"Money, Sex And God: The Critical Logic of Religious Nationalism"

Roger Friedland

Departments of Religious Studies and Sociology

University of California, Santa Barbara

God is once again afoot in the public sphere. Politics become a religious obligation. For an apparently new breed of religious nationalists the nation-state is a vehicle of the divine. Religious nationalism has a semiotic structure, a symbolic order. It is a critical discourse, a project deployed against global capitalism, not as an order of distribution, but as an order of collective representation. Religious nationalisms invest the human body, its erotic and generative qualities, with enormous import. It is a body and particularly a sexual politics. Religious nationalists direct the bulk of their fierce attention to the bodies of women--covering, separating, and regulating their erotic flesh. Religious nationalists also accord considerable symbolic importance to money, to foreign money, to money out of control. Is there an order that joins the two?

Religious nationalists are everywhere preoccupied with a return to public modesty, to clean the public space, both the city's and the televisual square, of naked bodies, particularly those of women, to reassert the divisions of gender, particularly in school, to resacralize familial, particularly conjugal, bonds, to bolster and celebrate the public powers of the patriarch.

Religious nationalism has an explicit eros. Religious nationalists give primacy to the family, not to democracy or the market, as the social space through which society should be conceived and composed. Familial discourse, with its particularistic logic of love and loyalty, is pervasive in religious nationalism. "The family," the Ayatollah Khomeini declared, "is the fundamental unit of society and the main center of growth and transcendence for humanity..." In the United States, the unifying core of Protestant fundamentalism is its defense of the heterosexual and male-dominated family.

Some analysts argue that religious regimes, like that of Iran or Pakistan, because they have failed to reduce unemployment or redistribute wealth, center their attention on familial relations, as though family politics were a substitute for, or sideshow from, the real business of state. This is to miss religious nationalism's distinct ontology of state power. The state of the family is taken as the primary criterion for the condition of the state. The elemental agents of religious nationalism are gendered and fleshy men and women, not the abstract individuals ordered through exchange and contract. Its space is the place of family, governed by relations of consubstantiality and identity, not the external, instrumental space of geo-politics, the public sphere or real estate. Religious nationalism is about home.

Maintaining the conjugal powers of men, covering female flesh, organizing sexuality and limiting the visible presence of women's bodies in the public sphere are critical elements of most religious nationalisms. For example, the very first national religious mobilization of the Iranian Islamic forces took place in 1961 after Khomeini spoke at Qum on Ashura, the day of atonement, attacking the Shah for having transformed the legal status of women, allowing women into the army, the police and the judiciary, giving them the vote, and overriding Islamic law such that divorce required mutual consent. Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution forbade co-education, its closed down the childcare centers, and made the veil obligatory first in government offices and then in every public place. Women, of whatever age, had to obtain permission of their fathers when they married for the first time.

In the United States, the Supreme Court's 1973 legalization of abortion and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution were essential goads to Christian fundamentalist political mobilization. Pointing to the commonalities between Iranian and American fundamentalism, Martin Riesebrodt writes that:

The public status of women's bodies is a critical site and source for religious nationalist political mobilization. Religious nationalists seek to masculizine collective representation.

Religious nationalists also target money as an awesome force, its excesses an economy of evil, its lack an absence of God. Controlling a nation's money is an essential project for religious nationalists, not just as political economy, but as collective representation. The penetration of foreign monies, those moving with the authority of alien states, are understood to disfigure the nation's inner landscape, an improper penetration. It is the culture of the materiality itself that is both denoted and carried by foreign monies, a culture carried by and carrying foreign powers.

Take Ayatollah Khomeini, for instance. Through the "White Revolution," the Shah had both integrated Iran into the multinational capitalist order and progressively stripped the monarchy of its Islamic foundation by grounding his regime in the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian past, replacing the Islamic calendar with the Achaemenidian, unveiling women, introducing women's suffrage, and generally abrogating Islamic family law. Khomeini linked three targets: American capitalist penetration, the corruption of the state, and the recent granting of women full suffrage. In response to the majlis¥ decision to grant American personnel diplomatic immunity, he declared:

Islamicists, just like Marxists, understood the intrusive materiality of western capitalism as a cultural medium, a meaningful thing, not use betrayed by exchange, but the sacred profaned. To them western capitalism was a body politics, operating through and on bodies, an economy of sensuous excess, to be countered by bounding a moral territory.

