to reassert the divisions of gender, particularly in
school, to resacralize familial, particularly conjugal, bonds, to bolster and celebrate the
public powers of the patriarch.1
Religious nationalism has an explicit eros.2 Religious nationalists give primacy to
the family, not to democracy or the market, as the social space through which society
should be conceived and composed.3 Familial discourse, with its particularistic logic of
See Oliver Roy, The Failure of Political slam, trans. Carol Volk, (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1994); Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalism and
Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Betty DeBerg,
Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism,
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990); Riesebrodt, op. Cit., p. 57.
1
2
Marcel Fournier has pointed out to me that the symbolic order I describe is not
unique to religious nationalism, but characterized fascist nationalisms well, notably that
of the Nazis, as well as the fascist French nationalism of both Vichy and LePen. The
difference, I would argue, derives from the fact that a nation unified through its
adherence to God is replaced by one unified through race. The differences and
similarities between the two require further investigation.
3
Even within Europe, Christian Democratic welfare states differ dramatically
from those of the social democratic, in their greater support for families organized around
the single male-earner. Christian Democratic welfare states tend, in fact, to be more
egalitarian in their impact than those of the social democrats. centered families, which are
targeted to the needy. Walter Korpi and Joakim Palme, “The Strategy of Equality and the
1
love and loyalty, is pervasive in religious nationalism. “The family,” the Ayatollah
Khomeini declared, “is the fundamental unit of society and the main center of growth and
transcendence for humanity…”4 In the United States, the unifying core of Protestant
fundamentalism is its defense of the heterosexual and male-dominated family.
Some analysts argue that religious regimes, like that of Iran or Pakistan, because
they have failed to reduce unemployment or redistribute wealth, center their attention on
familial relations, as though family politics were a substitute for, or sideshow from, the
real business of state.5 This is to miss religious nationalism’s distinct ontology of state
power. The state of the family is taken as the primary criterion for the condition of the
state. The elemental agents of religious nationalism are gendered and fleshy men and
women, not the abstract individuals ordered through exchange and contract. Its space is
the place of family, governed by relations of consubstantiality and identity, not the
external, instrumental space of geo-politics, the public sphere or real estate. Religious
nationalism is about home.
Maintaining the conjugal powers of men, covering female flesh, organizing
sexuality and limiting the visible presence of women’s bodies in the public sphere are
critical elements of most religious nationalisms. For example, the very first national
religious mobilization of the Iranian Islamic forces took place in 1961 after Khomeini
spoke at Qum on Ashura, the day of atonement, attacking the Shah for having
transformed the legal status of women, allowing women into the army, the police and the
judiciary, giving them the vote, and overriding Islamic law such that divorce required
mutual consent.6 Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution forbade co-education, its closed down
the childcare centers, and made the veil obligatory first in government offices and then in
every public place. Women, of whatever age, had to obtain permission of their fathers
when they married for the first time.7
In the United States, the Supreme Court’s 1973 legalization of abortion and the
proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution were essential goads to Christian
fundamentalist political mobilization. Pointing to the commonalities between Iranian and
American fundamentalism, Martin Riesebrodt writes that:
Fundamentalism is particularly occupied with the public display of the female
body. In both the United States and Iran its themes are the immoral dress of
women in public, the creation of a uniform type of decent women’s clothing
(veiling, national costume), the stimulation of male sexuality by women (dress,
Paradox of Redistribution,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 63, No. 5, October,
1998, pp. 661-687.
4
Rieisebrodt, Pious Passion, p. 145.
5
Valentine M. Moghadam, Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in
the Middle East, (Boulder: , 1993).
6
Lawrence, Shattering the Myth, pp. 112-115; Risebrodt, Pious Passion, p. 117.
Azar Nafisi, “The Veiled Threat,” The New Republic, February 22, 1999; Freda
Hussain and Kamelia Radwan, “The Islamic Revolution and Women: Quest for the
Quranic Model,” in Freda Hussain, ed., Muslim Women, (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1984), pp. XX, Lawrence, Shattering the Myth, .
7
2
films, theatre, swimming pools), and unsupervised contact between the sexes and
opportunities for meeting (dance halls, swimming pools, coeducation).8
The public status of women’s bodies is a critical site and source for religious nationalist
political mobilization. Religious nationalists seek to masculizine collective
representation.
Divine Bodies and Foreign Money
Religious nationalists also target money as an awesome force, its excesses an
economy of evil, its lack an absence of God. Controlling a nation’s money is an essential
project for religious nationalists, not just as political economy, but as collective
representation. The penetration of foreign monies, those moving with the authority of
alien states, are understood to disfigure the nation’s inner landscape, an improper
penetration. It is the culture of the materiality itself that is both denoted and carried by
foreign monies, a culture carried by and carrying foreign powers.
