Card-Carrying Christians: Debt and the Making of Free Market Spirituality in Colombia

By Rebecca C. Bartel

In the waning years of Latin America's longest and bloodiest civil war, the rise of an unlikely duo is transforming Colombia: Christianity and access to credit. In her exciting new book, Rebecca C. Bartel details how surging evangelical conversions and widespread access to credit cards, microfinance programs, and mortgages are changing how millions of Colombians envision a more prosperous future. Yet programs of financialization propel new modes of violence. As prosperity becomes conflated with peace, and debt with devotion, survival only becomes possible through credit and its accompanying forms of indebtedness. A new future is on the horizon, but it will come at a price.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: May 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9780520977068

Rebecca C. Bartel

Rebecca C. Bartel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Associate Director for the Center for Latin American Studies at San Diego State University.

Book preview

Card-Carrying Christians

Card-Carrying Christians

DEBT AND THE MAKING OF FREE MARKET SPIRITUALITY IN COLOMBIA

Rebecca C. Bartel

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2021 by Rebecca C. Bartel

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bartel, Rebecca C., author.

Title: Card-carrying Christians : debt and the making of free market spirituality in Colombia / Rebecca C. Bartel.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020045079 (print) | LCCN 2020045080 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520380011 (hardback) | ISBN 9780520380028 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520977068 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Evangelicalism—Social aspects—Colombia.

Classification: LCC BR1642.C7 B37 2021 (print) | LCC BR1642.C7 (ebook) | DDC 332.7088/280409861—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045079

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045080

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

—Gabriel García Márquez

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction: Aspirational Faith

1. Credit

2. The Soul

3. Deregulating Christianity

4. Inclusion

5. Multiplication

6. Becoming

Conclusion: Necrofinance

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. New Year’s fireworks, downtown Bogotá

2. Easy Credit sign

3. Main auditorium of the Misión Carismática Internacional

4. A moment of praise and worship

5. Let’s Reconcile sign

6. Small-group worship at the Misión Carismática Internacional

7. Christmas lights at Usaquén Park

8. Usme, southern Bogotá

9. Makeshift poster for an Opportunity International workshop

10. Micro-business bookkeeping

11. Welcome sign at the village of Garzal

12. The Four-Square Pentecostal Church in Garzal

13. Outside the Four-Square Pentecostal Church in Garzal

14. A member of the Garzal church with his cacao crop

15. Children looking into a school classroom in Garzal

16. The G12 Convention Center in Bogotá

17. Bogotanos vote in historic referendum in 2016

18. Evening worship at the Four-Square Pentecostal Church

Acknowledgments

The writing of this book has been sustained and supported by many generous readers, critics, friends, and family. I conducted the research over numerous years in Colombia, and the project grew from my time living in the country for eight years prior to beginning my Ph.D. I have now been engaged with Colombia for two decades, and this book would not have been possible without the web of relationships I have been fortunate to forge over these years. I am deeply grateful to the community from the neighborhood of Veraguas in Bogotá, where many of the early ideas for this book developed through long discussions on political economy and religion, faith, hope, and the vibrancy of Colombian life. To Arturo Orrego and Viviana Machuca, Alejandro Perez, Leidy Orrego, Andrea, Alejo, Jennifer Manrique, Matty and Pacho, Emerson, Julietta and Pablo, Juli, Andreita, Bibiana, Hermana Flor, Diana, Jhon, Alejandra, Pablito, David, Tere, and all the others—gracias. I remember here also those who are no longer with us: Hermano Héctor, Hermana Ofelia, and Hectorcito. Que descansen en paz. In Colombia I am indebted to the human rights organizations and networks that shaped my political understanding of Colombia’s armed conflict, and the herculean efforts for peace that have been sustained for decades by generations of indefatigable activists, scholars, and peacebuilders. I am especially grateful to the people of Justapaz and Mencoldes, the Mennonite Church and Anabaptist Seminary, and the communities where I first began to learn how religion operates as an embedded social realm, specific to culture, history, and context, not a sui generis genre of human experience that can be assigned universally or understood as a discrete category of human life, separate from politics or economics. I am thankful to the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) for the opportunity to work as their regional policy analyst for Latin America during the last four years I lived in Colombia. This work allowed me to experience Latin America as a region as well as the many distinct peoples, histories, and contexts of individual nations, cultures, and communities. My work with MCC also gave shape to some of my initial questions about the relationship between political economies and religion that developed into the research themes for this book. Thank you.

