Love To Serve God and Wal-Mart? Readers share 100 books like To Serve God and Wal-Mart...

By Bethany Moreton,

Here are 100 books that To Serve God and Wal-Mart fans have personally recommended if you like To Serve God and Wal-Mart. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala

Chad E. Seales Author Of Religion Around Bono: Evangelical Enchantment and Neoliberal Capitalism

From my list on American evangelicalism and neoliberal religion.

Why am I passionate about this?

I've always been fascinated by the ways religion reconciles contradiction. Both of my parents were public school teachers in the panhandle of Florida, and I now work at a public university in Texas, yet the culture in which I was raised, of white evangelicalism, supported economic policies of neoliberalism that defunded public life. My interest in American religion is motivated by the question of why we participate in systems that harm us. This is an economic question, but sufficient answers must address the power of religion to shape what we see as morally good and bad. These books all do that.

Chad's book list on American evangelicalism and neoliberal religion

Chad E. Seales Why did Chad love this book?

No other book better encapsulates the evangelical spirit of neoliberal policies in the details of everyday life, including what it feels like to be arrested in the United States for being part of a gang, and ending up in a call center in Central America, only to be morally shamed for not working hard enough, as your corporate employer leverages the power of religion, and the threat of danger, to keep you trapped there. 

By Kevin Lewis O'Neill,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Secure the Soul as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"I'm not perfect," Mateo confessed, "Nobody is. But I try." Secure the Soul shuttles between the life of Mateo, a born-again, ex-gang member in Guatemala and the gang prevention programs that work so hard to keep him alive. Along the way, this poignantly written ethnography uncovers the Christian underpinnings of Central American security. In the streets of Guatemala City - amid angry lynch mobs, overcrowded prisons, and paramilitary death squads - millions of dollars empower church missions, faith-based programs, and seemingly secular security projects to prevent gang violence through the practice of Christian piety. With Guatemala increasingly defined by both…


Book cover of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

Andrew L. Whitehead Author Of American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church

From my list on Christian Nationalism in the United States.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been fascinated by the relationship between Christianity and the United States for decades. Much of my work in the area of Christian nationalism is the result of my personal religious history and experiences, as well as my work as a social scientist. I’ve always been fascinated by how religion influences and is influenced by its social context. Christian nationalism in the US is a clear example of how influential religious ideologies can be in our social world.

Andrew's book list on Christian Nationalism in the United States

Andrew L. Whitehead Why did Andrew love this book?

Knowing our history is so important, and this is one of the best books on the history of Christian nationalism in the United States during the 20th century.

What becomes so clear is the cultural influences on American Christianity including which voices are lifted up, and which ones are ignored or silenced. Let’s just say you won’t ever look at Billy Graham and his work the same way again.

By Kevin M. Kruse,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked One Nation Under God as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

We're often told that the United States is, was, and always has been a Christian nation. But in One Nation Under God , historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the belief that America is fundamentally and formally Christian originated in the 1930s.To fight the slavery" of FDR's New Deal, businessmen enlisted religious activists in a campaign for freedom under God" that culminated in the election of their ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. The new president revolutionized the role of religion in American politics. He inaugurated new traditions like the National Prayer Breakfast, as Congress added the phrase under God" to…


Book cover of Consuming Religion

Chad E. Seales Author Of Religion Around Bono: Evangelical Enchantment and Neoliberal Capitalism

From my list on American evangelicalism and neoliberal religion.

Why am I passionate about this?

I've always been fascinated by the ways religion reconciles contradiction. Both of my parents were public school teachers in the panhandle of Florida, and I now work at a public university in Texas, yet the culture in which I was raised, of white evangelicalism, supported economic policies of neoliberalism that defunded public life. My interest in American religion is motivated by the question of why we participate in systems that harm us. This is an economic question, but sufficient answers must address the power of religion to shape what we see as morally good and bad. These books all do that.

Chad's book list on American evangelicalism and neoliberal religion

Chad E. Seales Why did Chad love this book?

If you want to understand how corporations and not churches became the most powerful institutions of moral influence in America, capable of taking away an employee's personal choice outside the workplace and denying their access to healthcare based on the owners’ biblical beliefs, legally protected by the U.S. government as a religious freedom, then you need to read this book.