Take Ayatollah Khomeini, for instance. Through the “White Revolution,” the
Shah had both integrated Iran into the multinational capitalist order and progressively
stripped the monarchy of its Islamic foundation by grounding his regime in the preIslamic Zoroastrian past, replacing the Islamic calendar with the Achaemenidian,
unveiling women, introducing women’s suffrage, and generally abrogating Islamic
family law.9 Khomeini linked three targets: American capitalist penetration, the
corruption of the state, and the recent granting of women full suffrage. In response to the
majlis´ decision to grant American personnel diplomatic immunity, he declared:
Large capitalists from America are pouring into Iran to enslave our people in the
name of the largest foreign investment...The regime is bent on destroying Islam
and its sacred laws. Only Islam and the Ulama can prevent the onslaught of
colonialism.10
Islamicists, just like Marxists, understood the intrusive materiality of western capitalism
as a cultural medium, a meaningful thing, not use betrayed by exchange, but the sacred
profaned. To them western capitalism was a body politics, operating through and on
bodies, an economy of sensuous excess, to be countered by bounding a moral territory.
The House of Jacob
Religious nationalism offers a cosmology in which resistance to Western
economic domination takes on transcendental meaning. This joining of God and state is
Riesebordt, Pious Passion, p. 179. This erosion of patriarchal norms, he
writes, “takes place primarily in the sphere of the family and sexual morality. The
progressive repeal of gender-specific distinctions of legal status and the diminishing need
for a gender-based division of labor weakens paternal authority over women.” P. 202.
8
9
Martin Riesebrodt, Pious Passion: The Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism
in the United States and Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), trans. Don
Reneau, pp. 116-117.
10
John Foran, Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to
the Revolution, (Boulder, Co.: Westview, 1993), p. 368.
3
not, however, a cultural space to be occupied just by those states which must adapt to
western economic and military might. Tens of millions of citizens seek to push the
American republic there as well. Here, too, the yoking of the state apparatus to God is
understood to offer a way to protect the nation’s powers from the invisible hands of
supra-national finance capital. Fundamentalist Protestantism follows the money.11
Transnational money is a medium of evil in these Christian politics. Pat
Robertson argues that a cabal of global financiers, their salaried agents, the newspapers
and foundations over which they wield great influence, are systematically eroding the
sovereignty of the nation-state, notably that of the United States. In their vision it is not
money, per se, that is noxious, but money beyond control of the nation-state. In his 1991
bestseller, The New World Order, Robertson argues that the financiers of the West,
families like the Rockerfellers and the Morgans, the Rothschilds, Kuhns, Loebs, the
Lazard Freres, have plotted first the bankers’ takeover of the creation of American
money, and second, the construction of global institutions of governance, both the United
Nations and transnational financial and monetary regimes like the World Bank and the
IMF.12
Politicized Christian evangelicals like Robertson thus make the national
transubstantiation of word into value, the nation’s creation of money, a critical entry
point through which and a reason for which militant Christians must re-enter the public
sphere. Modern money is created by fiat, “out of nothing” as Robertson remarks, its
value carried by the people’s word, its sovereign authority. Robertson argues that both
the word, through the financiers’ manipulation of elections, and the medium of value,
through their creation of a private central bank, the Federal Reserve Board, have eroded
that natural, national couplet, word and value. “Any nation,” Robertson writes, “that
gives control of its money creation and regulation to any authority outside itself has
effectively turned over control of its own future to that body.”13
The globalist agenda, ostensibly motivated by concerns to limit the possibilities of
nuclear war, to protect the world’s ecology and human rights, pushes inexorably towards
the erosion of patriotism. Robertson plumbs the interlocking layers of interest behind this
ostensibly peaceful, munificent globalism. Financial capital’s interest in global
hegemony is the apparently hard substrata of technocratic ideology, the notion that only
knowledgeable elites can manage our complex biosphere and global economy.
But within that alloy is something more sinister, the superceding of Judeo-Christian
cosmology by a spiritualism that lodges the sacred in the nature we hold in common, a
belief system that both renders us divine and erodes our particular moral and ontological
distinctiveness vis a vis non-human species.14 And behind that is a drive to reverse the
11
My friend David Obst, in his memoir, To Good To Be Forgotten, indicates that
this infamous line from Robert Redford’s movie, All the President’s Men, was in fact
made up by Woodward and Bernstein in order to generate a powerful narrative line for
the movie.
12
Pat Robertson, The New World Order, (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1991).
13
Robertson, The New World Order, p. 118.
14
Robertson is correct about the empirical significance of spiritualism. Large
percentages of the American population believe that the natural world is sacred in itself,
4
order of things, to make evil good and good evil. “The real danger is that a revived oneworld system, springing forth from the murky past of mankind’s evil beginnings, will set
spiritual forces into motion which no human being will be strong enough to contain.”15
Robertson thus makes currency unhinged from the sovereign nation-state, and
particularly those of the Judeo-Christian world, a figure through which and a force by
which he imagines that the systematic deconstruction of the West’s moral code, anchored
in the Ten Commandments, is being accomplished. Not only are Americans now being
taught globalist teachings that we are no better than any other peoples, our history is
presented to us as sullied by oppression, racism, sexism. “All over this country, children
are being introduced as world citizens, with reverence for the earth, the environment, the
animals, and for people of all ethnic, religious, and sexual orientations.”16
Multiculturalism and ecology take on a sinister aspect.
Divine Bodies
Religious nationalism is not a response to poverty, to an absence or even an
uncertainty of money. It has a middle class base, and often explodes onto the public
stage when economic conditions are improving, not declining. In religious nationalism
money figures as symbol of collective power, a flow that must be captured and
controlled, put in proper hands. Religious nationalists invest money’s boundary
crossings, its movement into and out of the nation-state, with great symbolic importance.
