How Christianity Forgot Its Grammar, Part 2 — Contrapunctus IV: The Grammar and the Trophy Case
Jazz, Shame, and Being With — Essay #11
Listen to how your community tells its own story — the narrative it recites about where it came from, who belongs, what made it great. Every community has one. And underneath every story, there’s a grammar.
I’ve spent three contrapuncti tracing unholy profane sacraments — four centuries of instruments that inscribed dominative identity into bodies through repetition, not argument. The theological vacuum that made it possible. The economic phases that gave it new instruments in each age. The way it went underground and became invisible.
But the grammar underneath those instruments is older than any of them. It crossed the Atlantic before the first enslaved person was offloaded at Jamestown. And it’s the grammar I grew up speaking in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, without knowing I was speaking it.
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Movement III: How Formation Persists
The auction block is 165 years gone. The water fountain signs came down before I was born. And yet, at a high school dance hundreds of miles from home, the walls still ruled.
How does formation transmit across centuries?
I’ve been sitting with this question for a long time — longer than I’ve been writing this series. Because the question isn’t really about history. It’s about me.
How did I end up formed by practices I never witnessed, in institutions that had officially repudiated everything I’m describing? None of the schools I attended had water fountain signs. None of the churches I served practiced explicit racial exclusion. And yet every one of them transmitted the formation the signs had performed.
The historian David Hackett Fischer identified three mechanisms by which cultural formations persist long after the conditions that created them have disappeared: institutional transmission, functional interdependence, and elite self-reproduction.1
I want to show you what each one looks like when the formation being transmitted is an unholy profane sacrament.
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Start with self-reproduction.
A Mississippi merchant named Mabry arrived in the state in the 1820s and built himself into one of the region’s largest enslavers. Then the Panic of 1837 destroyed him — wiped out his holdings, bankrupted his operations, left him ruined in a state full of ruined men.
The fires were literally still burning when people fled their plantations; some abandoned everything except their enslaved human beings.2
You would think that catastrophe on this scale would teach something. You would think that a man who had watched an entire economic system collapse around him would build differently the second time.
By 1850, Mabry owned sixteen enslaved people again. He was rebuilding the same system that had just destroyed him.3
Rothman notes, with an anthropologist's studied calm, that neither Mabry nor most other whites in Mississippi seemed to learn anything from their experience. One is tempted to call this irrational. But that would misunderstand the situation entirely. Mabry wasn't operating by the logic of a market. He was operating by the logic of a liturgy. And liturgies don't fail. They form.4
And this is the point I need you to see — because it’s the point that changes everything about how we understand persistence.
Mabry wasn’t a rational economic actor making a calculated decision to re-enter a risky market. He was a formed person. The profane sacraments had taught him what a person of worth does — you acquire human beings, you extract labor, you build a hierarchy with yourself on top — and that formation was deeper than the evidence of its failure.
The system reproduced itself not because it worked but because the formation compelled repetition.
The system reproduced itself not because it worked but because the formation compelled repetition.
Fischer calls this functional interdependence: the parts of a folkway reinforce each other so powerfully that even catastrophic failure cannot interrupt the pattern.5
Mabry’s ruin didn’t teach him anything because the profane sacraments had formed him below the level where teaching operates. His body knew what to do before his mind could question it. If that pattern sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same pattern I described in the trophy case versus the workshop — the same compulsive reproduction of a formation that doesn’t work but can’t stop because the formation is deeper than the evidence against it.
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Now institutional transmission. This is the mechanism that should trouble us most, because it’s the one that operates in plain sight without anyone noticing.
When the great Anglo-American merchant banking houses — the Rothschilds, the Barings, the Browns — developed their sophisticated financial instruments in the early nineteenth century, they developed them in and through the cotton trade. The skills, the networks, the risk-assessment models, the transatlantic credit relationships: all of it was built on the buying and selling of commodities produced by enslaved labor.6
When the cotton trade declined and eventually ended, these firms didn’t disappear. They pivoted — to railroads, to gold, to government bonds, to the financial instruments that would become modern investment banking.
The evolution of many of these Anglo-American firms from merchant banking into financial operations more characteristic of modern investment houses, Boodry demonstrates, is directly attributable to their earlier involvement in the enslaved-produced commodity trade.7
The firms changed their clients. They didn’t change their grammar.
This is institutional transmission at its most invisible. No one at a modern investment bank traces their risk models back to cotton futures backed by enslaved bodies. No one connects the credit instruments to the commodities they were invented to trade.
The institutions transmitted their operational logic forward — the practices, the relationships, the ways of calculating value — while shedding the content that made the logic legible as a profane sacrament. The grammar persisted. The vocabulary became respectable.
The institutions transmitted their operational logic forward while shedding the content that made the logic legible as a profane sacrament. The grammar persisted. The vocabulary became respectable.
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But the mechanism that haunts me most is the third one — the social embedding — because it demolishes the story I grew up telling myself about where the profane sacraments lived.
My family were the large plantation owners. Our family owned a cotton plantation near Bayou Boeuf in central Louisiana before the Civil War. I knew that. What I was raised to believe was that enslavement was their story — something that happened in the past, on that land, in a world that had ended. The plantation was history. The Baton Rouge I grew up in was something different.
That’s the story I needed. Because if the profane sacraments were confined to the plantation — performed by enslavers on their own land, sustained by their own cruelty — then the world I inherited wasn’t continuous with that world. It was after. It was different. It was clean.
Bonnie Martin’s research on local lending records demolished that story.
Eighty to ninety percent of enslaved-backed capital wasn’t Wall Street. It was neighbor-to-neighbor.8
The church elder mortgaging his neighbor’s enslaved family to finance a land purchase. The widow using the human beings she’d inherited as collateral for a loan from a friend. The small farmer who didn’t own enslaved people himself but whose mortgage was secured by someone else’s.9
The profane sacraments weren’t maintained by a distant planter class. They were woven into the social fabric at the most intimate level — the level where you couldn’t oppose the system without opposing your own community’s economic infrastructure, your neighbor’s solvency, your church’s financial stability.
This is Fischer’s elite control — but it’s actually something deeper than elite control. It’s social integration so complete that the profane sacraments became indistinguishable from ordinary community life.
They weren’t something a community practiced. They were the medium the community existed in.
And that distinction matters enormously, because it explains how good people — genuinely kind, religiously sincere, morally serious people — could inhabit a world built on profane sacraments without experiencing themselves as complicit.
The formation wasn’t in the cruelty. It was in the normalcy.
The formation wasn’t in the cruelty. It was in the normalcy.
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And here’s where I need to show you something about how vocabulary works — because it’s the mechanism that connects everything I’ve been describing to the faith I inherited.
