In all honesty, this started out as a sort of vain, self-interested project. Chick-fil-A is tasty--why not write about it? By the time I was working on a graduate thesis, 2012's same-sex marriage controversy was winding down, so even the restaurant's religious/political/capitalist implications were gradually becoming irrelevant. However, since our president-elect's appointment of Carl's Jr. CEO Andy Puzder as Secretary of Labor, it's become clear that fast food--not to mention corporate interests in general--and the ideological skirmishes it represents will remain relevant for at least the next four years.
With thesis chapters on Hobby Lobby and Walmart already underway, I turned to the Oxford Bibliographies to enlighten me on the historiography of fast food. There isn't much, and it's easy to understand why: the labor scandals, geographic patterns, and outright nutritional horrors of fast food are far more attractive to sociologists, cultural geographers, and food scientists than historians, who tend to place singular topics within broader lineages by nature.
There isn't much on faith-based business specifically--but there's plenty on the various climates that gave rise to it. Namely, Michael Kimmage's massive historiography of US conservatism in the twentieth century, which includes several works I've dipped into as I strive to form the environments in which faith-based business CEOs built their legacies.
Zachary Hutchins' bibliography of various resources delineating what exactly constitutes the "Fourth Great Awakening" (my undergraduate adviser referred to it as the "Umpteenth" Great Awakening, which I admittedly prefer) is equally fascinating. Most notably, it doesn't downplay the importance of theologians and religion scholars in writing religious history, both fields that historians tend to tragically overlook.
Finally, if I'm feeling particularly daring, I can turn to anthropologist Jo Littler's impressive list of writings on consumer capitalism, which mostly encompasses very complex theoretical writing. I'll definitely check out Littler's own "Gendering anti-consumerism," which offers a similar ideological take to the one I'm trying to communicate in my own thesis.
As Nanosh said in a previous post, it's easy to get lost in the magnitude of these bibliographies, and I hope I've communicated this awe and confusion in a way that's easy to understand. As I strive to describe faith-based business and the numerous historical, cultural, and political borders it crosses, these bibliographies will provide an invaluable framework.
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