Religious nationalism offers a cosmology in which resistance to Western economic domination takes on transcendental meaning. This joining of God and state is not, however, a cultural space to be occupied just by those states which must adapt to western economic and military might. Tens of millions of citizens seek to push the American republic there as well. Here, too, the yoking of the state apparatus to God is understood to offer a way to protect the nation's powers from the invisible hands of supra-national finance capital. Fundamentalist Protestantism follows the money.

Transnational money is a medium of evil in these Christian politics. Pat Robertson argues that a cabal of global financiers, their salaried agents, the newspapers and foundations over which they wield great influence, are systematically eroding the sovereignty of the nation-state, notably that of the United States. In their vision it is not money, per se, that is noxious, but money beyond control of the nation-state. In his 1991 bestseller, The New World Order, Robertson argues that the financiers of the West, families like the Rockerfellers and the Morgans, the Rothschilds, Kuhns, Loebs, the Lazard Freres, have plotted first the bankers' takeover of the creation of American money, and second, the construction of global institutions of governance, both the United Nations and transnational financial and monetary regimes like the World Bank and the IMF.

Politicized Christian evangelicals like Robertson thus make the national transubstantiation of word into value, the nation's creation of money, a critical entry point through which and a reason for which militant Christians must re-enter the public sphere. Modern money is created by fiat, "out of nothing" as Robertson remarks, its value carried by the people's word, its sovereign authority. Robertson argues that both the word, through the financiers' manipulation of elections, and the medium of value, through their creation of a private central bank, the Federal Reserve Board, have eroded that natural, national couplet, word and value. "Any nation," Robertson writes, "that gives control of its money creation and regulation to any authority outside itself has effectively turned over control of its own future to that body."

The globalist agenda, ostensibly motivated by concerns to limit the possibilities of nuclear war, to protect the world's ecology and human rights, pushes inexorably towards the erosion of patriotism. Robertson plumbs the interlocking layers of interest behind this ostensibly peaceful, munificent globalism. Financial capital's interest in global hegemony is the apparently hard substrata of technocratic ideology, the notion that only knowledgeable elites can manage our complex biosphere and global economy.

But within that alloy is something more sinister, the superceding of Judeo-Christian cosmology by a spiritualism that lodges the sacred in the nature we hold in common, a belief system that both renders us divine and erodes our particular moral and ontological distinctiveness vis a vis non-human species. And behind that is a drive to reverse the order of things, to make evil good and good evil. "The real danger is that a revived one-world system, springing forth from the murky past of mankind's evil beginnings, will set spiritual forces into motion which no human being will be strong enough to contain."

Robertson thus makes currency unhinged from the sovereign nation-state, and particularly those of the Judeo-Christian world, a figure through which and a force by which he imagines that the systematic deconstruction of the West's moral code, anchored in the Ten Commandments, is being accomplished. Not only are Americans now being taught globalist teachings that we are no better than any other peoples, our history is presented to us as sullied by oppression, racism, sexism. "All over this country, children are being introduced as world citizens, with reverence for the earth, the environment, the animals, and for people of all ethnic, religious, and sexual orientations." Multiculturalism and ecology take on a sinister aspect.

Religious nationalism is not a response to poverty, to an absence or even an uncertainty of money. It has a middle class base, and often explodes onto the public stage when economic conditions are improving, not declining. In religious nationalism money figures as symbol of collective power, a flow that must be captured and controlled, put in proper hands. Religious nationalists invest money's boundary crossings, its movement into and out of the nation-state, with great symbolic importance.

Religious nationalism is a strategy for bounding the collectivity, restoring the national body as a collective agency moving with purpose and power on the world stage. Religious nationalisms have proliferated at that moment when national economies are decreasingly national, when skeins of firms, contractors, sub-contractors, divisions and subdivisions cross the globe, when massive migrations of labor have caused residence and citizenship to diverge, when national accounts based on imports and exports no longer make sense, and currencies, the representation of national value, are beyond reach of the nation state.

