Card Carrying Christians: Credit, Debt, and Believing in Emerging Colombia

Card Carrying Christians: Credit, Debt, and Believing in Emerging Colombia by Rebecca Charity Bartel A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department for the Study of Religion Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Rebecca Bartel 2016 Card Carrying Christians: Credit, Debt, and Believing in Emerging Colombia Rebecca Charity Bartel Doctor of Philosophy Department for the Study of Religion University of Toronto 2016 Abstract This dissertation addresses the entanglements of Christianity and financializing capitalism in Colombia, South America. At its most empirical, this dissertation details ethnographically the debt upon which the Gospel of Prosperity rests. The ethnographic research, collected over two and a half years of sustained fieldwork, assesses Colombia’s largest mega-church, a Protestant micro-credit program in Bogotá, various commercial banks, a rural Pentecostal community, and a multi-level marketing company. Together, this evidence establishes that financializing capitalism in Colombia depends upon a Christian morality. The evidence also makes possible the dissertation’s more theoretical claim: that credit is a matter of belief. The argument begins with some reflection on the etymological fact that both words, credit and belief, share the same Latin root, credere, but then leans on participant observation, extended interviews, and life narratives to demonstrate how credit has become a matter of belief at the level of lived experience in Colombia. ii Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been possible without the dedicated teaching, mentoring, challenging, and accompaniment of many people, from Toronto to Bogotá. My research has been generously supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the W. Garfield Weston Fellowship for International Doctoral Research, the Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement of the SSHRC, and the University of Toronto Department for the Study of Religion and the University of Toronto School of Graduate Studies. To the scholarly community at the University of Toronto, I am profoundly indebted. First, to my advisors. Dr Simon Coleman always offered the “big questions” and the intellectual acumen to push my fledgling anthropological pursuits in the right direction. Never was there so sensitive an ethnographer, so astute a researcher, so knowledgeable a mentor. Thank you, Dr Coleman. Dr Pamela Klassen has read, responded, and listened to many of these ideas over the last six years. The first presentation of the nascent thoughts for this work was under Dr Klassen’s tutelage at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, in 2011. Dr Klassen has consistently encouraged scholarly excellence with a careful eye on ‘showing, not telling.’ In particular, her feedback from the critical perspective of feminist theory, critical history, and a dynamic understanding of Protestantism, has strengthened the arguments presented here. Thank you, Dr Klassen. Dr Ruth Marshall has persistently urged “thinking things all the way down.” Dr Marshall’s commitment to rigorous reading and robust theoretical analysis have sustained many long conversations and debate. Dr Marshall has never let me get away with glossing over a theoretical trope, or skipping a necessary argumentative move. Her deep understanding of Pentecostalism, the politics of the spirit, and the dynamics of poverty and violence on religious praxis have all informed the analysis. Dr Marshall has also shown me the possibilities of being an excellent scholar and also balancing a healthy family life. For all of this, I am truly grateful. Thank you, Dr Marshall. Finally, Dr Kevin O’Neill has mentored and fostered my writing and intellectual development over the last six years. Dr O’Neill regularly challenged me, forever pushing iii towards improvement, greater creativity, deeper thinking, and excellence. Many conversations and meetings, classes and conferences, and revisions and reviews have served to secure confidence in finding my own voice and how to express it. A more dedicated supervisor there never was. After winning a doctoral scholarship in my first year, I wrote an enthusiastic letter of thanks to my harshest critic and staunchest ally, my advisor. He responded: “Thank me when you have finished your dissertation and you have secured a tenure track job.” Well, Dr O’Neill, here we are. Thank you for all of it. I am also grateful to the Universidad Nacional de Colombia for inviting me to be part of their Sociology Department, teaching my course in the heightened political context that was 2013- 2014. I especially thank Dr William Mauricio Beltran, sociologist of religion and compañero. I learned so much, not only a new