If the twentieth century was, as one periodical had it, the “Christian Century,” the story of the America's long twentieth century in religion must be the rise of conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity at the expense of the more liberal and social gospel varieties that seemed earlier to reign at its inception. This history has become familiar, but is often structured around religious leaders and controversies—the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, the Scopes trial, the Hocking Report on missions, Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Carter, Jerry Falwell, and so on. To this familiar ground comes Darren Grem with a convincing new emphasis to explain the rise and its character as something more than a case of preachers evangelizing and listeners falling in line, the trope of evangelical historiography for American subjects from the Great Awakening to the present. Grem's book includes religious leaders, to be sure, but his innovation is to focus on the conservative evangelical business elites who, having experienced God's blessings on their business lives, sought to bring private enterprise's bounty and methods to their faith and faith institutions as “Christian businessmen.”

It is traditional to credit wealthy businessmen for their roles in financing the development of American fundamentalism and evangelicalism. Conventionally, however, the ministers and evangelists get the limelight. Grem persuasively demonstrates that business leaders did much more than foot the bill, but rather, having a strong conception of the right way to proclaim and practice Christianity, called the tune. Not surprisingly, the tune sounded a great deal like private-enterprise-centric Christianity. The category of Christian businessman had been around since the businessman's revival of 1857–1858, with Dwight L. Moody fostering the vocational identity of businessmen as Christian leaders in forming a Christian society thereafter, but the rise of the limited liability corporation late in the nineteenth century set the foundation for a new kind of Christian businessman in the twentieth century—the corporate titan used to inventing and innovating on a large scale in business and eager to do the same to improve religion. The most familiar of Grem's subjects are the oilmen, Lyman and Milton Stewart of Union Oil and J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil, who Grem shows, by skillful attention to detail, did not just finance religious men's ideas, but frequently found religious leaders to promote their own ideas and ideals. Grem's book is a model of massing details to advance a case while keeping a narrative going.

In the first half of The Blessings of Business, Grem explores the many ways big business shaped conservative evangelicalism from the 1920s to the 1960s. Men like Herbert J. Taylor, Henry J. Crowell, and R. G. LeTourneau founded and were involved in such ventures as the Christian Business Men's Committee, Church League of America, Youth for Christ, the Navigators, Wycliffe Bible Translators, and Christianity Today. Most of these blended an evangelical purpose with a strong critique of anything that looked like socialism in government, such as the New Deal domestically and certainly communism abroad. They valorized the free enterprise system as the economic system most compatible with Christian liberty and in Billy Graham they found an advocate par excellence. In treating Graham's relations with the businessmen, Grem notes contemporary accounts of how much the evangelist himself projected a businesslike image, quoting one reporter saying: “He looks like a salesman. Tall—six feet two inches. Handsome. Burning eyes. The sure gesture. The right phrase. The firm handclasp. Wherever Billy goes the celestial balance sheet shows a substantial profit” (63). The traditionally problematic God and mammon relationship was not so subtly being revised and Graham could reliably be counted on to decry communism and praise the free enterprise system in every sermon just as much to condemn divorce and marital infidelity.

One of Grem's larger purposes is to push the date back on when corporate capitalism became so involved with conservative evangelicalism from the early 1980s to turn of the twentieth century. In this goal, he joins other historians, such as Kevin Kruse and Matthew Sutton. Yet for religious historians, Grem's account may have the most explanatory purchase to date insofar as Grem also turns in the second part of his book to examine the multitude of ways conservative evangelicalism, once bitten by the corporate bug, began to think of itself more and more as a big business. Some of the business evangelization happened inside corporations, as in the case of Truett Cathy's Chick-fil-A franchises (closed on Sundays) or Max De Pree's practice of “servant leadership” from the helm of the Herman Miller furniture company. While these practitioners of businesses ministry could be anti-union in their “Christian love” of their laborers, the preachers beginning enterprises to service evangelical culture are perhaps more disturbing in Grem's account. These include Jim and Tammy Bakker's “Heritage USA” theme park funded by their televangelism contributions and the rise of Christian booksellers from the 1950s forward, to the point where they sold much more than books by the 1980s. Grem sees Christian retailers as selling “a white, male-led, middle-class evangelical ideal” in “a life of purposeful consumption. To buy was to witness” (176). Add to the books, Christian music, radio, and motivational speakers like Zig Ziglar, who uses what God has done to make one a better salesman, and the circle is made complete.

Thus, in America, the lines between faith and free enterprise, between doing well and doing good, blurred; ministry is supportive of industry (in all senses) and a good business does the Lord's work on at least the other six days of the week besides Sunday. Darren Grem's The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity deserves a wide and appreciative reading both from American religious historians and from inhabitants of the land simply trying to account for abiding anomalies in the relationship between religion and the culture around them.