Reviews in American History

American evangelicals have long had a complicated relationship with the market. At the end of the nineteenth century, populist evangelical politician William Jennings Bryan railed against the injustices of the rich, and in the 1930s evangelical preachers encouraged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to go farther in redistributing the nation's wealth. At the same time, other evangelicals enjoyed a cozier relationship with capitalism. In the early twentieth century, evangelical revivalist Billy Sunday welcomed contributions from John D. Rockefeller, and at the end of the century, Christian Right activists campaigned for tax cuts for the rich. Faced with the complexity of evangelical economic views, most historians of modern evangelical politics have avoided a discussion of commerce, preferring instead to explain the Christian Right as a product of the culture wars, racial attitudes, the growth of the Sunbelt, or the Cold War—anything, it seems, except economics. Yet recent histories of secular conservatism have demonstrated the centrality of corporations and global economic trends in shaping the modern American Right.¹ Now historians are beginning to apply a similar analysis to evangelical politics, [End Page 175] demonstrating that an analysis of consumer behavior and of the patterns of the market offers new insight into evangelical political culture.

Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise examines the evangelical version of capitalism that Sam Walton's company pioneered and argues that the corporation's use of religious values to sanctify low-wage, service-sector jobs shaped modern evangelical political culture by enlisting born-again Christians in support of a globalized, service-based economy. The Ozarks region of northwestern Arkansas, the center of an anti-chain-store movement in the early twentieth century, was a surprising birthplace for the world's largest corporation. But Walton found a way to channel Arkansans' religiosity and cultural politics into a successful enterprise.

Walton was not an evangelical; instead, he was a member of a mainline Presbyterian church, and his wife was a donor to Planned Parenthood who supported abortion rights. He had no wish at first to make his company a haven for conservative evangelical religion and politics. But he recognized that Christian values sold well in the suburban Sunbelt, so he adopted an evangelical image for his company, beginning with the marketing of "family values." As socially conservative evangelicals of the Sunbelt recoiled from the leftward shift in national mores in the late 1960s and 1970s, Wal-Mart offered them a safe haven from feminism, youth rebellion, and the sexual revolution.

Walton's company proved especially adept at profiting from socially conservative gender norms. Even in its early years, Wal-Mart hired a mostly female workforce, but women were mainly confined to low-wage, part-time positions, while men took most of the managerial posts. Wal-Mart rarely encountered complaints of sexism, though, because many of the women that it hired were rural evangelicals who were used to acquiescing to male leadership. By subjecting male managers to long work hours and frequent job transfers, the company made corporate leadership positions unappealing to women with family responsibilities.

But if Wal-Mart's evangelical culture was partly a product of Walton's economic calculations, it was equally a product of the churchgoing women who shopped and worked at Wal-Mart and who wanted to buy "Christian" products. Wal-Mart did not begin selling Christian books until the early 1990s, but...