way of thinking about Colombia, about religion, and about research, but also about the intricacies of political and academic life in a country that I thought I knew so well before. I feel like an entirely new window onto Colombia was opened for me through that experience, and I deeply grateful. Gracias. During my penultimate year of PhD work at the University of Toronto, 2014-2015, the union representing student workers at the University went on strike (CUPE 3902). This experience was equally frustrating and illuminating on so many levels. It was the most vivid experience of recognizing the University as an increasingly bureaucratized and corporatized entity. This was a painful but perhaps an unsurprising realization to make. However, one positive outcome of the strike were some very special friendships that must be mentioned here. To the Delta Squad (Joe Curnow, Caitlin Henry, Anjali Helferty, Omar Sirri, Abe Singer, Christy Guthrie, and Andrew Kohan). To the many friends I have made through the DSR: Justin Stein, Matthew King, Paul Nahme, Arun Brahmbhatt, Aldea Mulhern, Jessica Radin, Mike Ruecker, Andrew Tebbutt, Rebekka King, Ian Brown, Zoe Anthony, Maria Dasios, Amy Clanfield, Anna Cwikla, Jarian Gahan: Thank you all for being community. I will miss you all. Special thanks to Greg Fewster for a magisterial job in copy-editing this entire manuscript. My parents, Dietrich and Jocelyn, are the ones responsible for setting me on this academic journey. After many years of living in Latin America, a handful of graduate degrees and diplomas from Colombia, and the yawning questions I had developed about political economy and religion, it was my father (also a PhD) who encouraged me to pursue this final iv degree. My mother, the financial advisor, accountant, and local economist offered so many intuitions and insights into the religious underworld of the financial economy – sometimes without knowing it! I thank both of them for their endless encouragement and proofreading. My dear Aunt, Victoria, has been a constant source of support, and cheese and wine, and much more, over these years of graduate school. She generously opened her home and her life to me, and many times over served as a sounding board for ideas, complaints, and heartaches. Thank you, Vicki. You have made Toronto feel like home. My life partner, Javier Nuñez, has offered patience, encouragement, and bright insights into so many of the ideas that swirl around these pages. Javier accompanied me to all of these field sites, at least once, journeyed to Bogotá’s mega-churches and through the Magdalena Medio jungle river basins. His deep listening and gentle questioning of cultural assumptions and clichés have helped make this thesis a little more nuanced. Gracias, amor, por nunca dudar. Por creer siempre. En nosostros, y en todo. The many years of living and learning in Latin America, and Colombia, have inspired every page of this work. I am particularly grateful to the Veraguas Community, for their accompaniment and reminder that intellectual pursuits are worthy insofar as they respond to the “real lives” of the marginalized. The influence of liberation theology and pedagogies of resistance still fuel grassroots organizing, community-led political movements, and efforts at transforming systems of violence desde abajo everywhere in region, from Mexico to the Patagonia. During my years as regional policy analyst with the Mennonite Central Committee, I travelled throughout Latin America and I was privileged to meet and work alongside the great masses of individuals and collectives who are struggling for recognition and dignity, for their land and the well-being of their future generations, and for economic and political systems that give life, as opposed to taking it. To all of those communities, those individuals, those activists and educators, I am deeply grateful. A few individuals deserve special recognition: To Jennifer Manrique, community organizer, mother, and rebel, thank you for the many conversations that oriented me, so many years ago, to Colombia’s history and context. To Viviana Machuca, philosopher, feminist, theologian, mother, and agitator, thank you for the hours of debate over decolonizing feminist critique, and applying Latin American feminist thought to considering political economies. I never quite accomplished this in the current work, but I intend to continue working at this for the v rest of my career. To Arturo Orrego, compañero, philosopher, theologian, historian, father, and husband, I owe gratitude for helping me understand the complex history of Pentecostalism in Latin America, and orienting me to Marx before I even knew I would need to read Capital for my comprehensive exams. The hours of debate about the pros

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