Even Christian conservatives are critiquing capitalism

There's been a resurgence of critiques of capitalism since the financial crisis of 2008.

Or, to phrase it as a Guardian headline writer did, "Karl Marx is going mainstream." Last Summer, the British paper reported:

Sales of Das Kapital, Marx's masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse.

The resurrected interest isn't just British, either. It's here in Germany and can even be found in the US, where "socialist" is a popular political slur. The slur, though, isn't quite as much of a slur as it once was.  During the last midterm election cycle, a Pew poll found that the 29 percent of Americans said they had positive feelings about the word "socialism." That number was much higher when only younger Americans were considered. Nearly half of those under 30 respond positively to the idea of socialism, the poll found.

Bhaskar Sunkara -- who is one of those younger Americans, and is also the editor of one of the newest leading left-of-liberal journals, Jacobin -- thinks this new interest can be attributed to the financial crisis, the time that's passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union ("The cold war era conflation of socialism with Stalinism no longer holds sway," he writes), and with capitalism's failure to deliver the promised future.

The resurgent critiques of capitalism aren't just coming from the left, though, either.

There's also an apparent new willingness to raise questions about capitalism from the right. Even in quarters where there's little tolerance for Marx's thinking, little sympathy for socialism, one can find what appears to be a new openness to critical questions about capitalism. The resurgent, post-2008 critique of capitalism goes beyond the Marx revival.

First Things
At First Things, for example, a journal that can't credibly be construed as leftist, it has recently been argued that "out political challenges mostly flow from the triumph of capitalism. And American conservatism is in trouble because it can’t acknowledge much less respond to this fact."

The editor, Catholic theologian R.R. Reno, clarifies that such criticism is not an attack on capitalism, per se, any more than warnings about the dangers of sunburn on the beach are attacks on sunshine. Nevertheless, it is a critique, an argument for fetters on the "free" market.

Reno writes,

The triumph of economic freedom is a good thing. It’s made possible a global economy that has lifted and promises to continue lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. But that’s only part of the story. If American conservatism is unwilling to face the fact that economic freedom creates social and therefore political problems -- political problems that will require in one way or another limiting economic freedom -- it will be irrelevant to our age.

There is, of course, a Catholic tradition here that Reno is continuing. To a certain extent this is not new, and doesn't date from the financial crisis. Catholic theologians have long argued and the church has regularly taught that the logic of markets leads to certain immoralities, injustices and oppressions, while at the same time reaffirming the rightness of many of the basic conditions and functions of capitalism. The argument is an argument against excesses. It's not a novel argument that Reno is re-raising.

It's my impression, though, that this argument hasn't been made in public very much, and Reno's article is a change in that regard. It's a critique that has been easy enough to find in theological circles, but it's been confined in those circles to some extent. In the US, Catholic concerns about capitalism have been marginalized, while concerns about abortion, the family, the death penalty, and even questions about the justice of a war like the 2003 invasion of Iraq have been much more prominent.

When Reno raises the issue of capitalism, then, and says capitalism is a problem, it's not a new argument, but may be considered a sign of new openness to critiques of capitalism on the right. It's a conservative instance of this cultural moment where the claims of a "free" market are being called into question.

It could also be just a quirk of the editorial policy of First Things. That magazine is not averse to trolling it's core audience. And yet, there are other conservative religious journals which one wouldn't associate with leftists or Marxists where there also seems to be a new openness to these sorts of questions.

Front Porch Republic
One relatively new journal -- Front Porch Republic -- is more or less dedicated to this kind of critique. It has been a platform for various arguments about right-of-center alternatives to capitalism, especially distributism, and also versions of localism. The journal hasn't invented these alternatives and the associated critiques, but it has done a good bit to promote them. The journal has worked to popularize anti-capitalist thinkers, such as Hilaire Belloc, who haven't been very popular in the past, as well as to call attention to traditional conservative arguments for restraints on the "free" market.

Front Porch Republic, notably, started in 2009, right after the financial crisis, at the very same moment Marx was "going mainstream." The editors note the historical moment's import in the journal's founding:

The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power has served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future have been eliminated from the public conversation .... We come from different backgrounds, live in different places, and have divergent interests, but we’re convinced that scale, place, self-government, sustainability, limits, and variety are key terms with which any fruitful debate about our corporate future must contend.

This isn't Marx, and it's a long way from Sunkara's Jacobins, but it is a critique of capitalism.

Cardus
This can also be seen in other religious conservative journals. The most recent online edition of Comment, for example, the journal of a  Neo-Calvinist think tank Cardus, which is "dedicated to the renewal of North American social architecture," includes an article arguing for a "biblical" alternative to capitalism. (Full disclosure: I wrote for Comment under a previous editor). In that article, Paul Williams writes:

In the biblical tradition, economic activity is depicted as something that is intended to bring together and sustain a relationship between God, humanity, and creation. In Genesis, for example, the work of humanity in cultivating the earth, making it fruitful, guarding, keeping, and caring for it is described in exactly the same language as that used later of the priestly tasks in the temple. Economic life is inherently religious because it is a form of worship taking place in the temple of God's creation. The fall of humanity into sin is a failure to guard, keep, and care for this place of intimate relationship safe from the evil of pride and autonomy -- sin fractures all the relationships that work and economic activity cultivate: those with God, with one another, and with creation itself. Redemption thus involves restoring these fractured relationships, and the primary biblical motif for redemption in the economic realm is 'Jubilee.'

