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Leigh E. Schmidt, Bethany Moreton. To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2009. Pp. 372. $27.95, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Page 870, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.870
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Extract
Bethany Moreton offers a business history of Wal-Mart and its half-century rise from Sam Walton's small discount chain to a massive global corporation; even more, she offers a social, cultural, and religious history of Wal-Mart Country, the company's natal environs of northwest Arkansas, southern Missouri, and eastern Oklahoma. It is charged political terrain—this place where Wal-Mart shoppers, employees, and managers join evangelical homemakers, preachers, and missionaries in a gospel of service and free enterprise. Moreton strides across that Sun Belt landscape of untrammeled entrepreneurialism and white evangelicalism with unusual balance and daring. She succeeds admirably in walking the fine line of critical understanding, never succumbing to condescension toward the Wal-Mart faithful, but never allowing the contradictions—particularly the doublespeak about the liberal state—to stand without demystification. Throughout the book Moreton effectively probes that deeply etched incongruity, “the Sun Belt's signature combination of government subsidy and antigovernment politics” (p. 31).
From the beginnings of the Wal-Mart saga, Moreton discerns the dense interplay of corporate and Christian boosterism. One of the company's first big investors was the Texas tycoon Jesse H. Jones, who had found salvation through the revival preacher John Brown. Jones, in turn, supported Brown's efforts to start a Bible college in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, in the same county that Wal-Mart would eventually call home. With Jones as trustee and financial backer, the school made a place for itself in the network of Christian colleges, but it found new security and prominence through hitching its wagon to Wal-Mart's star in the 1980s and 1990s. The Bible college effectively turned itself into John Brown University, replete with a Christian management and business leadership institute named for the center's chief patron and “Executive in Residence,” Wal-Mart senior vice chairman Don Soderquist (p. 163). Cultivating a snug relationship among Christian education, conservative free enterprise, and corporate staffing became a staple of Sun Belt economic growth. Tyson Foods, for example, joined Wal-Mart in cultivating such connections.
