The opening ritual of every First Place meeting is the weigh-in. First Place is a national Christian weight loss program sponsored in thousands of evangelical churches and private homes around the country. Before the meeting begins, group members line up to be weighed. The scale is typically located in a semi-private space: a church’s kitchen, a hallway, a small closet. The weigh-in itself is between the group member and the group leader alone, but the line is often bristling with conversation and often with tension. When being weighed, the member steps on the scale and recites the week’s scripture memory verse, one of nine commitments participants make for the duration of the thirteen-week program. The leader writes down the member’s weight in her book—it is almost always a her—along with the member’s success at recalling the verse. The fusion between religiosity and weight loss that marks First Place is exemplified in that moment where the member is held accountable to two sacred symbols of God’s power and will: scripture and the scale.

The weigh-in is constructed in First Place, as it is in many weight loss practices, as the time of judgment, where the truth of one’s adherence to the program will be revealed. There is an expectation of reward for the faithful and punishment for the transgressor: that the scale will be just in its pronouncement. But, as many dieters know, there is a great tension in almost all weight loss pursuits between what the mind wants and what the body does. In First Place that tension is sacralized in an ongoing contest between godly ideals and bodily realities. While the program celebrates thinness as God’s normative ideal, weight loss is in fact hard to come by, especially in diet-based programs like First Place. The scale’s authority as arbiter of fidelity to the virtues of weight loss, an authority established by the program and reinforced in American culture, is always at danger of being undermined by fat’s tenacity. Thus tension around the weigh-in is high, filled with fear of judgment and condemnation for failing at a project that is seen as reflective of God’s will yet is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. This tension needs to be managed if faith in the program, and, at some level, faith in God, is to be sustained, especially when the scale shows its disfavor and weight is not lost.

One way this tension is managed is through a regular, informal conversation that I observed regularly at the First Place group I attended and came to call “divining the scale.” After the weigh in was completed and participants settled in for the meeting, but before the meeting formally began, the group, often at the behest of the group leader, collectively discussed their weight loss results, interpreting them and discerning what they meant or didn’t mean about the women themselves, about their relationship to God, and about the program.

One conversation took place in the sixth of the group’s thirteen meetings. After everyone weighed in, but before the meeting formally began, Norma, a group leader in her mid-60s with short brown hair, a solid build, and sparkly eyes, asked everyone how they were doing. “Did you all have a really crappy week?” she asked. Someone in the group asked if Norma could give a tally of the weight lost. “This week it wouldn’t help,” she responded. “It was terrible. We’ve had one superstar, but I don’t want to say who so as not to jinx her.” “You don’t want to say cause she isn’t safe,” someone teased. “You know we’d kill her.” “But the rest of us,” Norma continued, “it’s pathetic. At least I’m the same, not up. But we’re up and down. Any idea what’s going on?”

In making the move to divine the scale’s message for its faithful but flawed supplicants, Norma raises questions about religion and food, eating and spiritual transgression, questions that have been of interest to Christians for a long time. And it raises a tension that stands at the heart of First Place’s project. The program believes that thinness is normative for the believer and that weight loss occurs when we are in physical, mental, spiritual and emotional harmony with God’s will. “As we put God in first place for our day and with our weight,” writes program director Carole Lewis, “then everything else falls into place.” The more one aligns with God’s will through adherence to First Place’s nine commitments, the more that alignment should be reflected on the scale.

But bodily realities and the limitations of dieting as a method of weight loss challenge this presumption and reality of weight’s persistence threatens to overrun the spiritual ideals that underpin the program and are the basis for its claim to efficacy. If people don’t lose weight after faithfully adhering to the program they may come to question its conflation of God’s bodily ideal with thinness and weight loss. Members need to be trained to read the persistence of weight not as a reflection itself of God’s will (if I’m trying and I don’t lose weight, maybe God doesn’t want me to), or the failure of dieting’s disciplines (if I keep doing this and it doesn’t work, maybe it just doesn’t work) but to attribute it to other causes.

The first response to Norma’s question came from Celeste, a small woman, also in her 60s, with dyed blond hair who converted to evangelical Christianity from Catholicism. She offered: “Satan and his dirty work.” Tessa, one of the group’s success stories, gave a more worldly explanation. “We get complacent at week six,” she said. “We started by doing everything we’re supposed to do. So this week, after not coming last week, I didn’t write anything down for CR [Commitment Report], didn’t open up the Bible study.” Norma then confessed her own complacency, saying “I’ve decided I didn’t need to do a CR because I haven’t been taking it with me.” “Mine is exercise,” offered Kathleen, a younger, larger woman with two small children at home. “All I can say is don’t think you’re a Lone Ranger.” Norma comforted, “We’re all not doing well.”

First Place’s program consists of nine spiritual and physical commitments. These commitments serve a range of purposes, but one, as we can see in this exchange, is an opportunity to defuse the tension between godly ideals and bodily realities. When beginning a thirteen-week session, First Place members commit to regular attendance at group meetings, adherence to the food plan, regular exercise, memorization of one scripture verse per week, daily bible reading, daily bible study (the two are different), daily “quiet time” in prayer, weekly encouragement of another group member (usually via email or phone), and faithful recording of adherence to these commitments, including every bit of food eaten, in what’s known as a Commitment Record or a CR. The CR is handed in to the group leader every week and she returns it at the next meeting with comments. Commitments are so numerous in part because the program aims to address the problem of weight loss physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. They also reflect an increasing tendency to see weight loss as a life altering pursuit that requires personal changes far more extensive than food restriction and increased exercise and a resultant proliferation of disciplines.

