To Serve God and Walmart
Here’s another fascinating interview on GRITtv, this time with Bethany Moreton, author of  To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise.
Moreton, in this interview with Laura Flanders, calls her work an answer to Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas. Frank examined the apparent conundrum of working class Kansans voting solidly Republican when their economic interests would clearly be better served by liberal policies.
But Moreton speaks with great respect of the multiplicity of motives, beyond mere economics, driving these voters. Amazingly, she finds Walmart employees who see their work as a kind of Christian service. What distinguishes her work from Frank’s is her remarkable respect for her subjects.
This is an interesting interview about a subject of surprising importance.
One thought on “To Serve God and Walmart”
I can’t think of the last time I learned so much from one book. To Serve God and Wal-Mart is a huge synthetic history of the service economy. She has great material — free enterprise tourist sites, interviews with former Wal-Mart managers and workers, in-depth information on Wal-Mart’s efforts to create allegiances to the free market in Central America–and is an imaginative and strong writer.
I found her description of the book on the Powells website at:
http://www.powells.com/blog/?author=635
I agree with the blogger that while she writes for a coastal audience, she has tremendous respect for the folks she interacted with over many years in Central America and the Ozarks. And she links all of her findings to huge trends in American and global history.