In 1630, John Winthrop stood on the deck of the Arbella and told the Massachusetts Bay colonists that they would be “as a city upon a hill.” The eyes of all people were upon them. If they dealt falsely with their God in this work — if they failed the covenant — they would be made “a story and a by-word through the world.”10
That was a warning. Winthrop’s pride was contingent and fragile: fail the covenant, and the whole world watches you fall. The city upon a hill was not a boast about American greatness. It was a terrified prayer about American accountability.
The image carried weight precisely because it could be lost.
By the time John F. Kennedy quoted Winthrop in 1961, the warning had become an affirmation. By the time Ronald Reagan added the word “shining” — “a shining city upon a hill” — it had become a boast. By the time Barack Obama invoked it, the grammar had converted entirely.
Same words. Completely different meaning.11 Grammar conversion works two ways: sometimes the vocabulary stays familiar while the meaning inverts — that's Winthrop. Sometimes the vocabulary changes entirely while the underlying logic persists — that's Hayek. Both are grammar conversion. Both require different eyes to see.
The conversion was invisible because the vocabulary stayed familiar. This is what I’ve been calling grammar conversion — and it’s the mechanism that makes all the others so dangerous.
Institutional transmission works because no one recognizes the operational logic underneath the new vocabulary. Functional interdependence works because the compulsion to repeat feels like rational choice. Social embedding works because the profane sacraments feel like normal community life.
And grammar conversion is what makes all three mechanisms theologically lethal — not because it corrupts Christian vocabulary from outside, but because it operates from inside, wearing the vocabulary's clothes, sitting in its chair, answering to its name. The grammar changes. The vocabulary stays pious. Nobody notices. This is, one might observe, a reasonably efficient arrangement.
Winthrop’s pride was the pride I described in Essay 7 — contingent, fragile, dependent on faithful response to a gift that could be squandered. The contemporary “City upon a Hill” offers something entirely different: pride that requires nothing of you except ancestry and belonging.12
The first is the pride of a covenant. The second is the pride of an identity. And the distance between them is the distance between a faith that forms you through demanding practices of mutual accountability and a faith that confirms what you already are.
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I stayed with Winthrop’s grammar conversion for a long time because I thought it was a peculiarly religious phenomenon — something that happened to theological language when it was untethered from the practices that had kept it honest.
I need to tell you where I’m standing as I trace this genealogy — because this isn’t someone else’s intellectual history. The pipeline Slobodian describes runs through Annapolis, through my senior economics thesis on Capitalism and Freedom, through a decade of reading Hayek before I read the Gospels carefully enough to hear them.
John Galt was my supreme exemplar before the Spirit claimed me. I already told that story in Essay 9. I’m telling it again here, briefly, because what follows is a genealogy I once inhabited without knowing it had a name.
It took Quinn Slobodian to show me the same grammar conversion running in secular register, with no theological vocabulary required at all.
My first hero as an adult was Milton Friedman. I did my economics thesis my firstie year at Annapolis on Capitalism and Freedom. I already told the story of my immersion in neoliberalism in Essay 9 — “Pharaoh in Greek Dress: I Learned the Creeds and Practiced John Galt.” John Galt was my supreme exemplar before the Spirit claimed me and I became a Jesus follower. I read Hayek before I read the Bible.
Until the last decade I would have said freedom is non-intervention — the absence of constraint, the liberty to pursue return without interference. Now I know freedom is the capacity to love God and all creatures, in Hauerwas and Campbell’s language, or freedom as non-domination in Pettit’s.
That conversion — from negative liberty to participatory freedom — is the grammar conversion happening in reverse. But I need you to understand that when Slobodian traces the Hayek-to-Murray pipeline, he’s tracing the intellectual genealogy of the water I swam in. This isn’t someone else’s intellectual history. It’s mine.
The mechanism is precise. Friedrich Hayek built an evolutionary framework — a story about how human societies had progressed from tribal instinct to extended market order through cultural evolution. It was an elegant account. It was also, as Slobodian documents, deliberately unstable.13
Hayek’s distinction between cultural evolution and genetic evolution was blurry enough that a reader could drive through the gap in either direction. A careful reader could interpret Hayek as saying that market norms were cultural achievements, fragile and requiring protection.
A less careful reader — or a more strategic one — could interpret him as saying that market behavior was genetic, hardwired, and therefore that the people who didn’t exhibit it were biologically deficient.
Hayek also functionalized religion. He called religious beliefs “symbolic truths” serving the “multiplication of mankind.”14
Not false, in Hayek’s account — useful. Religion as a technology for social cohesion rather than a participation in divine life. The grammar was familiar: the vocabulary of faith preserved, the content evacuated, the function reassigned.
One appreciates the honesty, at least. Hayek was doing in philosophical prose what most American Christianity has been doing in practice for two centuries: keeping the vocabulary, reassigning the function, and trusting that nobody would check under the hood. I know because I didn't check mine for decades.
Once religion was reduced to social utility, biology could replace it as the warrant for hierarchy without anyone noticing the substitution. God’s will became nature’s law. The grammar didn’t change. The authority did.
And then the radicals drove through the opening.
Gerard Radnitzky took Hayek’s cultural evolution and biologized it — claiming property rights as genetic rather than cultural. Ludwig von Mises had opened what Slobodian calls a “parenthetical space” for race theory — a passing concession that group differences might be more than cultural.
Murray Rothbard performed what I’d call an ontological escalation: he took Mises’s cultural observation about groups and hardened it into a biological claim about racial nature.15
Charles Murray operationalized the escalation in The Bell Curve, sorting populations into cognitive castes — what Slobodian names “neurocastes” — where human worth becomes, in his phrase, “objective and calculable.”16
Richard Lynn supplied the international data that made the sorting global.
I’m giving you the names because the names matter. This wasn’t a cultural shift. It was a research program.
Each step was a grammar conversion: the vocabulary of science — objectivity, data, measurement, falsifiability — carrying the grammar of hierarchy underneath.
Here’s why this matters for the essay’s argument. The grammar conversion doesn’t need the church. It doesn’t need Winthrop or “City upon a Hill” or covenant theology. It can operate entirely through secular-scientific language — IQ scores, genetic markers, evolutionary psychology, human capital theory — while performing exactly the same sorting that the profane sacraments performed through whips and ledgers and redlined maps.
The supersessionist standard I described in the Age of Commerce — a supposedly universal criterion of belonging that certain populations always fail — doesn’t require a theological warrant. It just needs a test. And the test doesn’t need to be administered by a church. It can be administered by an admissions committee, a hiring algorithm, or an IQ researcher with a grant from the right foundation.
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Wendy Brown showed me the deepest level of this persistence.
Neoliberal rationality doesn’t just convert institutions — it converts selves.17
When every person becomes, in their own self-understanding, a portfolio of human capital requiring perpetual self-investment, the formation no longer needs external instruments. The ledger that Clinch maintained on his enslaved workforce has been internalized.
