My (outlandish) hope in Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is to help push capitalism closer to the center of political theory and political science. On my reading, a capitalist “axiomatic” binds together labor, capital, growth imperatives, and commodities. But these defining elements are also insufficient. A specific capitalist assemblage simultaneously depends upon, affects, and folds to varying degrees into its institutions other relatively autonomous force fields, including climate change, religious intensities, mutating diseases, scientific research, new political movements, novel financial instruments, compensatory hopes poured into investment and consumption, wars, and security anxieties. Such intersections combine with the intrinsic instability of markets to produce the volatility of capitalism. It, too, is an open system in a world of open systems that invade, energize, and threaten it.

I appreciate both the reflective way Lisa Wedeen reviews the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine” and the insightful issues she poses. I will keep the axiomatic and that machine in mind in responding.

The discussion of complexity theory, and so on is too brief. Extensive engagements with complexity theory, nature/culture imbrications, time, and causality appear in a companion manuscript now under review. I also agree with Wedeen that secularism is not a faith but a framing device, by which its most active American proponents assume a Protestant concept of “religion” that has never been so consigned to the private realm as they imagine. I do contend, however, that every contemporary theory contains an element of existential faith—whether theistic or nontheistic—about the fundamental contours of the universe. The ideology of secularism helps to screen this element of faith from many academics and encourages them to attribute it only to others. Moreover, both intellectual life and political-economic institutions are suffused with spiritual energies, by which I mean collective orientations to existence that vary at their extremes between resentment of the fundamental terms of existence, as a constituency itself understands those terms, and a generous embrace of existence. Creed and spirituality are linked but not entirely reducible to each other. All this means that attention to the existential element must be folded into economic theory.

I do think that both my book and Linda Kintz's earlier Between Jesus and Market (1997) together identify pressures and evangelical themes that encourage many working-class white women to support the outlooks of husbands and boyfriends. With respect to race, however, I concur with Lisa Wedeen. I have periodically charted pressures that spawn racism in the white working class. In this book, I lean on those accounts as I explore how new pressures find expression in economic-political life. But much more work is needed on this front. It is especially important to address how capitalism, empire, and race have been intercoded historically. It is also pertinent to ask to what extent capitalism necessarily demands racial divisions. And two final, related questions: At what point would changes in established modes of consumption, investment, work, and inequality push us to the edge of capitalism? Toward what?

I do not know the answers to those questions. I do know that the “interim image” of eco-egalitarianism presented in Chapter 4 of my book as an urgently needed, improbable possibility—including radical changes in the infrastructure of consumption and income ceilings—requires a political assemblage larger, more intense, and active on more fronts than anything around today. I count Wedeen as an ally in these struggles and thank her for both an illuminating book and a thought-provoking engagement with mine.