Book Review of Bethany Moreton’s “To serve God and Walmart

Bethany Moreton's "To serve God and Walmart: The making of Christian free enterprise." (Harvard University Press, 2009)

Author Bethany Moreton's work provides an insight into Walmart's corporate history and its swift climb, within 50 years, from a little discount retail chain opened up by Sam Walton to an international retailing giant. The author goes beyond readers' expectations to include Walmart Country's religious, social, and cultural history (the term 'Walmart Country' would refer to its politically charged birthplace and surroundings of East Oklahoma, north-western Arkansas, and south Missouri). It is a place where the retailer's customers, supervisors and staff collaborate with missionaries, evangelical housewives, and pastors, within a doctrine of free enterprise and community service.

Moreton has penned an in-depth and captivating analysis of the popular global retail giant, America's largest private-sector employer, and the largest global public company. Through an elaborate case study, the author has effectively assimilated its cultural history and economic assessment into the book, providing readers with a picture of the overall nation. By so doing, she has explicitly clarified the relationship between contemporary American business, governance, and religion. The book is an indepth report on free market and evangelical doctrines' mainstreaming, and will help readers comprehend how the company won America's hearts and wallets.

The Central Theme

What is the reason behind the rise of modern consumerism's leading entity in the Arkansan Ozark Mountains situated so far from America's industrial cities, financial hubs, and age-old transportation hubs? After all, prior to Walmart, this region was hardly considered to be the birthplace of a modern corporate giant. Moreton studies the advantages Walmart's rural south setting presented, for its managers to cleverly take advantage of.

This well-researched work addressing Walmart's ideological underpinnings considers the chief force to be the ageless urban-rural divide that company shareholders successfully leveraged, eventually entrenching the idea that shopping at a Walmart outlet would allow its bitter rural customers to rebuff the godless, urban secular notions and the companies and banks that, for long, domineered over rural citizens. The retailer's successful incorporation of the Southern Republican States' inhabitants provided Republican politicians a model to help improve its revanchist alliance of free marketers, Christian social right-wingers, racists, and elites.

The Subtle Influence of Christianity

According to the book's author, Walmart had to ensure rural agrarian wives would become its permanent customers; in as much, it needed to mirror its corporate structure to that of Southern states' tiny family farms, thus successfully calling to mind familial values. It wished for these homemakers to become its employees as well as clients, through modeling itself on rural family relationships. Hence, Walmart developed an echelon of submissive, altruistic females who toiled hard and served a largely male leadership from an intrinsic, almost-genetically acquired sense of personal obligation. The author concludes from a highly publicized class suit against Walmart for its lack of female managers that the company essentially established a patriarchy (with its founder Sam Walton being the angelic headman), re-presenting retailing as the proving field for conventional traditional masculinity. While orthodox Christians concentrated their efforts on reiterating that women belong at home, Walmart established itself as the effective ideological ally, side-lining females at workplaces whilst extolling their contributions to "servant leadership" (i.e., uncompensated domestic service).

The author writes that such cooperation with conservative advocates combined with, according to her detailed description, a highly publicized attempt at acquiring capital at the local level and, subsequently, an intensive attempt at supporting secondary education for local citizens aided the retailer in overcoming the remaining regional opposition to consumerism and retail chains in general. It persevered to preserve the disappearing traditional American principles of altruistic Christian domesticity. The author presents a rather compelling account, although a few idiosyncrasies do accompany it. For instance, it appears strange that Moreton calls Arkansas a "Sun Belt" area, which is a stretch, apparently endeavoring to link Walmart's growth to changes in demography, and the explosive growth in the nation's "Sand States." Throughout, the author has made use of a carefully substantiated, selective description to create a narrative; however, readers may find it suspiciously appropriate on occasion, given the many incidents, company events, and management interviews accessible to the author. It is not easy to ascertain if a few anecdotes cited in the book are predictable or personally selected. on a more general note, concentrating firmly on ideological aspects and failing to recognize the harsh numerical ofeconomies scale the retailer was able to produce against competition, provides an overall slightly-myopic image of the company's growth.