Religious nationalism is a strategy for bounding the collectivity, restoring the
national body as a collective agency moving with purpose and power on the world stage.
Religious nationalisms have proliferated at that moment when national economies are
decreasingly national, when skeins of firms, contractors, sub-contractors, divisions and
subdivisions cross the globe, when massive migrations of labor have caused residence
and citizenship to diverge, when national accounts based on imports and exports no
longer make sense, and currencies, the representation of national value, are beyond reach
of the nation state.
Part of religious nationalism’s appeal is the increasing inability of the nation-state
to establish the conditions for collective solidarity, given its insertion in markets and
production systems which are ever more global. Income inequalities within nations have
steadily widened and there appears to be little states can do about it. The economic fate
of a nation increasingly lies beyond its borders, the traditional parameters of
macroeconomic policy beyond reach. Religion provides an alternative basis of solidarity,
of collective power, to reasoned consent and contract, a different basis for national
identification.
As globalized cultural commodities become the new totemic measure of man, not
only do modernity’s elemental measures of self-worth move out of reach for billions of
people but the media by which collectivities can construct difference untainted by
deference, by lack, by their incompleteness, become ever more scarce. Global commodity
not because it was created by God. James Proctor, “American Environmentalism:
Science of Religion?” Colloquium, Department of Sociology, UC Santa Barbara, October
18, 2000.
15
16
The New World Order, p. 253.
Robertson, The New World Order, p. 215.
5
chains now not only sever thing from place, but the images, sounds, tastes, forms and
words through which we express our distinctive lives and our location in the world, a
location that is increasingly mediated through objects, not places. Religion offers an
autonomous cultural space, perhaps the only one, from which to bound the nation, to
make it a powerful body in the community of nations.
The resurgence of Hindu nationalism in India is illustrative of the relation
between religious nationalism and the problematic boundedness of the nation-state. The
1992 destruction by Hindu nationalists of the Babri Masjid mosque at Ayodhya, the
birthplace of Ram, the foundational Indian sovereign in Hindu cosmology, took place
against the backdrop of major challenges to India’s boundedness, its sovereign skin. On
the one side, there were territorial challenges by Muslims in Kashmir and by Sikhs in the
Punjab. On the other, foreign capital had finally penetrated India’s long-guarded national
marketplace. The great politicized pilgrimage that razed this central mosque took place
against the historic decision in 1991 by the Indian state to open the country to foreign
investment.17 A centered divinity is arrayed against a de-centering coin.
Islamic nationalism explodes on the heels of an extraordinary enrichment, not
impoverishment, of the Arab world, namely the enormous increase in oil revenues in the
1970’s. The rise of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries saw a gargantuan
inflow of Western currency into the predominantly Arab, Islamic world. The
consequence was a growth in income inequality within that world, further eroding the
solidarity of the Arab world as a geopolitical bloc. The fabulous sums were not
converted into productive investments, into an expansive economic base, but frittered
away in conspicuous consumption, military hardware and projects of institutional
prestige. If anything, it revealed for all to see the utter dependence of the Arab world on
the West for technology, expertise and organization. The currencies generated by the
extraction of fossil fuels proved impotent, generating pleasures without production,
unproductive seed. The oil wealth issued in a flood of money without power. Islam
seemed to promise a power that could stand against the West.
Coin and Collective Representation
That religious nationalists invest the coin with such collective symbolic
importance derives from money’s generic and trans-historical qualities. Numinous
money, traversing outside and in, grasped only in instants, has religious properties.
Money is a collective representation. Adam Smith declared in his The Wealth of Nations,
that a nation’s money “reflects all that a people wants, makes, submits, is.”18
Increasingly, money has become the dominant collective representation, its sum our
totality.
Money is not just a sign commanding the distribution of people and things, it is a
symbol of the collectivity in which they circulate, a collective representation. This is not
only because money has primacy as modernity’s media for establishing social
17
The Ayodhya campaign, which began in 1990, coincided with the
acknowledged failure of Nehru’s state socialist programme. See Pankaj Mishra, “A New,
Nuclear India?” New York Review of Books, June 25, 1998, p. 62.
18
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p ?.
6
relationships. It is because money is one of our sacred substances, not only because it
measures value, but because its capacity to value hinges on the authority of the nationstate. Money, as the sign of value, hinges on the authority of the state. Its capacity to
price, and hence to value, is tied to the capacity of the state, from which it derives, to
govern. That God is being fused to the territorial state might have something to do with
the fact that money has become a global medium and store of social valuation over which
the state has lost control due to the multi-nationalization of finance and the deregulation
of financial markets.19 That the nation-state seems weak and uncertain, that the
distinctiveness of a national culture appears at risk, that the parameters for collective
action appear severely limited, that a people’s destiny seems beyond their control or even
comprehension are figured—condensed might be a better word—through the fearful
symbolism of money has sociological foundation.