The idea of "Jubilee," according to Williams, conflicts with what he calls "capitalism-as-ideology." He calls for a critique of capitalism -- or at least the ideology associated with it -- that challenges the idea that the mechanisms of the capitalist markets are morally neutral, and challenges the "sense that there is no alternative to our current system" (emphasis original).

Though the comparison would likely horrify both parties, Williams arguments are in some senses similar to those made by the French philosopher Alain Baidou. Baidou argues that "the existing world is not necessary," that it is only because "we accept the inevitability of the unbridled capitalist economy" that we "cannot see the other possibilities that are inherent in the situation in which we find ourselves" (emphases original). Baidou calls this claim, that things can be other than they are, that a politics of emancipation is possible, "the communist hypothesis." Williams clearly isn't talking about communism when he speaks of an alternative, yet he, like Baidou, starts his critique with an attack on the idea that capitalism is inevitable, alternatives impossible. The common starting point is that things could be different, and that those possibilities should be thought.

The alternative being entertained in the pages of Comment is not a Marxist one, and not something that could be described as "left of liberal." Williams holds a chair for Marketplace Theology and Leadership at a Christian graduate school in Vancouver, Canada, and he's previously worked as an economic advisor for major global corporations. The publisher of Comment, Ray Pennings, recently wrote that "growing sense of class identification" in Canada is a "reason for concern," and suggests economics shouldn't be a major, central political issue. No one would confusing Pennington for a mainstreamer of Marx. Nevertheless, there is a critique of capitalism happening at Comment.

There's a tradition here, too, that's being continued. This also is not exactly new. North American Neo-Calvinists have long critiqued capitalism, making arguments for the necessity of the values of stewardship and vocation. The market is good, according to Neo-Calvnists, not to the extent that it's totally unfettered, but to extent it is shaped and limited -- in a real sense, disciplined -- by Christian morality.

In many cases, though, this argument has not been articulated as a negative, a warning about capitalism, but as a statement about potential, and possibility. It has been a critique only in the softest, gentlest version of that term. Neo-Calvinists have generally made their arguments via statements about the good that Christians can do in business.

For example, the previous editor of Comment, Gideon Strauss, wrote,

The whole world of making products, providing services, buying and selling, building companies, establishing relationships of trade -- marketplaces filled with businesses and their customers -- can be a vibrant expression of what it means to be human in God's wonderful creation .... the original promise of business activity and market relationships is being redeemed, and we can work with courage, lead with love, and expect our efforts to bear fruit of very long-lasting value.

One can also find authors in Comment praising the important work of sales, calling for Christians to recognize the sacred in their office cubicles, calling for reconsideration of cubicles, and listing "50 things I love about business."

The critique, such as it was, was more like a call for a value supplement to capitalism. That's quite different than talk about jubilee.

The argument that Williams is making can be detected in each of these pieces, and one can connect what Williams says about the need for an alternative that arises from "jubilee" with these other articles. But the tenor is different. The negative point is much sharper. The shift may only be a shift in tone, a shift of emphasis, but such shifts are still important. What seems to be happening is a new willingness, a new need to critique capitalism.

That openness seems to date from 2008. Whether or not this is all a matter of passing grumblings or something more significant remains to be seen, but there is, right now, a broad and diverse range of sharp critiques on capitalism. It's broader, even, that has generally been noted. There's a lot of public interest from a lot of different quarters. Such arguments have seemed more palatable, more possible, and certainly more popular in the last few years than they have been for a long time.

It does seem that Sunkara's right about the historical causes of this, too. The financial crisis and the broad consensus among the political class about how to respond to the financial crisis ("too big to fail") opened up the possibility of serious critical questions. The counter argument for the necessity of capitalism, the boogie man of Stalinism, isn't as powerful as it once was. And, for a not insignificant number of people, the promises that capitalism makes about the future now kind of all sound like the same sort of fantastical sales job one heard from the hucksters of the housing bubble, the huskers of the dot com bubble, and from all the masters of the universe who stood to profit from the financial crises they helped create.

It's even more true, it seems, than Sunkara suspects. The resurgent critiques capitalism aren't just happening among the left-of-liberals: there are even a number of North American Christian conservatives of various stripes raising protests against the existing economic order.

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The triumph of Darwin's Doubt

One might think that getting a negative review of a recently released science book in a high-profile magazine would be a bad thing for that book. In the case of Darwin's Doubt, though, it's not. Getting trashed in the New Yorker is actually something of a triumph.

Gareth Cook writes in the New Yorker that this book, the latest big splash for Intelligent Design, has an "inspired-by-true events feel," and is a "masterwork of pseudoscience." For author Stephen C. Meyer, for the Discovery Institute where he works, and for advocates of Intelligent Design and criticisms of evolution more generally, this is a good thing.

The negative review is a positive sign.

As David Klinghoffer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, wrote:

What's important is the way the logjam against intelligent discussion of intelligent design in the mainstream media is finally unjamming .... Real scientists and thoughtful, open-minded laymen are paying attention right now to a genuine and fascinating disputation about biological origins. The endorsements from scientists in relevant fields that Darwin's Doubt has already received is itself confirmation of that. I've said already that I don't know how the debate will be resolved, if it ever will. But make no mistake: the debate is happening.

