According to Daniel Vaca, assistant professor of religious studies at Brown University, the unnamed evangelical book executive was joking when he said, “Don't you know? ‘Evangelicalism’ is just a marketing slogan” (12). The rest of Vaca's engaging and thought-provoking book, however, demonstrates that the executive was not kidding. Evangelicalism, in this rendering, is not a global religious movement that originated in the First Great Awakening, a theological identity inscribed by a famed quadrilateral, or a subculture defined and fueled by opposition to the American mainstream. Here, evangelicalism is instead a “common consciousness [cultivated] through commercial endeavor” (12). Evangelical publics emerge wherever evangelical products—especially books—are sold.

Evangelicals Incorporated helpfully adds to the ongoing scholarly effort to define evangelicalism, but the primary conversation it engages is the business turn in American religious history. Vaca contributed a chapter to the edited volume by that title (Oxford University Press, 2017) and continues its vein of bringing business practices to the surface, examining them historically to see what influence they exerted on social processes while also asking, in a more religious studies mode, how business concepts function as religious concepts. Chronologically, Vaca takes the relay baton from Timothy E. W. Gloege, whose Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (University of North Carolina, 2015) limned the earlier history of marketing slogan evangelicalism.

Although Vaca's subject is Zondervan, a Christian book publisher based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he spends little time on book content and almost none on reader response. In other words, Vaca's book is located up the supply chain from Erin A. Smith's What Would Jesus Read? Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America (University of North Carolina, 2015). Instead of published pages or participant observation of a reading group, his main sources include business records, marketing plans, correspondence between executives, and goldmine interviews with employees. Vaca is not particularly interested in whatever theological or cultural vision Zondervan's big-name authors (such as Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, Hal Lindsey, Oliver North, and Rick Warren) were communicating. He attends to the invisible hands that packaged those visions, financed their production, and brought them to market via door-to-door sales, Bible conferences, catalogs, chain bookstores, or the internet.

Zondervan is an excellent subject for this study. The company emerged from a family squabble in bookish and overwhelmingly white western Michigan. Peter “Pat” Zondervan worked for his uncle, publisher William Eerdmans, until shady practices (including pocketing the profits of book sales) got him fired. He founded his own rival company in 1931 and, a few years later, beat out his uncle at a praying contest to land Sunday as an author. The go-getting, occasionally corner-cutting company continued to grow until it was tripped up by SEC violations in the mid-1980s. It became an acquisition target, bought by HarperCollins in 1988, and subsequently placed under the umbrella of Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp. Vaca's book, then, tracks one white evangelical institution from the era of fundamentalist firebrands to the era of Fox News, an effective path for tracing the history of white American evangelicalism as a whole.

Whiteness is central to Vaca's story. Zondervan's roots lay in the Dutch Reformed tradition, the same tradition that undergirded apartheid in South Africa. When the company attempted to shed its Dutch identity for an identity as a transdenominational purveyor of “distinctive” books, whiteness persisted in terms of both demographics and ideology. Zondervan's white staffers sold books by white authors to white customers, normalizing the assumptions of white, middle-class culture at every stage.

Although Zondervan was sometimes successful in marketing books by nonwhite authors to its white customer base, Vaca recounts, it never cultivated much of a nonwhite audience nor ever tried very hard. Sales wisdom followed “Church Growth” missiologist Donald McGavran's advice that “people like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers” (196). Readers wanted their Christian books comfortably to reflect themselves. “By treating commercialism as the means by which they defined evangelicalism,” Vaca explains, “evangelical media companies perpetuated homogeneity that they might have theoretically and theologically opposed” (211). Marketing logic did not have to conform to biblical principles. It just had to sell books, which then became the lenses through which readers saw the Bible, preventing alternate views from breaking through.

It might seem from this description that Vaca's project is to unmask Christian bookselling as mere profit-seeking: all business and no ministry. Vaca's take is more subtle, however. Alongside his subjects, he asks, why can't it be both? When female schoolteachers spent their summers selling Christian literature door-to-door, were they not, as the employment ads called them, “book missionaries” (128)? Couldn't the “field ripe unto harvest” be simultaneously full of potential customers and converts? Mightn't the conglomerates (like NewsCorp) that bought up Christian publishers around the end of the twentieth century represent, as an executive at Baker Publishing put it, “God's hand investing in this category” (173)? While some observers would call these assessments, particularly the last one, self-serving delusions, Vaca writes, “I offer ‘faith’ as a more empathetic way of describing evangelical efforts to navigate the contradictions of financial capitalism” (188). This, to Vaca, lies at the heart of what evangelicals do: they “continually have authorized new social practices and priorities through the ongoing creation of sacred tradition” (162). The real delusion would be to see theirs as an old-time religion.

Vaca's goal in framing business decisions as acts of faith is not only to extend empathy but to expand the scope of religious analysis to include artifacts of modern life, such as trade associations and vertical integration. These topics are not covered in most religious historians’ graduate courses, but Vaca demonstrates that, at least for the study of evangelicalism—“the commercial religion of our time” (234)—they are at least as salient as the theological and ecclesial topics that are covered instead. To the sociologists’ trinity of belief, behavior, and belonging, then, add business and branding. You can neither have nor understand religion without them.