To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

Publisher: Harvard University Press (September 7, 2010) | ISBN: 0674057406 | 392 pages | PDF | 5,7 Mb
The world's largest corporation has grown to prominence in America's Sun Belt—the relatively recent seat of American radical agrarian populism—and amid a feverish antagonism to corporate monopoly. In the spirit of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? historian Moreton unearths the roots of the seeming anomaly of corporate populism, in a timely and penetrating analysis that situates the rise of Wal-Mart in a postwar confluence of forces, from federal redistribution of capital favoring the rural South and West to the family values symbolized by Sam Walton's largely white, rural, female workforce (the basis of a new economic and ideological niche), the New Christian Right's powerful probusiness and countercultural movement of the 1970s and '80s and its harnessing of electoral power. Giving Max Weber's Protestant ethic something of a late-20th-century update, Moreton shows how this confluence wedded Christianity to the free market. Moreton's erudition and clear prose elucidate much in the area of recent labor and political history, while capturing the centrality of movement cultures in the evolving face of American populism.

Review
This brilliant book could well become one of the most talked about nonfiction books of 2009–certainly among those who helped bring in the Obama era and likely among their opponents as well.
--Nancy MacLean, author of Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace

A fascinating portrait of the interconnections of commerce, spirituality, and government in modern society. Moreton treats Wal-Mart as a great whale of a corporation that gathered religious and political significance as it traveled from Bentonville, Arkansas, throughout the US, on to Mexico, and to every corner of the globe.
--Walter A. Friedman, Harvard Business School

Startlingly original, creatively researched, and forcefully argued, this beautifully written book tells a compelling story about a crucially important player in modern American life.
--Bruce J. Schulman, co-editor of Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s

To Serve God and Wal-Mart is a landmark study. Moreton's subtle blend of economic and cultural history compels us to rethink the history and geography of modern America. Revelations abound on every page.
--Jean-Christophe Agnew, Yale University

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