Part of religious nationalism's appeal is the increasing inability of the nation-state to establish the conditions for collective solidarity, given its insertion in markets and production systems which are ever more global. Income inequalities within nations have steadily widened and there appears to be little states can do about it. The economic fate of a nation increasingly lies beyond its borders, the traditional parameters of macroeconomic policy beyond reach. Religion provides an alternative basis of solidarity, of collective power, to reasoned consent and contract, a different basis for national identification.

As globalized cultural commodities become the new totemic measure of man, not only do modernity's elemental measures of self-worth move out of reach for billions of people but the media by which collectivities can construct difference untainted by deference, by lack, by their incompleteness, become ever more scarce. Global commodity chains now not only sever thing from place, but the images, sounds, tastes, forms and words through which we express our distinctive lives and our location in the world, a location that is increasingly mediated through objects, not places. Religion offers an autonomous cultural space, perhaps the only one, from which to bound the nation, to make it a powerful body in the community of nations.

The resurgence of Hindu nationalism in India is illustrative of the relation between religious nationalism and the problematic boundedness of the nation-state. The 1992 destruction by Hindu nationalists of the Babri Masjid mosque at Ayodhya, the birthplace of Ram, the foundational Indian sovereign in Hindu cosmology, took place against the backdrop of major challenges to India's boundedness, its sovereign skin. On the one side, there were territorial challenges by Muslims in Kashmir and by Sikhs in the Punjab. On the other, foreign capital had finally penetrated India's long-guarded national marketplace. The great politicized pilgrimage that razed this central mosque took place against the historic decision in 1991 by the Indian state to open the country to foreign investment. A centered divinity is arrayed against a de-centering coin.

Islamic nationalism explodes on the heels of an extraordinary enrichment, not impoverishment, of the Arab world, namely the enormous increase in oil revenues in the 1970's. The rise of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries saw a gargantuan inflow of Western currency into the predominantly Arab, Islamic world. The consequence was a growth in income inequality within that world, further eroding the solidarity of the Arab world as a geopolitical bloc. The fabulous sums were not converted into productive investments, into an expansive economic base, but frittered away in conspicuous consumption, military hardware and projects of institutional prestige. If anything, it revealed for all to see the utter dependence of the Arab world on the West for technology, expertise and organization. The currencies generated by the extraction of fossil fuels proved impotent, generating pleasures without production, unproductive seed. The oil wealth issued in a flood of money without power. Islam seemed to promise a power that could stand against the West.

That religious nationalists invest the coin with such collective symbolic importance derives from money's generic and trans-historical qualities. Numinous money, traversing outside and in, grasped only in instants, has religious properties. Money is a collective representation. Adam Smith declared in his The Wealth of Nations, that a nation's money "reflects all that a people wants, makes, submits, is." Increasingly, money has become the dominant collective representation, its sum our totality.

Money is not just a sign commanding the distribution of people and things, it is a symbol of the collectivity in which they circulate, a collective representation. This is not only because money has primacy as modernity's media for establishing social relationships. It is because money is one of our sacred substances, not only because it measures value, but because its capacity to value hinges on the authority of the nation-state. Money, as the sign of value, hinges on the authority of the state. Its capacity to price, and hence to value, is tied to the capacity of the state, from which it derives, to govern. That God is being fused to the territorial state might have something to do with the fact that money has become a global medium and store of social valuation over which the state has lost control due to the multi-nationalization of finance and the deregulation of financial markets. That the nation-state seems weak and uncertain, that the distinctiveness of a national culture appears at risk, that the parameters for collective action appear severely limited, that a people's destiny seems beyond their control or even comprehension are figured-condensed might be a better word-through the fearful symbolism of money has sociological foundation.

