Abstract
In the pandemic of 2020, it quickly became commonplace for Americans to advocate for sacrifice in exchange for a strong economy. The more egregious of these calls were for sacrificing elders and sacrificing the weak. Religion scholars such as Jacqueline Hidalgo (n.d.) began to voice their alarm at this religiously coded economic violence. Elizabeth Castelli commented on Facebook, “The pernicious idea that saving the economy is more important than saving people’s lives has a theological history. Devin Singh excavates that history in his important recent book, Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West.” And indeed, Singh himself noted this sacrificial economic logic in his op-ed, “COVID-19 is Exposing Market Fundamentalism’s many Moral and Practical Flaws” (Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2020).
Singh’s book, Divine Currency, lays bare foundational elements of theological thought that make this calculation thinkable. Singh examines the early centuries of an enduring tradition in which the death of Christ, ubiquitously known as sacrifice, is also figured as financial exchange (ransom, payment of debt, etc.). He persuasively details how patristic theologies of God’s sovereignty, ransom, and redemption all mirror imperial economies of money and war in the Roman empire. He shows how theologies of salvation may not be straightforwardly beneficent. This book beautifully parses the origins of a world-shaping theology.
Those teaching Divine Currency will find that it pairs well with Marion Grau’s Of Divine Economy, which is an important precursor to it. Where Singh’s genealogical approach reveals the deep-seated theo-economic underpinnings of “secular” governmentality and its hierarchies and conquests, Grau (2004, 14) constructively reveals places in the tradition where God can be read as an economic trickster involved in “subversive divine economic deals”. Naming the influence of economics on theology and then rereading it, Grau offers tools to challenge the destructiveness of capitalism and the theological heritage that Singh outlines (24–25).
I use Singh’s work here to draw to the fore how prisons are operating as a sacrificial and economic place of conquest, governance, and control during the pandemic. A massive but unremarked sacrifice is taking place in prisons, one that also takes the form of racial and colonial conquest. Yet those inside prisons are taught in prison ministries that they are made “free” by Christ’s sacrifice, which has paid their debt to God. Free to be sacrificed for the economy, apparently. Sacrifice and economy are so woven together that they have become sacrificonomics.
To be clear, Singh is not primarily investigating the language of sacrifice in Divine Currency, but rather theological monetary metaphors. Nonetheless, these themes are connected with sacrifice in the Christian canon and tradition (2018, 244 n.6). Singh shows that salvific payment ominously mimics imperializing economic violence and the extension of power. His work clarifies how the language of sacrifice is still so easily conjoined with a supposed financial imperative. Divine Currency helps us to see that contemporary calls and demands for sacrifice are theologically-infused aspirations of economic conquest, annexation, and colonization.
God’s coin as imperial logic
Singh details how God’s salvation is modeled after notions of governance and economic management in antiquity. God the Father is depicted as the governing emperor, while God the Son comes to be understood as the steward who dispenses money but who is also money itself, paid to redeem humans. Early theologians, Singh demonstrates, imagine humans and Christ as something like a minted coin. Minted coins were an imperial imprimatur, through which the emperor would assert his authority, legitimacy, and sovereignty, including in newly conquered territories (2018, 41–56). Through taxation, the minted coin compelled obedience and tribute to that emperor. Theological arguments reflect this imperial structure. Eusebius and Tertullian figure the human soul as a coin stamped with God’s image. Macarius of Egypt and Gregory of Nyssa imagine sinful humans as coins that need to be reminted to make clear the imperial image (108–119). Augustine calls Christ “God’s coin”—both the imperial mold and the imprint (119–124).
Christ’s sacrifice becomes divine currency with which humans’ debts are paid. Singh outlines in some depth Gregory of Nyssa’s imagery of Christ as money paid for humans said to be in debt bondage to Satan. When God pays for humans with the Christ’s life, Satan then owes God and is brought into debt bondage with God. As Singh describes Gregory of Nyssa’s formulations, “Satan is brought into debt bondage to God, as the devil had first done to humanity…. [This is an exchange which] endorses the power dynamics of debt slavery and economic conquest, bringing them into soteriology” (2018, 135). God buys out the debt slavery of sinners, and takes Satan hostage instead.
While compelling in the theological realm, these metaphors have disturbing implications for governance, especially in situations where conquered or colonized people are affiliated with the devil or forces of evil. Soteriology is conceived as “theopolitical conquest, at the heart of which occurs a monetized transaction that helps secure freedom and victory, overturn a foe, and bring that enemy into subjection” (189). Singh notes that it is not a clear shot from patristic theology to early modern and contemporary colonization, but suggests that nonetheless, monetary conquest is central to the production of God’s sovereignty; it provides the basis for systems of governance and control. Theologies thus formed have contributed to the development of economic ideas, culminating in the history of colonization.
Both enemy and friend are governed through monetary exchange and debt relations. Believers end up with a debt obligation to God, to be repaid through good works, care for the poor, and other forms of generosity. Following an imperial model of governance, “debt cancellation operates side by side with reentrenched indebtedness” (181). Those recipients of God’s ransom are more easily governed. Moreover, debt payment, or even the simple issuance of currency, creates an obligation to the ruler, in the form of taxes and tributes (46–56, 182, 187).