My time in intellectual communities in Colombian universities, where I earned an M.A. in political science and a graduate diploma in armed conflict resolution at the Universidad de los Andes, and then later had the great privilege of teaching and leading a research team at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, has been foundational to my thinking and scholarly trajectory. I am thankful especially for the collegiality and generous inclusion into Colombian scholarly conversation extended to me by William Maricio Beltrán Cely and Clemencia Tejeiro at the Universidad Nacional; Arturo Orrego at the Universidad Libre; Viviana Machuca, through her work with World Vision; Jeferson Rodriguez, through his work with World Vision and the Fraternidad Teológica de Latinoamerica; Angélika Rettberg, who shepherded me through my M.A. thesis on political economies of war at Los Andes; and the wonderful folks at the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia. Gracias.

I am grateful to the scholarly community at the University of Toronto where the budding ideas for this book were nurtured by many sage mentors and colleagues. This ethnography grew from my dissertation and I am thankful to my advisor, Kevin O’Neill, and his inexhaustible pursuit of excellence. Kevin’s pioneering, and deeply ethnographic work into the moral worlds of evangelicalism, violence, security, and politics in Latin America influenced many of the insights I develop in this book, and his mentorship and encouragement has been unparalleled in my professional growth. Thank you. Ruth Marshall and her intolerance of mediocre thinking, Pamela Klassen and her truly unique mind and brilliant guidance in the curation of an argument, and Simon Coleman and his dazzling ability to cut through the chaff and offer the most delicately perceptive insight into growing ideas helped shape so many early ideas. I thank you all. At the University of Toronto, I also developed relationships and professional friendships that I still rely on, and gain energy and perspective from, to this day. Arun Brahmbhatt, Ian Brown, Jenn Cianca, Anna Cwikla, Matthew King, Rebekka King, Paul Nahme, Mike Ruecker, Justin Stein and so many others. I am grateful for you all.

My collegial community at San Diego State University has supported the culminating research and writing for this manuscript. I appreciate the challenges and deep questions from my graduate students, especially in my seminar on Religion and Economy, who provided me with fresh angles from which to approach the themes in this book. I am deeply grateful to the conversation partners and readers at SDSU who have become so important to my intellectual development, and the development of many of the arguments that became fine-tuned through the final writing of these pages. Drew Thomases and Jocelyn Killmer have become steadfast friends and colleagues, and I am grateful for the many vibrant conversations around the nature of religion and culture, the challenges and privileges of early professorhood, and ways to write a good book. Thank you for all the times you read, chatted out ideas, and encouraged me. Erika Robb Larkins has been a friend, a confidante, and mentor, as well as a brilliant reader of so much of this book. I am deeply indebted to her astute perspectives on writing ethnography, and building an intellectual community. Thank you also to Raechel Dumas, John Gove, Risa Levitt, Jess Whatcott, Joanna Brooks, Angel Nieves, Ramona Pérez, and Kate Rubin for the lively conversations, lending your ear to my ruminations, asking the good questions about the work, and pushing me to finish well. Thank you. Other conversation partners and colleagues have brought sophisticated queries into this work and invigorated my thinking. I am particularly thankful for the many conversations and debates with Janna Hunter-Bowman, who shares a commitment to peace in Colombia and whose own outstanding work on religious communities and peace-building in Colombia has been an inspiration and a model. I am also grateful for the friendship and wisdom of Lucia Hulsether, who has, with verve and vitality, pushed me to think better about capitalism, religion, and the seductions of the secular.