It is widely recognized and accepted that it is difficult if not impossible to meet all of these commitments at any one time, not to mention in an ongoing manner. But the virtual impossibility of ongoing, faithful adherence does not keep members from being held accountable to them, especially when weight loss is not achieved. The sheer number of commitments give First Place members a variety of ways to explain why weight loss has not occurred as hoped. Surely there is always something that members have not faithfully implemented in their lives during the previous week, especially as the thirteen-week session progresses. The proliferation of commitments provides a range of ways to assign individual responsibility for the lack of weight loss success, diverting attention from the shortcomings of dieting and from the possibility that God is the author of those failings which may themselves carry a message that participants could discern.

Frustration with the complexity of the program, and confusion over which aspects should be prioritized, was then voiced by Deborah, a medical professional with a teen-aged daughter who came to First Place in part to manage her diabetes. “But the program is about all emotions, spirituality. You should focus on exercise,” she told Kathleen, “and make that a focus. It’s hard to manage every piece of the program.” Norma used this comment to report on a conversation she heard at another church meeting that she and other First Place members attended the previous week. “I overheard, very recently, Deborah talking about the First Place group. Someone asked how are you doing. She goes, ‘Well, I’m doing really well spiritually, but not so much with losing weight.’” “I didn’t think I could do the Bible verses,” Deborah modestly replied. “She has the right idea,” Norma continued. “The bottom line is to keep the communication line open with God. Bible study forces us to be self-reflective and to get to the important stuff.”

First Place’s range of commitments reflects a central ambiguity in the program’s purpose: whether First Place is a weight loss program whose value is enhanced by the inclusion of spiritual practices or whether it is a spiritual program whose value is enhanced by the inclusion of weight loss practices. This a live question that is often at play in First Place interactions, including this one. Ostensibly, the program positions itself as the first: as a weight loss program that is enhanced by spirituality. First Place is effective at weight loss, they claim, because it focuses on the whole person, integrating spiritual concerns into the heart of its practice. The absence of God is depicted as the problem in secular weight loss programs and First Place presents itself as filling that crucial void.

Yet there is reason to see First Place as primarily a program of Christian discipleship that instills spiritual practices by linking them to the popular goal of weight loss. Spiritual changes are often the changes celebrated in First Place literature and its spiritual disciplines inculcate Christian practices that are deeply valued yet quotidian in the evangelical subculture. To use a food metaphor, spirituality and weight loss are applesauce and pill, combined in First Place to make the vital but bitter one more palatable. The question is whether spirituality is the applesauce that makes the pill of weight loss go down more easily, or whether the possibility of weight loss is the appealing substance that allows Christian disciplines to slip in. If weight loss is the pill, the weigh-in is the moment where it should display its efficacy. But if spiritual discipline is the pill, the lack of weight loss threatens to keep people from eating the applesauce.

Most of the time this ambiguity is not an issue. Within this self-help landscape, weight loss aims and spiritual aims are seen as so vitally interconnected, so conflated, that there is no need to distinguish between the two. Thinness is God’s desire, and godly devotion will effect weight loss. But when the judgment of the scale threatens to reveal possible tensions between First Place’s spiritual and weight loss projects, distinguishing between the two can be helpful. First Place commitments are so extensive that most people need to prioritize one or two of them at any given time. Spiritual commitments have the advantages of being the clear priority in a faith-based program that, after all, puts God first and of being more easily attainable than weight loss. It is far easier to cultivate a regular prayer practice than to ensure that one’s body will respond to dietary disciplines in the desired way.

By reporting Deborah’s conversation as a positive example, Norma makes the distinction between the physical and spiritual aims of the program in order to place the importance clearly on the spiritual. Deborah is held up as a model for recognizing the importance of spiritual improvements made in the course of the program even when weight loss does not follow. This not only gives members a more attainable goal to focus one’s sights on, but defuses the power of the scale as the ultimate revelator of faithfulness. Members have a means of claiming success even when it’s not reflected in the numbers. This strategy is not without its risks: the promise of weight loss is what provides the opportunity for inculcating spiritual disciplines. Thus Norma can’t go so far as to say that weight loss is not a priority at all. But differentiating between the physical and spiritual aims of the program, and prioritizing the latter, is useful in deflecting attention from the limitations of weight loss by devaluing it as a goal in comparison to spiritual development.

The divining the scale exchange concluded with participants making confounding observations about the vagaries of weight loss. Caroline observed “It’s weird that the week I didn’t write the food down I lost a lot of weight. It’s weird.” Tessa seconded the weirdness of weight loss, saying “[. . .] Sometimes I feel the same way. I had a weight loss during a week when I ate the worst in years.” Celeste said, “I did well and gained a pound. I knew I was going to lose a pound this week but I didn’t.” Norma tried to reassure her, replying “Sometimes there’s a delay thing. You might lose three next week.” “Thanks for trying to make me feel better,” Celeste said, “but that won’t do it.”

The pursuit of weight loss is in almost all contexts something akin to evangelical religion. Both are based on a simple philosophy based on perceived common sense and easy-to-apply salvific formulas. Both value and cultivate a perception of the transparency and accessibility of its central authority, scripture or the scale, for those who seek answers there. Both present themselves as straightforward in theory yet are complicated in practice, continually threatened by lived experience which often seems to trump its claims. When it doesn’t all make the sense that it should, sometimes it’s best to simply contemplate the mystery.