Conquest and sacrifice in prisons
Divine Currency provides key insights into understanding how sacrifice can so seamlessly be taken up in relation to the current economy in the time of pandemic. Sacrifice is no longer a part of the economy; it is the price of economy. Different from the divine economy, those sacrificed to COVID-19 are not in on the deal, nor are the sacrifices voluntary.
One such involuntary sacrifice is taking place in prisons, where people are being left to die of COVID-19. When so much else is shut down, prisons continue on, out of sight. Millions of people are incarcerated in crowed dorms, with poor ventilation (Vansickle 2020; St. John 2020). Transmission of the virus is inevitable. Deaths are mounting fast. Thousands have served decades and are now elderly with severe health conditions—incarcerated during the prison boom of the 1980s and 90s (Nicholson 2018). Many have family waiting to care for them, but they are not released. In November 2020, there were 197,659 cases of COVID in federal and state prisons, roughly twice the amount of cases per million as in the U.S. population, with 1454 reported deaths (Marshall Project 2020). The racial injustice is clear: prisons disproportionately incarcerate black and brown people; as COVID is allowed to progress in prison, it is a racialized violence, furthering what Dylan Rodríguez calls, “the genocidal logic of evisceration” (2020, 168–73).
People in prison are sacrificed for the economy. Prisons are bedrocks of state economies (Gilmore 2007). During the pandemic, prisons continued to generate revenue, produce products, and provide industry and employment. Sacrificonomics explains why someone like California Governor Gavin Newsom, who promised to decarcerate, did not largely do so during the pandemic. This sacrificial commerce is protected by its concealment from the public eye, as well as a politically torqued fear of crime.
As Rodríguez argues, prisons enact “racial-colonial state violence” (2020, 214). They are colonial in the way they extract labor while trying to act as a “civilizing force.” People in prison, like the colonized, are made to work; they are given “life skills” at less than 25 cents an hour. Those in prisons are sacrificed for the economy, while having to work in unsafe prison factories (Dreier 2020). It is colonial sacrificonomics.
Free to be sacrificed
The decision to sacrifice captive people seems to run counter the Christian message that is so often taught in prison ministries. Most prison ministries include substitutionary atonement in their mission statements (see Carey 2017; Runions 2020). This theology sees Christ’s atoning sacrifice as paying a debt to God. Prison ministries take their cue from the Bible, perhaps missing just how much they are shaped by a theological tradition of economic captivity and conquest. A much cited verse is 1 Corinthians 6:19–20. “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit….You are not your own; you were bought at a price.” Singh points to this passage as an important founding text for theological language of debt and debt forgiveness (2018, 137).
To incarcerated people, the phrase, “You are not your own,” is perhaps an obvious point. It also carries chilling implications considering the argument that prison abolitionists have been making that prisons continue the legacy of slavery in the U.S. (Davis 2003; Sharpe 2016). The verse dramatizes the indebtedness of the governed, as well as obligation to pay tribute that Singh discusses (2018, 182). Redeemed prisoners are governed by God. Notably, prison ministries do not typically cite the more radical verse in 1 Corinthians 7:23, “You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of human masters” (for a queer reading of this verse that subverts heteropatriarchal hierarchies, see Grau 2004, 165–72).
The price Christ pays for sinners is said to make incarcerated people free—free from the prison of guilt and sin, free from the bonds of death and hell (Van Domelen 2017; Prison Fellowship, n.d.). But they are patently not free. Salvation does not actually free them from paying their “debt to society,” or doing forced labor. Instead, salvation helps maintain control in prisons by creating assent for “rehabilitation,” as well as docility in labor. True, the idea of God’s love, care, and power can provide needed sustenance for those enduring harsh conditions. Yet Christ’s redemptive ransom also ends up enacting a kind of conquest. Treated as an “enemy” of society, the “criminal” is brought into further subjection and made more pliable. As Singh puts it, “Liberation here essentially involves annexation” (2018, 192).
No matter how emotionally or spiritually freeing salvation may feel in prison, it does nothing to stop the sacrifice of life for the economy in the time of COVID-19. Having accepted the payment of Christ’s sacrifice, prisoners are rendered free to sacrifice their own lives. Modeled on a conquering emperor, redemption enacts a conquest.
Conclusion
Divine Currency is the kind of intellectual history that allows us to see why demands for sacrifice—and actual sacrifice—may be so acceptable in the current moment. People are told they will be saved if the economy is saved; the economy will be saved through the sacrifice of others. The salvific logic of governance has been fully internalized and desacralized. Where religious language does appear, it all too often is used to further this colonial logic and render people more governable, as happens in prisons. Singh helps us to see how the Christian language of sacrifice—wedded for centuries to imperial and colonizing economic strategies of debt payment, taxation, and governance—has gone underground. This sacrificonomics authorizes what can only be called genocidal sacrifice in prisons.
