Page 107 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

90 David Chidester

Of course, we must notice the role of material forces of production in these
films. Make Mine Freedom was sponsored by a former chairman of General
Motors, Destination Earth by the American Petroleum Institute, so the oil
and auto industries were clearly driving these productions. However, their
instrumental and interested roles were mystified in these films by rendering
capitalism not only as spirit but as secret, a sacred secret at the heart of
America. The capitalist production of material and spiritual values, Make
Mine Freedom concludes, “is the secret of American prosperity” (Sutherland
1956). In Destination Earth, as we have seen, the entire storyline was premised
on discovering, decoding, and deploying a secret. Colonel Cosmic was sent
to “bring back the secret”; he found that the “code was remarkably easy to
break”; and he concluded that “the real secret” was oil and competition, a
source of energy and an economic system.
Secrecy plays an important role in the production of sacred values within
any political economy of the sacred (Mathewes 2006). Even open, public
secrets, such as those displayed in the films of John Sutherland, are important
in generating the mystery that invests values with a sacred aura. Scarce
resources, like oil, are heavily invested with secret, sacred meaning. However,
a secret, sacred aura attaches to all the commodities of the capitalist market.
As Karl Marx observed, the political economy “converts every product into
a social hieroglyphic,” a secret code that might not always be so easy to break
as “we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own
social products.” According to Marx, capitalism made deciphering the secret
meaning of products difficult by transposing relations among human beings
into mysterious relations among things, as if commodities, “abounding in
metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx 1867: 76), were
animated objects, with a life of their own, which enveloped human beings in
an economy that resonated with the “misty world of religion.”

The political economy of the sacred

As a counterpoint to modern economics, anthropological accounts of
economic relations in small-scale, indigenous societies, formerly known as
“primitive,” have found systems of exchange based on the reciprocity of the
gift, a ritualized regime of gift giving that entails sacred obligations rather
than economic debts. Durkheim’s colleague, Marcel Mauss, outlined this
contrast between primitive and modern economies in his classic book, The
Gift. As the anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchards observed, this investigation
of alternative economic relations showed

how much we have lost, whatever we may have otherwise gained, by
the substitution of a rational economic system for a system in which