We keep our own ledgers now — tracking our productivity, our credentials, our market value, our return on investment in ourselves.
If you’ve been following the counter-manna framework from Contrapunctus III, you’ll recognize what’s happened. Counter-manna in the Age of Chaos was capital’s liquidity preference dissolving community bonds from without — the external corrosion of daily-bread economics by a system that rewards perpetual optionality over committed presence. The internalized ledger is counter-manna operating from within. The individual subject is now organized by the same logic that previously required institutional enforcement.
The move from external to internal counter-manna is the profane sacrament’s final achievement: the formation no longer needs instruments because the subject has become self-administering.
The profane sacrament has become an interior practice. And like all the most effective formations, it feels like freedom.
This is how formation persists even when every visible instrument has been dismantled. The water fountain signs came down. The grammar found new warrants — scientific rather than theological, meritocratic rather than racial, internalized rather than administered. And the sorting continued.
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One more thing — because I need you to see how persistence works not just backward but forward, adapting to each age’s instruments.
In the antebellum South, when a state legislature wanted to prevent Black education, they didn’t just pass a law. They burned the school bonds.18
Physical destruction of the financial instruments that would have funded Black schools. This is a transitional form — still physical violence, but targeting infrastructure rather than bodies directly. Violence against the future rather than against the present.
Lincoln noticed something about this that most people missed. He compared Ohio and Kentucky — states with identical soils, identical climates, identical agricultural potential — and observed that one had built schools and the other had burned the bonds that would have built them.19
The difference wasn’t geography. It wasn’t economics. It was political choice — which profane sacraments a community chose to practice, and which ones it chose to refuse.
Identical soils, opposite systems. The formation was in the choosing.
And the burning of bonds is the genealogical ancestor of every administrative profane sacrament that followed — the redlined map, the restrictive covenant, the exclusionary zoning, the algorithm that sorts applications by zip code. Each one is violence against infrastructure rather than bodies. Each one targets the future rather than the present. Each one operates through institutions rather than individuals.
And each one is invisible in exactly the way that Mabry’s compulsion was invisible, that the merchant banks’ pivots were invisible, that the neighbor-to-neighbor lending was invisible: the grammar persists while the vocabulary changes, and the change in vocabulary is what makes the grammar unrecognizable.
But there’s something new emerging in our own time — a disordered peoplehood story that makes the grammar explicit, gives it political-theological foundations, and has a direct ancestor in the same era that burned those bonds.
Movement IV: Heritage American
Every nation tells itself stories about who belongs.
I know this because I helped write one. In 2023, the House of Bishops’ Theology Committee — my committee — published a report examining how Americans construct what we called “peoplehood stories.”20
We distinguished between ordered and disordered versions. An ordered peoplehood story is covenantal: it binds a community through shared commitments, mutual accountability, and practices that form members into a common life. It can be critiqued from within because the covenant itself provides the standard of judgment.
A disordered peoplehood story is identitarian: it binds a community through blood, ancestry, and the identification of enemies. It cannot be critiqued from within because belonging is the criterion, and the criterion is fixed at birth.
I helped write that report. I’m proud of the theological work we did. But I’m only now tracing the full genealogy of how the disordered story gets performed into bodies — not by churches but by the common life structures that produce the people who show up at church already formed.
The profane sacraments I’ve been describing didn’t just extract labor and enforce hierarchy. They taught a peoplehood story. And the story they taught has a name.
Michelle Goldberg and Jessica Catoggio have traced what they call the “Heritage American” narrative — a peoplehood story organized not around covenant and accountability but around ancestry and exclusion.21
Heritage American doesn’t ask what you’ve committed to. It asks what you were born into. The question isn’t will you be faithful to the covenant? The question is are you one of us? And “us” is defined not by practice but by blood.
I need you to see how old this is.
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In 1820, Mathew Carey — Philadelphia’s most sophisticated political economist, a man who had done more than almost anyone to theorize the American republic’s economic future — confronted the Missouri crisis and made a choice.
He had spent years arguing that the nation needed protective tariffs, a national bank, internal improvements — the full apparatus of what Henry Clay would call the American System. He genuinely believed this program would create a republic of broad-based prosperity for men of moderate fortune.
And he understood, with a clarity that Thomas Jefferson never achieved, that his entire program depended on slavery.22
The crisis forced his hand. Missouri wanted to enter the union as a slave state. Northern allies were demanding that Carey choose between his economic program and the expansion of slavery.
And Carey chose. He published his answer plainly: the freedom and comfort of the African race were objects worth a strenuous effort to obtain, but if they were to be bought at the expense of the peace and happiness of the country, the price was too great.23
Read that sentence again. It’s performing a grammar conversion in real time.
Every word in it sounds reasonable. “Freedom and comfort” — he’s acknowledging their humanity. “Strenuous effort” — he’s signaling moral seriousness. “Peace and happiness of the country” — he’s invoking the common good.
The vocabulary is entirely republican. And the grammar underneath is entirely racial: when the republic’s prosperity conflicts with Black freedom, Black freedom loses. Every time.
Not because Carey was a monster — Andrew Shankman’s devastating assessment is that Carey was “at his best when also at his worst,” a vital, thoughtful, tragic, and culpable embodiment of a nation that continued to fuse its best and worst versions of itself.24
Carey is Heritage American’s intellectual ancestor. He established the grammar: use the vocabulary of freedom to perform the practice of exclusion. And make the exclusion sound like wisdom.
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But that’s political economy. The grammar goes deeper when it enters the church.
Craig Steven Wilder traced what happened when a persecuted Christian community — American Catholics, barred from voting, serving on juries, holding office, bearing arms — discovered that slavery offered a path to survival and respectability.25
The Jesuits became among the first slaveholders in Maryland. Their plantations funded Georgetown College, which was tuition-free for its first forty years — an educational gift built entirely on the labor and sale of enslaved human beings.26
The Corporation of Roman Catholic Clergy administered both church affairs and enslaved property in the same meetings, transferring children between plantations and seminaries as institutional needs dictated: “the young negro girl, called Peg, and the small boy, called Jack, both now in the Service of the Seminary.”27
“They embraced human bondage to secure their own liberty.”28
That’s not a political calculation. That’s a grammar conversion at the deepest possible level — a Christian community securing its freedom through the enslavement of others while using the vocabulary of liberty, dignity, education, and mission.
The words stayed Christian. The grammar served extraction. And this is the structure I’ve been diagnosing throughout this essay: a theological vocabulary performing a non-theological function, invisible precisely because the vocabulary sounds right.
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And it wasn’t only the church that had a hidden theology. The profane sacraments had their own all along — it’s just that nobody called it theology.
