Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Assistant Professor of History and Women's Studies, University of Georgia, Athens, GA
Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and the History of Christianity Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, 2010-2011 
Area of Research: History of capitalism, the twentieth-century cultural and religious history of the United States, and transnational history 
Education: Ph.D. 2006, (M.A., M. Phil.) U.S. History, Yale University
Dissertation: "The Soul of the Service Economy: Wal-Mart and the Making of Christian Free Enterprise, 1929-1994," under the direction of Glenda E. Gilmore. 
Major Publications: Moreton is the author of Book: To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, May 2009). Winner, Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians, April, 2010.  
Moreton is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: 
"Why Is There So Much Sex in Christian Conservatism and Why Do So Few Historians Care Anything about It?" Journal of Southern History 75th anniversary issue, v. 75, no. 3 (August, 2009); "Make Payroll, Not War: Business Culture as Youth Culture," in Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); "The Soul of the Service Economy: Wal-Mart and the Making of Christian Free Enterprise, 1929-1994," Enterprise & Society 8:4 (December, 2007); "The Soul of Neoliberalism," Social Text v. 25, no. 3 92 (Fall 2007), pp. 103-123; co-authored with Pamela Voekel: "Vaya con Dios: Religion and the Transnational History of the Americas," History Compass, Summer 2007; "It Came from Bentonville: The Agrarian Origins of Wal-Mart Culture" in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism(New Press, 2005). 
Moreton is currently working on the tentively titled manuscript "Spiritual Development: Neoliberalism and Transnational Religion". 
Awards: Moreton is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Emerging Scholar's Prize Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan, April, 2009; 
Junior Faculty Fellowship Willson Center for the Humanities, University of Georgia, for fall semester 2009; 
Visiting Scholar Fellowship American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2006-2007; 
Charlotte F. Newcombe Fellowship Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 2005-2006; 
Dissertation Fellowship for the Study of American Religion Louisville Institute, 2004-2005; 
Program on Philanthropy and the Non-Profit Sector Fellowship Social Science Research Council, 2004; 
Program on the Corporation as a Social Institution Fellowship Social Science Research Council, 2003; 
Myrna F. Bernath Fellowship Award Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, 2003; 
Dissertation Research Grant Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2003; 
Coca-Cola World Fund at Yale Summer Travel Grant Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2003; 
Mellon Research Seminar Fellowship in Women's and Gender History Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, 2002. 

Personal Anecdote

My first act of research for To Serve God and Wal-Mart was shoveling fossilized chicken droppings out of a defunct coop on a goat farm in Northwest Arkansas. The farm's owners, friends of my favorite agrarian Jim Scott, evidently took my willingness to pick up a shovel as a character reference, and lost no time making me feel at home in Wal-Mart's backyard. Since we have no Freedom of Information Act for the state-supported institutions we somewhat inaccurately call private corporations, the research could only go so far by relying on formal archives. It was only through the generosity of my hosts in the Ozarks-the original Wal-Mart Country--that I was able to learn to explore how "Wal-Martism" might fill the conceptual hole in the middle of "post-Fordism." If the Detroit auto industry had set the pattern for the first half of the twentieth century-in spatial organization, labor arrangements, finance, family formation, ideology, immigration, art-then surely its successor was a likely site for understanding major developments of the post-war years.

When Wal-Mart beat out Exxon-Mobil to become the world's largest company in 2002, what we knew that the first service company to make it to the top of the Fortune 400 was what astute business journalists like Bob Ortega had been telling us since the early 1990s: Wal-Mart had remade retail by achieving such market dominance that it could dictate its terms to the suppliers rather than the other way around. At the fringes of this narrative were the voices of historic preservationists and organized labor, finally roused by the Arkansas company's disruptive penetration of Vermont, Chicago, and Southern California. The reigning questions about the new top multinational were often variations on "Wow--how did Wal-Mart do it?" or "Is Wal-Mart good for America?"

While my 2002 dissertation prospectus referenced this literature, though, it also included chapter proposals that ultimately allowed me to explore a question I found much more interesting, the one that Thomas Frank revived from the original Populist mobilization: "What's the matter with Kansas?" -understood now as "Why have Americans on the losing end of the deregulated, off-shored service economy enabled it politically for more than a generation?" To Serve God and Wal-Mart is therefore not so much a book about Wal-Mart as an account of the anointing of free enterprise, the unlikely legitimation of neoliberal economics through evangelical religion. It tells this story through the twinned biographies of the world's largest company and the ideological apparatus it nurtured. It argues that this specific experience of mass service work transformed economic common sense and infused it with evangelical values at precisely the moment that federal redistribution catapulted the Sun Belt to its position of decisive influence within the nation. That moment of waxing power for the old agricultural periphery coincided with American-led economic integration, so that the ethos of Christian free enterprise-the odd pairing of Jerry Falwell and Milton Friedman, so to speak-gave late twentieth-century globalization some of its most distinctive characteristics. Ultimately I join writers like Janet Jakobsen, Ann Pellegrini, Lisa Duggan, Tanya Erzen, and Linda Kintz in arguing that the Left's frustration with the "culture wars" misreads the necessary connection between conservative sexual mores and the post-1973 economy that Wal-Mart ultimately dominated. 

That I got to learn about this complex relationship while living in the Ozarks, knee-deep in chicken droppings, was my good fortune.

Quotes

By Bethany Moreton

"For the emerging Wal-Mart constituency, 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. Ultimately, they helped shape American-led globalization itself. The postindustrial society grew from a specific regional history an the heritage of Populism. It was built in the aisles and break rooms of Southern discount stores, in small-group Bible study and vast Sunday-morning worship services. It spread through the marketing classes and mission trips of Christian colleges, through student business clubs and service projects. Although free-market economic theories captured the hearts and minds of elite policymakers in the later twentieth century, the animatig spirit of Christian free enterprise shaped the outcome. The Wal-Mart Moms understood better than their critics: Family values are an indispensable element of the global service economy, not a distraction from it." -- Bethany Moreton in "To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009)

About Bethany Moreton