Book Review: To Serve God and Walmart by Bethany Moreton

Introduction and Overview

Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, 2009) provides an illuminating account of Walmart's corporate history and its swift climb, within fifty years, from a modest discount retail chain opened by Sam Walton to an international retailing giant. Moreton goes beyond readers' expectations to include the religious, social, and cultural history of "Walmart Country" — a politically charged region encompassing eastern Oklahoma, northwestern Arkansas, and southern 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 crafted 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, she effectively integrates cultural history and economic assessment, providing readers with a picture of the broader nation. In doing so, she explicitly clarifies the relationship between contemporary American business, governance, and religion. The book is an in-depth report on the mainstreaming of free-market and evangelical doctrines, and will help readers comprehend how the company won America's hearts and wallets.

The Central Theme and Rural Origins

What accounts for the rise of modern consumerism's leading entity in the Arkansan Ozark Mountains, situated so far from America's industrial cities, financial hubs, and established transportation networks? Prior to Walmart, this region was hardly considered fertile ground for a modern corporate giant. Moreton studies the advantages Walmart's rural Southern setting presented and how its managers cleverly exploited them.

This well-researched work on Walmart's ideological underpinnings identifies the chief driving force as the enduring urban-rural divide that the company's shareholders successfully leveraged. They ultimately entrenched the idea that shopping at a Walmart outlet would allow its rural customers to rebuff the godless, urban secular values — and the companies and banks that had long dominated rural communities. The retailer's successful incorporation of the Southern Republican states' inhabitants also provided Republican politicians with a model for building a revanchist alliance of free marketers, Christian social conservatives, and elites.

The Subtle Influence of Christianity

According to Moreton, Walmart needed rural agrarian wives to become its permanent customers. To achieve this, it mirrored its corporate structure on the small family farms of the Southern states, thereby evoking familiar familial values. It sought to make these homemakers both employees and clients by modeling itself on rural family relationships. As a result, Walmart cultivated a tier of submissive, altruistic women who worked hard and served a largely male leadership from an almost ingrained sense of personal obligation.

Moreton draws from a highly publicized class action lawsuit against Walmart — centering on the company's dearth of female managers — to argue that the company essentially established a patriarchy, with founder Sam Walton as the benevolent patriarch. It re-presented retailing as a proving ground for conventional masculinity. While orthodox Christians reiterated that women belong at home, Walmart positioned itself as their ideological ally, sidelining women in the workplace while extolling their contributions to "servant leadership" — in practice, uncompensated domestic service.

Moreton argues that this cooperation with conservative advocates was combined with a highly publicized effort to raise capital at the local level and an intensive campaign to support secondary education for local citizens. These strategies helped the retailer overcome lingering regional resistance to consumerism and retail chains. It persevered in preserving the disappearing traditional American values of altruistic Christian domesticity.

The author presents a compelling account, though it is not without idiosyncrasies. For instance, Moreton's classification of Arkansas as a "Sun Belt" area seems like a stretch, apparently an attempt to link Walmart's growth to broader demographic changes and the explosive growth in the nation's "Sand States." Throughout, the author employs a carefully substantiated but selective narrative; readers may occasionally find certain anecdotes suspiciously well-chosen, given the many incidents, company events, and management interviews available to her. It is difficult to determine whether some cited anecdotes are representative or hand-picked. More broadly, the book's firm focus on ideological factors — while failing to sufficiently account for the harsh numerical realities of economies of scale — produces a slightly myopic image of the company's overall growth.