Instead of monies backed by the authority of states, tied to material goods, new proliferating global monies are now the preserve of the accounting conventions of international organizations and multinational banks. While trade, direct investment and equity markets remain highly regionalized, a global market for currency and for government bonds has definitely emerged. Currency traders now not only discipline those governments whose monetary policies are judged inflationary, they can, in themselves, erode the value of currencies where the underlying economy is fundamentally sound. Although national states may still be critical in the process by which their currency's value is vaporized, the power of transnational money markets appears increasingly enormous and beyond the control of those national states, particularly the smaller ones.

There is less and less any locus of governmental authority that can regulate monetary flows, either their production or their circulation. At a moment when the dominant collective representation can neither be contained nor controlled by the territorial powers of the nation state is it surprising that God, that other totemic principle, might have such mass appeal? With the apparent collapse of the proletariat as a collective subject and the still halting gait of the demos, what else can match money's powers, its territorial and temporal reach?

As representative money, as opposed to its commodity form, and thus unhinged from any "thing," the value of money rests openly on faith, on belief in belief. Money, like a transcendent God, has become an invisible numeric network of promises, pure abstraction. Money has become a force of social nature whose powers are unmasterable, whose identity is non-national, the global economy seemingly beyond accounting or specification. The changeable flow of these bits, their erosions and secretions, bring down cities and erect states, move armies across the globe. To the ordinary mortal, its movements are unfathomable, yet they determine the conditions under which he or she will connect into its nervous network. God, an ineffable force, is now once again made a co-author of human history, an inhabitant of particular territories by contract, election or grace. A counter-faith to the money illusion.

As money becomes the increasingly expansive, universal equivalent, capable of conversion into all things, things that are never identical to the money into which they are converted, the dominant populist counter-discourse is that of God, a representation of value, in whom, as Georg Simmel noted in The Philosophy of Money, "all estrangements and all irreconcilables of existence find their unity and equalization." God, too, is a universal currency, being in all things, but not identical to any of them, the transcendental signified. Even those, like Nietzsche, who hate religion make the connection between faith and currency.

When the Portugese and Dutch traders first made contact with the Africans, they were astounded by their apparent inability to evaluate material trade goods, to undervalue them relative to the objects they considered sacred-a bit of cloth, an animal's limb, a bird's feather. The traders presumed this inability was integrally related to what the Europeans understood to be their absence of religion. God and money are both measures of the value of time, metrics for accounting, wherein sin, like waste, is expenditure without calculation with respect to these values. Both defeat death. Money is modernity's after-life. Both equip time with a telos, an end, energizing a desire for identification with the transcendental power for which they stand, setting in motion the primitive logic of accumulation, to have more of what they signify, knowing that identification will always fail. Money and God both mark an absent presence, the really made-up center of our social universe. Capitalism is a materialist mysticism.

Religious nationalists organize their critique of capitalism not through a discourse of exploitation, but one of profanation. The differences between God and money as symbolic orders are what make that possible. If capital is nervous and fickle, an uncertain guest, God is constant, always available, accessible. The teller never closes; the currency does not devalue. God provides the immutability that nations have sought in nature, including their nature as the institutional body of a collectivity defined by race. If money relativizes, God absolutizes, offering a foundation for a zone untouched by relative price. Religious nationalist tendencies towards terror express, indeed mark, that pricelessness, value's absoluteness. If money is an abstract value, a common metric devoid of substantive rationality, God is known through the distinctive substantive values He represents. If money is necessarily a medium of invidious individuality, God is potentially a medium of equality and solidarity, a unifying representation. If money is an object that appears to dominate the subjects who pursue it so diligently, God is a subject who guarantees the subjectivity of the men and women who submit to Him.

What then joins the religious nationalists' obsessive efforts to control the erotic bodies of women and money's symbolic importance? How does money function in this body politics?

Money is itself part of an eroticized order. The association between money and bodily pleasure is ancient. In Phaidon, Plato wrote: "He who loves the body craves either money or recognition or both." Aristotle, likewise, ascribed the source of moneymaking as an end in itself to the desire for "enjoyable excess" in terms of the "pleasures of the body." Marx, too, pointed to importance of excessive pleasure, of the aesthetics of luxury, as the attribute enabling gold to serve as the "positive form of abundance and wealth."

