Abstract
Our next site for investigating the conditions of the idea of finance in modern socioeconomies is the operations of faith. The work of faith or trust in the marketplace is a site for the production of truths about finance capital. We will examine this third condition of finance by analyzing the influence of the logic of finance on religious believers as faith in God coincides with faith in return on investment. This approach of deciphering and discerning the power of the idea of finance by studying its operations in one of its key constituencies is consistent with what we did in chapter 3. We studied the second condition of finance, which is praxis, by focusing on how actors on Wall Street dealt with the practical issues of moral hazards. In this chapter, we will investigate the third condition by examining how ordinary men and women of religion deal with practical issues of expectation of economic returns from faith. We will draw our example from the wealth and health gospel of the worldwide Pentecostal movement.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
I have adapted the words and phrases of Nikolas Rose for my purpose. Nikolas Rose, “Governing by Numbers: Figuring Out Democracy,” Accounting Organizations and Society 16, no. 7 (1991): 691.
Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 39
Bill Maurer, “Repressed Futures: Financial Derivatives’ Theological Unconscious,” Economy and Society 31, no. 1 (2002): 15–36.
Amos Yong, “A Typology of Prosperity Theology: A Religious Economy of Renewal or a Renewal Economics?” in Pentecostalism and Prosperity: The Socio-Economics of the Global Charismatic Movement, Christianities of the World 1, ed. Amos Yong and Katy Attanasi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 15–33.
Beta stands for systematic risk, and it measures the correlation between return on a firm’s stock and that of the market portfolio” (Nimi Wariboko, Principles and Practice of Bank Analysis and Valuation [Ibadan, Nigeria: Spectrum, 1994], 105–106).
Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson, The (Mis)Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 157.
See Asonzeh Ukah, “‘Those Who Trade with God Never Lose’: The Economics of Pentecostal Activism in Nigeria,” in Christianity and Social Change in Africa: Essays in Honor of J. D. Y. Peel, ed. Toyin Falola (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), 253–74.
Robin Horton, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 239.
D. Knights and T. Vurdubakis, “Calculations of Risk: Towards an Understanding of Insurance as a Moral and Political Technology,” Accounting Organizations and Society 18, nos. 7/8 (1993), 734.
Irving Pfeffer, Insurance and Economic Theory (Homewood, IL: Richard Irving, 1956), 42; quoted in Knights and Vurdubakis, “Calculations of Risk,” 730.
Stephen Green, “Negotiating with the Future: The Culture of Modern Risk in Global Financial Markets,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 (2000), 77; quoted in Maurer, “Repressed Futures,” 19.
For an extensive discussion of the Pentecostal principle, see Nimi Wariboko, The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New Spirit (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012).
Donald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley: University of California, 2007).
There are strong similarities between the Pentecostal principle and the description of the bourgeois spirit in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s The Communist Manifesto (London: Verso, 1998), 38–39. The passage starts from “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production” (p. 38) and ends at “National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness becomes more and impossible, from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature” (p. 39). This insight occurred to me only on January 31, 2011, when I read this passage again in a book.
For a response to this kind of question, see David Martin, “Another Kind of Cultural Revolution,” in Faith on the Move: Pentecostalism and its Potential Contribution to Development, Centre for Development and Enterprise Workshop Proceedings No. 2, ed. Roger Southall and Stephen Rule (Johannesburg: CDE, August 2008), 8–19. As he puts it on p. 12 of his essay, economists “may be interested in people who refuse to be victims, organize for mutual assistance, and foster aspirations as a battalion of irregulars in the war on poverty. Pentecostals all over the globe believe they are empowered by the Holy Spirit to overcome the spirit of poverty.”
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 76–90.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 28–61, 111, 126, 209.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 135.
Copyright information
© 2014 Nimi Wariboko
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wariboko, N. (2014). Faith Has a Rate of Return. In: Economics in Spirit and Truth. Radical Theologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137475503_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137475503_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50183-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-47550-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)