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

[Henk Elegeert]

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*To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise* By Diane
Winston <http://www.religiondispatches.org/authors/dianewinston/>
June 21, 2009

According to a pathbreaking new book, Wal-Mart’s success in reframing
traditional gender roles, bending the curricula of business schools, and
sanctifying working-class consumer capitalism, help explain the connections
between conservative politics, the market economy, and family values.

<http://www.religiondispatches.org/images/managed/Story+Image_walmart2.jpg>
From
the cover of Bethany Moreton's "To Serve God and Wal-Mart."

*To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
By Bethany Moreton
(Harvard University Press, 2009)*

People like us don’t do Wal-Mart. The very name conjures retrograde
rednecks, and the company’s M.O.—its sexism, anti-unionism, low wages,
insufficient health care, foreign product
sourcing<http://www.industryweek.com/articles/foreign_sourcing_of_production_18404.aspx>,
adverse environmental practices, and toxic impact on local businesses—has
made the moniker synonymous with free-market blight. But people like us
sometimes miss the obvious, which is why we’ve been on the losing side of
American politics for 40-plus years. Snookered by the Southern strategy,
reamed by the Reagan revolution, cowed by the Christian Right and whacked by
WMDs, we hope that Barack Obama is the change we can believe in. But we’re
still missing an analysis we can understand. Sadly, without that piece, no
change is secure since progressives need to understand what went wrong; as
well as how and why we’ve been ignorant of and alienated from the main
currents in American life.

Bethany Moreton’s pathbreaking study, *To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making
of Christian Free
Enterprise*<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674033221/ref=s9_simp_gw_s0_p14_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1W92FZ6V47HCJ2JK1Y76&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846>is
an invaluable asset for apprehending how we got here. Her new book
chronicles Wal-Mart’s role in mainstreaming evangelical and free market
values even as it became the world’s largest public corporation and the
nation’s biggest private employer. A critical appraisal of how religion,
politics, and economics were interwoven in post-Vietnam American culture and
society, *To Serve God and Wal-Mart* is also a bracing reminder that we,
among the most materialistic people in the world, have turned a blind eye to
the impact of material conditions on our actions, attitudes, and beliefs.
Simply put, the 2008 election’s voting bloc *du jour*, “Wal-Mart Moms,” are
more than a pundit’s wet dream or Rodeo Drive’s worst nightmare. They are a
significant segment of the American public, a key constituency in shaping
national values, and a harbinger of a global economic order organized around
“Christian service” and “family values.”

*Shop Local, Shop Wal-Mart?*

But long before there were Wal-Mart moms, there was a confluence of people,
place, and possibility that would become Wal-Mart Country. Beginning in the
late nineteenth century, white Christian farmers in Arkansas, Kansas,
Oklahoma, Texas, and Southwest Missouri mounted populist protests against
the encroachment of industrial capitalism. Aligning with the Populist Party,
many of these hardworking rural and small-town folks felt menaced by big
East-coast banks and creeping national corporations. They weren’t opposed to
money, business or success per se; rather, they wanted to ensure that some
of it came their way. Accordingly, they supported federal legislation that
protected the region and its farmers, setting a precedent for using
government funds to aid a “favored segment” of the nation.

By the twentieth century, these yeomen-farmers had a new enemy: national
chains. Viewed as foreign interlopers, the chains threatened to take local
resources and local capital out of the Ozarks and put them into the pockets
of Northern fat cats. In response, farmers and small businessmen began
experimenting with new retail models: stores that were locally owned and
financed, free of unions, and structured as cooperatives. It was in this
hothouse of native chauvinism and economic localism that Wal-Mart was
nurtured. Sam Walton, the company’s founder, was able to build on regional
economic models, populist sensibilities, and social realities when, in 1962,
he opened his first Wal-Mart store in Rogers, Arkansas.

Walton was smart, but he also was lucky. He had a business plan that worked
for its time and place. His stripped-down stores offered heavily discounted
goods, but didn’t stint on hospitality and manners. In fact, Wal-Mart was
the retail reflection of its consumer base: frugal, courteous, and reliable.
The fact that clerks and customers were neighbors and family members only
enhanced the down-home feel. Most of the clerks were local women, happy to
augment the family income with a little extra pay. Bringing their Christian
values into the workplace, they sought to serve others selflessly and
cheerfully. Moreover, as many were already familiar with the religious
concept of male headship, they had no problem taking orders from a male
manager who might be new to the company or many years their junior.
(Managers, for most of Wal-Mart’s history, were not just male, they were
white males.)

