“Ford did not just mass-produce cars,” writes Kati Curts to begin her study of the Ford Motor Company. Ford also “engineered and assembled new religious forms and administered powerful new economies of religion” (xi). Using Emile Durkheim’s theory of assemblage as its orienting method, Curts argues that Ford (the person and titan Henry Ford, to be sure, but really the company) became an “it,” a totem that revealed “the relational dynamics and processes of incorporation that helped constitute religion in an automobile age” (xiii).
The totem, dynamics, and processes which made the manufacturer into a literal and metaphorical vehicle of religion falls under the gerund and general framework of “fording,” which Curts takes as an all-encompassing description for “the products and practices of the Ford Motor Company—including efficiency standards, wage and labor policies, mediating technologies and historical projects” (6). Starting from that descriptive perch, the book’s opening chapters depend heavily on renaming as “religious” various activities and sites often treated as anything but in the vast literature on Ford. Machinery was messianic; efficiency was gospel; knowledge was metaphysical; shop floors were sacred. Curts cites Ford’s own words and works to build her theories of his theories of industrial capitalism’s spiritual means and ends, summarizing them thusly: “For Ford, the religious was to be worked out in the actions of life, through thought and experiment, across a continuously progressive assembly line of existence. He engineered a modernity that would come to be christened in its name, simultaneously congealing and culminating ‘now’ and ‘then’ in the perpetual motion of his relentlessly improved present-infinite” (51).
Work became the foundation on which all of Ford’s religious administrations, prognostications, and explorations rested, as did his wanderings among New Thought master minds, race scientists, reincarnationists, and Free Masons. Using a clever turn of phrase to encapsulate an entire sacred-secular framework of labor, Curts calls Ford’s “rite-to-work religion” another process, albeit “one in which the individuals in Ford’s factory learned their essential value through the work they did and the relations they developed at the Company to serve Ford’s process of individual productivity” (59). No alienated proletariat or working-class woefulness resulted in his factories, according to Ford’s heady but hardworking ethos. (Curts avoids calling it a “Protestant” ethic since its multi-sourced religious amalgamations hardly fit the category.) Up to five-dollars per day, paternalist welfare programs, and an entire Education Department kept Ford’s workers faithful to his company’s take on religious and economic progress while securing a “religio-racial identity and white nationalism manufactured and administered through the fording of right domesticity and properly propertied consumptive values” (90). The offer “[a]t Ford, through Ford … was industrial partnership of salvific power” (102). Work “saved” by stripping racial or ethnic identities and amplifying pioneering, pure-blooded, white-coded, masculine service. In addition to energizing antisemitism, Ford’s religion also countered national threats from what the industrialist deemed un-purifiable (the indigent or immigrant), parasitic (the investor), or primitive (the indigenous).
Print media like The Dearborn Independent and internal corporate practice reaffirmed Ford’s religious and racist assemblages. As Curts details, so did his view of history. Ford lionized Thomas Edison and mass electrification’s impact on industry and society at large, but he turned mere fandom into a faith via “his careful collecting of and scrupulous concern for the relic” (142). Like his sense of the sacred, relics meant to Ford “a vernacular Americana, something mundane rendered valuable for its participation in the flow of an exceptionalist national story” (143). Electric light enabled enlightenment akin to magical knowing and control. Rituals surrounding Edison’s achievement – retellings of its revelatory origins, hagiographies about electricity’s godlike power – also undid conventional views of history. Recontextualizing Ford’s famous dismissal of history as “bunk,” Curts casts the quip as unveiling the industrialist’s religious aspirations and obsessions with reliquaries. “Ford did not trust how [history] was written,” which was “why enshrining relics became so important. They would sympathetically influence and materially connect Ford’s incantations of industrial origin to the brand of American abundance he most wanted to disseminate” (151). Ford exported his view of a sacred past onto a nationalist imperial present at projects like Fordlandia, his failed extractive and religious colony in Brazil. He also set up domestic versions, such as at Dearborn’s Greenfield Village and Richmond Hill plantation near Savannah, Georgia, both of which delivered pre-Disneyland-esque presentations of an imagined and idealized pastoral world. “Ford’s history harrowed the past as pioneering accomplishment and civilizing possession,” Curts writes, “His conveyance of Anglo-American heritage became what subsequent decades of the good life looked like, smoothed of difference and heralding a history that never was” (165).
Curts concludes with a restatement of what Assembling Religion is all about: “I have sought to compile descriptions of Ford amid the material and magical aporias of religious study and historical interpretation” (178). As a compilation and rumination about Fordist capitalism’s imprint on American religion and vice-versa, the book serves as one of the most thickly described and expertly theorized works published in recent years. As a work of history, it may prove frustrating for readers who want less categorizations and retermings from Curts and more contextual details or labor conflict, especially as “fording” unfolded into “Fordism” over time or ran up against inherited religious traditions in worker communities or among middling professionals. How far Ford’s religion made it beyond the company and the industrialists’ pet projects also seemed an open question by book’s end, although the self-appointed salvific power – and volk-ish faiths – that some present-day tech CEOs claim for themselves suggest the spirit of Ford lives on. What they assemble in algorithms or A.I. might be religion of a sort as well. If so, Curts’s work suggests a way of thinking about why.
