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To Serve God and Wal-Mart

Date: November 23, 2009

Time: 12:00 PM

220 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor
New York NY 10001

LIVE WEBCAST

Demos, Interfaith Worker Justice, and The Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Research are proud to host a Demos Forum with author and award-winning historian Bethany Moreton on her landmark new book, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Join us for a discussion with Moreton and bestselling author and religion scholar Jeff Sharlet about the populist roots and evangelical culture of the Wal-Mart empire. Lew Daly, Director of the Fellows Program at Demos and author of the upcoming God's Economy: Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State, will moderate.

In the decades after World War II, evangelical Christianity nourished America's devotion to free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. The history of Wal-Mart uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and free-market activists. Through the stories of people linked by the world's largest corporation, this extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart's world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization

Copies of To Serve God and Wal-Mart will be available for sale at the forum. Moreton has assigned all royalties and subsidiary earnings from the book to Interfaith Worker Justice.

About the Author:

 

Bethany Moreton is a Professor of History and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia. In addition to To Serve God an Wal-mart, she is the author of publications and articles on globalization, conservative Christianity, and the feminization of work in the service economy. Previously, she was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Moreton holds the 2009 Emerging Scholar's Prize from the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. Her areas of interest include the history of capitalism, the twentieth-century cultural and religious history of the United States, and transnational history.

 

Respondent:

Jeff Sharlet is a contributing editor for Harper's and Rolling Stone and the bestselling author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. His other books include Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible,  Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, and the forthcoming What They Wanted: Lives of Despair and Desire. Sharlet is a co-founder of the award-winning online literary magazine KillingTheBuddha.com and a visiting research scholar at New York University's Center for Religion and Media. He is also the founding editor of TheRevealer.org, a review of religion and the press. He writes for Salon, The Nation, New Statesman, The New Republic, and Oxford American, among other publications, and frequently comments on religion, politics, and media for MSNBC, NPR, and Air America.

A live webcast of the forum will be available at www.demos.org.

To register for this event, click here or contact Jinny Khanduja at jkhanduja@demos.org or 212.389.1399.

With: Lew Daly

Tags: Religion

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