Religious nationalism both involves an outraged assault on the feminization of the collective body and a celebration of its renewed maleness. Commodity and woman are joined by a hermeneutics of dangerous desire. The capitalist market is powered by an unexamined, external term, an untranslatable aesthetic dimension, a pleasure principle. Women have traditionally carried the unacknowledged weight of male desire, sexual objects whose subjectivity is responsible for the violent excesses of men, often conjured with sexual appetites threatening to exceed the claims of sexual property and familial bounds. Money, too, is a signifier for desire without limit, an infinity of expansion.

Religious nationalisms are obsessed with the powers of feminine flesh, everywhere seeking to cloak the female body, to clear the public sphere of its exposed skin. Religious nationalism is deployed against the heterosexual powers of women, forces displayed in the spectral emporia of commodity culture that these patriots would redress and discipline in the family. Divided in production, we moderns are re-united in consumption, a sphere with domestic designs, a sphere whose allure is carried by women's desiring bodies, a feminized and feminizing zone. If the public voice is masculine, the body-the one always before our eyes-is that of woman.

Women are themselves an ancient currency. Women, as Claude Levi-Strauss and Gayle Rubin both pointed out so very long ago, are the elementary social currency, before kula shells and horses. If men strive to take women out of the public sphere, women who mark and carry the merchandise, who are yet the currency of exchange in the modern economy, the consumers and the consumed, then are they not taking out this doubly determined force?

Examples of female flesh as currency are easy to find. Writing in the Christian-right Focus on the Family, which offers a regular column on personal finance, and particularly a discipline for getting out of debt, Sarah Hinlicky, a theology student, explains why young American men squander their sexuality before marriage, comprising their capacity to love truly. She writes:

True masculinity entails loving one woman, a love made by loving her alone. An indiscriminate spending of one's seed, parallel to the profligate spending of money, robs a man of his masculinity, debases the currency of love.

Religious nationalists not only restore the value of female fecundity as the defining quality of woman, they make the nation-state into a heterosexual project. Hostility to abortion and homosexuality are almost always joined in the discourse of religious nationalism. Religious nationalism joins God to the territorial nation, the fusion of two collective representations, a couplet of spirit and matter, a male force and a female territorial body. Religious nationalism works the universal binaries of gender, a structure rendered in crystalline form by Sherry Ortner in which men are closer to culture and women to nature. Religious nationalism points to women's material bodies as a media through which the culture of the territorial state is constructed. As Ortner herself elsewhere points out, it is with the rise of the state, in which fathers become delegated sovereigns ruling over their own households, households as miniature polities themselves politically accountable to the state, that a doctrine of woman's virgin purity first emerges. It is here that patriarchy proper first occurs, patriarchal households in which women are now for the first time under the patriarch's "direct and systematic control." Women go from being themselves a source of danger to being in danger.

The purity of the bride is a question of bounded matter. Isaiah describes Israel's foreign servitude as the foreign sexual penetration of the female space of Zion. A state is known through its boundaries, through the continuous territory it controls, by its capacity to regulate the conditions for entry. A woman's bodily purity and state sovereignty are parallel symbolic orders. Although Ortner doesn't mention it, the emergence of states means the emergence of monies, a currency over which the state has exclusive control, a currency always threatened by devaluation, by debasement, by uncertainty over its properties and over whose property it is. Would it be so strange for the primitive currency, women's reproductive bodies, and the new currency, these two collective representations, to be figured in parallel? Women's bodies, once material media for political alliances between groups, now, with the rise of the state, become material representations of the territoriality of the state itself. Women come to stand for the timeless traditions of the territory, a culture rooted in the ground, in nationalist discourse, whereas men stand for the historical temporality of progress, the first located in domestic space, the second in public space.

Religious nationalisms are boundary politics, emerging in contexts of partitions and penetrations. Woman's body as a token of national territoriality is common in nationalist discourse. If religious nationalism is a way to mark the land, to defend or redefine a nation's boundaries, then we might interpret religious nationalism's obsessive control of women's bodies as a parallel figuration, the policing of a bodily frontier. The land is feminine substance, fecund matter. Religious nationalists draw their lines on feminine flesh, on the land and on the bodies of women. Both are bounded sites of reproduction, physical and cultural, one through the other.