Instead of monies backed by the authority of states, tied to material goods, new
proliferating global monies are now the preserve of the accounting conventions of
international organizations and multinational banks. While trade, direct investment and
equity markets remain highly regionalized, a global market for currency and for
government bonds has definitely emerged. 20 Currency traders now not only discipline
those governments whose monetary policies are judged inflationary, they can, in
themselves, erode the value of currencies where the underlying economy is
fundamentally sound.21 Although national states may still be critical in the process by
which their currency’s value is vaporized, the power of transnational money markets
appears increasingly enormous and beyond the control of those national states,
particularly the smaller ones.
There is less and less any locus of governmental authority that can regulate
monetary flows, either their production or their circulation. At a moment when the
dominant collective representation can neither be contained nor controlled by the
territorial powers of the nation state is it surprising that God, that other totemic principle,
might have such mass appeal? With the apparent collapse of the proletariat as a
collective subject and the still halting gait of the demos, what else can match money’s
powers, its territorial and temporal reach?
19
On the decline of the power of the American state over money and the social
structuring of its production, see Wayne Baker, “What is money? A social structural
interpretation,” Mark S. Mizruchi and Michael Schwartz, eds. Intercorporate Relations,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 109-144.
R. Wade, “Globalization and its limits: reports of the death of the national
economy are greatly exaggerated, “ Suzanne Berger and Ronald Dore, eds., National
Diversity and Global Capitalism, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 60-89.
20
Neil Fligstein writes: “[I]f traders think that a given currency is suddenly in
trouble, they can punish the holders of that currency. Markets tend to overshoot the real
exchange rate by over or undervaluing a given currency. Currency traders can also attack
currencies where the underlying financial fundamentals are sound as happened after the
Mexican debt crisis in 1994 to other countries in Latin America and the crises in Asia in
1997-98.” Pp. 31-32, “Is Globalization the Cause of the Crises of Welfare States?” EUI
Working Papers, 1998.
21
7
As representative money, as opposed to its commodity form, and thus unhinged
from any “thing,” the value of money rests openly on faith, on belief in belief. Money,
like a transcendent God, has become an invisible numeric network of promises, pure
abstraction. Money has become a force of social nature whose powers are unmasterable,
whose identity is non-national, the global economy seemingly beyond accounting or
specification. The changeable flow of these bits, their erosions and secretions, bring
down cities and erect states, move armies across the globe. To the ordinary mortal, its
movements are unfathomable, yet they determine the conditions under which he or she
will connect into its nervous network. God, an ineffable force, is now once again made a
co-author of human history, an inhabitant of particular territories by contract, election or
grace. A counter-faith to the money illusion.
As money becomes the increasingly expansive, universal equivalent, capable of
conversion into all things, things that are never identical to the money into which they are
converted, the dominant populist counter-discourse is that of God, a representation of
value, in whom, as Georg Simmel noted in The Philosophy of Money, “all estrangements
and all irreconcilables of existence find their unity and equalization.”22 God, too, is a
universal currency, being in all things, but not identical to any of them, the transcendental
signified. Even those, like Nietzsche, who hate religion make the connection between
faith and currency.
When the Portugese and Dutch traders first made contact with the Africans, they
were astounded by their apparent inability to evaluate material trade goods, to undervalue
them relative to the objects they considered sacred—a bit of cloth, an animal’s limb, a
bird’s feather. The traders presumed this inability was integrally related to what the
Europeans understood to be their absence of religion.23 God and money are both
measures of the value of time, metrics for accounting, wherein sin, like waste, is
expenditure without calculation with respect to these values. Both defeat death. Money
is modernity’s after-life.24 Both equip time with a telos, an end, energizing a desire for
identification with the transcendental power for which they stand, setting in motion the
primitive logic of accumulation, to have more of what they signify, knowing that
22
Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, 1990).
William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish I,” Res: Anthropology and
Aesthetics, 9, 1985, pp. 5-17; “The Problem of the Fetish II, Res: Anthropology and
Aesthetics, 13, 1987, pp. 23-45; “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa,” Res: Anthropology and
Aesthetics, pp. 105-23. David Chidister puts it this way: “In trading relations, the
absence of religion signified a context in which relations of exchange were arbitrary or
capricious, rather than predictable and regulated. African lack of religion, which was
demonstrated by their vain, fanciful regard for fetish objects, assumed a specific
significance within the intercultural network of mercantile exchange. …In the context of
trade on the west coast of Africa…this alleged inability to assess the value of material
objects became the defining feature of African ignorance, childishness, capriciousness,
and lack of any organized religion.” P. 15 Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative
Religion in Southern Africa, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).
23
24
Inheritance is the passing of accumulated seed, the capacity to command life, to
one’s seed.
8
identification will always fail. Money and God both mark an absent presence, the really
made-up center of our social universe. Capitalism is a materialist mysticism.
Religious nationalists organize their critique of capitalism not through a discourse
of exploitation, but one of profanation. The differences between God and money as
symbolic orders are what make that possible. If capital is nervous and fickle, an
uncertain guest, God is constant, always available, accessible. The teller never closes;
the currency does not devalue. God provides the immutability that nations have sought in
nature, including their nature as the institutional body of a collectivity defined by race. If
money relativizes, God absolutizes, offering a foundation for a zone untouched by
relative price. Religious nationalist tendencies towards terror express, indeed mark, that
pricelessness, value’s absoluteness.25 If money is an abstract value, a common metric
devoid of substantive rationality, God is known through the distinctive substantive values
He represents. If money is necessarily a medium of invidious individuality, God is
potentially a medium of equality and solidarity, a unifying representation.26 If money is
an object that appears to dominate the subjects who pursue it so diligently, God is a
subject who guarantees the subjectivity of the men and women who submit to Him.
