with financial blessings), the new capitalist version of the soul likened the Christian message to the values of free enterprise and effectively consecrated the pursuit of wealth. In severing itself from many of the moral fetters of old—the troublesome injunctions to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, and visit the prisoner—the modern self was given free rein to pursue material progress without restriction, to pursue self-gratification with impunity.52 Classic vices like acquisitive self-interest and greed were magically transformed into benign self-regard, a fundamental right of a modern human person and a guiding principle of the public realm of economics and politics. As Brad Gregory argues, the capitalist society required this new construction of avarice, an ideological about-face that upended the Gospels’ negative view of greed and sought to prove Jesus wrong: you can, after all, serve God and money.53
Of course the classic Christian position on ethics disavows these principles, this entire alchemical business that would commodify and transform the values of the soul into products of gold. We cannot speak of the soul and not address the exorbitant cost of gaining the whole world: namely, the loss of one’s soul (a comment found in all three synoptic Gospels). In assessing this famous adage by Jesus in modern times, it is difficult not to be struck by its relevance and prescience. In contrast to versions of Christianity that hallow the capitalist economy of desire (for fashion, consumer products, fetishes, wealth, etc.), the cultivation of the soul implied in the biblical tradition requires a prophetical, oppositional stand to the sinful drive to possess and dominate the world. It requires a drastic conversion from self-regard to other-regard, a love that is infinite in scope and more lavish and ostentatious than its competitor’s values of limitless consumption.54
Those who adhered to this classic reading of the concept of the soul and resisted the temptations of the new continued to shepherd many of the grievances brought against the most vulgar and defiling aspects of capitalism. Already at the dawning of modernity, in the early eighteenth century, a figure like Soren Kierkegaard expressed his befuddled dismay at the seeming ease with which Christianity embraced the new bourgeois world. He called this new order “Christendom,” a term that signified the betrayal of Christianity and victory for the gods of profit and shameless self-interest (there are no Christians in Christendom, Kierkegaard famously remarked). Christendom represented for him an unmistakable calamity, the parade of glory and power instead of abasement and abnegation, the promotion of sentimentality and mawkishness in lieu of the message of the cross, philanthropy instead of true agape.55 In these betrayals and others, Christendom was for Kierkegaard a secular order entirely devoid of Christian principles, a civilization now ruled, secretly, by the golden calf or the great beast of Revelation. As the lowly hidden God, a man of sorrows, despised and rejected by all, Jesus is a stranger to Christendom, his teachings discarded, discounted, and unheeded.
In confronting his readers with the strange wisdom of the cross, Kierkegaard reminds us that any Christian rendition of theology begins and ends with the full scope of Jesus’s incarnation, born into humble circumstances and fated to die in humiliating and ignominious circumstances. Christendom was a target of so much of Kierkegaard’s fury because it recoiled from this difficult message, preferring a theology of triumph to the desolation and absurdity of the cross, aligning itself with the rich and powerful instead of the poor and destitute, preferring Easter over Good Friday. In its glaring discomfort with suffering and death, with human finitude and frailty, Christendom retreated from these realities the way the priest and Levite cringed at the wounded man on the way to Jericho.
The American Self
North America, of course, established its own variety of Christendom, complete with many of the same characteristics identified by Kierkegaard. If we recall, for example, that the early Massachusetts Bay emigrants were largely members of the entrepreneurial and professional middle classes (tradesmen, merchants, lawyers, artisans, and clerics), we can understand Carl Degler’s comment that capitalism came to America in the first ships and Max Weber’s argument that the capitalist spirit arrived before the capitalist order.56 It’s difficult to dispute the powerful conjunction between Puritanism and capitalism in the American experiment; it was the wind behind the Mayflower’s sails. Supported by the divine right of possession and buttressed by the biblical stories of exodus and conquest, this experiment soon achieved combustible, explosive success in the domains of industry and free enterprise. It was not long before this new Israel was designated by John Winthrop “the city on the hill,” a light of free enterprise and unlimited material and spiritual progress.57
By the nineteenth century the powerful union of Protestantism and capitalism had picked up steam, as many preachers turned the pulpit, in the words of Sacvan Bercovitch, “into a platform for the American Way. The great crusades of Lyman Beecher and Charles Grandson Finney brought ‘Gospel tidings’—rugged individualism in business enterprise, laissez-faire in economic theory, and constitutional democracy in political thought.”58 The religious revivalists of the period were fusing Protestantism and American patriotism, Christian morality and capitalist economics, all in the interest of consecrating the Christendom of the New World. With piety and prosperity welded together in this way, every instance of visible success, moral or material, confirmed God’s providential designs for America.
For Kierkegaard, as for the classic Protestant reformers, this amounted to a pagan or secular morality, nothing remotely close to the dark wisdom of the cross, where God appeared incognito in the distressed face of the beggar and vagabond.59 As a betrayal of Christianity’s difficult message, Christendom seemed to insist on the opposite: God’s presence in the gilded facades of worldly success. In this scenario, the poor and powerless were abject instances of moral bankruptcy and spiritual failure. In fact, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the poor and unemployed, vagabonds and prostitutes, orphans and delinquents were depicted in such terms, examples of failed values and failed lives. But more ominously, as Michel Foucault has argued, these groups—especially those of a darker shade of brown—were turned into pathological subjects and in many cases criminalized.60
Because of new legislation directed at poor, vagabond, and colonized subjects in both Europe and North America, in the nineteenth century a whole new class of illegalities was created, and prison populations began to swell as a result.61 This repressive climate, in Foucault’s reading, “increased the occasions of offenses, and threw to the other side of the law many individuals who, in other conditions, would not have gone over to specialized criminality.”62 Whether through travel restrictions, greater demands for productivity in the workplace, discrimination in the judicial system, or vicious practices of displacement, exclusion, and incarceration, many new laws and regulations gave free rein to practices of ruthless injustice, the hand of naked power held out in gestures of benevolence.63 An example is the benign-sounding California Act of 1850 (An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians), which permitted officials to arrest and sell to the highest bidder Indians who were found intoxicated or vagrant or were accused of crimes. The act even gave whites the power to purchase Indian children by making available certificates for the custody of these children. (Over the next approximately thirteen years, an estimated twenty thousand American Indian children were held in bondage.)64
Bourgeois ideals of freedom, in short, coexisted with violent measures that denied liberty to many. Republican ideals were plainly mocked by the existence of chattel slavery, wage slavery, and other methods of punishment and abuse. It was culture well practiced in the sophistry of freedom, but with a sanctimonious eloquence that rang hollow for many Americans. For those who lived in the underground of American society, such as blacks, American Indians, and Mexicans, life remained confining and restricted, as if, to invoke Foucault once again, they were “the lepers of old.”65
For the reader curious about the relevance of this discussion to the sublime matter of the soul, I recall the devil’s offer of world dominion to Jesus: “All this I will give to you, he said, if you will bow down and worship me. Jesus said to him, away from me, Satan” (Matt. 4:8–10). In the Christian mind, the matter of worldly