In 1812, John Quincy Adams sat in St. Petersburg listening to Count St. Julien describe the merchant class with undisguised contempt.
They had no country but their counting-houses, St. Julien said. No God but gain.29
Adams recognized the truth of the accusation but couldn’t argue back, because he was — in his own rueful phrase — “the champion of the merchants.”30
He had sailed to Russia aboard a merchant vessel loaded with Cuban sugar and coffee produced by enslaved labor. His legation secretaries were sons of the merchant families whose fortunes depended on that trade.
The private commercial seal of an enslaver named Vincent Gray had become the de facto public seal of the United States foreign service in Havana.31
The state and the market had become indistinguishable.
But I want you to hear St. Julien’s language theologically. “No God but gain.” That’s not metaphor. It’s diagnosis.
The counting-house was a temple. Gain was the deity. This is idolatry in its classical theological sense, not its colloquial one — the attribution of ultimacy to a finite good, complete with sacrifice, priesthood, and an eschatology of endless accumulation.
The profane sacraments had a complete theology — a story about ultimate worth, about who deserves what, about whose comfort matters and whose doesn’t — operating underneath the Christian vocabulary that everybody used on Sundays.
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This is where the political theologian Carl Schmitt becomes indispensable — and troubling.
Schmitt argued that the fundamental category of the political is the friend-enemy distinction.32
Not the moral distinction between good and evil. Not the economic distinction between profitable and unprofitable. The political distinction: who is the existential enemy whose very existence threatens yours?
Schmitt understood that this distinction doesn’t emerge from rational deliberation. It emerges from a prior decision about who we are — and that decision, for Schmitt, is always theological in structure even when it operates in secular vocabulary.
Sovereignty belongs to whoever decides the exception. And the exception is always: who gets excluded from the “we”?
Heritage American is Schmittian to its core. It answers Schmitt’s question before it’s asked: “we” are the people whose ancestry makes them real Americans, and the enemy is whoever threatens that ancestral identity.
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And this grammar had a political debut.
In 1920, Warren Harding ran on the first “America First” platform, and the realm his administration built was exactly what Schmitt would theorize a decade later: sovereignty as the power to decide who belongs.33
The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 codified Heritage American’s logic into federal law — a national origins quota system designed to ensure that the people who arrived in the future would look like the people who had arrived in the past.34
Schmitt published The Concept of the Political in 1927. He wasn’t inventing a theory. He was describing what America had already legislated.
The second “America First” movement came in 1940 — the isolationist campaign that Charles Lindbergh addressed in Des Moines, naming who the enemies were.35
That realm collapsed after Pearl Harbor. But the grammar survived.
Now I need you to notice something about the third realm of America First.
When Stephen Miller articulates his “iron laws” of immigration restriction, when the movement consciously reaches back to borrow not just the slogans but the name of a program whose first iteration produced the Johnson-Reed Act, the naming is not nostalgia.36
It is a genealogical claim. It announces which realm is being rebuilt. And the friend-enemy grammar hasn’t changed: the vocabulary shifts — from “better race” to “national origins” to “merit-based immigration” — but the operating logic is always Schmitt’s.
We are defined by ancestry, and sovereignty means controlling who threatens the boundary.
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But here’s what I didn’t see until recently. I’d been treating Heritage American as a political phenomenon — a peoplehood story that emerged from cultural anxieties and found its voice in successive America First movements.
What I hadn’t reckoned with was that Heritage American was manufactured. Not metaphorically. Institutionally.
Quinn Slobodian traced the production line. In 1971, the Institute for Humane Studies was founded to cultivate a generation of intellectuals committed to radical market liberty. Through the 1970s, meetings at Gstaad within the Mont Pelerin Society pushed the boundaries of what market radicalism could encompass.
In 1982, the Ludwig von Mises Institute was established in Auburn, Alabama — and here the fusion began in earnest, because the Mises Institute deliberately cultivated connections between market radicalism and southern traditionalism.
In 1989, Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell convened the John Randolph Club — named, with full awareness, after a slaveholder — bringing together libertarian economists, paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan, and figures like Samuel Francis, who coined the term “Middle American Radicals.”37
I need you to hear what Rockwell’s manifesto actually said. It called for the defense of “Judeo-Christian traditions and Western culture” fused with uncompromising laissez-faire economics and hostility to democratic governance.38
This is the grammar I've been diagnosing throughout this essay — Christian vocabulary deployed within a fundamentally competitive grammar — except that here it wasn't hidden. It was a program. Which is, when you think about it, a kind of progress: after two centuries of performing the fusion unconsciously, someone finally wrote it down.
The vocabulary was familiar. The grammar was hostile. And the fusion was deliberate.
The genealogy runs from there through the Ron Paul newsletters of the 1990s — which Slobodian documents as vectors of radicalization, channeling financial anxiety into racial resentment — through Buchanan’s presidential campaigns, through the Tea Party, to the present.39
Each link in the chain was forged by specific people in specific institutions with specific funding. MAGA Christianism didn’t emerge from a zeitgeist. Its intellectual materials were manufactured in buildings with addresses.
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And this is where the theological diagnosis sharpens.
The conventional story — the one I told myself for years — is that Heritage American represents a backlash against neoliberal globalization. Working people left behind by capital’s mobility, turning to nationalism and racial identity as a consolation prize.
That story is comforting because it positions Heritage American as a reaction — something external to the system, something that happened to neoliberalism rather than from it.
Brown and Slobodian demolished that story for me. Slobodian’s term is precise: not backlash but “frontlash.”40
The far right is neoliberalism’s offspring, not its opponent. The reported clash of opposites is a family feud.
Brown provides the mechanism: neoliberalism didn’t just produce economic dislocation. It converted every domain of human life — education, health, civic participation, family — into market logic, and in doing so it destroyed the social as a sphere of shared meaning.41
When every relationship is a transaction and every person a portfolio of human capital, the only non-market source of identity left is the one the market can’t touch: blood. Ancestry. Heritage.
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Slobodian showed me something even more unsettling.
The connection between market radicalism and ethnic nationalism isn’t accidental — it’s logical. Neoliberal economists themselves recognized that markets require what some of them called a “metamarket” — ethnic, cultural, and linguistic homogeneity as a precondition for market function.42
Milton Friedman conceded that capitalism might not be exportable because it requires cultural foundations that not all societies possess. The nation-state reimagined as a corporation reducing transaction costs.
Heritage American is not a distortion of market logic. It is market logic’s own conclusion: if the market requires cultural homogeneity to function, then defending the market means defending the culture — which means identifying and excluding whoever doesn’t belong.
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Before I go further: a word about what I mean by the supersessionist standard, for readers arriving at this contrapunctus without the earlier essays.