The question Christian weight loss programs often poses for scholars of both religion and of dieting culture is similar to the ambiguity in First Place’s purpose: is Christian weight loss essentially a secular venture, luring believers into its programs by adding a spiritual varnish to a worldly practice, or is it merely explicating, marking or making clear the religious concerns that are at the heart of weight loss projects both sacred and secular? This is a question that is important to me and has informed a great deal of my writing about First Place. But First Place members don’t really care. They are much more taken with tension that mounts as the weigh-in progresses and their faithfulness is about to be measured by number. By collectively divining the scale in the wake of that judgment, the tension between godly ideals and bodily realities are eased and the program maintains its plausibility for another week.

That chicken sandwich—floating, glowing, miraculous—was featured in a 2007 Forbes article on Chick-fil-A, an Atlanta-based restaurant chain that currently has about 1,600 separate locations in 39 states. Founded by S. Truett Cathy (also pictured above) and incorporated in 1964, Chick-fil-A is well-known in the South—and increasingly in other parts of the U.S.—for a menu that includes the standard fast-food fare of soda, milkshakes, and (waffle-cut) French fries as well as southern staples like sweet tea and carrot n’ raisin salad. But it is most well known for its signature chicken sandwich.

In real life, nothing about a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich makes it illuminate and levitate. Best I can tell, its culinary chemistry is as follows:

– Two buttered hamburger buns
– Two sliced dill pickles
– One boneless, skinless chicken breast, battered and pressure cooked
– Salt, pepper, and other “seasonings”

Nothing spiritual there. Again, best I can tell.

Still, Cathy has imbued his chicken sandwiches with a spiritual aura ever since his company started to grow by leaps and bounds in the 1980s and 1990s. That’s certainly one reason why an illustrator for Forbes saw fit to Photoshop a pietà of poultry for the magazine’s story on Cathy and Chick-fil-A. It matched the story that Cathy told about himself, his company, and his chicken sandwich.

The story goes something like this. Born poor (but not too poor) in rural Georgia, Cathy started up a small diner in a working-class neighborhood of Atlanta shortly after World War II. He then set up another diner, lost it to a fire, and switched up his business model to prioritize the selling of chicken sandwiches over burgers. He then moved his operation into the suburban mall market. Then he moved into the strip-mall market. Then he moved into the just-off-the-interstate-exit market. He is now a billionaire. Through it all, Cathy remained a faithful Baptist and a self-professed “born again” evangelical Christian. Thus, Cathy claimed that the success of his sandwiches came not just from good business decisions or favorable market conditions. God blessed his chicken sandwich because Cathy had been a wise and godly steward of his time and talent.

Out of gratitude for God’s gracious affirmation of Cathy’s efforts and ideas, Cathy decided to return the favor. For that reason and that reason alone (again, so goes the story), Chick-fil-A donates millions of dollars each year to youth programs, foster homes, and college scholarships. It sponsors marriage retreats and youth camps. It encourages “God-focused,” evangelical-style dedications at every franchise opening. And, most notably, it requires every Chick-fil-A franchise to close on Sunday.

That chicken sandwich—a product, in Cathy’s estimation, blessed by God because of Cathy’s own faith in the possibility of that work-derived blessing—made all this happen.

How should we interpret this? How do you write about a company that sees its signature product as a spiritualized “good,” in both senses of that word? How do we navigate such a spirituality in the marketplace?

There are a few options, but no matter how you look at it, Chick-fil-A and its chicken sandwich present some dilemmas.

The first is one of taxonomy. Chick-fil-A spirituality fits awkwardly within available definitions. Cathy and many of Chick-fil-A’s executives and employees are evangelicals. Many are classic institutionalists in that they attend churches regularly or support distinct evangelical denominations. And, of course, they work for an organized, bureaucratic institution—the corporation.

But they also exude a kind of non-sectarian spirituality that is highly individualistic, captured by notions of spiritual transcendence, and strongly informed by the possibility of participatory engagement with the divine or sacred or “authentic.” Moreover, their Jesus and God and Bible are not very specific in terms of moral injunctions or “truth” statements, although Chick-fil-A executives and customers vary on that point. Still, they generally eschew the us-versus-them worldview and turn-or-burn rhetoric of a Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Indeed, most affiliates of Chick-fil-A are quiet—or at least not very public—with such views, even if they hold them privately. As a result, only on rare occasions have they been cast and criticized as exclusivists with their religious or spiritual claims and practices.

More often than not, Chick-fil-A sees “faith” not as ammunition in a cultural war but an inspirational resource for personal uplift and empowerment. If it’s activism, it’s of a different type than the kind of explicit public politics of the Christian Right. It is instead a kind of nice-and-smiley spiritual activism. “Faith” means “having faith in faith” and using the power of positive thinking to self-actualize and attain personal purpose and, by proxy, broader social influence. Maybe all that doesn’t fit cleanly into a definition of spirituality, which can be—let’s admit it—a shifting, amorphous, “know it when you see it” kind of category. But it sure does seem like they are trying to be “spiritual but not religious”—or at least prioritize the “spiritual” over the “religious,” while maintaining a distinct sense of trying to change the world, one chicken sandwich at a time.

