Securing a Future: Speculative Practice across Religion and Economy

This roundtable considers modern speculative practices that deploy the future to arrange power, property, and people in the present. Under the rubrics of religion, divination and prophetic practices are perhaps the most obvious uses of the future to accrue present day power and capital. Like religion, modern political economies offer their own forensics of the future, with quantitative speculation and risk management central to relationships of exchange and capital accumulation. Interest rates, insurance policies, demographic projections, and patent laws join millenarian prophets and fortune tellers in accumulating power and capital through speculation about the future. With research spanning divination patents, national insurance benefits, eugenicist economic models, and Christian nationalist infrastructures along the U.S.-Mexico border, roundtable participants examine the social function of future(s) at the intersection of religion and economy in modern life.