Moreton argues that Wal-Mart’s female workers essentially re-envisioned the
relationship between management and labor, substituting the competitive
“male” model that predominated in Northern factories with a family-oriented
female template that was less costly, more malleable, and ultimately able to
safeguard the traditional gender relations (including male authority) so
essential in a period of economic transition. Most important, says Moreton,
it pioneered

“the patriarchal organization of work [that] ranks as a hallmark of the
global economy, from the *maquiladoras* of young Honduran women embroidering
swooshes on shoes to the immigrant-owned family motels and convenience
stores that dot the United States.”

*Their World Looks to Them the Same Way We Would See Ours*

For many shoppers, Wal-Mart also embodied the best aspects of church: a
community of friendly, generous, caring men and women. Some customers,
comparing the store to their congregation, even found the latter wanting.
Wal-Mart epitomized Christian service and, thanks to its homely displays and
low prices, did not hallow the kind of conspicuous consumption common to
many malls, gallerias, and shopping districts across the country. If
anything, Wal-Mart sanctified a sort of stylized frugality, bringing the
religious values of thrift and neighborliness to the fore. In time, the
religious model even caught male managers in its net. The church’s notion of
servant-leadership—which preserved male authority even as wives took jobs
outside the home—also aided Wal-Mart as managers learned to lead through
their commitment to service.

Wal-Mart’s success—both in reframing traditional gender relationships for a
new corporate environment and in sanctifying working-class consumer
capitalism—help explain the connections between conservative politics, the
market economy and family values. But Sam Walton also had a major role in
spreading the gospel of Christian free enterprise, an amalgam that linked
religious principles, government support, and entrepreneurship. Even as
business was becoming the default major on campuses, Walton and his friends
sought to bend the curricula; first toward vocational training, which became
a source for unpaid interns, and then to entrepreneurship, which lionized
the visionary leadership provided by individuals exercising their God-given
autonomy.

The focus on the individual as entrepreneur echoed religious themes that
valorized individuality; particularly the importance of each person’s unique
access to God and responsibility for his own salvation. Not surprisingly,
alongside the teaching of (Christian) service and free enterprise, college
business programs also taught students to be wary of government
encroachments in the form of taxes, regulations, or oversight. But these
same programs gladly took government aid and encouraged students to use
federal funds to further their own professional goals. Government was a
one-way street: the expectation was that it should support entrepreneurship
without expecting anything in return. It was the old Populist notions
reinterpreted by Christian capitalists on steroids.

Walton’s collegiate programs eventually led to foreign exchanges that paved
the way for setting up shop globally. Adding a new dimension to American
evangelism, Christian universities would offer scholarships to
co-religionists from developing nations to attend business programs steeped
in the Wal-Mart philosophy. Graduates would return home to spread the
religious and economic gospel, often rising to become indigenous leaders in
their local Wal-Mart stores.

The program’s political aspects were woven into its religious tenets and
economic policies, both of which supported Christian free enterprise,
traditional values and a gendered workforce. Writes Moreton:

“They [Walton Scholars] perceived their own careers and free-market policies
generally as a form of public service, on the pattern of the Christian
business departments they attended. For its part, Wal-Mart and its suppliers
reaped tangible rewards from this network of skilled graduates. In 2005, the
Bentonville company entered the Central American market, drawing together
existing chains in Costa Rica and Guatemala that had employed Walton
graduates.”

What amazes me is that even as we dreamed of a progressive, cosmopolitan,
egalitarian, and cooperative counterculture, the Waltons of the world
created one that now spans the globe. Equally striking is that their world
looks to them the same way we would see ours: grassroots,
anti-establishment, humane, and compassionate. Moreton’s scholarship and
accessible style make this revelation all the more chilling. Wal-Mart won
the hearts and minds of a generation while we, focused on our own battles,
missed the war. The religious right was a sideshow and the political right a
diversion. Buying and selling was for them, as it has been for us, key to
our hopes, desires, and animating values. That’s the secret of the Wal-Mart
Moms—and perhaps the starting point of our own movement.

*Tags*: free market <http://www.religiondispatches.org/tags/free%20market/>,
wal-mart <http://www.religiondispatches.org/tags/wal-mart/>

"

Henk Elegeert

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