Another dilemma in our parsing of Chick-fil-A’s spirituality is the problem of misdirection. If we nod along with what Cathy claims about his sandwich and his company, we risk ignoring or downplaying or overlooking or justifying the processes that actually made the chicken. Skinless, boneless, battered, and butter-bunned chicken filets do not appear ex nihilo. Chicken farmers, sometimes in debt to large-scale processors and often struggling to make ends meet in the contemporary agricultural market, hatch and raise the company-owned chicks to maturity. Workers—often Latino, sometimes undocumented, usually uninsured and underpaid—in poultry plants wash, slice, and cut the live chickens for Chick-fil-A. Truckers drive the chickens to slaughter and then drive ready-to-cook cutlets to every Chick-fil-A distributor or franchise. Hourly part-time employees, often teenagers or college-age young adults, cook the chickens behind the counter at Chick-fil-A and then sell them to customers, who likewise invest whatever meaning or desire they want into the sandwich.

All of these people contributed their time and talent to the chicken sandwich, not just Cathy and certainly not some vague collusion of spiritual entities or forces. Some of these people contributed so much more.

ALBERTVILLE [AL]—The federal government has proposed $59,900 in fines for Wayne Farms LLC after a teenage worker died at its Albertville poultry-processing plant in April, labor officials said Wednesday. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s investigation of the accident found the worker, 17-year old Augustin Juan, was trying to free a stuck door on a bird cage when he was crushed between two cages. “These so-called ‘struck-by’ accidents are a leading cause of worker death in the Southeast,” said Roberto Sanchez, OSHA’s Birmingham-area director. . . . Company representatives could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
– The Gadsden Times, September 23, 2004

Wayne Farms LLC was—and still is—a major supplier of processed bird meat to Chick-Fil-A.

If there’s something spiritual to the sandwich, then it cannot become a glare that blinds us. Indeed, spirituality—something arguably protected by the First Amendment—potentially makes the corporate workplace a sacred site and, therefore, off limits to outsider involvement and critique. If anything can be claimed as spiritual in a work environment, then everything might be permissible, from beneficial social service to human catastrophe. That might sound alarmist. But it stands to reason that we should ask why a company might want to be the arbiter of spirituality and, therefore, a producer of the sacred that should be respected and accepted, more so or at least on par with those entrusted by the public to keep business within the limits of the law, as voted on and written. Indeed, the fact that many corporate CEOs liken notions of “spirituality” and “faith” as the key to “leadership” at work should make us pause and ask: Who made you God? If we understand spirituality in the marketplace as somehow divested from the marketplace and the people and decisions that make it up, then I’d argue we are not really doing our jobs. At best, we are studying hagiography. At worst, we might be enabling the use of “spirituality” by corporations as a kind of regulatory antidote.

What, then, are other options? I think any understanding of material goods made and sold by any company, especially self-declared “spiritual” companies doing “spiritual” business, needs to be grounded in the human element. It just has to be, whether it’s a copy of I Ching or a falafel or a “Jesus is My Boyfriend” T-Shirt or an iPhone 4S or a 3D-HDTV or a $35,000 industrial sprocket or a $35 shovel. That is not saying that we cynically dismiss the spiritual as de facto corporate cover—as merely the smoke and mirrors of the marketing and P.R. department. But we do have to recalibrate. Physical goods and personal services—and the men and women who make and price and value and sell them—are not quite like analyzing the “spiritual” in prophetic ecstasy or tribal song or mural-gazing or a contemplative moment by a lake. Material production and spiritual or quasi-spiritual fetish can and do intersect, just as Marx, Weber, and others have said.

But they also do not do so in simple, direct, and always predictable ways. The spiritual is not just a product of the material. The material is not quite a product of the spiritual. The chicken sandwich, again, stands before us with multiple and complex spiritual meanings which must be dealt with because they are there—stubbornly there—instead of not being there in the face of corporatization. Cathy’s chicken sandwich didn’t need to float and glow. Plenty of products and services are made, sold, and bought without overt spiritual overtones. Why Cathy and his company injects spirituality into the process of making and selling chicken sandwiches stands as a dilemma not quite explained by raising awareness about Chick-fil-A’s supply chain. Moreover, calling the company on the carpet for its lack of awareness or interest in that supply chain seems too easy, especially if we don’t seek to understand how Chick-fil-A’s spiritual affectations might hinder or enhance the company’s ability to be aware of or interested in those who sacrifice for its sandwich.

This circles us back to the question I raised earlier. How do we navigate spirituality in the marketplace? Let’s expand that question further by considering how we might address the movement in contemporary corporate America to bring spirituality into the workplace, a movement that Chick-fil-A certainly fits into. Whether you call it a “God at Work,” “Faith in the Workplace,” or “Spirituality in the Workplace,” there is an impetus toward making work mean “something” more than a means to profit-maximization. Why? To what end? By which means? In what ways? It’s also important to ask who is backing such initiatives and why. If Walmart and Tyson Foods are behind you, what does that mean for how we understand God-faith-spirituality at work?

Call it a movement devoted to delegitimizing regulation or killing unions or ensuring the docility of the employed (maybe it’s that). Or, call it a movement devoted to advancing personal self-satisfaction or revitalizing “business ethics” or “corporate social responsibility” (maybe it’s that too). Regardless, spirituality is there in certain corners of corporate America and it’s making singular and multiple, coherent and incoherent claims—while perhaps precluding other claims—about the value of work and human dignity, about the “essence” of the spiritual self, and about the possibilities of spiritual community through commodity-imagining, commodity-making, and commodity-buying.