By Kathryn Lofton,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Consuming Religion as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

What are you drawn to like, to watch, or even to binge? What are you free to consume, and what do you become through consumption? These questions of desire and value, Kathryn Lofton argues, are at bottom religious questions. Whether or not you have been inside of a cathedral, a temple, or a seminary, you live in the frame of religion. In eleven essays exploring soap and office cubicles, Britney Spears and the Kardashians, corporate culture and Goldman Sachs, Lofton shows the conceptual levers of religion in thinking about social modes of encounter, use, and longing. Wherever we see people…


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Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

Book cover of Spirituality, Corporate Culture, and American Business: The Neoliberal Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capital

Chad E. Seales Author Of Religion Around Bono: Evangelical Enchantment and Neoliberal Capitalism

From my list on American evangelicalism and neoliberal religion.

Why am I passionate about this?

I've always been fascinated by the ways religion reconciles contradiction. Both of my parents were public school teachers in the panhandle of Florida, and I now work at a public university in Texas, yet the culture in which I was raised, of white evangelicalism, supported economic policies of neoliberalism that defunded public life. My interest in American religion is motivated by the question of why we participate in systems that harm us. This is an economic question, but sufficient answers must address the power of religion to shape what we see as morally good and bad. These books all do that.

Chad's book list on American evangelicalism and neoliberal religion

Chad E. Seales Why did Chad love this book?

Austin, Texas, where I now live, is home to the first Whole Foods in America. Before the chain of grocery stores was bought out by Amazon, I used to shop there. Then I stopped, or well, I no longer went as often, because I learned in LoRusso's book that company founder John Mackey promoted a libertarian spirituality that considered government interference morally hostile and went as far as to proclaim Obama Care a form of fascism. 

By James Dennis Lorusso,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Spirituality, Corporate Culture, and American Business as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

By the early twenty-first century, Americans had embraced a holistic vision of work, that one's job should be imbued with meaning and purpose, that business should serve not only stockholders but also the common good, and that, for many, should attend to the "spiritual" health of individuals and society alike.

While many voices celebrate efforts to introduce "spirituality in the workplace" as a recent innovation that holds the potential to positively transform business and the American workplace, James Dennis LoRusso argues that workplace spirituality is in fact more closely aligned with neoliberal ideologies that serve the interests of private wealth…


Book cover of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

Patricia Ventura Author Of White Power and American Neoliberal Culture

From my list on today’s fascism and resisting it.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been trying to understand people’s politics since I was a kid and wondered why my dad, who had been a boy in Sicily under Mussolini, spoke so fondly of “il Duce”—even though Dad was an otherwise independent thinker who believed in people’s inherent dignity, not to mention a man who was an immigrant and an outsider and thus exactly the kind of person fascists hate. I think this background partially explains why I focus my writing on interpreting the significance and appeal of widespread and, in some cases, morally indefensible and contradictory cultural-political ideologies such as neoliberalism and racism.

Patricia's book list on today’s fascism and resisting it

Patricia Ventura Why did Patricia love this book?

Folks familiar with the term “neoliberalism” usually describe it as the economic system that tries to unleash the market by getting the government out of the way. I like Globalists because it shows how unleashing the market demands that government gets in the way—of workers’ rights, movements for equality, and, most ominously, democracy itself. Since it’s impossible to understand fascism without tackling capitalism, a book explaining how we got to today’s market principles is vital.

I see this book as a history of the neoliberal economists who encouraged political leaders to use state violence and repression to unleash free trade and shape the global economy. Globalists tell the story of how modern capitalism developed into today’s vast landscape of inequality that makes a fertile ground for fascism and violent extremism to develop.

By Quinn Slobodian,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Globalists as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

George Louis Beer Prize Winner
Wallace K. Ferguson Prize Finalist
A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year

"A groundbreaking contribution...Intellectual history at its best."
-Stephen Wertheim, Foreign Affairs

Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. It was a project that changed the world, but was also undermined time and again…


Book cover of Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World

Peter S. Goodman Author Of How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain

From my list on globalization breaks down what happens next.

Why am I passionate about this?

I'm the New York Times' Global Economics Correspondent. Over the course of three decades in journalism, I have reported from more than 40 countries, including a six-year stint in China for the Washington Post and five years in London for the Times. I have ridden with truck drivers from Texas to India, visited factories and warehouses from Argentina to Kenya, and explored ports from Los Angeles to Rotterdam.