I have shared parts of this work over the years, including at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, a workshop of the Religion, Economy and Law Research and Teaching Network at the University of Tübingen, the Fraternidad Teológica de Latinoamérca (Latin American Theological Society) workshop in Bogotá on Gender and Pentecostalism, the Colombian Institute for Anthropology and History workshop on The Sacred also in Bogotá, a workshop on the Religious Situation: 1968–2018 at the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis and various other colloquia. All these spaces for workshopping contributed to the depth and scope of this work, and forged new questions and avenues for exploration. I have also had the opportunity to present sections of this work at professional association conferences, including the American Academy of Religion meetings, the American Anthropological Association meetings, the Latin American Studies Association meetings, and many other smaller conference spaces. Each one of these conferences and workshops provided opportunities to expand and refine points in my arguments and presentation, and I am grateful for all the feedback and discussion that these venues provided, in diverse spaces from Europe to Latin America, and from so many distinct disciplinary perspectives.

I am indebted to Kate Marshall and Enrique Ochoa-Kaup at the University of California Press for enthusiastically supporting this project, and providing guidance and encouragement along the way. I am grateful to Alex Fattal and Kathryn Lofton for their tremendously generous reading of this manuscript and their insightful questions and suggestions. You helped me to clarify ideas, crystallize concepts, and refine the overall narrative arc of this manuscript. Thank you. I am also deeply thankful to Kali Handleman, the book whisperer, who guided a dissertation into a book with patience, and all the panache of a New York City editor. Thank you.

The research for this book has been supported by various grants and fellowships: The Social Science and Humanities Research Council Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholarship, the W. Garfield Weston Fellowship for International Doctoral Research, the National Vice-Chancellor for Research and Solidarity Extension of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and the University Grants Program at San Diego State University. The research was also supported by fieldwork grants from the University of Toronto, San Diego State University, and the Michael Smith Foreign Study Grant.

Deep curiosity and appreciation of diverse dimensions of the human experience, especially in the realm of faith and finance, come from my family. My mother, Jocelyn Bartel, possesses a faith that informs her daily life and her economic habitus, as well as how she ethically and responsibly has guided the financial well-being of so many others in her work as a financial advisor. My father, Dietrich Bartel, never allows an idea to sit idle, always genuinely engaging with curiosity about my research and writing, and has supported and encouraged every step on this journey. I am infinitely thankful to you both for your presence and sustaining support. Thanks also to my brother—one of the smartest guys I know, who has always wanted to know more and debate about class, economics, and the political—I often thought about how you would understand what I was writing, and thought about what questions you would ask. Thanks for making me a better writer and teacher, Greg. My dear Aunt Victoria has provided sustenance and refuge from the very earliest stages of this manuscript, to the very end. Thank you for your generosity, your big heart, and your boundless care for others. And to my compañero, Javier Augusto Núñez, who has offered patience, encouragement, and bright insights into so many of the ideas that swirl around these pages, thank you for accompanying me through this research, journeying with me to Bogotá’s mega-churches and through the Magdalena Medio jungle river basins. Your deep listening and gentle questioning of cultural assumptions and clichés have made this book better. Some of the photographs in this book were taken by Javier, and his sensitive eye and deep appreciation for the beauty and effervescence of Colombian life shimmer into relief through his artistry. Gracias. This book is dedicated to you all.

Preface

Ursula pulled deeply on her cigarette, head down. She kicked at the coals of the New Year’s bonfire we had made in the street with cardboard and bits of recycled wood from old fruit boxes. It was the dawning of 2014, and we stood outside on a chilly December 31, along with most of the neighbors in her barrio (neighborhood) of central Bogotá. The neighbors around us were either burning makeshift bonfires like ours or burning the Año Viejo (the Old Year) represented by a life-size straw figure, filled with fire crackers that popped and boomed, kindled at the stroke of midnight on the eve of a New Year. Competing music, salsa and vallenato, blared from stereos in parked cars and garages. Ursula, in her late fifties, took another drag and said to me: I am in so much debt.