The Argument

According to New York Times Book Review's Robert Frank, economists have, for long, realized the pull of flexi-work to a few employee groups. However, To serve God and Walmart's author goes further to provide newer observations regarding Walmart's lure. For instance, she expounds that Walmart reminded the masses of fundamentalist Christian philosophies adopted by numerous members of the company's workforce for cultivating a work climate that prompted them to be content with trivial benefits and meager wages. The author asserts that Sam Walton's management team was quick to realize the economic benefits of incorporating certain aspects of Ozark fundamentalist beliefs into the company's business strategy. The book explains why staff members readily accepted the company's very Spartan compensation package.

Nevertheless, one effective aspect readers will note is the author's account of a parallel growth of contemporary Christian conservatism and Walmart. The book tracks the origins of free-enterprise movements that enabled society to liken shopping to freedom, forging the relationship that this philosophy helped the retailer expand to mammoth proportions unchecked. The book is intriguingly-timed; the author, by consistently calling big businesses "immortal super-citizens," especially emphasizes the political authority enjoyed by Walmart and other multinationals.

Moreton hypothesizes that the retailer expanded to its current position owing to its ability to ride the "conservative economic policy" wave in its expansion endeavors and employ the "Christian enterprise" concept to hire people who perceived economic service to be their calling. Of late, the company has witnessed much negative media scrutiny with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision of female workers' right to pursue a class action gender discrimination suit against the retail chain. Despite Walmart's status on the global scene, one must not forget the fact that it is essentially a product of rural Ozark. It is worth noting that the retailer is considered synonymous with Americanism's religious fundamentalist and traditionalist version, which advocates free enterprise whilst simultaneously rejecting labor laws and unions. Although the retail chain might have, arguably, been the birthplace of the concept of 'big box' retailing or, at least, may have perfected it, not much indication as to how Target and other retailers succeeded without such doctrines is presented. The book has a profound rural theme; the author could have focused more on the unique challenges urban values present. For instance, the company signed its local workers for advertising activities. A more comprehensive examination of this point, as well as of the company's utilization of client demographic profiles and product categories is required. Further, just like fast-food giant, Mcdonalds, Walmart is usually embroiled in antagonistic or spiteful zoning debates, and how can one reconcile this with Christian principles? How is one supposed to justify the quandary of the closure of innumerable Christian bookstores, partly because of their inability to keep up with competition posed by Walmart? Moreton's work will undoubtedly open up avenues for further research; for instance, it would be a great idea to make the author's work more complex and scrutinize Whole Foods and other such companies for explaining the impact of liberal doctrines on corporate models.

Use of Religion

Bethany Moreton's initial idea was not penning a religious book on how the Ozarks successfully gave birth to the world's biggest economic giant. Instead, her research directed her instantly to orthodox Christian females who form not only the mainstay of the company's workforce but also America's biggest Protestant evangelical segment. Using Weber's Protestant work code, the author demonstrates how these traditionalist Christian females' faith assisted them in molding the novel service economy, by offering the philosophy and drive that gave meaning to their work. Christian females' faith made the "Christian service" motif endure for the junior-level employees of Walmart. This strong grassroots dogma ultimately converted the prominent business power and proprietorship metaphors into a "servant leader" doctrine that effectively combined economic trends with evangelical ones.

With the family shopping task falling to rural women, consumer demand brought an ever-greater array of Christian merchandise into Walmart outlets, together with a number of extensively recounted merchandise purges which effectively spot-cleaned the abovementioned product zone for literalist Protestant Christians (Assemblies of God, Southern Baptist, and Church of Christ followers). The novel capacity of Christian buyers to perceive their purchasing behaviour as the procurement of good, healthy merchandise for the entire family (instead of a waste of funds on unneeded, sensual personal fashion and entertainment) instantly matched the wider focus on religion-defined familial values well; this, to some extent, meant anti-abortion, anti-pornography, anti-sensual, anti-gay, and anti-violence entertainment, etc.