The supersessionist standard is the mechanism I traced in Essay 9: a supposedly universal criterion of belonging — purity of blood, orthodoxy of doctrine, civilizational fitness — that certain populations are structurally guaranteed to fail. It works in three moves: establish the criterion, present it as universal, ensure the targeted group cannot meet it. In medieval Spain it was limpieza de sangre — purity of blood — applied against Jews and Moors who had converted to Christianity but could not change their ancestry. The same grammar ran through colonial papal bulls, American loyalty questionnaires, and Jim Crow literacy tests.
What changes across the centuries is the vocabulary. What doesn’t change is the grammar: covenantal particularity severed from Christ, a vacuum created, and a sorting criterion rushed in to fill it.
What troubles me now is recognizing that criterion operating without any theological vocabulary at all.
I’d been treating the friend-enemy distinction as a rival theology — an alternative account imported into Christianity from Schmitt. But the tension I kept running into was this: if it’s a rival theology, how can it also be a product of economic formation? Barth would say those claims can’t both be true — one makes the friend-enemy distinction ontological, the other makes it epiphenomenal.
Essay 9 resolved this for me. The supersessionist standard — the mechanism I traced from limpieza de sangre through the loyalty questionnaire — is the deeper grammar. It’s theological and philosophical before it is economic: covenantal severance creates the vacuum, the supersessionist standard fills it, and spirit/matter dualism provides the justification.
That genealogy precedes and outlasts every economic formation it inhabits. Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction is the supersessionist standard in political-theological dress — the same dualistic temptation I diagnosed in Essay 9’s analysis of the Gnostic and Manichaean elements that infiltrated Christian grammar.
The purity test (are you friend or enemy?) sounds like a political category. Underneath it’s the same move: sever Christ from his particular covenant, create a vacuum, fill it with whoever controls the “universal” standard. Pneumatics, psychics, hylics — Heritage Americans, allies, enemies — friend, enemy. Same grammar. Same dissolved Christ poured into a new container.
What capital does is generate the conditions under which this grammar becomes compelling. The frontlash thesis doesn’t reduce Schmitt to an economic by-product. It explains why an ancient theological mutation finds such fertile soil in the Age of Chaos — because capital’s liquidity preference has destroyed every other source of meaning, leaving only the friend-enemy distinction as a viable organizing principle for communities that have been stripped of everything except ancestry.
You don’t need to read Schmitt to operate by his grammar. You just need to have been formed by a system that sorts human beings by economic utility and then watch that system dissolve the basis of your own worth. The theology precedes the economics. The economics makes the theology irresistible.
And this is what the church faces when Heritage American arrives in the pew: not an argument to be refuted but a formation already written into bodies.
The person who has been sorted by meritocracy's purity test, who has watched capital dissolve every other source of meaning, who has found in ancestry the one worth the market cannot touch — that person doesn't need a better theology explained to them. They need communities capable of offering what Heritage American offers, without requiring enemies to sustain it. Which is precisely what the church, formed by its own grammar conversions, has largely failed to provide.
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I can name the genealogy. I can trace the institutions. But I almost missed what Heritage American feels like from inside — what makes it compelling to the people who embrace it, not as ideology but as survival.
The education divide that the Age of Chaos produced isn’t merely economic. It’s a caste line — and the caste system has its own form of humiliation.43
The meritocratic order doesn’t just reward those with degrees. It implicitly — and sometimes explicitly — despises those without them. The language of “low-skill workers,” the policy assumption that education is the answer to every structural problem, the cultural contempt that radiates from every institution that sorts people by credentials — all of it communicates a single message to those on the wrong side of the divide: you failed the test. And the test was fair. So the failure is yours.
That’s the supersessionist standard in its contemporary form. A “universal” criterion — merit, education, cognitive ability — that certain populations always fail, and whose failure justifies their exclusion from prosperity, dignity, and political voice.
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Arlie Hochschild spent five years listening to what this humiliation produces.
She found people in Louisiana whose entire lives had been organized around what she calls an “endurance self” — the conviction that suffering without complaint is the measure of moral worth.44
They had worked hard. They had endured environmental devastation — cancer alleys, polluted waterways, toxic exposures their own state governments refused to regulate. They had asked for nothing.
And then they watched as other groups — groups they’d been formed to see as less deserving — received recognition, accommodation, public sympathy. The honor squeeze: the endurance that had been their source of pride was suddenly invisible. No one was honoring it. No one was even seeing it.45
And then someone saw it.
Hochschild describes what happened at Trump rallies as a form of collective effervescence — Durkheim’s term for the emotional electricity that binds a crowd into a community.46
For people who had been formed by the double erosion — eroded from within by the capital process that dissolved their communities, eroded from without by progressive movements that named their grammar — the rally was the first space in years where their grief was acknowledged, their anger validated, their identity confirmed.
It was church. Profane, unholy church — a liturgy organized around the friend-enemy distinction rather than the Eucharist — but church nonetheless. The rally performed community for people whose communities had been liquidated.
I need to sit with that. Because it means Heritage American’s appeal is not primarily ideological. It’s formational. It offers what the profane sacraments of the Age of Chaos destroyed: a sense of belonging, a community that sees you, a story that tells you your suffering was real and your worth is secure.
That the story locates worth in ancestry rather than covenant, and that the community requires enemies to sustain itself — these are the theological mutations I’ve been tracing. But dismissing the appeal as mere racism or ignorance is its own form of Gnosticism — the intellectual’s version of smelling the ink and not the perspiration.
The people at the rally are in pain. The formation is real. And the church that might have offered an alternative arrived without the practices that could have held them.
Heritage American offers what no achievement can: worth that requires no effort and cannot be lost. You don’t have to practice anything. You don’t have to submit to any discipline. You don’t have to be faithful to any covenant. You just have to have been born.
Heritage American offers what no achievement can: worth that requires no effort and cannot be lost. You don’t have to practice anything. You don’t have to submit to any discipline. You don’t have to be faithful to any covenant. You just have to have been born.
And this is its deepest appeal and its deepest lie — because worth that requires no effort is pride without substance. And pride without substance requires enemies to sustain itself.
If your worth comes from what you are rather than what you’ve committed to, then the only threat to your worth is the existence of people who blur the boundary between us and them. The enemy isn’t someone who has wronged you. The enemy is someone whose existence complicates your story about who belongs.
I’ve been describing this at a distance — the political economist, the Jesuits, the merchants, the immigration legislation, the political theologian. But I recognized everything I’ve described.
Movement V: Water Fountain Walls
Not because I studied it. Because I lived it.
My mother was a planter’s daughter. Our family owned a cotton plantation near Bayou Boeuf in central Louisiana before the Civil War. My grandparents reared nine children on the same land, farming it with the help of Black employees who didn’t join the Great Migration.
Mom grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, when the water fountain signs were still up. White women to the right. Colored women to the left.