We can’t take Chick-fil-A’s claims about its sandwich at face value because we lose something in the process. We lose the connection between spirituality and the people who make up the marketplace and the networks and chains that support contemporary capitalism. But we also can’t just dismiss these claims about the spirituality of work, of goods, of companies, of people—or stop with investigative exposés of how it has or has not filtered down to the bottom or up to the top of the corporate triangle. That doesn’t really dive into the messy endeavor to explain spirituality in the marketplace, either as a complicated and layered phenomenon or as an organized but diverse and divided movement.

I have my own thoughts about what history, as I understand it, has to say about the construction of spirituality in the world of buying and selling, of sweating and sacrificing, of hope and fear, of living and dying. I will share them and strive to sell them in the form of a niche or (fingers crossed) mass-market book. I will sell them as an extension of my scholarly persona in the marketplace of ideas. And, I will probably call my work a “spiritual” enterprise, intended to fill my own wants and needs, to better those around me, or to distract them from my own foibles and failures.

I suppose, then, I cannot saddle up on too much of a high horse when considering the chicken sandwich and those who spiritualize it, especially because I am captured in the same pushes and pulls of motive and morality and materiality in the contemporary market.

I also cannot do this because—despite what I have read and written, despite what I have averred, despite what I wish was and was not there –I must confess.

I have tasted and believed.

The Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich is like heaven on earth for less than five bucks.

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
– Bob Dylan, Mr. Tambourine Man (1965)

Struggling with a deep and abiding sense of loss, Cotton Mather invented America. As he lamented in his epic Magnalia Christi Americana, “I shall count my country lost, in the loss of the primitive principles, and the primitive practices, upon which it was at first established: but certainly one good way to save that loss, would be to do something that the memory of the great things done for us by our God, may not be lost.” In the wake of later generations’ inability to live up to their forefathers’ vision, Mather memorialized what he could not emulate. But there was a paradox in this. Mather’s grandfathers hoped to transform a howling wilderness into a gift for their grandchildren: “None the least concerns that lay upon the spirits of these reformers, was the condition of their posterity: for which cause, in the first constitution of their churches, they did more generally with more or less expressiveness take in their children, as under the churchwatch with themselves.” Giving up on the depredations of Europe, the Puritans sought to create New Israel from scratch. But there was far too much work to be done for their Godly society to be realized in one lifetime. Like later generations of immigrants, they would work hard so that their kids and grandkids could live the American dream. But something had gone terribly wrong.

Left with only the memory of the “great things done for us by our God,” Mather celebrated the errand into the wilderness even as he knew it was doomed. The founders’ graves were an ongoing rebuke to their posterity: “I’ll shew them the graves of their dead fathers; and if any of them do retreat unto a contempt or neglect of learning, or unto the errors of another gospel, or unto the superstitions of will-worship, or unto a worldly, a selfish, a little conversation, they shall undergo the irresistible rebukes of their progenitors, here fetched from the dead, for their admonition.” Mather was dwarfed by his grandfathers’ accomplishments. Next to monumental aspirations to create a city on the hill, the quotidian concerns of ordinary people were worldly, selfish, and small. Because the first Americans’ social vision proved too difficult to fulfill, they left to their grandkids a sense of spiritual failure. Caught in a temporal loop that retrospectively anticipated its own impossibility, Mather’s America was trapped in an imaginary space that mourned the memory of this lost future.

After my father died, I leafed through a Bible given to him as a child from the First Presbyterian Church of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. On its back page, he had written 1 Pete 23. I do not know when or why he did this or what significance he saw in this passage, but referring to a Biblical book by a diminutive nickname was the kind of thing he would do. The passage reads: “You have been born anew, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God,” and then continues “for ‘All flesh is like grass and its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord abides for ever.’”

First Peter is a vexing book. Addressed to the exiles, it proclaims freedom to the captives. Peter promises spiritual rewards for present suffering. Our mortal bodies, we are told, are passing ephemera like grass withering and flowers falling. Peter tells us this because he wants us to endure. Later readers have drawn diverse conclusions from his instructions. At best, those born of imperishable seed find the hope and strength to resist the world’s many injustices. At worst, the promise of spiritual freedom diverts our attention from the sources of this worldly suffering, such as in Peter’s injunction to servants: “Servants, be submissive to your master with all respect, not only to the kind and gentle but also to the overbearing. For one is approved if, mindful of God, he endures pain while suffering unjustly.” A Marxist would see here the opiate of the masses. Promising illusory happiness in place of real happiness, the spiritual strength to endure injustice could help such injustice to persist. So is this why we tell the suffering that they are free?

My father died at the age of 52. The cancer which took his life is not uncommon in people who can vividly recall the smell of napalm and who resided temporarily in a forest possibly sprayed by Agent Orange. The specter of Vietnam seemed to reappear after his death, with his obituary noting his Purple Hearts and Bronze Star for valor. During his life, my dad spoke little about these medals. Most of his war stories highlighted some absurdity, such as the time he weathered a field training exercise by jettisoning all of his survival equipment in favor of a case of beer. Or, he told of being rudely awoken from a nap for the trivial reason that the compound was shelled in a mortar attack. “Do you know what the odds are that a shell is going to hit you? Basically zero,” he told me. “They told me to take cover. I told them I was going to sleep.” Or, one time in a village, he was approached by soldiers from another unit who wanted his translators to tell the people: “We’re up there! Up there! Tell them! Tell them we’re up there!” The “up there” was the moon visible in the early evening sky. As my father would later learn, the source of the excitement was the Apollo lunar landing. It was unclear how the Vietnamese took the news, but implicit in the soldiers’ excited proclamations of triumph was that any nation capable of breaking free of terrestrial bonds promised great things. The success of the errand to place the American flag on the barren moonscape stood in stark contrast to the failing mission to the win the hearts and minds of villagers in French Indochina.