Pleasure’s Sign
What then joins the religious nationalists’ obsessive efforts to control the erotic
bodies of women and money’s symbolic importance? How does money function in this
body politics?
Money is itself part of an eroticized order. The association between money and
bodily pleasure is ancient. In Phaidon, Plato wrote: “He who loves the body craves
either money or recognition or both.”27 Aristotle, likewise, ascribed the source of
moneymaking as an end in itself to the desire for “enjoyable excess” in terms of the
“pleasures of the body.”28 Marx, too, pointed to importance of excessive pleasure, of the
25
They also masculinize the public sphere.
Carlo Mongardini writes: “La ragione economica non lega i rapporti, ha
bisogno che i rapporti siano gia costituiti; puo razionalizzare solo relazioni
spontantaneamente createsi. Cio ci appare evidente nella funzione del denaro che
interviene come momento di razionalita e di razionalizzazione dello scambio. Non
quindi come elemento che crea lo scambio ma che ne definisce le modalita
quantitative….Il ‘noi’ quindi non nasce come relazione economica, ma diviene relazione
economica.” “Dalla Politica All Religione,” pp. 115-124, in Carlo Mongardini e Marieli
Ruini, eds., Religio: Ruolo Del Sacro, Coesione Sociale e Nuove Forme di Solidarieta
Nella Societa Contemporanea, (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1994).
26
Cited in Johannes Weiss, “Chrematophobia and Social Theory,” pp. 65-72, in
Carlo Mongardini, ed. Il denaro nella cultural moderna.
27
28
Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T.A. Sinclair, (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1962),
pp. 44-45.
9
aesthetics of luxury, as the attribute enabling gold to serve as the “positive form of
abundance and wealth.”29
Religious nationalism both involves an outraged assault on the feminization of the
collective body and a celebration of its renewed maleness. Commodity and woman are
joined by a hermeneutics of dangerous desire. The capitalist market is powered by an
unexamined, external term, an untranslatable aesthetic dimension, a pleasure principle.
Women have traditionally carried the unacknowledged weight of male desire, sexual
objects whose subjectivity is responsible for the violent excesses of men, often conjured
with sexual appetites threatening to exceed the claims of sexual property and familial
bounds. Money, too, is a signifier for desire without limit, an infinity of expansion.
Religious nationalisms are obsessed with the powers of feminine flesh,
everywhere seeking to cloak the female body, to clear the public sphere of its exposed
skin. Religious nationalism is deployed against the heterosexual powers of women,
forces displayed in the spectral emporia of commodity culture that these patriots would
redress and discipline in the family. Divided in production, we moderns are re-united in
consumption, a sphere with domestic designs, a sphere whose allure is carried by
women’s desiring bodies, a feminized and feminizing zone. If the public voice is
masculine, the body—the one always before our eyes—is that of woman.
Women are themselves an ancient currency. Women, as Claude Levi-Strauss and
Gayle Rubin both pointed out so very long ago, are the elementary social currency,
before kula shells and horses.30 If men strive to take women out of the public sphere,
women who mark and carry the merchandise, who are yet the currency of exchange in the
modern economy, the consumers and the consumed, then are they not taking out this
doubly determined force?
Examples of female flesh as currency are easy to find. Writing in the Christianright Focus on the Family, which offers a regular column on personal finance, and
particularly a discipline for getting out of debt, Sarah Hinlicky, a theology student,
explains why young American men squander their sexuality before marriage, comprising
their capacity to love truly. She writes:
…American men know that they re being pressured to score as much as possible.
The ideal foisted on them is one of suave promiscuity, backed up by a blandly
materialistic worldview. The trap is baited with money. It is reinforced by all the
things guys are likely to get interested in: sports, vehicles, fraternities. The lure of
luxury effortlessly translates into the lure of womanflesh. One kind of lifestyle
naturally implies the other. The materialism of it allows men to shut down their
hearts without even noticing.31
29
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p 37???—get
book.
30
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. By J.H. Bell
and J.R. von Strumer, edited by R. Needham, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
Sarah E. Hinlicky, “Subversive Masculinity,” Boundless Webzine,
www.boundless.org/2000/features.
31
10
True masculinity entails loving one woman, a love made by loving her alone. An
indiscriminate spending of one’s seed, parallel to the profligate spending of money, robs
a man of his masculinity, debases the currency of love.
Religious nationalists not only restore the value of female fecundity as the
defining quality of woman, they make the nation-state into a heterosexual project.