She didn’t talk about them much. She didn’t have to. The signs weren’t the formation. The signs were just the visible edge of a world that had already sorted itself before anyone read a word.
Mom’s world operated on what I’d call a graduated hierarchy — a social sorting system so complete it didn’t need explicit instruction. Everyone knew their place, and the knowledge was in the body before it was in the mind.
You knew which neighborhoods you drove through and which ones you stopped in. You knew which families you visited and which you waved to from the car. You knew that Marie, the Black woman who came across the tracks each morning to care for me while Mom finished her degree at LSU, was family in every way that mattered emotionally and not family in every way the social architecture enforced.47
The hierarchy wasn’t cruel in any way Mom would have recognized. That’s what made it so effective.
She didn’t teach me to be racist. She would have been horrified by the word. What she transmitted was a formation about who belongs where — a set of somatic reflexes that sorted the world into “our people” and “not our people” long before I had a theology to explain why.
I didn’t have Hochschild’s language then, but I recognize it now. What my mother taught me — the graduated hierarchy, the careful calibration of kindness and distance, the warmth that never quite became equality — was her own version of the endurance self.48
She wasn’t cruel. She was formed. She had learned to bear the formation without naming it, to navigate its requirements without confronting its grammar.
And she taught me to do the same — to be kind within the hierarchy, never to be ugly about it, but never to question whether the hierarchy itself was the ugliness.
The endurance wasn’t passive. It took enormous effort. It was a practice — a daily discipline of managing proximity and distance, of knowing exactly how close was close enough and how close was too close.
It was, I’m realizing, its own profane sacrament: an outward and visible practice performing an inward reality of hierarchy, transmitted from mother to son with the same precision the church transmits its liturgy.
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Marie grew up in a different town, but the water fountain liturgy was the same. That profane sacrament shaped her identity too: those who counted as White rule; the best way to thrive is to keep quiet, serve well, and cooperate with White power.
Mom and Marie were pregnant at the same time. Marie came to work for Mom when I was a toddler. They cared for each other from their parenting phase to their golden years.
Yet neither could look the other in the eye as equal neighbors do.
Under duress, Jim Crow took down the water fountain signs before Gary and I learned to read. Signs were no longer necessary. The walls they constructed were hidden in plain sight, like landscape features covered by fig leaves that did not impede their function.
Phil Moser had a concrete driveway with the only basketball goal in the neighborhood. Marie would often bring Gary to work during summer vacation. Sweet memories remain of Gary and me shooting hoops at the Moser’s. We’d play H-O-R-S-E and 21 and one-on-one. Games were long because our best shots could barely reach the ten-foot goal.
It was fun. Like we were friends.
But friendship evaded us.
At that age, we were evenly matched. But we were not equals. Gary was neither shy nor timid. He could do or say whatever he wanted with me. But he wasn’t free. Water fountain lessons ruled him.
He was incapable of looking me in the eye without deference.
I didn’t recognize it then, but water fountain lessons ruled me too. The basketball court was a space where the walls thinned — where for thirty or forty minutes the sorting logic partially suspended itself. But when the game ended, Gary went home with Marie. I stayed.
The court was a breach, not a cure. It showed what life without the graduated hierarchy might feel like. It couldn’t sustain it, because the formation was deeper than the game.
The profane sacraments I’d spent four movements describing — the auction block, the whipping machine, the coffle, the ledger — those were the genealogy of what ruled us at the Moser’s driveway.
Adeline Hodges couldn’t watch grocery clerks weigh food because the weighing ritual had inscribed itself on her nervous system across a lifetime. Gary couldn’t look me in the eye because the deference ritual had inscribed itself on his across generations.
Different sacraments, different centuries, same formational mechanism: repeated practices writing grammar into bodies at a depth no belief can reach.49
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Water fountain walls were visible only in the breach. And when breaches occurred, communal discipline reinforced the walls.
As a Boy Scout, I never missed an opportunity to usher at LSU football games. At one game, I escorted a young mixed-race couple to their seats. As the game progressed, so did the drunken anger of those seated behind them.
Who did the couple think they were? They had no right to be in public together where children could see them. Slurs. Threats. A cup of beer thrown at the man.
Eventually, off-duty police officers stepped in to restore peace. They ordered the couple to leave immediately.
Not the drunks. The couple.
The breach had to be sealed. The walls had to be reinforced. The profane sacrament — the sorting of human value into visible hierarchy — had to be performed again, and the crowd was its celebrant.
I watched it happen. I was a boy in a Scout uniform, and I learned something that night that no one had to explain.50
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I had a crush on a girl named Anna for most of my adolescence. She was Chinese American. We were close — the kind of closeness that accumulates over years, the mutual recognition that something more was possible.
But neither of our families would have crossed the line. The walls ruled both households, from different directions, toward the same conclusion: we can be friends, but we are different people.
I remember Anna because I remember how clumsy and foolish I felt. I knew the wall was a false story — knew it the way you know something in your mind before your body catches up. But I lacked the courage and the wisdom to transcend it, and so I stood before her unable to respond to what was plainly there between us.
The dance was a different kind of unfreedom — there, I hadn’t recognized the wall at all. With Anna, I recognized it and still couldn’t cross it. That distinction matters. The first is formation operating below consciousness. The second is formation operating against consciousness — the body refusing what the mind has already understood.
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Then came Washington.
We were high school juniors representing our states at the week-long Presidential Classroom for Young Americans. An intense immersion experience. Friendships germinated and blossomed rapidly.
One of those friendships was with a beautiful and brilliant girl whose father was a Black preacher from Atlanta. We’d become good friends over the course of the week. The dance celebrated our completion of the program.
She asked me to dance.
Something happened in my body before my mind could name it. I told myself afterward that I was unaccustomed to girls asking boys to dance. That wasn’t how I was brought up.
But that wasn’t true.
Her outstretched hands invited me to breach water fountain walls I didn’t even recognize as walls. Hundreds of miles from home, they ruled. I wasn’t free.
Her outstretched hands invited me to breach water fountain walls I didn’t even recognize as walls. Hundreds of miles from home, they ruled. I wasn’t free.
But she was. She looked me in the eye without fear or deference. Just friendship.
I wanted to be free. Like her.
We danced.
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The Confident Immunity
I’d like to tell you I broke the chain.
That the hesitation at the dance was the last time the walls ruled me. That somewhere between a hotel ballroom in our nation’s capital and worship at the Duke Chapel, I became the kind of person who had shed the formation entirely.
That’s the story I told myself for years. It’s the story the trophy case was designed to prove.
Annapolis. Nuclear submarine officer. A successful high tech company in Baton Rouge. Episcopal ordination. Durham PhD.
Every station a line item in the case for my immunity. Surely a man with that résumé, with that theological formation, couldn’t still carry the grammar of the water fountain. Surely I’d thought my way out. Studied my way out. Prayed my way out.