As an herbicide, Agent Orange’s job was to wither plant life. But this was no mere landscaping exercise. It promised freedom. Chemical spraying cleared the territory American soldiers sought to liberate from communist tyranny. The memory of fighting in forests informed my father’s reductionist theory of the first Iraq War, which he claimed was promoted by an officer corps of Vietnam vets relishing the chance to redo their lost conflict in a place with no damn trees. While the explanatory power of this theory might be limited, I do remember thinking that the glee we had over that victorious war might for some soldiers compensate for the memory of a failed one.

While Agent Orange and smart bombs are distinctly modern methods of clearing space, the same herbicidal logic that ties freedom to the destruction of life can be found in Mather’s celebration of the providential work that cleared New England of its Native American inhabitants. “The Indians in these parts had newly, even about a year or two before, been visited with such a prodigious pestilence, as carried away not a tenth, but nine parts of ten, (yea, ‘tis said, nineteen of twenty) among them; so that the woods were almost cleared of those pernicious creatures, to make room for better growth.” Mather offered no commentary on these graves.

The ideal of better growth, the sense that a free society depends upon a spiritual vitality best cultivated in places cleared of history, nature, and people, promises a curious kind of liberation. Drawn to wide-open spaces, Americans seek freedom from the messy complexity of history, institutions, and the clutter and inconsistency of life. Variants of this can be found in the errand into the wilderness, or the frontier thesis that mourned the loss of seemingly limitless westward expansion, or in attempts to tell the American story as a series of revivals in which new spiritual energies revitalized decaying societies. In these portrayals, Americans are a people perpetually searching for a fresh start. These born-again narratives continue to persuade in spite of the diligent efforts of historians who insist these stories are nostalgic misrepresentation of events. More restrained historical analysts have told us, for example, that no errand existed among the first generation of American Puritans. This sense of mission and purpose was rather the projection of later descendents intent on aggrandizing the more modest ambitions of their forebears. If this is so, it means that America imagines its origins as a monumental project of spiritual freedom that exists as a standing rebuke to the quotidian reality of social life. Mather’s lament for lost “primitive principles” and “primitive practices” ties the American dream to an elusive origin existing in empty, imaginary utopian space perpetually undone by the real life failings of human beings.

The American answer to failure is to tell a story about success. Rather than mourning loss as loss, we are encouraged to pick ourselves up, start again, work hard, and succeed. We are reminded of the great things done for us by God and the obstacles faced and conquered by people whose suffering was far greater than ours. Above all, we are reminded of our freedom. For this reason, even the most modest attempts to ameliorate human suffering through collective projects to heal the sick, feed the hungry, or educate the young are seen by many today as signs of an encroaching tyranny. As it stands right now, freedom is the ubiquitous slogan of a selfish, petty, vicious, low-down politics that would be abhorrent to Peter and Peter’s God.

Freedom often finds itself in tough spots like this. It’s the kind of word that people want to do things it might not be able to do. Freedom’s remarkable elasticity seems to endow it with an uncommon ability to resist and to justify injustice, to call for something better and to say that things are fine the way they are. But one point of consistency is that freedom has a hard time reckoning honestly with the losses, failures, and violence that lie in its wake.

Like many of his generation, my father was inspired by On the Road. Ironically, he was drafted after he quit school in the spirit of Sal Paradise to wander America on a motorcycle. Kerouac also yearns for open space, but sees no need to clear it of people. He dreams of freedom instead by immersing himself in America to grow deeply within a mad tramping chaos of people, nature, and sin. On the Road ends with a kind of mourning, but one that lacks Mather’s monumental aspirations. Kerouac tells us instead of his friend Dean Moriarty, who has been the source of no small suffering in the lives of himself and others, wandering pathetically around the corner of Seventh Avenue toward an uncertain future. I remember discussing this chapter with my father. I do not recall the particulars of our conversation, but I know we both agreed its final sentence was really good. Here it is:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

The importance of blood in American race discourse can hardly be overstated, and its particular, if hardly unique, function is generally granted. From slavery to eugenics, the practices of blood quantum, the one-drop rule, and everything Orlando Patterson called “rituals of blood”—all this testifies to the indisputable significance of blood in race discourse and racist practices. This significance carries over into law and into science but it still speaks, as if by containment, to the issue of race. Robert Cover did remind us that the relation between blood and law goes further, arguing that law is “that which licenses in blood certain transformations, while authorizing others only by unanimous consent.” Similar statements could be averred with regard to science, or to medicine at least, and perhaps to political science as well, since William Harvey’s discoveries on the circulation of the blood were picked up by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, by John Adams and countless others. At this point, however, we already run the risk of courting a strange but banal universalism (menstruation might be invoked for good effect), whereby blood could appear as a matter of concern common to every culture.

