Why Insurance is a Theological Problem

In the early 2010s, Sydney had a short-lived tabloid named mX. It was the kind of glib news and entertainment outlet that you could read and dispose of within a span of a train-trip, designed to kill time rather than inform or even entertain.

There was one exception however…

A 2011 edition of mX, featured a report concerning the vast sums with which an assortment of celebrities insured their various body parts. Some statistics included Mariah Carey insuring her legs for US$1billion as an accompaniment to an ad campaign by the Gillete razor corporation. Another included Ugly Betty actress America Ferrera, who insured her teeth for US$10 million as part of an ad campaign for a tooth whitening brand. However, the most amusing example of the insurance trend among the glitterati was the story of Tom Jones, who insured his chest hair for US$7million.

Readers of such a report might find this obsession with committing eye-watering sums of money to protect body-parts obscene. For me, however, it was a brilliant case study of how postmodern culture works, but also a case study of its profound theological impact.

More specifically, it was a great example of the workings of what social historians in the tradition Michel Foucault call an “insurational imaginary”. Put simply, this term refers to the further mutation of a culture’s obsession with security, stoked by news reports and infomercials depicting great and small threats to one’s bodily safety (I referred to insurance’s proliferation of risk in an article on abortion for the journal Solidarity).

Where the theological turn begins is when the person, whose horizons are framed by media-induced woe, perceives the world less as a gift from God, and more as an all encompassing series of threats. Everything from riding a bike to standing to look at a bird is an occasion that puts you at the threshold between life and death.

The next theological turn takes place when this obsession with security becomes quantified in monetary terms, as everything tends to be in the age of postmodernity. As the web of worry of threats to one’s body grows, so do the opportunities to leverage those threats into contingencies against which a person can be insured, for the right price. Scholars in the vein of the “insurational imaginary” argue, and the mX article demonstrates, that the body has become the latest object which insurance can leverage as a site of risk to be managed. Where threats arise, insurance steps in to reassure us that the body can be protected. All we need to do is let the business analyse, monetise, and commodify it.

The theological turn here is twofold. First, it converts our posture towards the world when circumstance presses in upon us and expose our presumption of unlimited autonomy. A Christian posture to such circumstances can be treated as an invitation to, as the leader of Communion & Liberation Julian Carron once wrote, “recognise the other [namely God] who is at work” to speak through those circumstances. And insurational imaginary, on the other hand, constantly warns that these circumstances are a final end to our aspirations, and even our very lives.

Secondly, and more subtly, the insurational imaginary converts the switching of metrics in determining the body’s worth. In a theological key, the main source of the underwriting of the body is the doctrine of the Incarnation, which gives value to the body simply because it is a body, which God has infused with immeasurable value by choosing to become an embodied subject and make that embodiment - in all its ethnic, circumstantial, and biological forms - the icon that transmits divinity to the world. In an insurational imaginary, the body is underwritten by a financial metric, which gives value to a body with reference to a series of external attributes. These attributes can be empirical, such as biomechanical ability, or they can be the product of perception (such as beauty and image). Moreover, because the insurational imaginary’s overriding imperative is the management of risk, the body’s worth will come with an upper limit when those attributes are present. When they are no longer present, there will be no floor to the value of that body.

This devaluation of the body is ironic, seeing that the culture of postmodernity that produced this “insurational imaginary” started out by celebrating the body as having its own inherent worth, and its limitless potential for self-actualisation.

The reason for this inversion of the celebration of the body’s worth can be found in a book entitled The Politics of Discipleship by Oxford’s Regius Professor of Divinity, Graham Ward.

The body celebrated in postmodernity, Ward says, is a hollowed out body, celebrated “as mere flesh”. When a body is treated “as mere flesh”, as it is in consumer culture, the body becomes reduced to a blank slate. It becomes stripped of its own meaning and gets turned into a commodity. When this happens, its value can only be discerned when it is augmented with commodities, such as jewellery, clothes or in this case, insurance products.

What compounds the tragedy is that all these commodities also do not designate their own value and only have their value ascribed to them by the corporations that make them. As the body’s value becomes monetised, the body becomes vulnerable to monetary manipulation, subject to the scores of technological augmentation, graphs and blips on a screen.

However, as recent financial crises have demonstrated, even money itself is a commodity. Money has no stable value and it too is subject to the whims of the most powerful commercial interests. The body, therefore, in attaching value to itself only insofar as it attaches itself to commodified baubles, becomes a mere abstraction of international commerce, and the body itself becomes a bauble to be bought, sold and traded.

The subtle transformations of the body “as mere flesh” into a commodity to be consumed calls to mind a reading from the Epistle of James, a sentence of which reads: “Your gold and silver are corroding, and that same corrosion will testify against you, and it will devour your flesh like fire. (5:3)”

The unceasing proliferation of new ways to turn the body into a consumable might tempt a Christian simply to let it happen, allowing the flesh to be devoured, as if the body were so tainted by sin as to be worthy only to be jettisoned to save the soul. It is an understandable temptation, but it is also a form of neo-Gnosticism that has no place in the Church.

What is needed is not a more spiritual spirituality that vacates the body, but a redeemed re-occupation of the flesh. For Ward, the starting point is not to endow more value on the body itself, but find the body’s value from its co-abiding in the Body of Christ, who rose from physical death and ascended into glory both spiritually and corporeally, and who asks us constantly to remain in him as He in us (John 15:4).

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