Who? Moi?
⁂
The woman I love has a brother named Salin.
When she and I first started dating, he did what good brothers do — he protected his sister. Went through my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Read carefully.
Paid attention not to what I said about myself but to what I amplified, what I retweeted, whose voices I elevated. What he found would have been mostly retweets of David Brooks and George Will and Bret Stephens — commentators I regarded as generous, charitable, the reasonable center.
But he also would have observed a clear GOP affinity in a time when passions were aflame with the George Floyd murder and other tragedies.51
Then he went to his sister with a question. Not an accusation — a question. A careful, intuitive, protective question not just from a brother but from a Deputy Assistant Secretary at HUD whose vocation caused him to study the very formations I’m now tracing in this essay.
Salin could read a social media feed the way a diagnostician reads an X-ray. He saw patterns I couldn’t see in myself because I was inside them.
His question: He seems like a decent guy, but are you sure he’s not a racist? Because based on his Facebook and Twitter feeds, I can’t tell for sure, but it seems that he might be. You need to be careful.
I want you to hear what Salin did — because it matters for everything that follows. He didn’t call me a racist. He didn’t condemn me. He asked a diagnostic question — the same kind of question this entire essay has been building toward.
He looked at the practices (what I amplified, whose voices I elevated, which perspectives I normalized) and asked what formation those practices revealed. He was doing, instinctively, what the profane sacrament framework does analytically: reading formation through practices rather than beliefs.
He was right to ask. That’s the part I couldn’t see for years.
⁂
My response was textbook. Textbook Miss Piggy. Textbook trophy case.
I was devastated. Then defensive. Then offended. Who the hell was this guy who had never met me? I’m a priest and a theologian, one who had thought hard and preached and taught for years about matters of race and reconciliation. I knew in my heart there was nothing racist about me.
I had a trophy case to prove it.
And it was exactly the response the formation predicts. The formation doesn't produce people who say "I am a racist." It produces people with trophy cases. That's the point. That's always been the point.
The trophy case isn't a failure of the formation — it's the formation's finest achievement. Salin wasn't reading my feed and finding a monster. He was reading my feed and finding a perfectly produced specimen of the system I'm now five contrapuncti into describing.
Watch it carefully, because you will recognize it in yourself.
The sequence goes like this: first the visceral recoil — how dare you — which is the shame signal before it becomes conscious. Then the rapid marshaling of evidence for your immunity — the credentials, the relationships, the theological commitments. Then the pivot to offense: the problem isn’t me, the problem is the person who asked.
The question is unfair. The questioner doesn’t know me. The standard is impossible.
I performed, in miniature, what I’ve been tracing across four centuries. The supersessionist standard in reverse: instead of constructing a purity test that others always fail, I constructed an immunity test that I always pass.
Same grammar. Different direction.
⁂
But it wasn’t the kind of challenge I could dismiss. I was head over heels in love with his sister. And that changed everything — not because love made me a better person, but because love made the trophy case insufficient.
I trusted my beloved to see me. With her alone I let my defense mechanisms down. I wanted her to know and love me as me — not the résumé, not the credentials, not the theological sophistication. And in order for her to know and love me as me, I needed to know and love me. Which meant the trophy case had to open. Love didn’t just create stakes that credentials couldn’t override. Love made the question necessary — because the trophy case was blocking the very intimacy I wanted most.
I’ll never forget that painful weekend — trying to persuade her that her concerns were unfounded, feeling like I’d been put on trial. And then, blessedly, the pivot: there must be something here I can’t see in myself.
Salin’s question spawned a journey of self-discovery that made self-knowledge possible — and self-knowledge made love possible. Not the love of performance, where you present your best self and hope it’s enough. The love of presence, where you let yourself be seen in the places you’ve spent a lifetime concealing. The co-regulatory container — the relationship secure enough to hold shame without the shame becoming identity — was what made it bearable to look.
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I deleted my entire Facebook and Twitter accounts. Everything that wasn’t a celebration of family. Gone. I wanted there to be nothing out there — or in me — that could lead anyone to see what Salin saw.
That was years ago. The journey Salin’s question launched has led through territory I couldn’t have mapped in advance — through listening I didn’t know I needed to do, through histories I’d never been taught, through the whole genealogy of profane sacraments that fills this essay.
Salin didn’t hand me these questions. He handed me something more valuable: the recognition that my confident immunity was itself a formation. That the trophy case was the most sophisticated expression of the very grammar it was designed to disprove.
And here’s where the inner bracket has to close — because the formation that produced my confident immunity and the formation that produced the standing ovation at the Prayer Breakfast are not as different as I want them to be.
I am not the opposite of the people who stood. I am a different product of the same assembly line.
I am not the opposite of the people who stood. I am a different product of the same assembly line.
Tony Perkins and I weren’t from the same place. But we were both formed by the same Baton Rouge — its profane sacraments working on both of us in the same era, producing a megachurch ally of power in one body and an arrogant theologian in another.
Different outputs. Same formation. And the arrogance that says I would never stand is just another room in the trophy case.
I should tell you that I know what you’re thinking — because I’ve been thinking it too. If the confident immunity was a room in the trophy case, and the theological credentials were a room, and the progressive politics were a room — then isn’t writing this essay another room? Isn’t a twenty-essay series diagnosing Dominative Christianism the most sophisticated expression of the very formation it diagnoses?
I can’t answer that. John Bradshaw’s work on internal family systems and my own acquaintance with polyvagal theory have taught me to recognize that Data — my controlling child, the part of me that manages anxiety through analysis — absolutely would write a treatise on love and feeling to avoid the act of feeling. I’ll leave it to the community to discern whether this effort is Data-led or Spirit-led. I can only tell you that I’ve asked the question. And that the asking doesn’t settle it.
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The formation wasn’t in the cruelty. It was in the normalcy. And the normalcy was in me.
My body knew things my mind had never been taught. Where to sit. Whom to approach. Which spaces were mine and which belonged to someone else. That knowledge didn’t come from theology class. It came from the profane sacraments — centuries of repeated practices that wrote their grammar into the common life I was born into, the common life I reproduced.
The question isn’t whether you were formed by this. The question is whether you can see it.
Salin asked me a question about my practices. Not my beliefs — my practices. He asked it with the precision of someone who had spent his career reading the profane sacraments that form neighborhoods, housing markets, and the people who live in them.
I wasn’t ready to answer. I’m still not sure I am.
But I’ve been learning to ask the question of myself. And in the final contrapunctus, I want to teach you how to ask it too — not as an intellectual exercise but as a bodily one. Not what do you think about race, or formation, or the church’s complicity. What does your body do?
