To Serve God and Wal-Mart by Bethany Moreton
In the decades after World War II, evangelical Christianity nourished America's devotion to free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. The history of Wal-Mart uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and free-market activists. Through the stories of people linked by the world's largest corporation, Bethany Moreton shows how a Christian service ethos powered capitalism at home and abroad. While industrial America was built by and for the urban North, rural Southerners comprised much of the labor, management, and consumers in the postwar service sector that raised the Sun Belt to national influence. These newcomers to the economic stage put down the plough to take up the bar-code scanner without ever passing through the assembly line. Industrial culture had been urban, modernist, sometimes radical, often Catholic and Jewish, and self-consciously international. Post-industrial culture, in contrast, spoke of Jesus with a drawl and of unions with a sneer, sang about Momma and the flag, and preached salvation in this world and the next. This extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart's world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization.
If you want to reach the Christian population on Sunday, you do it from the church pulpitIf you want to reach them on Saturday, you do it in Wal-Mart. - Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition, 1995
Bethany Moreton is Assistant Professor of History and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780674033221 |
| ISBN 10 | 0674033221 |
| Title | To Serve God and Wal-Mart |
| Author | Bethany Moreton |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Harvard University Press |
| Year published | 2009-05-01 |
| Number of pages | 392 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |