Daniel Vaca, an assistant professor of religious studies at Brown University, here adds his voice to the growing number of scholars attempting to dissect the historical relationship between religion and capitalism in American culture. Vaca focuses primarily on the evangelical publishing industry from the late nineteenth century through contemporary times. He constructs a more radical argument than most scholars, claiming that commercialism did far more than merely contribute to a commodified conservative Christianity. Rather, in his view, “industries have helped generate evangelical demand, evangelical identities, and the very idea of a coherent evangelical population” (p. 2). The marketplace effectively created and shaped evangelicalism as a distinctive religious tradition, transcending the influence of specific theological, geographical, or denominational factors. Publishers played a particularly prominent role in this process, cultivating an evangelical textual community that consumed the same literature, engaged in solitary reading as a sacred activity, and demonstrated religious commitment through the purchase of authoritative texts sanctioned by reliable firms and celebrity authors.

Vaca credits Fleming H. Revell, the brother-in-law of renowned evangelist Dwight L. Moody, with inaugurating an important transformation in religious publishing when he founded his firm in 1870. Revell drew on Moody's popularity and broad ecumenical appeal to create a commercial enterprise that superseded denominational boundaries, legitimized both individual evangelists and such doctrines as dispensational premillennialism, and coalesced a broad community of middle-class urban Protestants around the purchase of reliable religious texts. The company's desire to achieve commercial viability by catering to a mass market led it to eschew controversial topics and embrace a bland and inoffensive Christianity that reinforced contemporary class and gender norms. It thus provided a therapeutic alternative to the uncertainty and conflict that characterized Gilded Age America. Revell, for example, turned down Charles Sheldon's manuscript that ultimately became In His Steps (1896)—a best-selling classic that popularized the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?”—owing to its social criticism and populist critique of capitalist culture.

Subsequent chapters illustrate the ways in which other evangelical publishers embraced contemporary capitalist theories to solidify their companies, in the process birthing and nurturing a commercial religiosity that came to define evangelicalism. The William B. Eerdmans Company, for example, shrewdly transformed itself from a small firm that catered to Dutch Calvinist immigrants in western Michigan into a leading evangelical publisher by the 1930s. This development owed much to the way in which Eerdmans branded itself as a pious and intellectually scrupulous organization that championed its own distinctiveness, drawing readers into an expanding fundamentalist network. It became an important gatekeeper for orthodox fundamentalist literature, aligning itself with such organizations as the Winona Lake Bible Conference in order to achieve its mission. Zondervan, another leading publisher established in 1931, followed suit. By the 1950s, conservative Protestants had established such trade associations as the Christian Booksellers Association to coordinate activities, develop common strategies for creating differentiated products, and strengthen the connections between publishers and retailers. Eventually, new sales techniques emerged that again transformed the evangelical brand. Early twentieth-century booksellers relied on evangelical women who went door to door on missionary-style journeys to introduce reliable moral literature into Christian homes. By the 1960s, self-service bookstores that mimicked such institutions as the Piggly Wiggly supermarket chain emerged in cities, offering the illusion of choice to primarily female consumers. Women purchased products that further sanctified their domestic spheres. In the 1970s, Christian bookstores became fixtures in suburban shopping malls, signaling the ways in which evangelicals became a friendly and comfortable presence within largely white and economically homogenous communities.

Perhaps the most compelling section of the book explores how publishers embraced common corporate financial strategies from the 1960s through the early 2000s to grow their ministries and remain financially viable. Beginning in the 1960s, a series of horizontal mergers occurred within the industry that allowed publishers to expand the scale and scope of their products while broadening their theological focus. By the 1970s, vertical mergers had transformed evangelical publishers into conglomerates that diversified into such fields as Christian music, radio broadcasting, and family bookstores. Zondervan ultimately became a public company, which created conflicts with shareholders, tensions when short-term profitability conflicted with long-term goals, and unfriendly takeover attempts. Eventually, all of these companies embraced the notion of market segmentation as a key strategy for commercial expansion and economic viability. Scientific survey research undergirded their efforts. They especially cultivated such powerful evangelical constituencies as the New Christian Right, becoming more ideologically conservative in outlook. Perhaps not surprisingly, virtually all of these firms eventually became subsumed into Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Corporation empire through its HarperCollins subsidiary.

Vaca bases his provocative book on solid archival research, laudably exploiting corporate archives from the Baker Publishing Group, William B. Eerdmans, and Zondervan as well as collections that reside at established evangelical academic repositories. His thesis will not convince readers who place greater stock in theological belief systems and who view religious activity as a transcendent force that can shape as well as reflect socioeconomic systems. It also remains unclear whether his argument uniquely explains evangelicalism or applies equally to other religious traditions. Vaca implies that commercial capitalism contains transformative implications for all worship traditions, but evangelicalism after all constitutes one small corner of that universe. One wonders how his argument might stand up when explaining Mormonism, for example, that most uniquely American of all religions. Further, American evangelicalism historically developed within a global religious context. Did commercial capitalism also define evangelicalism in such places as Great Britain, Canada, and Australia? Regardless of how readers view its theoretical stance and universal applicability, though, Evangelicals Incorporated certainly constitutes the most thoughtful meditation available on the ways in which publishers at least helped to create a coherent evangelical culture.