The Institute for the Humanities is delighted to present a talk by Bethany Moreton, the winner of its second Emerging Scholars Prize in the Humanities. Selected as the result of a national/international search for nominations through the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes membership, Bethany Moreton holds a 2006 PhD in history from Yale, and is currently Assistant Professor of History and Woman's Studies at the University of Georgia.

For more than a generation, the conservative counterrevolution in America blurred the distinction between the invisible hand of the market and the all-powerful hand of God. In the "culture wars" narrative of the Republican ascendancy, this slippage represents the greatest con in recent history. "What's the matter with Kansas?," asked the Left in frustration; why do those people in the pews keep enabling a political order that eats them for lunch? Couldn't they figure out that "family values" were a skimpy fig-leaf for an economic vision that would make Darwin blush? Weren't Jerry Falwell and Milton Friedman really rather strange bedfellows, at the end of the day? The rise of Wal-Mart suggests another interpretation of this apparent contradiction, one in which family values are not a distraction from the global economy but rather a necessary element of it.