Religious nationalist hostility to abortion, at least in the American fundamentalist context, can be understood in this context. Jane De Hart shows the discursive parallels between two efforts to criminalize abortion in the United States, one between 1840-1880 and the other after 1973, and the historic Roe v. Wade decision of that year. In both, abortion was targeted as a threat to the family and to the nation. In both the woman was linguistically reduced to a "container," not a person with civil rights enabling her to control her body as her property, but an incubator, nurturant ground in which grows a separate living being. Although the agents attacking abortion were divergent-professional doctors in the first case, Christian fundamentalists in the second, it is striking that in both, the boundaries of the nation-state, its territorial integrity and its racial purity, were at risk, the first time as a result of the Civil War, and the second, as a result of unprecedented immigration, and perhaps, one could argue, the defeat of the American military in Vietnam. (Eric Rudolph, the reputed abortion bomber who also hit the 1996 Atlantic Olympics for having refused to allow its torch to pass through a North Carolina county that had passed an ordinance against "sodomy," was also motivated his a hatred of what he called "atheistic internationalism.")

Women's bodies are men's sovereign property, a property by men possessed. Women, religious nationalists declare, have no right not to reproduce, to make the nation's physical reproduction a womanly matter. At stake is who-women or men-and hence what-eggs or sperm-will dominate this process. And it is the capacity to reproduce that joins religious nationalist concern to control the wombs of women with the coincident desire to control its monies. Both are forces of reproduction, at once material and cultural. Pat Robertson, for instance, joins the two, pointing to the backing of the globalist financiers for the writings that supplied the philosophical justification for the Constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, and for Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood promoting both abortion and sterilization. Likewise Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, the radical anti-abortion organization, not only opposed abortion and homosexuality, but the government's devaluation of the nation's currency.

Control over the bodies of women assimilates easily to nationalist discourse. The word nation derives etymologically from natio and natus, birth and born respectively. Nations are living creatures, collective subjects. They are drawn out of female flesh, flesh that must be controlled and cordoned off by men. If the nation is a female substance, a womanly materiality, its form is of another order altogether.

As the universal equivalent and hence as a pure form, money partakes of the masculine metaphysical pole, an ideal value that remains invariant whatever the materiality. If money is a masculine form, and if man is the foundational measure of money, what is the form possessed by men for which money is an equivalent? Or put another way, Pierre Bourdieu speaks of the body's properties as "analogical operators" that both establish and naturalize equivalencies in the social world. What property of the male body is money's analogue in the circuit of exchange?

The hard male member is a tool, an instrument that has achieved a fetishistic, phantasmagoric aspect in psychoanalytic theory. In fact the penis is minimally informative, a vehicle of transport, a medium, not a message. It is not the form possessed by men that is a measure of that value for which money is an equivalent, but man's very capacity to transmit his form. Man's measure is his capacity to produce men, to make life. Money, Serge Moscovici has written, is "the metaphor par excellence of the pure life force. Acceleration in its circulation is simultaneously an acceleration of social life, of life itself. A sudden stop would be a death, matter becoming inert." Is not the life force the force of life?

Man's capacity to make life, while mediated by his ability to produce the means of reproduction, rests primordially on his own reproductive force, his capacity to produce children, to generate seed, to spend himself productively between the loins of women. Man's capacity to produce man inheres in his seed, in semen. Like money, semen is a precious fluid to be saved, spent and invested. Semen spent without prospect of product, whether masturbation or homosexuality, is profane and prohibited. Thus like money, but unlike the phallus, the exchange of semen is not only joined to pleasure, it is essential to material survival. Children mean workers, warriors and wombs. Their absence spells collective death. God's covenant is marked by progeny. Seed produces members; impregnation is more important than erection. The selective investment of semen is the most elementary form of economic life. These deep homologies, which make of money a token of male reproductive powers, accord with the fetishization of money, not simply as a token of all potential pleasure, but of all potential powers.

