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The evangelical financial ethic: Doubled forms and the search for God in the economic world

American Ethnologist

Published online on

Abstract

In evangelical churches across the United States, volunteers assist other church members in transforming household budgets into lenses that reveal God's kingdom on earth, reframing the force and volatility of markets as divine mystery. The strategies of financial ministry are distinctive, yet they engage a more general conundrum that pits economic success against conflicting ethical projects; they illuminate the process of ethical management in the financial economy. The ministries’ uses of budgets also challenge the idea that market devices gain power primarily by formatting economic transactions and establishing conditions for market exchange. Evangelical financial ministries show how, in everyday calculative practices, a device such as a household budget renders the spiritual economic, and the economic spiritual. In the exercise of evangelical ethics, financial ministry returns the divine touch to the invisible hand. [Christianity, economy, ethics, finance, households, markets, United States]