In 1922, Sinclair Lewis published a biting satire about a businessman named Babbitt, whose life was trapped in the material obsessions, class conformities, and religious hypocrisies of the day. Around the same time, real-life Christian businessmen R. G. LeTourneau and Herbert J. Taylor were busy coordinating an evangelical movement that could sell their gospel of corporate capitalism to a society they feared lost to secularity. Unlike Babbitt, LeTourneau and Taylor wore their religious sincerity on their sleeves and rejected the conformities of their day in order to start a revolution. That revolution is the focus of Darren Grem's stellar book, The Blessings of Business.

In tracking corporate evangelicalism's empowerment, Grem joins a burgeoning field of study in Christianity and capitalism, but his well-crafted text is critically important in its own right. Several interventions stand out. The range of Grem's story is in itself impressive. After opening with a brief prehistory of corporate evangelicalism in the late nineteenth century, Grem moves through the critical stage of its development in the 1930s and 1940s, when executives such as LeTourneau, head of his own land-moving equipment company, and Taylor, CEO of Club Aluminum Products, exercised authority as wealthy laymen to mold their church culture in their image. Together they forged business associations and helped found the National Association of Evangelicals, funded corporate-friendly preachers like Billy Graham, and popularized their message of Christian free enterprise. The second half of the book charts these ambitions between the 1950s and 1980s, when rags-to-riches, Bible-believing entrepreneurs like S. Truett Cathy (Chick-fil-A), William B. Walton (Holiday Inn), and David Green (Hobby Lobby) extended corporate evangelicalism into all sectors of suburban consumption via “culture industries,” such as Bible bookstores and Christian music, and in defense of “God's familial contract” into the heart of the Reagan-era culture wars (pp. 166, 216). Here Grem extends his purview in additional directions. Crossing regional lines, he makes a forceful argument for why and how the revolution he describes was not restricted to the Sunbelt, the focus of most recent histories of evangelicalism. Grem insists “corporate centers in the North, such as Chicago, and the Southwest, such as southern California, mattered as well, and often mattered more” (p. 4). This is a curious insistence considering most case studies in the second half of his text remain southern based, but it is a useful corrective nevertheless.

The analytical breadth of Grem's work is just as notable. Corporations and churches do not stand alone in this tale; the state is also a key actor. Grem ably shows how the state enabled corporate evangelicals by providing their philanthropies tax breaks and passing measures like Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing religious discrimination in the workplace, which ultimately allowed them “to bring their religious beliefs to bear on workplace cultures, both in large corporations and in thousands of smaller businesses” (p. 6). Although evangelicals often derided it, Washington, it turns out, frequently acted as their best friend. Grem's account is layered with other significance. Shunning tidy categorization, he reveals how an inherent pragmatism in corporate evangelicalism facilitated theological wiggle room. While some businessmen of LeTourneau's ilk remained fundamentalist in doctrine, others, such as Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, “blended positive thinking with Christian revivalism, whooping it up for corporate free enterprise” (p. 6). Gathered from many different ends of the evangelical spectrum, corporate evangelicals nevertheless banded together as an ecumenical front when it came time to marketing a conservative political gospel.

To his credit, Grem also resists simplistic readings of corporate evangelicalism's progressions as a steady ascent, culminating in Reagan's election. While the book follows that trajectory, it also pauses to assess the contingencies that allowed some enterprises to flourish (Chick-fil-A) and others to flounder (Jim Bakker's Heritage USA) and to evaluate the true influence of his subject's initiatives. “Though they aimed for broad local influence,” Grem writes, “evangelicals’ work through private means . . . often reaffirmed their parochialism” (p. 7). By the end of the twentieth century, he offers in his concluding section, corporate evangelicals had managed to “secure billions of dollars for their movement,” “[fix] themselves to corporations large and small,” and win “a perennial place in American politics”; yet by other measures, they remained “surprisingly insular, diffuse, and limited” (p. 7). Grem's is a responsible history that avoids teleological or conspiratorial tones and instead deftly portrays a dynamic movement whose progressions unfolded in fits and starts, with no clear or predestined end in sight.

The Blessings of Business is, in short, a strikingly comprehensive synthesis, brilliant in its combination of sweeping and probing analysis. Through its weighty but accessible prose, readers learn how the corporate sector and conservative evangelicalism constantly reconstituted each other in the modern era and constructed a politics that reflected their shared wishes. Fortunately for other emerging scholars in the field, it also leaves room for fresh departures and next steps, some made necessary by the latest developments in Washington. Although his scrutiny of the dominant racial (white) and gendered (masculine) compositions of his subjects hits the right mark, it remains for other historians to pull other vital constituents into the heart of the story: black entrepreneurial and prosperity-gospel evangelicals, for instance, who have long been key to the Republican Party's agenda, and enterprising evangelical women whose prowess in social media has made them vital players in the market and in politics. That both of these constituencies deserve attention, President Donald Trump would concur. And although Grem's is an exhaustive study of boardrooms, pulpits, and pews, it remains tethered to a binary in the literature that divides business and labor, and their functions of faith, into two separate parts, to be studied by two separate schools. Students of Christianity and capitalism would do well to start writing their histories in more holistic terms, with corporate Christian enterprises (be they factories or fast-food restaurants, bookstores or beauty shops) rendered in ecological terms, as milieus in which business and labor, practices of work and faith, must be assessed together. The challenge, in other words, is for other scholars to build on the foundation Grem so eloquently provides.