Debate has long been the immediate goal of the Intelligent Design movement. The goal has been to legitimate the possibility of the Intelligent Design position by generating controversy. Meyer's book, which looks at the "Cambrian explosion," a relatively rapid diversification of organisms in the fossil record, where new and more complex forms of life appeared, will be seen as achieving that goal precisely to the extent that there's public pushback, take-downs and criticism.

Controversy -- such as claims the book is "holed beneath the waterline on the key issues of Cambrian paleontology, phylogenetics, and the information argument" -- are opportunities for Intelligent Design advocates. They're opportunities for rebuttal, but more, they serve as evidence that there's a controversy. And if there's a controversy, then there are sides to that controversy, and the rules of fairness dictate that both sides should be taken seriously. The case can be made for "teaching the controversy," which doesn't resolve it or end it in the way Intelligent Design proponents might want, but does give them a public hearing.

Meyer has long been a proponent of teach-the-controversy. This book isn't a break from that modus operandi. 

Since the late '90s, organizations such as Meyer's Discovery Institute have explicitly pushed the policy of "teach the controversy," a phrase Meyer apparently coined. Intelligent Design advocates have not mainly sought to debunk evolution and neo-Darwinian understandings of life, but to start a debate, and make the case there is a debate.

The strategy has been clearly outlined in Discovery Institute policy documents, including the "Wedge Document," a fund raising proposal that was leaked in 1999. In the "Wedge Document," the outlined ultimate goal is "To defeat scientific materialism and it's destructive moral, cultural and political legacies." The first objective, in accomplishing this, is to start a "major public debate between design theorists and Darwinists."

Meyer has been one of the very public advocates pushing for that objective, though he generally argues that he doesn't want to start a debate, put get some acknowledgement that a debate is happening.

In 2002, he wrote, "When two groups of experts disagree about a controversial subject that intersects the public school curriculum students should learn about both perspectives"

In 2003, he wrote, "Teaching both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian theory will engage student interest and teach them to weigh evidence -- a key skill in scientific reasoning. "

In 2005, he co-authored an opinion piece repeating the argument. It said,

We encourage teachers to present the case for Darwin's theory of evolution as Darwin himself did: as a credible, but contestable, argument. Rather than teaching evolution as an incontrovertible 'truth,' teachers should present the arguments for modern neo-Darwinism and encourage students to evaluate these arguments critically. In short, students should learn the scientific arguments for, and against, contemporary evolutionary theory.

The negative review of Meyer's book on Intelligent Design should be understood in this context. Victory, for Meyer and his compatriots, does not necessarily look like convincing people, though of course they're interested in that too. The main goal, the primary goal, is for there to be a debate.

Mostly, the advocates of Intelligent Design have pushed for this debate to happen in public schools. As the New York Times reported in 2005, they "mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive." That same strategy works in the public square -- and is possibly even more successful there, given the commercial possibilities of controversy.

This book is being promoted prominently at 300 Barnes & Nobel stores, where there are special displays of Darwin's Doubt. That's not inconsequential in getting on the bestseller lists and stirring up controversy. The book also, like Meyer's last one, was published by a mainstream commercial publisher, HarperCollins, through the imprint HarperOne. Jerry Coyne, an active opponent of Intelligent Design, has critiqued the publisher for its participation in this, asking "have they no shame"?, but the publisher, along with the booksellers, are obviously mostly interested in the question of profits. They stand to quite literally gain from the very same public debate that Meyer and those who agree with him wants to generate.

Negative and even hostile reviews will likely help that cause.

According to Klinghoffer, the generated controversy, and the fact that a mainstream publisher is happy to contribute to this specific controversy, may be the true triumph of Darwin's Doubt. He writes:

The publication of Meyer's book marks the moment when the theory of intelligent design -- love it or hate it -- has solidly joined the mainstream discussion about biological origins. We of course can't say how the debate will ultimately be resolved. No one can. But we take great satisfaction in knowing that it is definitively engaged. The hunt for a replacement theory for Darwin's noble but crippled idea is now unmistakably on -- not only in the professional, peer-reviewed scientific literature, as Stephen Meyer documents, but in the public square as well. 

Even if one agrees with the New Yorker that Meyer's work and Intelligent Design generally are matters of pseudoscience, it's hard to dispute that the debate over evolution has entered the mainstream of American culture. The Discovery Institute and others have been quite successful, perhaps not at changing minds, but at starting a debate than can then be pointed to as justification and legitimation for "hearing both sides."

As Rick Santorum, then a US senator, said in 2005, "My reading of the science is there's a legitimate debate. My feeling is let the debate be had." The debate, as it's happening, validates the debate happening.

With Darwin's Doubt, this long established strategy can be seen at work.

On Sunday, Darwin's Doubt made the New York Times bestseller list, coming in at number 7. It has also made Publisher Weekly's bestseller list, where it is ranked 10th in sales for the week, with more than 6,000 copies of the more than 400-page tome sold.

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Jerry Jenkins' vanity press

Jerry B. Jenkins is the consummate hack.

The man knows the Christian fiction market and he works it.

