Forum for Interdisciplinary Religious Studies (FIRSt)

Smaller Gods: the Divine Lives of Corporations

This project addresses regulatory practices of the making and unmaking of the religious. More specifically, it is a rethinking of the modern corporation through the framework of religious categories and experience. Essential to both the freedoms of religious groups, and to the state as a regulatory device, the religious corporation has emerged in the 21st century as a hidden, but crucial form of religious collective. Ethnographically situated among predominantly Tagalog speaking communities in the Philippines, this research moves between corporate offices in Manila, rural Christian, Muslim, and indigenous Mangyan communities in the island provinces of Mindoro, 19th and 20th century archives, and courtrooms in the Philippines, the United States, and Spain, revealing how religious and legal actors navigate the intersection and antagonisms between religious and corporate ways of seeing and being in the world. This project illuminates how contemporary corporate models both enable and prohibit the beliefs, identities, and divine ontologies that constitute religious movements and collectives. Ultimately, this research argues that the corporate lives of religious groups are increasingly important to how we understand financial and transnational practices of religious movements; secularism and the engagement between state and religious forms of governance; and the legal and governmental spaces afforded to and engaged by minority collectivities.

Project staff: Dr. Scott MacLochlainn
Project publications:
  • MacLochlainn, Scott. 2018. “Believing in bureaucracies: christianity, religious corporations, and the Philippine legal state.” Anthropological Quarterly (forthcoming).
  • MacLochlainn, Scott. 2018. “Collaboration and complicity: The work of ‘Intention in Duterte’s Philippines’.” In: Murphy, Fiona and Heffernan, Emma (eds.). Collaboration in the Neoliberal Age. Bloomsbury Press (forthcoming).
  • MacLochlainn, Scott. 2018. “Learning the code of plural.” Journal of World Christianity (forthcoming).