Presumably consumed with anger and revenge—not to mention law—the Old Testament famously seems to confirm, and partake of, such universalism. The soul is blood, it (approximately) said. The more widespread translation, however, from Luther onward, has it that “the life of the flesh is in the blood,” which introduces a massive innovation, a new kind of universalism. Consider that where the ancient texts (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin too) asserted an equality of creatures, the new dispensation offers blood as a principle of difference, which implicitly separates human from (soulless) animal. Thus, Acts 17:26 was translated: “And He hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth,” leaving the door open to doctrines of “lower” races as animals. In the early version, in other words, neither life nor difference was quite what was at stake. Only in this light can we take the measure of the transformation that has taken place and understand the peculiarity of the new universalism of blood, and the difference blood makes. Not surprisingly, the translation, which averred the contiguity of (human) life, blood, and spirit, was spectacularly reiterated by G. W. F. Hegel, philosopher of the universal par excellence. Hegel enacted the new universalism, the universalism of the new, when he stated that the “simple infinity, or the absolute Notion, may be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood, whose omnipresence is neither disturbed nor interrupted by any difference, but rather is itself every difference, as also their supersession; it pulsates within itself but does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest. It is self-identical, for the differences are tautological; they are differences that are none.” As a universal, the soul of the world, and the simple essence of life, blood had become the absolute notion, which divides and differentiates—the difference, Shakespeare’s Salarino had proclaimed in The Merchant of Venice, “between bloods.”

Let us linger for another moment with the suggestion that blood is universal. In that perspective, America would merely, and merely illustratively, partake of blood. Such universals, though patently false (as the Old Testament demonstrates), do make it easier, but not necessarily compelling, to consider the specificity of the American spirit in its rapport to blood, to ponder the plausibility of its circulations. There is, however, no mention of blood in the Declaration of Independence, and the American Constitution only refers to blood once, in the context of treason and its effect on blood, which it calls, after English law, “the corruption of blood.” This older phrase signals the legal consequences of the act of treason and the cancellation of property rights, forbidding family members the inheritance of a traitor. More important, the text points well beyond the general matter of blood in law, and underscores the particularity of the new universalism. Here law establishes (and naturally reiterates) two essential components of the American spirit. The first has to do with kinship, immortalized by Lewis Henry Morgan as the “community of blood,” and which David Schneider famously designated as “American kinship.” The second component is the foundation of the American economic regime (among others), namely, property. I quote from a 1792 Act of the Laws of Virginia, which deploys the device of blood quantum in a context that has little to do with race:

And, in the cases before mentioned, where the inheritance is directed to pass to the ascending and collateral kindred of the intestate, if part of such collaterals be of the whole blood to the intestate, and other part of the half blood only, those of the half blood shall inherit only half so much as those of the whole blood.

I am not suggesting that property, rather than race, is systematically tied to blood (even race was never fully so), only that the blood of kinship is determining of both race and property as inheritance. And when considering the endurance, the further importance of blood in economic thought, what Hobbes referred to as the “sanguification” of the body politic, Marx as the vampirism of capitalism, and which Henry Giroux recently described as “the shameless blood lust of contemporary captains of industry,” blood would have to be recognized in its extensive, familial and domestic, social and national, and indeed, economic, dimensions. To which one would of course have to add the current sedimentations of the slogan “No Blood for Oil.”

So blood in America was never exclusively about race. Nor has it been a mere instance of an alleged universal. Humankind, in the Bible or elsewhere, was never made “of one blood” (unless one reworked the old Latin or followed equally overdetermined, but faulty, translations). Blood is rather the mark and marker of a specific conception, and projection, of law and kinship (Abraham Lincoln put it best when he said “Let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father”). It is the mark and marker of a particular regime of economy and medicine (the expansion and proliferation of which might come to constitute a problem). In the medical field in particular, from sickle cell anemia to the invention of the terminology—and modus operandi—of “blood banks,” shipping these ahead of the bombs too, the investment in blood, Douglas Starr rightly points out, has long been about “medicine and commerce,” and about much more. The emphasis on race science therefore does a dual disservice to our understanding when it turns our attention away from the considerable role blood played in American society at large, preventing as well a recognition of “the enormously powerful symbolic role of blood in American culture and politics,” as Susan Lederer has it. One can therefore speak, with Keith Wailoo, of “the rise of an independent hematological sensibility” in the United States. One can speak, finally, of the “hematological style in American politics.”

Consider Samuel Sewall who, in 1700, understood the presence of Africans on the continent as constituting “in our Body Politick . . . a kind of extravasat Blood.” Or John Adams, again, who, commenting on the British constitution, wrote that “a political constitution is like ‘the constitution of the human body’; ‘certain contextures of the nerves, fibres, and muscles, or certain qualities of the blood and juices’ some of which ‘may properly be called stamina vitae, or essentials and fundamentals of the constitution; parts without which life itself cannot be preserved a moment.’” James Madison, for his part, reminded his listeners of “the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defense of their sacred rights, consecrate their union, and excite horror at the idea of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies.” There were a couple of relevant Roosevelts, and then there was Ronald Reagan, who buttressed a widespread regime of “hemophobia,” as Michael Davidson calls it. And after September 11, Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell tell us, “the excessive desire to give blood was perhaps driven by a sense that the body politic was itself wounded in the attacks.” Barack Obama made clear, in his inaugural address, that he continues to hold up the bloody torch: “Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man—a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake.”

I submit therefore the following formulation toward an understanding of the American spirit, of American spirituality through its generations.

Blood is spirit. Blood is the American spirit.

This statement could easily have been misunderstood as a contrived reduction of American history, of American religion. Does it not seem to summon race first and foremost, one of America’s more embarrassing, yet ephemeral and marginal, facets? One might retort with some reason that race is hardly so negligible, or obsolete, yet that case would be misguided, or at the very least difficult to advance, by having recourse to an argument on the spirituality of race in America. But what if race was derivative instead, a moment or component in a larger spiritual movement? What if that movement and its history were carried by blood, by a Great Awakening, and quickening of blood? What if blood defined a more expansive history of America, of spirituality in America? What if America was possessed by blood?

