In To Serve God and Wal-Mart, Bethany Moreton, assistant professor of history and women’s studies at UGA, shows how a Christian service ethos powered capitalism at home and abroad.
In the decades after World War II, evangelical Christianity nourished America’s devotion to free markets, free trade and free enterprise. The history of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, overseas
missionaries and free-market activists.
While industrial America was built by and for the urban North, rural Southerners comprised much of the labor, management and consumers in the postwar service sector that raised the Sun Belt to national influence.
These newcomers to the economic stage put down the plough to take up the bar-code scanner without ever passing through the assembly line. Industrial culture had been urban, modernist, sometimes radical, often Catholic and Jewish and self-consciously international.