title: It's Not Business, It's Personal: Implicit Religion in the Corporate Personhood Debate.
abstract: Debate surrounding the United States Supreme Court's 2010 decision inCitizens United v. FECis 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 ofmisidentification 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 but it also illuminates the implicit religious underpinnings of American political discourse.
authors: University of Texas at Austin.
authors: David
authors: D
authors: McClendon