To Serve God and Wal-Mart shows how a Christian pro-capitalist social movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down.
For many people in the old agricultural periphery, the book argues, the gospel of free enterprise answered some of their most pressing needs. It compensated for the loss of the yeoman dream of self-sufficiency; it sanctified mass consumption; it raised degraded service labor to the status of a calling; it offered a new basis for family stability and masculine authority even as neoliberalism undermined both; for some whites it eased the dismantling of official white supremacy. The generation that moved from the farm to the store, and their children who filled the marketing classes at Christian colleges, crafted an ideology of Christian free enterprise from their experience of a particular historical moment, a particular geography, and a particular religious heritage. To Serve God and Wal-Mart tells this story, often in the words of the people who experienced it.
Their unlikely blending of free market economics and evangelical religion resolved a contradiction at the core of neoliberalism. Since its only unit of analysis is an autonomous individual seeking his own maximum utility, capitalism cannot provide for the regeneration of the very virtues it depends upon. Market logic renders merely irrational the very concerns we put at the center of our existence—art, justice, love, friendship, democracy, even worship itself. The ideal of Christian service washed commerce in the blood of the lamb.
As much as my own economic ideals differ from the ones Wal-Mart promotes, I came out of this work very hopeful about the potential for common ground. The historical actors imbued with Christian free enterprise were willing to claim economics as a moral issue rather than a technical one. The left has been brow-beaten into timidity about its own tradition of economic justice, trying to deflect the spittle of a Glenn Beck by making small, neutral, technocratic claims where the issues merit real moral courage. The much broader public that pollsters call the “Wal-Mart Moms” agrees with the American majority on key issues—that the minimum wage must be raised, for example, or that health care should be universally available. If we quit dismissing the areas of disagreement as cultural distractions, we might find much to respect in their underlying motives.