The author feels it is no simple coincidence that the entertainment-focused mega-churches that made light of strict codes to support servant-guided ministerial models and relationships began surfacing throughout the region at the time of Walmart's growth, where Christian employees glorified their customer relationships, considering their jobs to be Christian service. The corporation took advantage of the region's conservative family principles and made males the corporate leaders on borrowed status, whilst the females remained clients' and corporate leaders' 'servants'. Hence, the retailer's workforce structure suited the structure of Ozark community and its beliefs well. Nevertheless, ultimately, the males learnt and glorified the Walmart female employees' servant ethos. The author has depicted calls from Christian media (including pulpits, James Dobson's "Focus on the Family," etc.) which demanded that husbands extol their wives' domestic roles and consider their own patriarch role as a service-leadership role rather than one of power or mastery as a consequence of the characteristically female service economy of America.

Influence of American Capitalism

The author has scripted a convincing argument on the established relationships between the nation's capitalism and orthodox evangelicalism.

The book's latter half shifts focus from outlets to the part the retailer played in the broader political context -- of a conservative justification to advocate for a nation that supports capitalism and to spread a worldwide message that combined free enterprise and liberty. The distinctive historical events, which led to withdrawal of funding for regional and Christian educational institutions gave Walmart a chance to step up and offer them financial aid in return for the establishment of meaningful partnerships. This Walmart-educational sector alliance implied that higher education institutions would disproportionately approve of free enterprise, brainwashing pupils, in the process, via the fictitious "entrepreneur" instruction, placing a general emphasis on entrepreneurial functions that stress corporate ethics and character development marketed for practicality. Such free-enterprise pupils would make up a capitalist market's labor force as well as reproduce, on campuses across the world, the very same teaching, thereby catalyzing the dissemination of capitalism. Business schools consequently became political arenas rather than centers aimed at earnest academic research, further propelling the large-scale, nationwide creative conservative campaign.

While Moreton adopts much more restraint and understanding as compared to Frank (What's the Matter with Kansas?), she nevertheless affords readers a negative perspective of conservative Christianity, labeling it the main device that reinforces injustice. The gender-based discrimination which allowed Sam Walton and team to take advantage of the South's females whilst ensuring their cultural sensibilities weren't offended, is related to evangelical complementarianism -- an aspect of American Protestantism's large constituency. Further, the author has depicted evangelicals as trusting and narrow-minded individuals. The very individuals persecuted by the capitalist Leviathan stood as its most fervent advocates and disseminated free enterprise orthodoxy via their institutions, happily choosing even against personal material interests whenever discussions arose of same-sex marriages or abortions. The business homage for Walmart's lowest-level employees (performing "Christian service") was hypocrisy concealed behind evangelicalism.

Relation with Karl Marx Ideals

A majority of early religious and class-based social scientific analyses employ the social models put forward by Max Weber, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, etc. The three social scientists' studies demonstrate religion alternatively reflecting societal class authority, providing meaning and reinforcing diverse classes' economic activities, or offering diverse classes a way to champion personal societal interests. Marx has typically engaged in a community-level analysis of class and religion. His early ideology's legacy for subsequent scholars in the field was: setting the religion's theoretical framework as a societal institution which could both dispute and support or class structure.

Unlike social movement and labor researchers, Moreton (and other religious historians) trace how Christian evangelicalism influenced the novel service economy's advent and the free market capitalist movement in America and elsewhere across the globe. Religious analyses under modern international capitalism's history demonstrate the complex means by which an evangelicalism-based Christian philosophy developed the practical and conceptual groundwork facilitating corporate elites' success in a novel world economy, whilst simultaneously minimizing workforce resistance.

Relation with Emile Durkheim

The marketplace of recent history, which was widely enchanted with wealth and riches, actually proved to benefit Pentecostal and Evangelic Churches. A relevant ground-breaking research is Moreton's Walmart analysis and her study of the retail chain's origins in Western Southern and Arkansan radical evangelicalism. The author's work represents an outstanding organizational history that inspects the company's half-century-long growth from the initial modest discount outlet to its current mega-store status, and proves Arkansan and Missourian evangelical entrepreneurialism produced a free enterprise, gender, philanthropy, and labor movement ultimately defining the nation's Sunbelt South. From this region's unrestrictive zone was born an ideology which justified a pro-familial, post-industrial, conservative political and economic approach which transformed America and, subsequently, the rest of the world.