Money as a spermatic analogue is not just an analytic possibility; it is a discursive fact, finding its way into many religious traditions ranging from Hinduism to Japanese Buddhism to Protestant asceticism. There is, for example, the same equivalence of semen and gold in the Ayatollah Khomeini's strictures regulating sexual intercourse with menstruating women. "During the time a women is menstruating," Khomeini writes, "it is preferable for a man to avoid coitus, even if it does not involve full penetration-that is, as far as the circumcision ring-and even if it does not involve ejaculation. It is also highly inadvisable for him to sodomize her during this time." Sperm of any kind-spent in coitus, in sodomizing a man or a woman, involuntary emission or masturbation-is impure. There are no distinctions. Before having performed ablutions, a man who has ejaculated must neither eat nor drink, nor read more than seven verses of the Koran. Khomeini's concern is not with the regulation of sexual acts as much as seminal expenditure. Khomeini explicitly says that sodomizing a man, even his wife's father or son, is not grounds for divorce. However, ejaculating inside a menstruating vagina, but not the anus, of a woman, calls for payment of gold to the poor. Khomeini divides a woman's menstrual cycle into three parts. Intercourse during the first two days requires the payment of 18 nokhods (a measure of gold), the next two days, 9 nokhods, and the final two days 4 and a half nokhods. Seed lost in this way to the community must be paid back to the community through gold offerings to the poor. This is hardly a loose analogy. Khomeini insists that "[i]f the price of gold has changed between the time of coitus and the time of payment, the rate in effect on the date of payment will prevail."

We have then to finish the syllogism. God is deployed against foreign monies. Money is semen's symbolic equivalent, its analogue in the logic of collective representation. What then is the relation between God and semen. Although semen has been banished, disavowed, in our cultural theories, in the western imaginary, the answer is everything. That masculine divine forces are imagined as generating the world through semen is, in fact, pervasive. Mircea Eliade, the omnivorous comparative historian of religions, has written of the common experience of light understood as an expression of divinity. Emile Benveniste noted that while the Indo-European languages had no common word for religion, they concurred on the meaning of God as "luminous." The sun's emission of the living light, this primal condition of knowledge, is widely interpreted as the emission of sperm from the phallus. As the Stoics and all the emanational theologies, among many others, assert, God creates the world through seed.

Money is a symbol of that first currency, an equivalence that points to the original logic of money's fecundity, its capacity to produce more than itself, to expand as it circulates without ever being identical to the materiality it commands. Money, as a fungible bodily fluid, has historically operated as a currency of the public sphere, exchanged from man to man, enabling men to accumulate the reproductive powers of women and to organize the productive forces of other men. It is an erotic fluid whose circuits have been predominantly homosocial. Its currents are dangerous, threatening to overrun the banks of instrumentality, to become an autonomous economy of pleasure. In the imagination of the religious nationalism, physical reproduction is the central figure for cultural reproduction.

Religious nationalisms, I have argued, are responses to threats to the boundedness, the powers and the purposes of the territorial collectivity, a deployment of God in the service of the solidarities of the nation-state. It is a soldering of pre-modern collective representations to modern ones. This is a semiotics, a delineation of homologies observed in religious nationalist discourse, in its cosmology and its practices. At one level it is merely an empiricist constellation of binary terms. But there is an internal, non-arbitrary relation between the elements. It is a map of metaphors. One could argue that this semiotic order, the symbolic logic, of religious nationalism is a displacement from political economy, controlling women and reproductive sexuality as a substitute for their inability to control their placement in the global economy, that the homology derives from this substitution. I would argue that religious nationalists turn to the family as the institutional space through and from which they would constitute the collectivity, and that its institutional logic, here the gendered erotic order of reproduction, provides not only the substance of their political project, their distinctive ontology of power, but it provides the basis from they read that political economy and the organizing principles from which that semiotic order is constructed, that energizes it and makes it productive.

That movements that seek to bound and build the collective body should seek to confine women to a womanly place, to regulate their sex, and that they should imagine uncontrolled monies, and foreign monies in particular, as forces endangering that national body is thus not surprising. These are semiotically joined as forces of reproduction, the elements by which the religious nationalists would restore and revitalize the masculine sex of state.