Hostility to abortion and homosexuality are almost always joined in the discourse of
religious nationalism. Religious nationalism joins God to the territorial nation, the fusion
of two collective representations, a couplet of spirit and matter, a male force and a female
territorial body. Religious nationalism works the universal binaries of gender, a structure
rendered in crystalline form by Sherry Ortner in which men are closer to culture and
women to nature.32 Religious nationalism points to women’s material bodies as a media
through which the culture of the territorial state is constructed. As Ortner herself
elsewhere points out, it is with the rise of the state, in which fathers become delegated
sovereigns ruling over their own households, households as miniature polities themselves
politically accountable to the state, that a doctrine of woman’s virgin purity first
emerges.33 It is here that patriarchy proper first occurs, patriarchal households in which
women are now for the first time under the patriarch’s “direct and systematic control.”
Women go from being themselves a source of danger to being in danger.
The purity of the bride is a question of bounded matter. Isaiah describes Israel’s
foreign servitude as the foreign sexual penetration of the female space of Zion. A state is
known through its boundaries, through the continuous territory it controls, by its capacity
to regulate the conditions for entry. A woman’s bodily purity and state sovereignty are
parallel symbolic orders. Although Ortner doesn’t mention it, the emergence of states
means the emergence of monies, a currency over which the state has exclusive control, a
currency always threatened by devaluation, by debasement, by uncertainty over its
properties and over whose property it is. Would it be so strange for the primitive
currency, women’s reproductive bodies, and the new currency, these two collective
representations, to be figured in parallel? Women’s bodies, once material media for
The essay, by Sherry B. Ortner, originally published in 1974, “Is Female to
Male as Nature Is to Culture,” appears in Ortner’s Making Gender: The Politics and
Erotics of Culture, 21-42, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). See also her reprise and
reconsideration, “So, Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture,” pp. 173-180.
32
The case of religious nationalism is particularly interesting in this regard because
it generally seeks to relegate women to the domestic sphere, to re-associate them with
reproduction. But this subjugation is not associated with a denigration of nature, with a
subordination of nature. If anything, religious nationalism understands our predicament
as a failure of culture, not of nature, of culture’s threat to species being. Thus the
reciprocal metaphorization of culture/nature to which Ortner refers (p. 179) needs to be
carefully thought through.
Ortner does not mention the state’s territoriality. “The Virgin and the State,”
pp. 43-58, in Ortner, Making Gender, 1996. Ortner writes: “The notion develops that
men are directly responsible for the behavior of their women, rendering it part of every
man’s definition of self and manliness that ‘his’ women never escape his control; his
honor, and the honor of his group, are at stake.” P. 50.
33
11
political alliances between groups, now, with the rise of the state, become material
representations of the territoriality of the state itself.34 Women come to stand for the
timeless traditions of the territory, a culture rooted in the ground, in nationalist discourse,
whereas men stand for the historical temporality of progress, the first located in domestic
space, the second in public space.35
Religious nationalisms are boundary politics, emerging in contexts of partitions
and penetrations. Woman’s body as a token of national territoriality is common in
nationalist discourse. If religious nationalism is a way to mark the land, to defend or
redefine a nation’s boundaries, then we might interpret religious nationalism’s obsessive
control of women’s bodies as a parallel figuration, the policing of a bodily frontier. The
land is feminine substance, fecund matter. Religious nationalists draw their lines on
feminine flesh, on the land and on the bodies of women.36 Both are bounded sites of
reproduction, physical and cultural, one through the other.
Religious nationalist hostility to abortion, at least in the American fundamentalist
context, can be understood in this context.37 Jane De Hart shows the discursive parallels
between two efforts to criminalize abortion in the United States, one between 1840-1880
and the other after 1973, and the historic Roe v. Wade decision of that year. In both,
abortion was targeted as a threat to the family and to the nation.38 In both the woman was
34
In her essay, Ortner derives virginal value from the ancillary development of
hypergamy, upward matrimonial mobility, in which women both prove their fitness for
higher status grooms and represent the ideal higher status of the group hoping to move up
in the world.
This is a slight variation on Anne McClintock’s formulation. She writes:
“Women are represented as the atavistic and authentic body of national tradition (inert,
back-ward looking and natural), embodying nationalism’s conservative principle of
continuity. Men, by contrast, represent the progressived agent of national modernity
(forward-thrusting, potent and historic), embodying nationalism’s progressive, or
revolutionary, principle of discontinuity. Nationalism’s anomalous relation to time is
thus managed as a natural relation to gender.” “’No Longer in a Future
Heaven’:Nationalism, Gender, and Race,” pp. 260-284, in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor
Suny, eds., Becoming National, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 263.
35
36
In his studies of central America, Michael Taussig shows how traditional
collective identity is carried on and through the bodies of women, in the fact that women
continue to wear distinctive attire, whereas men don western dress. Michael T. Taussig,
Alterity and Mimesis, (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Jane Sherron de Hart, “Abortion Politics and the Politics of National Identity,”
Lecture for UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, March 2, 1999. In her account,
De Hart stresses the centrality of familial reproduction to the production of a racialized
ethnicity necessary to national identity, and the ways in which perceived threats to
national identity “resonate” with anti-abortion discourse.