The diagnostics aren’t comfortable. They weren’t meant to be. But they're the only way I know to find the gap — not between the formation and yourself, as if there were a pre-formed self waiting underneath to be liberated. Formation goes all the way down. The gap is between the formation you have received and the formation you are being invited to receive. The choosing is itself a formative act. The first practice of a different pattern.
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Next in this essay: Contrapunctus V: Diagnostics
All five contrapuncti:
How Christianity Forgot Its Grammar, Part 2 — Contrapunctus III: The Instruments of Order and Chaos
Contrapunctus IV: The Grammar and the Trophy Case
Contrapunctus V: Diagnostics
Notes
David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Fischer identifies three mechanisms of cultural persistence: institutional transmission, functional interdependence, and elite self-reproduction.
Joshua D. Rothman, “The Contours of Cotton Capitalism,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 136.
Rothman, “Contours of Cotton Capitalism,” 142–143.
Rothman, “Contours of Cotton Capitalism,” 142–143. “Neither Mabry nor most other whites in Mississippi seemed to learn anything from their experience.”
Fischer, Albion’s Seed. Fischer’s concept of functional interdependence explains why personal ruin could not interrupt participation in the slave system.
Kathryn Boodry, “August Belmont and the World the Slaves Made,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 174–178.
Boodry, “August Belmont,” 174–178. “The evolution of many of these Anglo-American firms from merchant banking into financial operations more characteristic of modern investment houses is attributable to involvement with this earlier trade in goods produced with slave labor.”
Bonnie Martin, “Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 108–116. 80–90% of slave-backed capital was generated through neighbor-to-neighbor transactions.
Martin, “Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism,” 108–116. Widows, church members, and small farmers using enslaved human beings as collateral for personal loans.
John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630). See also Abram Van Engen, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).
On the trajectory from Winthrop’s covenantal warning through Kennedy (1961), Reagan (1989), and Obama, see Van Engen, City on a Hill.
See Essay 7, “The Gift of Pride,” regarding contingent vs. non-contingent pride. See also the Ontological Foundations Appendix on participatory versus achieved identity.
Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Princeton: Zone Books, 2025). Slobodian documents Hayek’s deliberately blurry distinction between cultural evolution and genetic evolution.
Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Princeton: Zone Books, 2025). Hayek functionalized religion as “symbolic truths” serving the “multiplication of mankind” — not false, but useful. Religion as a technology for social cohesion rather than a participation in divine life.
Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards. Ludwig von Mises opened a “parenthetical space” for race theory. Murray Rothbard performed an ontological escalation. Charles Murray operationalized it in The Bell Curve (1994). Richard Lynn supplied the international data.
Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards. “Neurocastes” is Slobodian’s term for the far right’s fixation on cognitive sorting — “class war by psychometrics.”
Brown, Undoing the Demos, ch. 3, “Revising Foucault: Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus,” 79ff. When every person becomes a portfolio of human capital requiring perpetual self-investment, the formation no longer needs external instruments.
John Majewski, “Why Did Northerners Oppose the Expansion of Slavery?” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 289.
Majewski, “Why Did Northerners Oppose the Expansion of Slavery?”, 289–290.
House of Bishops Theology Committee, “Peoplehood Stories: Ordered and Disordered Nationalism in American Christianity,” in Allen K. Shin and Larry R. Benfield, eds., (New York: Church Publishing, 2024).
Michelle Goldberg and Jessica Catoggio have analyzed the “Heritage American” narrative as a contemporary expression of identitarian peoplehood.
Andrew Shankman, “Capitalism, Slavery, and the New Epoch,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 243–244.
Shankman, “Capitalism, Slavery, and the New Epoch,” 256.
Shankman, “Capitalism, Slavery, and the New Epoch,” 259–260.
Craig Steven Wilder, “War and Priests: Catholic Colleges and Slavery in the Age of Revolution,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 228–230.
Wilder, “War and Priests,” 237.
Wilder, “War and Priests,” 236.
Wilder, “War and Priests,” 239. “They embraced human bondage to secure their own liberty.”
Stephen Chambers, “‘No Country But Their Counting-Houses,’” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 195.
Chambers, “‘No Country But Their Counting-Houses,’” 207.
Chambers, “‘No Country But Their Counting-Houses,’” 203–204.
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007 [1927/1932]), 26.
Warren G. Harding’s 1920 presidential campaign ran on an explicit “America First” platform.
The Johnson-Reed Act (Immigration Act of 1924). See Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
The second “America First” movement (1940–1941). See Susan Dunn, 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
Stephen Miller’s articulation of immigration restriction as governed by “iron laws” represents the third iteration of “America First” as an explicit political program.
Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2023).
Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism. Lew Rockwell’s manifesto called for the defense of “Judeo-Christian traditions and Western culture” fused with uncompromising laissez-faire economics.
Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism. The genealogy runs through the Ron Paul newsletters, Buchanan’s presidential campaigns, the Tea Party, to the present.
Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism and Hayek’s Bastards. Slobodian’s term: not backlash but “frontlash.” The far right is neoliberalism’s offspring, not its opponent.
Brown, Undoing the Demos, chs. 1–3; and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, ch. 1. Neoliberalism converted every domain of human life into market logic, destroying the social as a sphere of shared meaning.
Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism. Neoliberal economists recognized that markets require a “metamarket” — ethnic, cultural, and linguistic homogeneity as a precondition for market function.
Case and Deaton, Deaths of Despair, chs. 10–12; see also Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “The Great Divide: Education, Despair, and Death,” Annual Review of Economics 14 (2022): 1–21. The education divide has become the new caste line.
Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, chs. 10–12. The “endurance self” is the conviction that suffering without complaint is the measure of moral worth.
Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, chs. 10–12. The “honor squeeze”: available sources of honor were being squeezed from every direction.
Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, ch. 15, 215ff. Hochschild describes Trump rallies as generating what Durkheim called “collective effervescence.”
Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020). Jones provides the analytical framework for understanding how white Christianity transmits racial formation through ordinary community life. The autobiographical material to which this framework is applied is the author’s.
Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, chs. 10–12. See note 44 above.
Baptist, “Toward a Political Economy of Slave Labor,” 59–60. Adeline Hodges, interviewed in 1930s Alabama in her eighties, could not watch grocery clerks weigh food — because seventy years earlier the nightly weighing ritual of the cotton field had inscribed itself on her nervous system. Baptist draws on the WPA Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives for Hodges’s testimony.
The LSU football game incident is drawn from my life story. Jones, White Too Long, 31–35, provides the analytical framework for understanding how such communal enforcement of racial hierarchy operates within white Christian communities.
The Salin anecdote is drawn from “Race on the Rocks,” Episode 1 (Common Life Politics podcast, 2020). Salin Geevarghese — Craig’s brother-in-law, former Deputy Assistant Secretary at HUD under President Obama.