I'm not very interested in the moral and aesthetic disapproval that's normally implied by calling a writer a hack. I am quite interested in how book markets work, though, and especially how the Christian fiction market works. So I'm very interested in hacks. Hacks consciously and actively respond to the market as they find it. In some ways, they are just more pure. They're untroubled by fantasies that artistic quality correlates to commercial success, unbothered by the sense of aesthetic justice that insists artistic quality should correlate to commercial success. Hacks write for the world as it actually is.

Hacks write like it's their job.

They know that writing is their job, and they embrace that, and embrace all the marketing analysis and economic acumen necessary to succeed at that job. Jenkins, for example.

"I make no apologies for writing for the masses," he once said. "I am one of them."

He has always had an eye for the markets with mass potential, such as Christian children's series and Christian athlete biographies. He has authored or co-authored 220 books, by my count, or about 3.4 for every year he's been alive. Fourteen of those books have been New York Times bestsellers. He accepted the deal to co-author Left Behind where others would have balked (and did balk), and he wrote the first book of the series in under 24 days. Left Behind sold as many copies as Catcher in the Rye, and it's never been required reading for high schoolers. Jenkins stayed on for 12 more books, plus three prequels, and he cooperated with lots of spin-offs, including a series of 40 children's books. He was pretty consistently smart about how and where to push the franchise -- in one case, at least, smarter even than the people who actually made the marketing decisions.

So, when Jenkins takes up a new project, it's likely that that says something about the way the Christian fiction market is evolving. He's not necessarily innovative, but he's paying attention to the market, and responding to it. When that project, further, is explained specifically as a response to market conditions, it's especially worth noting.

His new project is a vanity press, Christian Writers Guild Publishing. They will be charging would-be authors nearly $10,000 to put their works in print.

Thus speaketh the consummate hack: this is the fiction market now.

His explanation for the vanity press -- which he doesn't call a vanity press -- is that authors now need well-established "platforms" to get published, and that the $9,995 will help aspiring writers get that platform. For the cost, Jenkins' group provides proof-reading, cover design, e-book formatting, an ISBN number, and a package of promotional material, "everything the writer needs for a successful book launch."

The vanity press does not itself sell the book, nor promote it, nor take any financial risk or responsibility for actual marketability, which is pretty much the definition of a vanity press.

Jenkins told Publisher's Weekly that "good, passionate authors are ignored because they're unknown," but that they can "prove their worthiness in the market."

There are a number of self-published authors who have became very successful that are kind of the model being promoted here. They chose an alternative route, built a fan base, "proved their worthiness," and became very successful. One noted recent example is Hugh Howey, who's self-published e-book sic-fi series Wool has become a phenomena. He reportedly has made as much as $40,000 a month while selling his e-books for as little as $1.99 apiece. Another is E.L. James, whose cultural juggernaut, Fifty Shades of Gray, started out as Twilight fan-fiction, available free online, and was then published by a vanity press, and was then picked up by a traditional publisher. In the Christian fiction market, the main example of this route to market success is William Paul Young. The first printing of Young's book, The Shack, was an edition of 15 -- photocopied at Office Depot. About one million copies of the book were sold before the rights were bought by a mainstream publisher.

There's a difference is a difference between self-publishing and a vanity press, but Jenkins' is kind of eliding the distinction. The promotional material for the press positions it as an aid to self-publication. Jenkins' claim is that his company can help aspiring writers follow this path to popular success, mostly by helping them produce a product that isn't as obviously terrible as most self-published fiction is. A decent edit job, a good cover, and a little marketing advice could make all the difference. Or so it seems is Jenkins' proposition.

That's the hope that costs $9,995.

Jenkins, of course, is not the only one who sees that the shrinking book market is accompanied by an expanding market of aspiring authors willing to pay for the chance to see their words in print. The Christian publisher Thomas Nelson -- owned by NewsCorp, FOX New's parent company -- has also recently launched a vanity press. Now, manuscripts rejected by the publisher may be referred to the WestBow division, where would-be authors can pay to have their books printed by the vanity press division of a major publisher. There's also a Catholic vanity press, which promises to provide "proper checks" to "ensure that authors' works are free from doctrinal or moral error," but which appears to charge extra for editing.

Many observers are skeptical of the self-publishing and vanity press models. Michael Ann Dobbs, at io9, writes that, "Once a sign of slightly deluded grandiosity, self-publishing now looks like a reasonable move for writers," but, still, even after these very public successes,

self-publishing landscape threatens to become a vast wasteland for authors too. They have few ways to get recognition and little to no support. They risk spending years trying to sell books no one seems to want, when a good editor or few more drafts could have made the books successful.

The numbers are pretty dismal. The average book published by a vanity press sells between 40 and 200 copies, according to Jane Smith of How Publishing Really Works. Self Publishing Resources reported that one vanity press with 10,000 titles had seen an average of 75 copies sold per title. If the would-be authors that use Jenkins' service have similar sales, they would pay between $50 and $200 per copy sold, recouping just a few dollars with each sale.

A survey of self-published authors found that over half of them never even sold $500 worth of books.

