Reading and Book Signing with Darren Grem at Square Books

Square Books will host a reading and signing reception with Dr. Darren E. Grem, Assistant Professor of History and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, on Friday, June 10 at 5pm at Off Square Books on the Oxford Courthouse Square. Dr. Grem’s new book is The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity.

In the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History and at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Dr. Grem teaches courses in twentieth-century U.S. history, southern history and southern studies, southern music history, American religious history, and modern U.S. politics and culture.

The Oxford University Press website on the book:

The Book of Matthew cautions readers that “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” But for at least a century conservative American Protestants have been trying to prove that adage wrong. In The Blessings of Business, Darren E. Grem argues that while preachers, activists, and politicians have all helped spread the gospel, American evangelicalism owes its enduring strength in a large part to private enterprise.

Grem argues for a new history of American evangelicalism, demonstrating how its adherents strategically used corporate America–its leaders, businesses, money, ideas, and values–to advance their religious, cultural, and political movement. Beginning before the First World War, conservative evangelicals were able to use businessmen and business methods to retain and expand their public influence in a secularizing, diversifying, and liberalizing age. In the process they became beholden to pro-business stances on matters of theology, race, gender, taxation, trade, and the state, transforming evangelicalism itself into as much of an economic movement as a religious one.

The Blessings of Business tells the story of unlikely partnerships between well-known champions of the evangelical movement such as Billy Graham and largely forgotten businessmen like Herbert Taylor, J. Howard Pew, and R.G. LeTourneau. Grem also shows how evangelicals set up their own pro-business organizations and linked the quarterly and yearly growth of “Christian” businesses to their social, religious, and political aspirations. Fascinating and provocative, The Blessings of Business uncovers the strong ties that conservative Christians have forged between the Almighty and the almighty dollar.