Peter's book list on globalization breaks down what happens next

Peter S. Goodman Why did Peter love this book?

Here is a book ahead of its time, a work that anticipated the breakdown in globalization to imagine something else – manufacturing clustered closer to customers and a rejection of the sort of efficiency that does not bother to measure the costs of not being able to find medicines in the midst of a pandemic.

By Rana Foroohar,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Homecoming as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A sweeping case that a new age of economic localization will reunite place and prosperity, putting an end to the last half century of globalization—by one of the preeminent economic journalists writing today

“This invaluable book is as bold in its ambitions as it is readable.”—Ian Bremmer, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Crisis

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Kirkus Reviews

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Thomas Friedman, in The World Is Flat, declared globalization the new economic order. But the reign of globalization as we’ve known it is over, argues Financial…


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Book cover of The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier,

The coaching book that's for all of us, not just coaches.

It's the best-selling book on coaching this century, with 15k+ online reviews. Brené Brown calls it "a classic". Dan Pink said it was "essential".

It is practical, funny, and short, and "unweirds" coaching. Whether you're a parent, a teacher,…

Book cover of The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism

Robert Chernomas Author Of Neoliberal Lives: Work, Politics, Nature, and Health in the Contemporary United States

From my list on class warfare and that the wrong class is winning.

Why am I passionate about this?

Neoliberalism and I have grown up in opposition to one another over the past four decades. As a professor of economics, union, and political activist I have observed, wrote about, and resisted its effects on the life chances of the great majority of its citizens with particular focus on the United States as its primary protagonist and gatekeeper. The opposition to this transformative epoch included writing about the significant contributions of my profession to Neoliberal economics in two previous books; The Profit Doctrine: The Economists of the Neoliberal Era and Economics in the 21st Century: A Critical Perspective.

Robert's book list on class warfare and that the wrong class is winning

Robert Chernomas Why did Robert love this book?

In addition to its excellent coverage of the economics of this transformation, its historical account of the shift in class partnerships makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the period. In the Golden Age of the previous period Big Business maintained a fraught alliance with its unions willing to pay growing wages closely aligned with labor productivity growth with the grudging acceptance of higher taxes and regulations of the Keynesian era leaving small business to fend for itself. Once Japan and Germany reindustrialized creating a more competitive economic landscape Kotz describes the full-blown class warfare identified by Buffet as Big Business realigned with small business to fight for cuts to its wages, taxes, regulatory costs and unions, and progressive politics.

By David M. Kotz,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The financial and economic collapse that began in the United States in 2008 and spread to the rest of the world continues to burden the global economy. David Kotz, who was one of the few academic economists to predict it, argues that the ongoing economic crisis is not simply the aftermath of financial panic and an unusually severe recession but instead is a structural crisis of neoliberal, or free-market, capitalism. Consequently, continuing stagnation cannot be resolved by policy measures alone. It requires major institutional restructuring.

"Kotz's book will reward careful study by everyone interested in the question of
stages in…


Book cover of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era

Vinícius Guilherme Rodrigues Vieira Author Of Shaping Nations and Markets: Identity Capital, Trade, and the Populist Rage

From my list on understanding the transformation of capitalism and globalisation.

Why am I passionate about this?

Since 2008, I have conducted research on themes related to International Political Economy. I am currently the co-chair of the research committee on this topic at the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and am passionate about making sense of the interplay between material and symbolic factors that shape capitalism and globalisation. Being based in Brazil, I was stuck when the country—which did not have salient identity cleavages in politics—came to be, after 2008, a hotspot of religious-based right-wing populism associated with the defence of trade liberalisation as globalisation started to face meaningful backlash from White-majority constituencies who are relatively losers of the post-Cold War order in the advanced industrialised democracies.

Vinícius' book list on understanding the transformation of capitalism and globalisation

Vinícius Guilherme Rodrigues Vieira Why did Vinícius love this book?

I love the way he explores the interplay between economic ideas and political institutions that culminated in the triumph of market forces in the aftermath of the Cold War. Yet, Gerstle’s most interesting insights lie at the end of the book as he classifies Trump and Modi as ethnonationalist leaders of the same feather as China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Globalisation, however, has not necessarily reached its end, as it may simply be reframed to fit a world whose shape has yet to be defined.

