It usually surprises people to learn that corporations in the United States are legally regarded as individual persons, what Bethany Moreton calls “immortal supercitizens.” If a latter-day Geppetto were to grant actual personhood to Wal-Mart, that “person” would not have Pinocchio’s lovable personality. Hardly. Dr. Moreton suggests that Wal-mart as a real person would be a sociopath in real need of some time on a psychiatrist’s couch. Wal-Mart the person is a conscienceless manipulator, an opportunist of the vilest order, an abuser with a tendency to use anything or anyone, only to discard them once used. And this “person” operates behind the deception of a friendly façade and a warm greeting. Put simply: Wal-Mart as a corporate person is an asshole.

To be sure, Bethany Moreton, assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia, nuances her analysis of the world’s largest corporation. Her first book, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, 2009), relies on a staggering amount of research and a precise eye to tell the story of Wal-Mart’s rise.

Government, Yuk!

Moreton provides both a bird’s eye view of the corporation’s history and the in-store perspective of a great many interviewed employees. Her wide-lensed analysis includes in its focus aspects as divergent as the sleepy Ozarks of the early 20th century, the turbulent Latin America of the late 20th century and the network of conservative free market fundamentalists who dutifully prepared the way for Wal-Mart’s meteoric rise.

Wal-Mart’s opportunism has taken a number of forms. Moreton begins her analysis by describing how Wal-Mart was, in its more fragile early years, the glad beneficiary of the comforts of a government-subsidized growth economy. She returns to the early 20th century to chart the growth of an American economy powered by state encouragement, a Keynesian model that came to be generally standardized by the post-War period. But once Wal-Mart and its corporate contemporaries found their stride, they quickly forgot their humble beginnings and shunned their former friend, the government. In effect, Wal-Mart helped to kick away the ladder, so that businesses started in their wake would not receive the same encouragement they had in their own formative years.

Mom and Pop

Moreton points out that in its stores, Wal-Mart used existing relationships in the home, namely the male-female power structure, to great success. She explains that “Wal-Mart wanted the yeoman’s wife as both a customer and an employee. To get her, it had to model itself on her family relationships.” Stores came to resemble large families (which many employees genuinely appreciated, as Moreton’s interviews suggest) in which the woman’s place in the home was analogized as a lesser paid, harder working floor salesperson. Wal-Mart was discovering an important lesson for 20th-century corporations: industrial, commodity-producing labor was not the only way to make money. The immaterial, affective labor of the mother and housewife could also be harnessed for profit. Moreton’s particular expertise in gender politics (she also teaches and researches women’s studies) sheds a helpful light on this integral aspect of Wal-Mart’s early success. But just as the government policies that helped the corporation’s growth were rejected, the workers’ families who built Wal-Mart’s empire were never offered even the most basic thanks in the form of living wages, health care or the right to bargain collectively.

Jesus, Too

After the government and the family had been used and more or less discarded, Wal-Mart found American Christianity a useful vehicle for profit. Accompanying the rightist religious revival of the 1970s came a revised notion of Christian servitude, one which wove notions of the market, Christian values and wistful patriotism into a dense amalgam to formulate a new mode of devotion: the “servant-leader.” Moreton describes the usefulness of the servant-leader for corporate structures like Wal-Mart: “What disappeared in this formula [of servant-leadership], of course, was any notion of authority or ownership… rather, one’s position of power within a system became de facto evidence of service, with no reference to the external structures that determined the distribution of power.”

The new mentality defanged the classic American skepticism—when not downright antagonism—toward big business. The servant-leader became one whose self-worth and, yes, even metaphysical fate, could be gauged by his devotion to the profitability of a multi-national corporation. That model echoes the aristocratic systems of Europe, where participants served their superiors in a hierarchy, at the top of which sat the divine king. The entire hierarchical order, with God’s chosen on top, grew to associate fidelity to one’s earthly master with devotion to the God of the heavens. In both cases, of course, the vast majority are relegated to a peasant status.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart can be seen as a case study, a scrutiny of the all-too-familiar larger phenomenon, that strange conflation of metaphysics and economics, where the Dow Jones average moves in mysterious increments according to unknown and unknowable vagaries, and the individual is sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit. Is this how a merciful God distributes His favor? Or could it be that religion is being used in that old familiar way, to legitimize exploitation otherwise abhorrent?

Matthew Pulver