None of the reports on Jenkins' vanity press or the press' promotional material give any indication for how things would be different for the aspiring authors who use this service. It is true that those who get help with editing, cover design, etc., generally sell more copies than those who don't. Not $9,995 worth of more copies, though. Even if a lot of Jenkins' authors do better than half the self-published authors out there now and sell, say, 168 digital copies on Amazon at $2.99 each and make a gross of $500, they'll pay Amazon 30 percent of that, net $350, and still be more than $9,000 in the red.

This is a vanity press, too, so all the burden of selling will fall on the author, which has led some to call this whole thing a scam.

Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware doesn't use that word, but seems a little flabbergasted by the audacity of this enterprise. There's little to nothing in the way of a plan that would vault one into the ranks of a Hugh Howley or an E.L. James or a William Paul Young. She writes: "Can [Christian Writers Guild Publishing] really be expecting authors to pay nearly $10,000 for a path to publication that doesn't even get their books into retail channels? .... Even with distribution, $9.995 is a hell of a lot of money." According to Strauss, Jenkins' vanity press is expensive even when compared to other vanity presses.

The man who has himself has has more than 200 titles published by traditional publishers responded to such criticism when asked about it by a reporter from Christianity Today. He said the cost is "reasonable only for those who can afford it and want the quality we offer."

And it seems reasonable, of course, to those who believe that this is their way to prove their worthiness to the market, the money understood as a sign of good faith and fealty to the book market's gods.

There's not a market for all the Christian fiction books that are being written right now. But there is, clearly, a market of aspiring novelists willing to pay for the chance, the promise, the hope, of breaking into the little market that there is. Readers may not be consumers, but with a vanity press, books aren't the product, authors' ability to call themselves authors is the product. And there's a burgeoning market for that. This is the first conclusion about the market for Christian fiction that can be drawn from the new project of the always-saavy Jerry Jenkins: there's money to be made off of those who want to be the next Jerry Jenkins.

There's also a constriction of opportunities for traditional publishing. Publishers are just making fewer bets on the unknown, these days. Christian fiction publishers especially.

This isn't entirely new. It's always been the case that Christian fiction presses have been incredibly cautious and tended to put their resources into known commodities. Series have always been popular, new names have always struggled for recognition, and there's always been strong support for established genre fictions and a great leeriness of anything that doesn't have an established audience (i.e., market). But with the book industry as a whole suffering, those tendencies have become even more acute.

Add to that the third thing that can be concluded from Jenkins' latest project, the reality that's inducing angst among publishers and aspiring authors alike: it's just not clear that there's a standard model for success in publishing, anymore. As late as the '90s, it seemed clear what worked. There were paths, routes. Popular fiction publishing seemed like a business with rules, and there was a belief it was possible to know who had the potential to be the next Steven King, the next Danielle Steel, and possible to know what to do with a book that had that potential to launch it into the upper echelons of bestsellerdom.

Jenkins, for one, knew what those rules were, and followed those rules, and reaped his success. He embraced his inner hack, and was willing to do what he had to do to move books.

Now it seems like no one knows what the rules really are. Those who are willing to offer a sacrifice to the market don't know what sort of sacrifice they should be making. If someone tells them the required sacrifice is $10,000, that's at least can seem like a definitive answer.

The bestselling authors of the last decade on the other hand don't seem like they offer models for success, but really seem to be flukes. Stephanie Myer's story is the most traditional, but even it depends on a bit of an accident, where the person who reviewed the manuscript for the agent didn't realize the book was significantly too long and should have been rejected out of hand. E.L. James' path to success is stranger and less likely to serve as a decent model than Meyer's; Steig Larson's success doesn't really seem easily emulatable; and Hugh Howley does not even appear to know how he did what he did, much less what someone else should do if they wanted to do what he did. It all seems very anarchic, right now, like no one knows exactly what one has to do to get a chance to prove worthy of the market.

Which is why some will willingly do what a consummate hack says, and pay that hack $10,000, since he at least has a history of knowing the market and really working it.

Even if "working it" now means selling a different sort of fiction.

But to see how he does it is to see something state of the Christian fiction market right now.

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The religious practices of corporate alter egos

Are businesses, legally speaking, just the alter-egos of their owners?

The absolute clearest, most on-point exploration of the issues actually at stake in the religious liberty court cases involving for-profit business and the new health care rules is this piece by Howard M. Friedman, a former law professor and the blogger at Religion Clause. He raises this question, looking at one way the argument is being made for the religious freedoms of corporations.

Friedman notes that, in addition to questions about corporate personhood and the constitutional guarantees about exercise of religion, there are some curious quandaries about corporate law being brought up by these cases, specifically in the ways owners appear to be undermining the sorts of legal distinctions intended to protect corporate owners.

Friedman writes:

In the Affordable Care Act cases, some courts have avoided the difficult issue of whether a business has religious conscience rights by instead concluding that the business is so closely identified with its owners that it may assert the owners’ religious objections as its own.

This idea—that a corporation and its owners should be treated as the same person—is a well-known concept in corporate law, commonly referred to it as “piercing the corporate veil.” Most of the time, lawyers warn their corporate clients to do everything possible to avoid this “piercing,” since the doctrine is usually invoked when creditors of a business are making claims against the personal assets of a company’s shareholders, seeking to recoup their losses from an insolvent business by going after its owners. There is a vast amount of case law on when a court should allow “piercing the corporate veil” to reach shareholders’ personal assets, often focusing on abuse of the corporate form, misleading of creditors, or lack of corporate formalities. Business lawyers look to whether the corporation is the mere alter ego of its owners and routinely advise their corporate clients to emphasize the corporation’s separate existence from its owners.