By Gary Gerstle,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Best Books of 2022: Financial Times Best Non-Fiction Books of 2022: De Tijd Shortlisted for Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year

The most sweeping account of how neoliberalism came to dominate American politics for nearly a half century before crashing against the forces of Trumpism on the right and a new progressivism on the left.

The epochal shift toward neoliberalism-a web of related policies that, broadly speaking, reduced the footprint of government in society and reassigned economic power to private market forces-that began in the United States and Great Britain in the late 1970s fundamentally changed the world.…


Book cover of The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism

Xenia A. Cherkaev Author Of Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice

From my list on the possibility of collectivist modern life.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am interested in how regimes of ethics and property interrelate, and how this interrelation informs political thought: in questions of cooperatives and collectives, customary use-rights, and household economies. I'm an anthropologist by training and geographically I work in Russia. I've written about socialist property law and stolen late-Soviet penguins, Stalin-era mine-detection dogs and perestroika-era saints, möbius bands, 19th-century Russian cheese-making co-operatives, New World Order theories of “The Golden Billion” and other important matters.

Xenia's book list on the possibility of collectivist modern life

Xenia A. Cherkaev Why did Xenia love this book?

72 people died when the Grenfell Tower burned in 2017, hundreds more lost their homes.

As survivors slept out in London's mosques and churches, one politician suggested requisitioning empty investment properties to house them. But the idea was shot down as a violation of human rights: those of the property owners. Whyte's Morals of the Market opens with this historical anecdote to ask how neoliberalism and human rights discourses evolved together.

Working through published and archival sources, the book shows that neoliberal thinkers “developed their own account of human rights as protections for the market order.” To their authors, such claims were not cynical. They were moral: grounded in a political morality that equated social progress with commercial relations, collectivism with moral failure, socialism with civilizational regression.

As people whose social worlds have been shattered by neoliberal policies increasingly turn to right-wing populism for a new kind of collectivist future,…

By Jessica Whyte,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Morals of the Market as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. In the wake of the Second World War, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to "civilisation". Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a distinctive account of human rights as tools to depoliticise civil society, protect private investments and shape liberal subjects.


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Book cover of Benghazi! A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink

Benghazi! A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink by Ethan Chorin,

Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…

Book cover of Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad

Alanna Cant Author Of The Value of Aesthetics: Oaxacan Woodcarvers in Global Economies of Culture

From my list on people who make things for a living.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a Canadian social anthropologist living in England, and my research is about material culture and heritage in Mexico. I have always been fascinated by the ways that people make their cultures through objects, food, and space; this almost certainly started with my mum who is always making something stitched, knitted, savoury, or sweet, often all at the same time. I hope that you enjoy the books on my list – I chose them as they each have something important to teach us about how our consumption of things affects those who make them, often in profound ways.

Alanna's book list on people who make things for a living

Alanna Cant Why did Alanna love this book?

In Thiefing a Chance, Rebecca Prentice shows us what life is like for women who make clothing in a factory in Trinidad – a livelihood shared by more than 75 million people worldwide, most of them in the Global South. I recommend this book because although Prentice discusses the ways that late-capitalism and neoliberal structural reforms have produced the difficult economic and working conditions that her research participants must cope with, she also shows how the women are not passive subjects in these processes. She documents how they take every opportunity on the factory floor to informally gain skills and to make ‘illicit’ garments out of spare materials, which they can sell outside of work.

However, Prentice resists the temptation to analyze these practices as ‘social resistance,’ and instead shows how such informal practices actually encourage these women to embrace neoliberal identities of competitive, enterprising individuals.

By Rebecca Prentice,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Thiefing a Chance as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When an IMF-backed program of liberalization opened Trinidad’s borders to foreign ready-made apparel, global competition damaged the local industry and unraveled worker entitlements and expectations but also presented new economic opportunities for engaging the “global” market. This fascinating ethnography explores contemporary life in the Signature Fashions garment factory, where the workers attempt to exploit gaps in these new labor configurations through illicit and informal uses of the factory, a practice they colloquially refer to as “thiefing a chance.”

Drawing on fifteen months of fieldwork, author Rebecca Prentice combines a vivid picture of factory life, first-person accounts, and anthropological analysis to…


Book cover of Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala
Book cover of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America
Book cover of Consuming Religion

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Interested in neoliberalism, evangelicalism, and globalization?

Neoliberalism 57 books
Evangelicalism 37 books
Globalization 116 books