Arriving at faith- and modernism-linked intricacies from diverse perspectives, the author acknowledges that the direct declension accounts linked to Emile Durkheim's (and other social scientists') secularization theories do not adequately explain modern American complexities adequately. Instead of a direct religious weakening, recent U.S. history has seen incredible adjustment and resilience by both groups of modernists (non-religious and religious, secular and sacred). Although secular authority spheres (e.g., science and government) have sometimes been differentiated and fashioned from the once-dominant spheres of religious influence, an emphatic religiosity (e.g., religious discourses of achievement, wellbeing, and affluence) has, at other times, maintained custodianship over the quotidian routines of American society and their ultimate dreams. That is, secularization is not a preordained or guaranteed aspect of contemporary America; rather, it is a sporadically- and haphazardly- realized contingency.

Understandings and Take-Away

The converse of ideological standpoints, the American "Wal-Marting" phenomenon offers a harsh understanding of the fact that counter-hegemonic factors do not act alone in altering the links of education with other key societal institutions. The author highlights how neoconservatives as well as neoliberals, propelled by capitalist interests, have applied measurement and educational accountability in strengthening as well as furthering the corporate elite's influential structures. Those who wish for societal transformation must go beyond research and reporting.

Although the author has created an interesting narrative, her discussion on Walmart's contribution to fostering free-enterprise thinking among higher education institutions is no surprising fact, and emphasizing the importance of this effort serves to undercut her more cohesive notions regarding Walmart's religion-gender integration into business strategy. In spite of the profound details, it still appears unlikely that the company needed to offer scholarships and co-opt higher educational institutions for succeeding. Unlike its attempts at Christianizing retail employment and the shopping experience, the aforementioned educational ploys appear to be unimportant image- and public relations-building activities, common to all large business.

Nevertheless, the former half of Moreton's work is a fascinating and stimulating reading that complicates all simplistic perspectives regarding the American enthusiasm with regard to Walmart, despite its meagre wages, anti-union attitudes, bleak exurban-life model, and evisceration of small towns.

Conclusion

The author has presented a highly detailed, readable account of the economic and cultural developments that contributed to Walmart's growth, relating to more wide-ranging trends in the nation's recent history. Thus, the book may prove beneficial in various disciplines, including politics, women's studies and economics. The author has adopted rare daring and balance when traversing the Sun Belt setting of white evangelicalism and free entrepreneurialism. She successfully and admirably treads the delicate line of analytical understanding, taking care never to reveal any contempt towards those faithful to the firm, whilst also not allowing any contradictions (especially the ambiguous talk regarding free state) to go unexplained.

It is expected that readers will, in the end, feel outraged after becoming aware of the retailer's injustices in the name of religion, just the way they would after reading about the Spaniards' American conquest, and associated brutalities and slavery. While the book demonstrates religious influence over economics, the author's portrayal and the extent of religious power is alarming. The author's claims portray evangelical Protestantism American and fundamentalism as wicked forms of Christianity, except, probably, when making persecution appear ostensibly rewarding and tolerable. Religion contributes to broadening the divide between the privileged and underprivileged classes of society. One can internalize the author's stand as an examination of the hazards of adopting Christian doctrine for serving personal agendas. One can now see seemingly-religious philosophies for justifying all vices including greed, Jihad and sexism.

The author's work on the retail giant's enormous role in influencing contemporary America covers the history of discount, self-service, and chain outlets; Sam Walton's biography; the culture, geography, and economic characteristics of Walmart's birthplace; the links of family life with shopping and being employed at the company; the company's distinctive workforce culture model; the company's associations with Christianity and free enterprise; the shareholders' attempts at influencing the outside world, economies, and America; and the numerous forms of reciprocal government-Walmart relationships (together with the aims those relationships served to achieve). Using all the aforementioned descriptions and justifications, the author has created a less benevolent and far more ominous image of the actions and aims of the largest global corporation than many individuals, even the company's most active critics, ever imagined.