However, the pleadings filed in many of the contraceptive mandate challenges purposely blur this line, collapsing the beliefs of the business with its owners, inviting “piercing.”

The distinction between an owner or a shareholder and the corporation itself, as Friedman notes, is an important legal underpinning of modern capitalism. What happens to these companies if they succeed in obliterating that distinction remains to be seen, but it could be serious.

The entire piece is well worth reading:  My Business, Myself: Piercing the Corporate Veil

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The economics of Left Behind, the movie, then and now

Left Behind, the movie, was either a commercial success or a commercial failure, depending on how you look at it. Depending on your expectations, and your understanding of the market for explicitly evangelical films.

The new version of the movie -- planned for release at the end of 2013, starring Nicolas Cage -- may or may not succeed in theaters. The way it's being produced, though, demonstrates how significantly the market has changed in in the last 12 years.

The original Left Behind was the most financial successful independent film of 2001, bringing in more than $2 million on its opening weekend in February of that year. It ultimately grossed $4.2 million, domestically.

An opening of $2 million can be horrible. Formula 51, also released in 2001, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Meatloaf (!), took in about $2 million on its opening weekend, and was considered a bomb, though investors made their money back and a bit of a profit on video rentals and foreign sales. Bubble Boy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, took in $2 million on the opening weekend, ultimately grossed more than $5 million, and was also considered a commercial failure.

Nevertheless, Left Behind did a lot better than a lot of other films. Of the 356 films from that year ranked by Box Office Mojo according to commercial success, Left Behind came in at 157.

That isn't bad, but calling it a commercial success certainly evidences a limited vision. It's a success for an alternative movie, available only to a certain sub-market, a film blocked out of the mainstream distribution networks, advertised mainly through Sunday schools and prayer groups.



This is certainly how the production company, Cloud Ten, viewed the film. Their marketing strategy included selling DVDs before the theatrical release, with coupons included inside. They hoped to make money by keeping production costs very low -- scenes set in Israel were shot in Ontario with camels from the local zoo -- and attract an evangelical audience by casting Kirk Cameron and several celebrity ministers and Contemporary Christian Music stars as extras. As the executives of Cloud Ten saw it, there was no way to attract a mainstream audience or compete on the open market, given the hostility of the film industry and film critics towards evangelical Christianity and movies with a message.

One of the top people at Cloud Ten told Christianity Today that the film was guaranteed to be panned by critics, whatever its technical quality, "just because of the message."

The attitude seemed to be, why try?

The authors of the book, by contrast, have consistently sought to escape the limitations of the evangelical market, believing that their story could sell and would sell in the American mainstream, if produced and pushed correctly.

Left Behind, the book, for example, was published by the Christian publishing company Tyndale House, but was not sold only in Christian bookstores, as most Christian fiction had been up to that point, but by major booksellers and at Wal-Mart. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' subsequent series was published with a secular publisher, Penguin, specifically because the company argued it could market the books to evangelicals and non-evangelicals. Those books were advertised on Christian radio, but also in USA Today.

LaHaye and Jenkins believed the 2001 film would be as successful as the Left Behind books, reaching millions, if it was made right and sold right.

That belief caused a pretty severe rift between the authors and the film producers: Jenkins panned the movie as harshly as any of the non-evangelical critics, calling it a poorly produced, glorified "church basement" film. LaHaye went further, actually filing suit against the producers for breach of contract, for making a bad movie, a suit that was settled out of court in 2008.

Cloud Ten defended itself as doing the best it could, given the circumstances. Circumstances have changed, though, and opinions at the studio seem to have shifted, too. Since regaining the rights to the film in 2012, it has put in motion a plan to reboot the series, this time with mainstream actors and a reported budget of $15 million. A distribution deal has been struck with Samuel Goldwyn Films, which isn't the biggest outfit in Hollywood, but has succeeded with other evangelical-friendly films such as Amazing Grace, which grossed $21 million, and Fireproof, which grossed  $33 million.

There are also now mainstream (if not solidly bankable) actors attached to this project, including Nicolas Cage, One Tree Hill's Chad Michael Murray, and High School Musical's Ashley Tinsdale.

That news has been met by some of the snark that Could Ten execs predicted back in 2005, when Peter Lalonde, who has written the new Left Behind scripted, bashed Hollywood for being anti-Christian, saying, "Of course Hollywood sends messages every day, but they have always had this mindset towards Christian films, and frankly I think they still do."

Whether or not that's true today, and whether or not Lalonde still thinks that's true, the market has changed, and the strategy for making and marketing an evangelical film has changed too. Now everyone, it seems, agrees with LaHaye and Jenkins.

The new Left Behind is attempting to recreate the success of other explicitly evangelical films, following a version of the model developed by Sony, which brought in $34 million domestically with Courageous and $43 million with Soul Surfer, a film made for $18 million, given serious publicity, and released in more than 2,000 theaters in 2010.