But blood is a metaphor, is it not? It cannot—more precisely, it should not—be read literally in most of the instances I have recalled. The domains of its operations are not to be over-interpreted, as if one could find bits of flesh and drops of blood in the law or in the economy. Besides, blood is a universal! I have begged to differ on a number of counts here, locating these very claims, along with other moments and practices, in a larger, American hematology. I will now content myself with the following remark: the possibility of reading blood spiritually, the insistence on its metaphoricity, rather than on a literality to be exposed and interrogated—in reading the Old Testament, for instance—is precisely what the formulation I offer here seeks to make explicit. The very possibility of distinguishing between a “literal” blood and a (notably massive) series of metaphorical displacements is constitutive of our hematological condition. No blood could be extricated from the determinations America has construed, elaborated and deployed. To the extent that blood continues to be seen as a metaphor that would have been (wrongly) literalized in race discourse and practice, to the extent that blood continues to be unreflectively seen as if it were distinctly spiritual or physiological, it maintains its covert hold on us. In the United States of America, at any rate, all blood is spirit, and all spirit is blood. Literally.

QED.

Artist Richard Prince (b. 1949) is at once an observer, purveyor, and critic of an American spirituality shaped through promiscuous borrowings from the everyday world. Prince is best known for his technique of “rephotography,” a formal descendant of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades in which the artist takes pictures of pre-existing photographs. In these and other works, Prince mimics and critiques the spirituality of his context, employing a range of appropriation strategies in order to recycle, reshape, re-contextualize, and re-purpose the flotsam and fragments of American life: advertisements, car parts, cartoons, dime-store novels, and even other people’s jokes. As critic Nancy Spector has remarked, Prince’s art is thus “stolen but original, ironic but sincere, illusory but real,” something that might be said of the “spiritual America” he invokes.

Among Prince’s most recognizable images are his re-photographs of iconic cowboys against the great American landscape portrayed in the famous Marlboro cigarette ad campaign. By appropriating and recontextualizing these images, Prince reveals that the quintessence of “authentic” American machismo is as constructed as the advertisements themselves. In fact, as Spector has illuminated, the “founding myth of the sanctity of individual freedom” is itself a commodity, a spiritual ideal packaged and sold to consumers. This incarnation of American spirit is thus a product, in every sense of the term, of what David Loy has called the “religion of the market” and its auxiliary consumerist-entertainment complex. Any “pure” American spirituality, in other words, is always already contaminated, polluted, impure; it is an admixture of patriotism, capitalism, and popular culture.

The wild bricolage of desires, dreams, and sentiments that characterizes Prince’s notion of American spirituality ranges from the familiar to the outrageous. In seeking to disclose the full amplitude of this spirituality, and to expose the contradictions therein, Prince not only de-familiarizes the banal—advertising images and the like—but also elevates the obscene to critical visibility.

Shot at the outset of the American “culture wars” of the Eighties, Prince’s most famous and controversial re-photograph carries the title “Spiritual America.” This name itself is an appropriation; it was first attached to a 1923 photograph by Alfred Steiglitz that excerpted the harnessed hindquarters of a gelded horse. Steiglitz saw his photo as a “bitterly ironic critique of the American puritanical ethos.” Prince’s “Spiritual America” is an appropriation of Garry Gross’s lascivious photo of a nude, ten-year-old Brooke Shields. The all-American girl stands in a deep bathtub, with thick, almost seminal, steam swirling at her feet. Her face is heavily made up, and her body, glistening with oil, is turned to highlight at once the curves of her buttocks and her pre-pubescent chest. Shields’s face, as critic Michael Newman describes it, captures the contradictory nature of American spiritual values and longings, showing “both the fearfulness of the child and the total control of the temptress.”

That Prince saw his work in a religious register befitting this strange spirituality is clear. In 1983, he arranged an entire exhibition under the title “Spiritual America” in a gallery by the same name. Here the re-photograph of Gross’s image of Shields “hung alone—shrinelike—in a cheap gold frame beneath a diminutive picture light at the end of an otherwise unlit, or dimly lit, narrow room with exposed brick walls.” Newman develops this comparison, suggesting that “gallery meets church” in the exhibition of “Spiritual America.” Prince, he says, “could be making a critical point here at the expense of art-lovers: we go to worship at a gallery or museum and that constitutes us as a certain kind of passive spectator…. It’s an image which panders to the fantasy that the object is complicit with the viewer’s desire to see.”

Prince’s gesture, however, is leveled not only at “art-lovers,” but at an American spiritual tendency more broadly, at the American proclivity for privately reveling in what it loudly condemns. In fact, “Spiritual America” met with controversy and confusion for its spectacular sexualization of a minor, soliciting at once desiring gazes and outraged condemnation. And this was just the point. In Prince’s hands, the pedophiliac image provided a way of unlocking the paradoxical nature of this country’s collective spiritual disposition. If, as Newman suggests, there is a “religious power” to Prince’s photo, it has to do in part with its function as an icon of American spirituality and a corresponding contradictory moralism. Engaging the gaze of the viewer in a manner at once complicitous and critical, the piece thus exceeds what Walter Benjamin called the modern artwork’s “exhibition value” and partakes of the “cult value” of religious art. At once ironic and iconic, Prince’s work illuminates a spiritual America that takes pleasure in conjuring what it condemns, loathing what it longs for.