It’s Not Business, It’s Personal

Implicit Religion in the Corporate Personhood Debate

Authors

  • David Michael McClendon University of Texas at Austin

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/imre.v17i1.47

Keywords:

Religion and politics, secularism, implicit religion

Abstract

Debate surrounding the United States Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC is ostensibly about the legal rights of corporations. However, I argue that the debate about corporate personhood is infused with religious concerns, rooted in the Protestant Reformation, about the proper identification of agentive subjects and the consequences of misidentification for human personhood. Focusing on the language used by opponents and defenders in the popular media, I show how both sides are animated by Protestant notions of human agency, and share similar anxieties about the threats to that agency posed by abstract corporate or governmental entities. Attending to this fundamentally religious dimension not only improves our understanding of the moral stakes in the debate over corporations’ legal rights: it also illuminates the implicit religious underpinnings of American political discourse.

Author Biography

  • David Michael McClendon, University of Texas at Austin
    David McClendon is a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and a trainee at the Population Research Center.

References

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Published

2014-07-22

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

McClendon, D. M. (2014). It’s Not Business, It’s Personal: Implicit Religion in the Corporate Personhood Debate. Implicit Religion, 17(1), 47-61. https://doi.org/10.1558/imre.v17i1.47