Part of that change can be attributed directly to the Left Behind books, which demonstrated a mainstream market for evangelical stories. The authors really envisioned a change in the market for novels and for films, where religious works wouldn't be segregated off into a sub-market but would be widely available, go mainstream and succeed.

Whether or not the new Left Behind movie attracts an audience is an open question. The brand isn't what it was at the beginning of the century. The controversies that might have sold tickets have long since gone away. The fact that investors are putting more up more than three times the amount the original movie brought in, though, goes to show how the market for Christian fiction has dramatically different than it was.

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Culturally contested Christmas

A curious historical fact: the first people to work to "take the Christ out of Christmas," as it were, were not atheists, or crass materialists, or secularists/pluralists trying to diminish the role of Christianity in American culture. They were Protestants.

Protestants were very conflicted about Christmas in the 1800s.

For one thing, many were opposed to the "mass" part of Christmas, i.e., the Catholicism implicit in the holiday. If December 25 was a religious holiday, that seemed to mean accepting the Catholic tradition of the church calendar and the Catholic idea of tradition, the same tradition that led to the veneration of the Virgin Mary, the authority of the Pope and the church councils, and all the sundry things Protestants argued should be rejected because they're not in the Bible. The Bible which says nothing about a gift-giving solstice holiday.

At the same time, Protestants felt a strong impulse to take the cultural practice of the day -- the Christmas of the tavern, the Christmas of the department store -- and repurpose them as devotional practices.

This meant that they were at the same time critical of the non-religious celebrations of Christmas and leery of the religious celebrations too.

As Leigh Eric Schmidt writes in Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays:

Through much of the nineteenth century, the Christianization of Christmas was a quite fragile proposition, tentative and fragmentary. Every time a pastor tried to remind his congregation that Christmas was a solemn religious event that 'should be observed in the heart as well as at the hearth, in the temple as well as at the table,' he seemed to have to admit that the most visible observances of the season were 'rioting and vain amusement' -- shooting guns, callithumpian music, practical jokes, heavy drinking and the like. The churches were invariably hard pressed to communicate the devotional dimension of Christmas; the raucous plebeian version of the celebration always threatened to drown them out.

Confessedly, these Protestants in the Puritan mold were partially to blame for the sorry state of Christmas devotion in the colonial and antebellum worlds. The tradition of holiday purgation, long shared in by Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and many Methodists, bequeathed a model of thorough desacralization that actually helped Christmas go its secular way in American culture. Time and again these Protestants insisted that Christmas was just like any other day, that it was without 'any peculiar sanctity.' At best, Christmas was an object of 'mistaken piety'; at worst it was the occasion of superstition and corrupt tradition. Given these presuppositions about the idolatry of the ancient church calendar, when low-church Protestant began their home-centered recovery of Christmas in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, they often welcomed it back explicitly as a 'social holiday,'not as a 'religious observance.' As one Sunday School publication, the Baptist Teacher, editorialized in 1875, 'We believe in Christmas -- not as a holy day, but as a holiday.'

As has been regularly pointed out, the so-called "war on Christmas" is pretty specious. It is the case, though, that the meaning of Christmas is and has always been culturally contested. In its practice, this holiday is often conflicted, with multiple meanings, divergent rituals, discordant customs, and perpetually competing interpretations.

It's common today, for example, to find evangelicals at once upset that Christmas has been "commercialized" and that Wal-Mart clerks don't recognize the religious nature of the celebration in their standard customer greetings. This isn't a new thing, though; the conflict over what Christmas is has a long history. And it's not only the case of a conflict between the American Protestant majority and others, be they Catholic or non-religious. The conflict runs even through American Protestantism itself.

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The obsession with the obsession with the end of the world

The first episode of the reality TV show Doomsday Preppers was watched by 1.29 million people. It is the most-watched show in National Geographic's history. By the time the fourth episode of the second season aired last month, ratings had suffered a little, but still there were more than 700,000 viewers.

It's very unlikely that all those 700,000 viewers were themselves interested in ways to prepare for the end of the world. It seems unlikely even that such a show would make sense, economically, if it catered only to those sympathetic to the ideas of the subjects of the show. And really, the people featured in this show are presented as strange, as freaks, as laughable.

To quote the New York Times review:

Watch [...] for a short while and, unless you’re a prepper yourself, you might be moderately amused at the absurd excess on display and at what an easy target the prepper worldview is for ridicule.

It may be the case that there's a "burgeoning 'prepper' movement," as USA Today claims, but there's little actual evidence of that. Such people do clearly exist, but that's not a new thing. And that's not why such a show exists.

If you want to explain the reason such a show as this exists, you have to look not only at the existence of the people featured in the show, asking why there are so many people dedicating their lives to preparing for the end of the world, but also at the audience.

Why are there so many people so fascinated by people so obsessed by the end of the world?

This is true, too, with the slate of apocalyptic predictions all due tomorrow, the Mayan calendar and the black hole at the center of the galaxy and the hidden planet set to collide with earth. The number of people who take such theories seriously is vanishingly miniscule. The number of people who take seriously the people who take such theories seriously, however, is quite sizable. How do we explain that?