At midnight on New Year’s Eve, the people of Bogotá flood into the streets to ignite explosive symbols of newness (figure 1). The excitement of beginning again, of starting over, is palpable in the streets. Aspirations for the incoming year burst into the air as fireworks crack in the sky above the city. Revelers eat twelve grapes at midnight, each sweet fruit infused with a desire for each month of the new year.

Figure 1. New Year’s fireworks, downtown Bogotá. Photo by iStock.com/PabloACruz.

Ursula’s desires for the new year flared as she reflected on her financial situation, confessed in private to me while her family, my hosts on this Bogotá New Year, ate grapes and natilla (flan) and pulled suitcases around the block in hopes of much travel in the new year. Ursula nodded to herself and mumbled, Tengo muchas deudas. Pero este año será diferente. Este año será mejor. (I have a lot of debt. But this year will be different. This year will be better.) She then turned her face toward mine and looked into my eyes, pleading: They don’t know. Please don’t tell them, okay? I did it all for them, for my darlings, for my family. I wanted prosperity. I know God wants that for us. I believe that. I must. This year will be different. Her hopes for newness sparkled as the fireworks fizzled. Ursula desired a new time, even if the new time cost more than she was able to pay at the moment.

Ursula grew up in the hard knocks of rural life, in poverty and in the crosshairs of Colombia’s civil war, before making her way to Bogotá, like so many of the capital city’s inhabitants. When she was a young, single mother in her late teens, she migrated to the city in search of a better life. Ultimately Ursula succeeded, finishing high school through distance learning in her twenties, and then completing a medical degree online in her forties. Now a doctor, Ursula found herself independently earning enough money, through shift wage labor, to provide for her extended family. The upturn in her economic situation also qualified Ursula for numerous credit cards and loans, albeit bringing with them her debtor’s anxiety.

The debt that sustained Ursula’s story of emergence and financial well-being is at the crux of this study. So too is Ursula’s belief that God would prevail with the promise of prosperity if only she managed her debts correctly. Going into debt, taking on more credit, and organizing her life increasingly around ordering her debts, Ursula put to work an interiorized set of practices animating the Christian morality that, I argue, underwrites financial capitalism. By managing her faith, Ursula maintained the conviction of many Colombian Prosperity Christians—that prosperity would lead to peace, because inequality is understood by so many to be the root of violence in Colombia.

Violence is rooted in suffering, Ursula told me one afternoon as we sat at her kitchen table during an extended interview. I believe in peace. But without bread, there is no peace. Peace without justice is just another form of war. The belief that Ursula articulated served to make her own life believable amid the ever-present state of violence in Colombia, and it expressed part of the nation’s longing for peace as well as her own desire for believing herself to be an active participant in that vision. As Gabriel García Márquez articulated in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, and as I quote in the epigraph that begins this book, Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all share in asking so little of the imagination because the great problem of Colombia has been to find the conventional forms to make life believable; so macabre, so creative, so historical has been the story of violence, that reality often surpasses fiction.¹ This is the root, García Márquez laments, of the solitude of Latin America, and in particular, Colombia. It is also the central theme of his magical realist masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which provides a pointed critique of paternalistic fictions and neocolonial (de)formations of power and violence in the region.² All of this framed the belief that Ursula put to work to understand her own role in seeking prosperity as a path to peace, within the story of a nation scarred from the unbelievability of its own history yet committed to forging ahead toward a horizon of a peaceable future.

