This article explores the relationship between neoconservative values and neoliberalism in American jurisprudence through a critique of the US Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision. The article uncovers how the Court imposes market-oriented logic on religious expression and in the process spiritualizes economic activity. In this way neoliberal rationality is intertwined with neoconservative values. For example, exercising religion through corporatization can be understood as a neoconservative moderation of the corrupting influence of excessive neoliberal individualism. Finally, while the decision furthers employer control (...) of workers’ reproduction, the Court’s proposed workaround—a direct government contraceptives program—would undermine that control and points to another, more emancipatory response to the problems of neoliberalism. (shrink)

This article reflects on the convergence of revolutionary anti-capitalism and moral fundamentalism in the contemporary Islamic revival. It is concerned more generally with the recurrent appeal to fundamental value — of a sexual, genealogical or economic kind — in the history of anti-imperial and anti-capitalist movements. Exploring the tradition of Islamist philosophies of finance, the article suggests that Islamic political theology is unique in its ability to separate absolute law from territory ( pace Schmitt). Transgressing the boundaries of nation-state postcolonialism, (...) it thereby relocates absolute value, and hence absolute prohibition, in the realm of the sexual and the divine. (shrink)

What are we to make of the New Christian Right’s loss of political influence and the rise of the Tea Party and libertarianism more broadly? Rather than imagine a coalition of resentment as does William E. Connolly, this paper argues that several key religious ideas of protestant fundamentalism have become secularized and now function as a political theology that privileges the personal and marginalizes the public arena. American fundamentalism shares several characteristics with protestant fundamentalism—even as it represents what might be (...) called a migration of the holy. (shrink)