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

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 Colombiaâ s largest mega-church, a Protestant micro-credit program in BogotĂĄ, 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 dissertationâ 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.

Department dc:contributor.department

Religion, Study of

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Bartel, Rebecca Charity

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• O'Neill, Kevin L

• Belief
• Christianity
• Colombia
• Credit
• Debt
• Finance

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/76297

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/76297