I'm very skeptical, personally, about reports of how widely such apocalyptic theories are believed. A lot of the accounts of belief seem to be very vague or very naive about what it means to believe, and there's also a strong, strong tendency towards credulity when it comes to other people's credulity. However, even if we accept the phenomenon of apocalyptic beliefs without any skepticism, that wouldn't explain the cultural phenomena of obsession with the end of the world. Because that obsession, in American culture at this moment, is not just and not even most basically obsession with the end of the world, but obsession with obsession about the end.

Beyond the matter of "true believers," there's a cultural phenomenon right now of avid interest in true believers. There's a market, here, and it's booming.

It's not enough to just explain the people featured on Doomsday Preppers, the people out there who aren't joking about Nibiru, the people who are violent in their belief in the possibility of zombie apocalypse. If we want to understand this, we can't just look at the obsessed on the TV screen. We have to also look at us looking at the TV screen.

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The religious shape of capitalism

A new study published in Management Science is making a very Max Weber-like claim about the essential differences of religions affecting engagements with capitalism & shaping capitalism.

According to the University of Georgia and Southern Methodist University study, mutual funds are done differently in areas dominated by Catholics than they are in areas dominated by Protestants. The study says that difference is best explained by the respective natures of the different versions of Christianity.

From the abstract:

"Funds located in low-Protestant or high-Catholic areas exhibit significantly higher fund return volatilities. [...] Risk-taking associated with local religious beliefs manifests in higher portfolio concentrations, higher portfolio turnover, more aggressive interim trading, and more "tournament" risk-shifting behaviors, but not over-weighting risky individual stocks. Overall, our results suggest that local religious beliefs have significant influences on mutual fund behaviors."

One of the study's authors told CNN that Baptists in particular make a difference.

The theory, here, is that Baptists are more suspicious of promises of "great solutions" and "great returns," and that, in certain concentrations, that suspicion is adopted by the whole culture.

It will be interesting to see if this holds up & how far the study goes in attempting to explain the data. There's a real statistical difference, apparently, but the more useful/interesting part of the study for religion will be if there's any good argument as to why. Weber's own version of this idea that religion shapes economics, which was an inversion of Marx's claim, has the tendency to seem really persuasive on a certain level, but to not withstand a lot of detailed historical analysis.

A bit of Weber, from the classic The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, written in 1904 and '05:

"[I]t is a fact that the Protestants (especially certain branches of the movement to be fully discussed later) both as ruling classes and as ruled, both as majority and as minority, have shown a special tendency to develop economic rationalism which cannot be observed to the same extent among Catholics either in the one situation or in the other. Thus the principal explanation of this difference must be sought in the permanent intrinsic character of their religious beliefs, and not only in their temporary external historico-political situations."

"[...] one might be tempted to express the difference by saying that the greater other-worldliness of Catholicism, the ascetic character of its highest ideals, must have brought up its adherents to a greater indifference toward the good things of this world. Such an explanation fits the popular tendency in the judgment of both religions. On the Protestant side it is used as a basis of criticism of those (real or imagined) ascetic ideals of the 'Catholic way of life,' while the Catholics answer with the accusation that materialism results from the secularization of all ideals through Protestantism."

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Ritual, money, & the death of a pet

By some accounts, the function of religion in daily life, and especially of religious ritual, is to lend solemnity to otherwise puny, pallid human moments.

I think of this as the Peter Ivanovich theory of religion, named after a character in Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Iliyich. Ivanovich, at the start of the story, finds himself at a funeral and "like everyone else on such occasions, entered feeling uncertain what he would have to do. All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to cross oneself."

This is religion as a response to what could be called existential awkwardness. Ritual being what you do when you don't know what to do. The idea is that religion and/or ritual serve to mark, to recognize the seriousness and importance of a moment that would, without that mark, not seem that important at all. There is, in the act, an insistence that something is important and meaningful, despite how it might seem.

This is how I would see pet funerals, the practice of treating deceased pets to the same processes and ceremonies traditionally reserved for humans.



In a mostly horrid bit of journalism, Business Week recently re-discovered the industry of pet funerals, as seems to happen somewhat regularly. Mostly this piece is a baseless trend story, written up as a will-you-believe-this-ridiculousness?, without actually demonstrating much interest in understanding what might explain this "phenomena" or why people, apparently lots of them, want funerals for their cats and dogs and pot-bellied pigs and hamsters.

There's one interesting moment of insight, though. At the very end, Bob Walczyk, the apparently empathy-less owner of Forever Friends in Green Bay, Wisc., notes that services such as his allow people to solemnize their pets' deaths and lives, and to do something, perform some act, that declares the importance relationships with their pets.

Except, for Walczyk, what allows people to mark out meaningfulness in the face of apparent meaningnessless isn't religion, and isn't ritual. But money.

As the reporter writes,

"the most valuable secret he’s learned after years in the business, Walczyk says, is that selling a pet funeral means never offering the lowest price. Customers aren't looking for value; they're looking for quality.  

 "'We're the most expensive place in town,' Walczyk says with a laugh. 'And everybody still comes to us.'"

Maybe one should update Tolstoy: "All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to spend money."

One way to think of this would be as a market essentially functioning to replace religion in modern life. I wonder, though, if it might not be more helpful to broaden the standard understanding of ritual, to think about how consumption can also be ritualistic, and how, whether people are religious or not, there's still this need to mark out aspects and moments of life as different, and rituals still serve this important, Peter Ivanovich-function in people's lives.

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