Bartel, Rebecca.Card‐carrying Christians: debt and the making of free market spirituality in Colombia. 312 pp., bibliogr. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. $29.95 (paper)

The role of religion in capitalist transformation has been a recurring theme in anthropological theory, most recently focusing on the interface of religion and finance. Rebecca Bartel's Card-carrying Christians: debt and the making of free market spirituality in Colombia is a significant contribution to this debate. The book explores how Charismatic Pentecostalism advances financialization, exploring the increasing influence of financial instruments, institutions, and regimes of valuation on the everyday lives of believers in Colombia's capital Bogotá. In a buzzing Latin American metropolis, everyday survival coupled with middle-class aspirations constitutes a fertile ground for the expansion of the commercial credit card industry, which was deregulated following Colombia's post-1990s neoliberal restructuring. Bartel shows how Charismatic Pentecostal faith deepens the scope of financialization. From sermons of church elites to daily financial decision-making, financial debt becomes an expression of faith in God – to the extent that ‘souls’ themselves become ‘financialized’. Methodologically speaking, Bartel creatively identifies sites where the entwinement of Christianity, finance, and debt becomes visible. Instead of focusing on one church, she identifies a network of sites where new financial subjectivities are shaped, centring debt as an expression of faith. These subjectivities are gendered, racialized, and entwined in global hierarchies of worth and value. From Christian microfinance companies to NuSkin multilevel marketing firms to the small enterprises of Pentecostal women, expressions of faith in God are woven into financial literacy trainings, budget planning, reorganization of debts, and the swiping of multiple credit cards. Card-carrying Christians thus makes a significant contribution to the kind of anthropology of Christianity that studies how religious modes of reasoning and calculation extend far beyond explicit sites of worship. This shift generates rich analytical language, such as ‘financial resurrection’, ‘neoliberal soul-scape’, and ‘covenanting on credit’, which makes for an evocative exemplar of ethnographic writing. The book is theoretically ambitious in bringing Foucauldian analyses of spirituality and neoliberal governmentality in close conversation with Colombia's history of violence. Bartel shows that financialization is part of a broader societal project to generate a ‘resurrected Colombia’ after decades of civil war. The spectre of violence is particularly palpable in the chapter on a Pentecostal rural community, which brings home the political and existential stakes of Christian faith. By foregrounding the history of violence and imperial power, Bartel articulates the limits of a Foucauldian approach to the cultivation of pious, disciplined subjectivities, which can appear removed from the struggles of daily survival. Such limits are captured by the evocative concept of ‘necrofinance’. Drawing on Mbembe, the precarious, indebted subjectivities cultivated at the interface of Pentecostal faith and financial debt are ‘always a breath away from devastation’ (p. 58) – financialization remains embedded in age-old structures of determining who can live and who is left to die. At the same time, Pentecostal frames legitimate financial debt as a Christian mode of aspiration. Throughout the analysis, Bartel carefully refrains from romanticizing the time before credit cards, when financial debt could result in a quick death due to loan sharks. Charismatic Pentecostal faith coupled with financialization produces subjects whose ‘very being’, as Bartel's argues, is financialized. As one consequence, little space remains for alternative economic imaginaries. While financialization can be powerfully experienced as working towards peace, its speed and scope of deepening are underpinned by Pentecostal modes of believing. On one occasion, a key interlocutor, Remedios, openly criticizes the Pentecostal mode of capitalist discipline following a group meeting of a Christian microfinance company (p. 70). It would have been helpful to see even more done with such instances of reflexive problematization, even resistance, including further unpacking the limits of faith when the promise of discipline does not result in prosperity. This could have further helped to articulate the limits to Foucauldian analyses. While Card-carrying Christians centres ordinary Christians’ life trajectories and dilemmas of financial decision-making, future questions remain of the dynamics of capital accumulation by Christian institutions that extract value from this entwinement. It also remains to be seen how financialization shifts towards ever more intangible monetary payments, away from physical cards to fully ‘contactless’ modes of payment, so that the gap between the creditor and the debtor becomes ever more abstracted. In such a world, what will become of God as an agent that blesses this circulation of money, and how does money originating from sacrificial gift-giving metamorphose into capital that accumulates in one place, among some actors, but not others? In summary, Card-carrying Christians is a superb contribution to recent anthropological theory that nuances Foucauldian analyses of finance, neoliberalism, ethics, and governmentality. The sophisticated analysis bringing together a history of violence, religion, and financialization will speak to broader audiences in the social studies of finance, while the shift from questions of belief to believing and the economy will also appeal to scholars of religious studies.