“We are told businesses have souls,” wrote Gilles Deleuze in 1990, “which is surely the most terrifying news in the world.” It is the way in which Deleuze made his case for a particular version of secularization—a mixture of fascination and dread that is a primary affect of Bethany Moreton's new book on the entanglements between postwar Protestantism and the triumph of the service economy. To Serve God and Wal-Mart is a surprising, erudite, and, by all accounts, religious history that draws upon an eclectic array of source material—from internal memos and meeting minutes to popular culture and personal interviews. For what comes through Morton's account is a deep appreciation for Wal-Mart as both a corporate personality and the myriad means by which it sought to incorporate, like a loving father, the personalities of those it served in the second half of the twentieth century. “For the emerging Wal-Mart constituency,” writes Moreton, “faith in God and faith in the market grew in tandem, aided by a generous government and an organized, corporate-funded grassroots movement for Christian free enterprise” (5). In a series of chapters tracing the network of relations that make up the soul of Wal-Mart, Moreton makes a compelling case for how Wal-Mart arose, hand-in-hand, metaphor-by-metaphor, alongside and within the rising political dominance of a pan-denominational evangelicalism.

Moreton's focus is not on the tentacles of something that is essentially Wal-Mart (although founder Sam Walton does play a significant but not determinative role). Rather, Moreton's emphasis is on the centerless network. Nodes include Christian colleges; cultural counter insurgencies against the hippies; neoliberal sentiments functioning as morality among political leaders (from Nixon to Clinton); well-funded pro-business lobbies (who promoted privatization as an antidote to fears over the federal deficit); the infiltration of these lobbies into higher education from the 1970s onward; Students in Free Enterprise and other grassroots efforts to fight communism with the salvific celebrations of consumption; and last but not least, the mediaphilia of evangelicals and their expert embrace of technological innovation.

In both its texture and expanse, To Serve God and Wal-Mart is integral to understanding the seamless shift from Cold War–era nationalism to the neo-liberal embrace of global markets and local service economies. Moreton's book is also the most sweeping response to Thomas Frank's somewhat glib question a few years back in What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan, 2004). After reading Moreton's account of how Wal-Mart rose from the ashes of populism, harnessing human desires even as it created them in its own image, it becomes difficult to frame the tendency of family values voters to vote against their own economic interest as distasteful evidence of false consciousness.

For Moreton portrays Wal-Mart neither as cause nor even ideological effect but as a symbolic logic. In Moreton's rendering Wal-Mart is an institution, an individual allegiance, and the strange and continuous traffic between. “People within the orbit of Wal-Mart,” she writes, “learned to revalue shopping as selfless service to family, and service in turn as a sacred calling. In this context, the salient identity became not citizen-consumer nor worker of the world, but Christian servant” (101). In Moreton's rendering, Wal-Mart functions as a translation machine—remaking the yeoman dream of one's hands on one's own plough into a “new corporate populism” (8) in which each individual achieved the absolute right to save, save, save.

In melding the employees' and shoppers' sense of freedom with the evangelical tradition of sacred service, Wal-Mart was doing what came culturally. That is, it had a therapeutic sense of its base. For Wal-Mart was able to assuage all manner of anomies and fears afflicting its workers and customers (even the ones that it was contributing to)—the anxiety over a dissolving white majority, reasonable paranoia over communist dominance, the discomforts associated with social mobility and, of course, the alienation that the very service economy that Wal-Mart was integral in promoting. For example, in a dazzling series of chapters at the beginning of her book, Moreton details how Wal-Mart was, in part, responsible for the so-called feminization of work that accompanied a burgeoning service economy in the second half of the twentieth century. What working-class women encountered as new vistas of work and agency, men, in turn, experienced as a decrease in status and economic authority. Although such reconfiguration of the workplace may have been a constant source of tension and disruption, Wal-Mart was able to successfully convince both its workers and its customers that such changes aligned with the ideals of a vaguely Protestant family unit. Learning how “to sell service on a mass scale” (66) by tapping into the metaphorical resources of Christian service (as in being a servant for Christ), women were empowered in their choices to shop and serve while the patriarchal province of the nuclear family was preserved in a different but still palpably mythic guise. Wal-Mart, in its efforts to dignify and masculinize the service economy in a new key, was of a piece with evangelicalism's growing preoccupation with and deployment of fatherhood, reproduction, and family values. This interest and political execution was, in hindsight, necessary in the postwar years. For within a service economy, men could not necessarily expect to be the sole breadwinner nor achieve any lasting measure of job security. A new myth was born. For men and women, in roughly equal proportions and in differently desperate times, were mobilized to stand up for Wal-Mart, their family, and their God.

Each of Moreton's chapters chronicles the pastoral power emanating from Wal-Mart—from the adjectival conflation of “Christian” and “family” to the post-colonial cross-border cosmologies of evangelical mission to South and Central America in the 1980s and 1990s. For to read the history of Wal-Mart in this light is to ask what the “church-planting” movement that grew out of Dallas Theological Seminary in 1973 had to do with the kind of universal shopping experience envisioned by Wal-Mart executives. Or perhaps the relationships between the Enterprise USA theme park and the privately funded PBS documentary Free to Choose (1980), with a pumped-up Arnold Schwarzenegger touting the economic policies of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.

The backdrop of such musing, of course, is the awesome and bewildering scope of American-led globalization since World War II. For when the authority of corporate leviathans such as Wal-Mart are packaged and bought as so many opportunities to actualize one's service to God, family, and country, then perhaps the problem is not so much with Kansas but how Americans approach their freedom and salvation as mere variants of one another. This elision puts them at the cutting edge of the secular age. Everything seems to be connected. Amen. And so we rely on scholars like Moreton to address the powers of modernity even as they slip past our current categories of analysis.