Empire of FaithChapter 1Churn, Change and Religious RevivalismRonnie D. Lipschutz[I]n the seventeenth century…men were said to have a property not only in land and goods and in claims on revenue from leases, mortgages, patents, monopolies, and so on, but also a property in their lives and liberties (Macpherson, 1978: 7).Whiteness is not simply and soley a legally recognized property interest. It is simultaneously an aspect of self-identity and of personhood, and its relation to the law of property is complex (Harris, 1993: 1725).As status hierarchies weaken, it takes considerably greater effort to keep subordinate groups subordinate and inferior meanings inferior. Lower status groups feel able to assert themselves and demand greater respect. Higher status groups experience increasing fears that they will suffer a corresponding loss of prestige in the non-Paretian world of social status. People certain their superior social status may treat their social inferiors with indulgence and even paternal affection, but when the status barriers beging to break down, their rhetoric turns to fear, anger, and hate. They can no longer afford the luxury of condescension (Balkin, 1997: 2334)IntroductionThis is a book about three, related topics: capitalism, property, and social movements. There is a connection between capitalism, identities and social movements, one that is hardly captured by standard theories of resource mobilization or opportunity structures or “new social movements.” In this book, I claim that there is a deep structurallinkage between capitalism and the political behaviors of social forces organized in groups, one that arises from the alienating and commodifying tendencies of capital, on the one hand, and the struggles of individuals and groups to achieve and retain their autonomy-in-the-self, on the other. This is not a deterministic argument; rather, it is DRAFT 9/071-1about the constraints imposed on agents acting politically in marketized environments and how those agents confront, oppose and resist those constraints.The dynamism of capitalism, ongoing power struggles among domestic and transnational social forces, and the actions or inactions of the American state constantly threaten to undermine established and long-standing hierarchies of power, wealth, and status, along with their ideological justification and the “common sense” they instill in bodies politic. Individual and collective identities are deeply vested in both cultural and material aspects of daily and social life and, when some part of those identities appears threatened, a closing around other parts can develop. Indeed, as we shall see, such periodsof disruption are often associated with what are generally called “industrial revolutions,” and they tend to revolve around conflicts within elites, over changing belief systems.1 For reasons having to do with the historical development of the nation-state, these belief systems have, historically, been rooted in religion—even though social and political elitesare not themselves always particularly devout. Thus, the great culture wars of the American past and the American present have been fought in largely religious terms, even though the sources and symptoms of conflict have been attributable, at least in part, to material transformations across society.More fundamentally, in liberal-capitalist societies, what Sidney Tarrow and othershave called “contentious politics” revolves around property. At first glance, this claim might seem not only not intuitively obvious but also quite wrong. After all, we 1 George Van Pelt Campbell has made a similar argument, claiming that “globalization undermines moral consensus” through relativization, that is, the “calling into question such things as the definitions, boundaries, categories and conclusions through which they have understood the world and established theiridentity.” But he does not link this process to material or economic change. See George Van Pelt Campbell, “Everything you Know is Wrong: How Globalization Undermines Moral Consensus,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, San Francisco, 14 August,2004 at: http://hirr.hartsem.edu/sociology/sociology_online_articles_campbell.html (accessed 28 Oct. 2005).DRAFT 9/071-2understand property to be constituted of things to which individuals and groups hold some kind of title, written or customary. Social movements, by contrast, appear to be about identities, those mental constructs that individuals hold and which bind them, more or less strongly, into social groups and forces. Indeed, identity is commonly regarded as a fundamental constituent of the individual’s self-consciousness and reflexiveness, most sharply captured, perhaps, in Carl Schmitt’s distinction between friend and enemy. Yet, isthere not something of a possessive nature in the very notion of identity? Do we not “own” our identities and regard them as individually unique? And do we not react when something or someone threatens to strip or deprive us of specific privileges and rights that, in our understanding, accrue to our identities?In this book, I argue that human rights are forms of “property in the self.” Human rights are the means developed by and within liberal capitalism to protect the individual’s body and property from expropriation by the state and depredation by the market. While the notion of rights as forms of protection might seem overly-functionalist, the origins of human rights are very much imbricated with the social and material transformations accompanying the transition from feudalism to capitalism in 16thand 17th century England.2 During the 21st century, the world is passing through a similar transition, from a mode of capitalism substantially rooted in a national, Fordist, mass production/consumption economy to one that is global, post-Fordist, and information-based.This book is also about the relationship of social movements to property and human rights within capitalism. In making this argument, I draw substantially on a 2 Historically speaking, the first form of “right” originated as feudal nobles struggled with their sovereigns to establish claims over real property. As we shall see, the second form of right did not emerge until capitalism began to be separated from the political sphere, sometime during the 16th and 17th centuries.DRAFT