37
As a result of these efforts, American women’s access to abortion has been
significantly curtailed by reducing state funding for abortion, lowering the number of
hospitals and clinics offering abortions, and placing restrictions on the conditions under
38
12
linguistically reduced to a “container,” not a person with civil rights enabling her to
control her body as her property, but an incubator, nurturant ground in which grows a
separate living being. Although the agents attacking abortion were divergent—
professional doctors in the first case, Christian fundamentalists in the second, it is striking
that in both, the boundaries of the nation-state, its territorial integrity and its racial purity,
were at risk, the first time as a result of the Civil War, and the second, as a result of
unprecedented immigration, and perhaps, one could argue, the defeat of the American
military in Vietnam. (Eric Rudolph, the reputed abortion bomber who also hit the 1996
Atlantic Olympics for having refused to allow its torch to pass through a North Carolina
county that had passed an ordinance against “sodomy,” was also motivated his a hatred of
what he called “atheistic internationalism.”39)
Women’s bodies are men’s sovereign property, a property by men possessed.
Women, religious nationalists declare, have no right not to reproduce, to make the
nation’s physical reproduction a womanly matter. At stake is who—women or men—
and hence what—eggs or sperm—will dominate this process. And it is the capacity to
reproduce that joins religious nationalist concern to control the wombs of women with
the coincident desire to control its monies. Both are forces of reproduction, at once
material and cultural. Pat Robertson, for instance, joins the two, pointing to the backing
of the globalist financiers for the writings that supplied the philosophical justification for
the Constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, and for Margaret Sanger’s Planned
Parenthood promoting both abortion and sterilization.40 Likewise Randall Terry, the
founder of Operation Rescue, the radical anti-abortion organization, not only opposed
abortion and homosexuality, but the government’s devaluation of the nation’s currency.41
Control over the bodies of women assimilates easily to nationalist discourse. The
word nation derives etymologically from natio and natus, birth and born respectively.
Nations are living creatures, collective subjects. They are drawn out of female flesh,
flesh that must be controlled and cordoned off by men. If the nation is a female
substance, a womanly materiality, its form is of another order altogether.
As the universal equivalent and hence as a pure form, money partakes of the
masculine metaphysical pole, an ideal value that remains invariant whatever the
materiality. If money is a masculine form, and if man is the foundational measure of
money, what is the form possessed by men for which money is an equivalent? Or put
another way, Pierre Bourdieu speaks of the body’s properties as “analogical operators”
which abortions are legally permissible. See Jane Sherron De Hart, “Saving the Fetus,
Saving the Nation: Abortion as an Un-American Activity,” unpublished essay, Fall, 1999,
Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara.
39
Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious
Violence, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p.~54
40
Pat Robertson, The New World Order, pp. 190, 220.
41
From Crosswinds, a magazine committed to the theological position that the
dominion of God must be reasserted, cited in Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of
God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999).
13
that both establish and naturalize equivalencies in the social world.42 What property of
the male body is money’s analogue in the circuit of exchange?
The hard male member is a tool, an instrument that has achieved a fetishistic,
phantasmagoric aspect in psychoanalytic theory.43 In fact the penis is minimally
informative, a vehicle of transport, a medium, not a message. It is not the form possessed
by men that is a measure of that value for which money is an equivalent, but man’s very
capacity to transmit his form. Man’s measure is his capacity to produce men, to make
life. Money, Serge Moscovici has written, is “the metaphor par excellence of the pure
life force. Acceleration in its circulation is simultaneously an acceleration of social life,
of life itself. A sudden stop would be a death, matter becoming inert.”44 Is not the life
force the force of life?
Man’s capacity to make life, while mediated by his ability to produce the means
of reproduction, rests primordially on his own reproductive force, his capacity to produce
children, to generate seed, to spend himself productively between the loins of women.
Man’s capacity to produce man inheres in his seed, in semen. Like money, semen is a
precious fluid to be saved, spent and invested. Semen spent without prospect of product,
whether masturbation or homosexuality, is profane and prohibited. Thus like money, but
unlike the phallus, the exchange of semen is not only joined to pleasure, it is essential to
material survival. Children mean workers, warriors and wombs. Their absence spells
collective death. God’s covenant is marked by progeny. Seed produces members;
impregnation is more important than erection. The selective investment of semen is the
most elementary form of economic life. These deep homologies, which make of money a
token of male reproductive powers, accord with the fetishization of money, not simply as
a token of all potential pleasure, but of all potential powers.45
Money as a spermatic analogue is not just an analytic possibility; it is a discursive
fact, finding its way into many religious traditions ranging from Hinduism to Japanese
Buddhism to Protestant asceticism. There is, for example, the same equivalence of
semen and gold in the Ayatollah Khomeini’s strictures regulating sexual intercourse with
menstruating women. “During the time a women is menstruating,” Khomeini writes, “it
is preferable for a man to avoid coitus, even if it does not involve full penetration—that
42
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1990), p. 68.
43
Both Freud and Lacan performatively privilege the phallus as the originary
signifier, centering, ordering the body image constituting the ego as the subject's first
object, and the penis as its privileged referent. Judith Butler has pointed out how Freud
and Lacan seek to seek to conceal from themselves the way in which they have idealized
the penis in the form of the phallus. Both, she suggests, fear the transferability of the
phallus to other body parts. Bodies That Matter, p. 81.
Serge Moscovici, “L’Einsteinisation de l’argent,” pp. 25-41, Carlo
Mongardini, ed., Il denaro nella cultural moderna, (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1998).