I have known Ursula for over fifteen years. During my fieldwork, I was fortunate to often stay on the second floor of her house located in the neighborhood of Veraguas, a lower-middle-class neighborhood in central Bogotá. Her home buzzed with the mayhem of multigenerational family living. Many evenings were spent with extended family talking about the past. I heard stories of black roses arriving for Ursula’s son, who was the pastor of small evangelical church; the roses were a clear threat to any leader of a church who wouldn’t pay a vacuna, or extortion fee, to local urban paramilitary militias that ran the neighborhood. I heard stories of the times when three family members shared one egg because there was no other food in the house. I heard stories of survival and gumption, betrayal and despair. But so many of our conversations about the past turned to imagining new futures. The future always seemed bright in the shadows of the violence and poverty that had dominated the past. Ursula, and her family’s desires for prosperous futures echoed the nation’s desires for newness, for peace and a new time in Colombia. These aspirations were especially resonant because peace talks between the longest-standing guerrilla insurgency in the hemisphere, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the Colombian government were taking place in Havana during the formative years of this fieldwork.

In 2014, at the turn of the new year, peace was on the horizon. After over six decades of civil war, two generations, peace was the buzzword echoing in the public sphere throughout Colombia.³ The historic peace deal was finally signed between the Colombian government and the FARC in 2016, yet peace in Colombia remained, and still remains, far from established. Since the signing of the peace accord, hundreds of land rights defenders have been assassinated.⁴ Indeed, some would argue that the violence has worsened in some ways in post-accord Colombia. For example, in late 2019 some disgruntled factions of the FARC, frustrated with broken promises, ongoing targeted assassinations of ex-combatants, and a new administration that seemed reticent to implement key elements of the accords, announced their rearmament.⁵ The reasons for such endemic violence are myriad and, at times, contradictory. However, three central elements that have prolonged the violence are economic inequality, the uneven distribution of agrarian terrain and wealth, and unregulated foreign direct investment and extraction of natural resources for foreign gain. These were key components of the 2016 peace deal and without the effective apparatuses and political will to guarantee the redistribution of wealth and lands, the social leadership of peasant-farmer populations, along with indigenous and Afro-descendent communities, as well as urban populations, remain a target of economically driven violence.⁶ And yet, despite the ongoing terror and the dark shadows that hang over the horizon of peace, aspirations for peace and prosperity resound across the county.

Ursula’s aspirational Christianity orders her rapprochement with finance, futures, and practices of faith. Her debt has been incurred, on the one hand, through her reliance on credit in a freshly deregulated and credit-fueled economy (seen displayed in figure 2). On the other hand, it works in tandem with an arrangement of Christian practice that relies on indebtedness as a specific disciplinary program that shapes processes of interior and financial reform. The accounts in this book all illustrate, in different ways and in different social sites, how the deregulation of the market, deregulation of Christianity, and the deregulation of violence in Colombia have coproduced a financial morality, and a moral financial subject that is unique to late capitalist modernity.

Figure 2. Easy Credit sign on the back of a taxi in Bogotá. Photo by the author.

Introduction

ASPIRATIONAL FAITH

The great paradox of the twenty-first century is therefore the appearance of an ever-growing class of slaves without masters and masters without slaves. Certainly, both human persons and natural resources continue to be squeezed to boost profits. This reversal is logical, after all, since the new capitalism is above all specular.

—Achille Mbembe

Debt is faith.

Fernanda said this as she sat across from me at the coffee shop on the Misión Carismática Internacional (MCI) campus, centrally located in the heart of Bogotá. The little café had a line out the door as people flowed out one exit of the church compound from the 10 a.m. service, while the next group of congregants bustled into the church for the 11:15 service through an adjacent entrance. The MCI, Colombia’s largest megachurch, takes up four city blocks, with space for up to two hundred thousand people in the main auditorium, and features a food court, a merchandise plaza, three auxiliary chapels, two coffee shops, an education building, an administration building, and a host of other amenities. As Fernanda and I shared a tinto (a small, strong coffee), after church this Sunday morning, I asked why she thought people would tithe on their credit cards, as I had witnessed during the service. Fernanda shrugged her shoulders and stirred the sugar in her coffee. Giving on faith is a sign that you trust God; that you trust God will deliver. Going into debt is a sign of faith. She sipped her coffee and some of her disciples arrived at the table with cheese breads and cookies. They began a Bible study surrounded by the din of noisy visiting, group prayers, and other small Bible studies happening at nearby tables around us.

