UC Irvine

Across the US, household debt is at an all-time high. But a growing evangelical debt-refusal movement is prompting adherents to commit financial iconoclasm: they cut up their credit cards and declare their freedom from FICO scores, all in the name of preserving the nuclear family unit. By opting out of the consumer debt system, debt refusers, who are largely working- and middle-class white people, seem to be giving up a key form of racial-economic advantage: comparatively favorable access to high-quality credit. This is especially surprising in Appalachia, where this research took place, a region that has seen the all-too-common combination of deindustrialization and political-economic disinvestment, which makes debt a particularly important component of household survival.This dissertation contends that this religio-economic subculture reflects a reconfiguration in the way that race and class function to organize economic advantage, brought on by a pair of economic and social changes: first, the shift from labor to debt as the organizing logic of household economic life and, second, the shift from “unmarked” to “white” in white Americans’ understanding of their racial identity. Drawing on twenty-one months of ethnographic research, I find that Christian debt-refusal programs discursively entrench the idea of an even economic playing field while teaching participants to shore up the economic dividends of whiteness by maintaining advantageous relationships to debt. My interlocutor’s response to indebtedness reveals the way that the contemporary consumer debt system itself creates racialized class positions, which intersect with but are not identical to those created by labor. Through an analysis of the racial valence of Appalachian identity, the theological grounding of debt refusal, and the discursive strategies used to make sense of changing economic terrain, I propose a schema for describing the specific class positions created by the consumer debt system, and the ways that these articulate with racial difference to deepen economic inequality. This schema, I argue, provides a means of understanding growing white economic precarity and downward mobility without ignoring persistent and ever-transforming structures of white economic privilege