Author’s translation.
44
Goux cites Marx who speaks of money’s enabling the emergence of an
“abstract hedonism,” and hence of desire as distinct from need or a particular demand.
Symbolic Economies, p. 35.
45
14
is, as far as the circumcision ring—and even if it does not involve ejaculation. It is also
highly inadvisable for him to sodomize her during this time.”46 Sperm of any kind—
spent in coitus, in sodomizing a man or a woman, involuntary emission or
masturbation—is impure. There are no distinctions. Before having performed ablutions,
a man who has ejaculated must neither eat nor drink, nor read more than seven verses of
the Koran. Khomeini’s concern is not with the regulation of sexual acts as much as
seminal expenditure. Khomeini explicitly says that sodomizing a man, even his wife’s
father or son, is not grounds for divorce. However, ejaculating inside a menstruating
vagina, but not the anus, of a woman, calls for payment of gold to the poor. Khomeini
divides a woman’s menstrual cycle into three parts. Intercourse during the first two days
requires the payment of 18 nokhods (a measure of gold), the next two days, 9 nokhods,
and the final two days 4 and a half nokhods. Seed lost in this way to the community must
be paid back to the community through gold offerings to the poor. This is hardly a loose
analogy. Khomeini insists that “[i]f the price of gold has changed between the time of
coitus and the time of payment, the rate in effect on the date of payment will prevail.” 47
We have then to finish the syllogism. God is deployed against foreign monies.
Money is semen’s symbolic equivalent, its analogue in the logic of collective
representation. What then is the relation between God and semen. Although semen has
been banished, disavowed, in our cultural theories, in the western imaginary, the answer
is everything. That masculine divine forces are imagined as generating the world through
semen is, in fact, pervasive. Mircea Eliade, the omnivorous comparative historian of
religions, has written of the common experience of light understood as an expression of
divinity.48 Emile Benveniste noted that while the Indo-European languages had no
common word for religion, they concurred on the meaning of God as “luminous.”49 The
sun’s emission of the living light, this primal condition of knowledge, is widely
interpreted as the emission of sperm from the phallus. As the Stoics and all the
emanational theologies, among many others, assert, God creates the world through seed.
Money is a symbol of that first currency, an equivalence that points to the original
logic of money’s fecundity, its capacity to produce more than itself, to expand as it
circulates without ever being identical to the materiality it commands. Money, as a
fungible bodily fluid, has historically operated as a currency of the public sphere,
46
The Little Green Book, p. 91.
47
The Little Green Book, p. 92.
Mircea Eliade, “Spirit Light and Seed,” pp. 93-119, in his Occultism,
Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions: Essays in Comparative Religions, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1976). This entire paragraph is drawn from Eliade’s text.
In that the experience of self-realization, of the divinity within, is often experienced as a
flash of light, a instantaneous illumination, it is likely that the experience of orgasm was
the bodily basis upon which divinity was imagined.
48
49
Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Languages and Society, (London: Faber and
Faber, 1973), pp. 445-446, cited in Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 1998, p. 7. Derrida
writes: “I had insisted on the light, the relation of all religion to fire and to light. There is
the light of revelation and the light of the Enlightenment. Light, phos, revelation, orient
and origin of our religions, photographic instantaneity.” P. 40.
15
exchanged from man to man, enabling men to accumulate the reproductive powers of
women and to organize the productive forces of other men. It is an erotic fluid whose
circuits have been predominantly homosocial. Its currents are dangerous, threatening to
overrun the banks of instrumentality, to become an autonomous economy of pleasure. In
the imagination of the religious nationalism, physical reproduction is the central figure
for cultural reproduction.
Conclusion
Religious nationalisms, I have argued, are responses to threats to the
boundedness, the powers and the purposes of the territorial collectivity, a deployment of
God in the service of the solidarities of the nation-state. It is a soldering of pre-modern
collective representations to modern ones. This is a semiotics, a delineation of
homologies observed in religious nationalist discourse, in its cosmology and its practices.
At one level it is merely an empiricist constellation of binary terms. But there is an
internal, non-arbitrary relation between the elements. It is a map of metaphors. One
could argue that this semiotic order, the symbolic logic, of religious nationalism is a
displacement from political economy, controlling women and reproductive sexuality as a
substitute for their inability to control their placement in the global economy, that the
homology derives from this substitution. I would argue that religious nationalists turn to
the family as the institutional space through and from which they would constitute the
collectivity, and that its institutional logic, here the gendered erotic order of reproduction,
provides not only the substance of their political project, their distinctive ontology of
power, but it provides the basis from they read that political economy and the organizing
principles from which that semiotic order is constructed, that energizes it and makes it
productive.50
That movements that seek to bound and build the collective body should seek to
confine women to a womanly place, to regulate their sex, and that they should imagine
uncontrolled monies, and foreign monies in particular, as forces endangering that national
body is thus not surprising. These are semiotically joined as forces of reproduction, the
elements by which the religious nationalists would restore and revitalize the masculine
sex of state.
50
I am indebted to friendly interrogations from John Mohr from whose
institutional project studying the contingent relation between social categories and
organizational practices I have learned so much.
16