Introduction

Abstract

WHAT DOES the academic study of religion contribute to the study of capital and capitalism? What is the status of the field’s scholarship in these areas, and how can we further develop this work? This roundtable considers these questions. Its genesis was an observation that scholars across subdisciplines and methodologies of religious studies have long identified capital as an item of concern. However, as processes of capital have shifted, scholarship in the study of religion has struggled to find coherent vocabulary for articulating how “capital” fits into the field as a whole. Is global capitalism a kind of stealth universalizing Protestantism? Is it a modern world religious tradition that deserves a place alongside Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and the other usual suspects of introductory surveys? Does capitalism produce religion, or does religion produce capitalism? This collection of essays seeks new ways to classify and interpret capital within the study of religion. Recent scholarship has challenged at once the putative transparency of the secular and the exceptional neutrality of capitalism. This work tends to concentrate scholarly insight at two poles. On the one hand, scholars have considered markets as secular, as in apart from religion. Religion, in many of these iterations, is treated as an object existing in response to capitalism, or as a generating cause of certain forms of economic behavior.1 On the other hand, scholars have uncovered the religious worlds embedded in the “economic,” thus revealing the ostensible secular as really religious. These projects, despite their overlapping themes of questioning nonpartisan foundations and of debunking the ascent of a rational subject, remain detached from one another. One consequence is that they tend to construct their respective categories—the secular and capital—as independently articulated projects of modernity.

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