At any given Sunday morning service at the MCI—and there are typically seven services every Sunday—there comes a time when ushers with canvas bags ready for tithes, covenants, and seeds of financial faith take their positions at the edges of the hundreds of rows of chairs in the church auditorium. Credit card machines begin circulating in plain sight, held up high in the air by the specialized ushers, for those who don’t have (enough) cash and wish to give an offering on their credit cards.¹ On this particular Sunday, César Castellanos, the head pastor and local personality of the MCI was preaching, and Fernanda was jotting down points of the sermon in her notebook as I also took notes. Castellanos urged: If you are having any problems in the financial area, remember you have the blood of Christ, the life offered by Jesus, you can beat this financial problem. Repeat after me: I declare that ruin is defeated by the blood of Jesus. I declare that all spirits working against the blessing of Jesus’s blood are conquered in the name of Jesus! The music softly started up in the background, and the cue for prayer time was by now acutely tuned in the actions of the believers. Hands lifted and eyes closed. Make your offering count today. Show your faith to God. Make your offering a sacrifice to demonstrate your faith.

The lights dimmed and the music became louder and drowned out the rustle of thousands of hands reaching into thousands of wallets to make their sacrifice to God, performing their prosperity and performing their belief. With the worship band providing an emotive cadence to the fervent prayers, darkly clad ushers circulated throughout the convention hall with the credit card machines. They looked like floating lights. The faithful hailed the ushers over, and the credit card machines illuminated their faces as they entered their PIN and signed their receipts. The usher always asked, How many payments? for electronic tithing often employs payment plans of up to forty-eight months, with interest rates as high as 28 percent. These ushers ultimately added: May God reward you a hundredfold.

This book is about faith and finance in Colombia and the debt that ties these worlds together. It is also about Colombia’s emergence and the discourses that link economic progress with moral improvement, at the level of the individual as well as the level of a nation struggling to overcome decades of brutal civil war. However, while the reality of the armed conflict is omnipresent in Colombia (as shown in the preface with Ursula’s casual conviction that economic justice would lead to peace), this study deliberately turns away from foregrounding the trenchant presence of the armed conflict and looks to the quieter thrum of everyday Christian life.² This is not, then, a book about Christians and peacebuilding or the religiosity of bellicose acts. Rather, I present a study of the Christian morality that underwrites late capitalism and the free market spiritualities that accompany the proliferation of financialization as it becomes embedded in Colombia, one soul at a time.

Figure 3. Main auditorium of the Misión Carismática Internacional in Bogotá. Photo by the author.

I understand financialization as a disciplinary regime that operates at the intersections of Christianity and capital. Financialization, at its simplest, is the process of incorporating individuals into the financial system through mechanisms of financial inclusion: opening bank accounts, assuming debt, formally becoming banked.³ Financialization as a program of late capitalist expansion refers to a temporal moment beginning in the 1970s when profits from capitalist material commodity production were surpassed by financial speculation and financial revenue.⁴ The financialization of capitalism was driven by the development of financial services by corporations and banks that rely on personal incomes of individuals for financial gain. For example, Colombian department stores now offer credit cards and their own lines of financing. Banks have turned to transactions in financial markets through the stock market or via private lending to households. Household debt and personal income are now grist in the financial mill.

In Colombia, this process of financialization is still emerging, however quickly, and thereby offers a singular vantage point from which to analyze the ways in which financialization intersects with social order, as well as the localized moral rubrics that accommodate its expansion. These affective and internalized repertoires of moral practice give shape to financialized subjectivities that are animated by the desires of individuals who comprise Colombia’s growing markets for consumption and debt. Financialization sponsors their dreams, their desires, and their aspirations.

