S arah R uth H ammond . God’s Businessmen

With her 2010 Yale University dissertation, the late Sarah Ruth Hammond was a pioneering figure in the since rapidly expanded field of inquiry that looks into the potent interpenetration of conservative evangelicalism and American business. It is much to the credit of Darren Dochuk that he chose to edit and update her book manuscript based on that dissertation, and to the credit of the University of Chicago Press that they then moved forward with publishing it. The resulting book is a major achievement that breaks significant new ground even in a field that has developed much since Hammond’s untimely passing. Beautifully written and eminently accessible, God’s Businessmen constitutes a solid and important contribution to the literature in the field that should be read carefully by students of religion, business, and public policy alike. Two core propositions cohere the analysis, both of them eminently reasonable, cogently argued, and comprehensively documented. First, Hammond endorses and brings new evidence to bear on the recent narratives by others about a “long Christian Right.” The politicization of U.S. evangelicalism, she argues, was not some latter-day “shotgun wedding” (6) somehow imposed on reluctant participants by the libertarian ideologues of the Reagan Revolution. Rather, evangelical politics of morality have gone hand in hand with the politics of free enterprise at least since the 1920s, both of them grounded in an overarching sensibility characteristic of evangelical heartland America.

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