Guest Book Review: To Serve God and Wal-Mart, by Bethany Moreton

Thanks to our good friend Jonathan Rees for submitting this new book review of Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God And Wal-Mart. Dr. Rees is an Associate Professor of History at Colorado State University - Pueblo, and a contributor to one of our favorite blogs, Writing on the Wal.

Wal-Mart watchers are blessed with particularly interesting reading material these days.  Nelson Lichtenstein’s history of the company, Retail Revolution, will be coming out in July.  As it’s coming from a major trade press, that book will be difficult to miss.  On the other hand, Bethany Moreton’s scholarly study of Wal-Mart, religion and politics (already released from Harvard University Press) will probably have to be sought after by readers in parts of the country without an academic bookstore.  That’s a shame, because anybody who is interested in the cultural rather than just the economic significance of Wal-Mart needs to buy this book immediately.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart has more in common with Thomas Frank’s now-classic study of conservatism, What’s the Matter With Kansas?, than it does with any other book about Wal-Mart written to this date.  Like Frank, Moreton’s objective is to explain how it’s possible for evangelical Christians to serve God and Mammon at the same time.  While Frank’s answer was widely construed as condescending to evangelicals, Moreton treats the creation of Christian capitalism with the utmost respect, using the success of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. over the last 50-odd years as a kind of case study in how religion and materialism can live side-by-side in the United States, especially in the American South.  As she writes in her prologue in a direct slap at Frank, “Family values are an indispensable element of the global service economy, not a distraction from it.”

Moreton supports this argument by taking readers through the parallel development of Walmart and modern religious conservatism.  Like Lichtenstein, she anchors her argument with a discussion of the anti-chain store movement of the 1930s.  While it is tempting to see parallels between then and now, Moreton manages to explain how a store like Wal-Mart could become a vehicle rather than the object of Populist rage left over from the 1890s.  In a particularly eye-opening section of the book, she traces the roots of the free-enterprise propaganda that has somehow made it possible to equate shopping with freedom.  Even though this kind of consumer education effort didn’t start with Wal-Mart, the link here is that this ideology made it possible for Wal-Mart to grow to its mammoth size of today without raising red flags.  To people like me who encounter ideologically motivated pro-Wal-Mart comments nearly every day, it is easy to recognize the great extent to which these efforts that began in the 1950s still bear fruit. 

Moreton is also the first writer I have ever encountered who has made any sense of Wal-Mart and the Walton family’s numerous political activities.  While there is some mention of the company’s slow-growing lobbying efforts, there is a much longer discussion of Wal-Mart’s relationship with business programs at universities near the company’s Bentonville headquarters, especially religious schools, and even the group Students in Free Enterprise.  By funding college programs, the company helped create today’s political conservatives while they were young.  More importantly, Moreton argues that Wal-Mart fostered these relationships as a kind of minor league for its many managers in order to find the kind of people who would be predisposed to believe that selling unnecessary plastic items is somehow the Lord’s work.  In Moreton’s view, nothing Wal-Mart does is an accident.  While it would be quite a stretch to suggest that she is pro-Wal-Mart, she has certainly written a book that takes the company seriously as both an economic and a cultural force.  She is a student of Wal-Mart in the best sense of the word because she wants to know what Wal-Mart tells us about our world in general rather than just about our shopping habits.

Reading Moreton, it is impossible to escape the now-clichéd idea that Wal-Mart is not the same company today as it was when Mr. Sam was alive.  “When Ozark veterans of Wal-Mart’s early years speak of their working lives,” she writes, “one phrase recurs with startling regularity:  ‘I loved working at Wal-Mart,’ they say emphatically.  ‘It was like a family.’” Her use of the word “startling” here strongly implies that Wal-Mart is not like a family any more.  If there is anything missing from Moreton’s book it would be a satisfying explanation as to when and why this change happened.  As a professional historian, it is only natural that she can make the past come alive.  Yet by choosing a topic that is so close to the present, Moreton carries some responsibility to bring her story all the way up to the present day.  While she tries to do so in parts, there is little continuity to these efforts.  The result is a fascinating narrative about Wal-Mart’s early history and the political developments that helped make the company prosper, but very little of the kind of contemporary analysis that gave Charles Fishman’s The Wal-Mart Effect an audience well beyond the business section of local book stores.

It has been said that the past is a foreign country.  This is especially true for most of us when that past comes out of Arkansas.  Moreton has done a brilliant job providing a roadmap for navigating the cultural and economic developments that made today’s Wal-Mart possible and linking it to broader trends in recent American history.  However, to understand how Wal-Mart operates today and how it will continue to change in the future, all of us Wal-Mart watchers will have to wait for new entries in the growing library of books about America’s largest retailer. 

Posted by Jonathan Rees on Tuesday, July 07, 2009

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