This book, then, is also an ethnography of aspiration. I link aspiration to Christianity and to flows of capital by charting an anthropology of deregulation focused on four sites of Christian practices of prosperity: A Neo-Pentecostal megachurch, a US-financed Christian microcredit corporation, a Mormon-founded direct sales marketing company, and a rural Pentecostal community fighting against being displaced from their lands. At its most theoretical, this book is an exploration of the relationship between capital and Christianity and the ways that debt connects these spheres of social practice, imbricated in different ways through acts and practices of deregulation.

To explain, in Colombia, Christianity and capital have become deregulated, inasmuch as they are decentralized, highly mobile, and flow transnationally. In 1991, the Colombian government rewrote the constitution. In so doing, they instituted, among hundreds of progressive clauses, two fundamental ideals: the freedom of religion and the liberalization of the economy. Since that moment, both Christianity and capital have become increasingly diversified, decentralized, and deregulated. Estimates suggest that the Colombian population is nearing 20 percent non-Catholic Christian affiliation, and most of those adherents participate in Pentecostal, charismatic, and neo-Pentecostal expressions of Christianity.⁵ Alongside religious diversification, Colombia’s investor rating has steadily improved, and cheap credit has flooded the market. Credit card use has expanded by some 500 percent in the last fifteen years, and Colombians are spending. The most notable evidence is the rapid upsurge in credit card spending, which now averages approximately $2.5 million USD every hour, placing it within the top five credit card–using countries in the Americas, after the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Brazil.⁶ The net result is the revelation that debt is now central to Prosperity Christianity, and faith is foundational for finance.⁷

I situate my consideration of such deregulated Christianity alongside other efforts by anthropologists of Christianity to trouble the idea that contemporary Pentecostal, or Prosperity, Christianity operates as the "handmaiden of neoliberalism.⁸ Pentecostalism’s focus on individual salvation and, in the case of Prosperity Christianity, emphasis on consumption and upward social mobility, have been interpreted by some scholars as an indication of Pentecostalism’s neoliberal guise, or worse, Prosperity Christianity’s unavoidably American nature.⁹ Jean and John Comaroff’s astute analysis of millennial capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century charged Prosperity Christianity with transforming the discourse of neoliberalism into the Pentecostal vernacular, saying, for them [Prosperity Christians], and for their many millions of members, the Second Coming evokes not a Jesus who saves, but one who pays dividends . . . one who promises a miraculous return on a limited spiritual investment.¹⁰ While such critiques of the phenomenon of Prosperity Christianity and its exponential growth throughout the world are ethnographically relevant, especially in the Global South, my interest lies in troubling these rather flat readings of the prosperity gospel’s relationship with late capitalism. Instead, I argue that Christian practices of prosperity in Colombia, in the throes of financializing capitalism amid an ongoing armed conflict, provide rubrics of aspiration, agency, and survival for individuals who otherwise have little control over their lives in the complicated milieu of Colombia’s political and economic landscapes. However, this work also suggests that aspirational pulls are often stymied by despair when financial structures fuse with routines of war. Daily existential threats to life in Colombia produce specific arrangements of subjectivity that are at once the product of internalized methods and procedures of governance, while also accompanied by the relentless possibility of violence or elimination. Everyday life in Colombia is marked by aspirational faith as much as by the necropolitics of financialization, or what I call the necrofinance of late financial capitalism.¹¹

NECROFINANCE

For Cameroonian philosopher, Achille Mbembe, politics in late modernity operate as a work of death.¹² In the opening epigraph of this introduction, Mbembe states that in the time of late capitalism, slavery remains, in his estimation, as a shape-shifted formation of subjectivity vis-a-vis the brutal speculation of finance capital in mastering populations without the necessity of the master to be personified.¹³ Capitalist arrangements of power function through determining which populations may thrive, and which are disposable. For Mbembe, the political, as an ultimate expression of sovereignty, resides "in the power to dictate who is able to