The Aesthetics of Enterprise Evangelical "Edutainment": How Corporate Artists Helped Proselytize Capitalism Across the American Heartland

How do you make capitalism fun again? The administration of Oklahoma Christian College tackled this question head on during the stagflation of the late 1970s. Ever since Thomas Carlye's infamous 1849 essay, in which he argued that slavery should be reintroduced to the West Indies in order to discipline idleness out of the island's formerly enslaved population by compelling them to "do the Maker's will" working long hours for no pay, economics has been known as the "dismal science" (Carlyle, "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question," 1849). Yet, administrators at Oklahoma Christian College hailed from an American tradition that saw the nurturing and correcting hand of God at play within the supposedly universal laws of economics, a tradition I have chronicled at length elsewhere as "enterprise evangelicalism." Enterprise evangelicals are those American Christians who, influenced by early economic theory, attach the invisible hand of the market to the outstretched arm of God's providence in human affairs. Economics was no dismal science, enterprise evangelicals contended; it was a conduit to understanding the activity of God in governing human affairs. Thus, seeking to understand the laws and principles of economics, these Christian leaders insisted, was an important aspect of spiritual formation for responsible American Christians. Yet, by the late 1970s, few American Christians were willing to sign up for lengthy academic seminars promising insights into such a dismal science. The problem then was set: the lessons of economics must be made entertaining and aesthetically pleasing if they were to attract a media savvy American audience. "Edutainment" was the answer. 

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, administrators and Bible faculty at Oklahoma Christian College convened an impressive array of corporate designers, Disney imagineers, Hollywood script writers, and even Muppet-affiliated puppeteers to develop what they argued would be the greatest economics edutainment center in the world: Enterprise Square, USA. Spending more than $15 million dollars on the project, Oklahoma Christian College constructed an educational shrine to capitalism on the most public-facing corner of its campus. The exhibit featured custom built video games teaching players about property rights, cutting edge animatronics, innovative light shows, and even what they claimed was the world's largest working cash register. Visitors to Enterprise Square, it's designers imagined, would not only learn about capitalism, they would fall in love with it. Enterprise Square's designers wanted visitors to not only develop intellectual respect for the august discipline of economics, they wanted their audience to form affective bonds with capitalism, to be enchanted by its creative powers, and to develop an aesthetic preference for dreams of capitalist abundance over the relative paucity of socialist equity.

Walt Disney is rumored to have coined the term “edutainment,” a tongue-in-cheek portmanteau of education and entertainment, sometime in the mid-1950s. What Disney discovered, and what administrators from Oklahoma Christian hoped to capitalize on, was that the affective bonds formed by entertaining someone were much more powerful than the intellectual bonds formed by informing someone. Thus, ensuring that educational content was also entertaining guaranteed a more satisfied and, relatedly, more loyal audience. In examining a contemporary example of edutainment, Answers in Genesis' Ark Experience in Kentucky, anthropologist of religion James Bielo has elucidated this phenomenon as an "aesthetics of persuasion" (Bielo, Ark Encounter, 2018, p. 25). In my paper, I will examine the aesthetic of persuasion at play in Enterprise Square, USA to demonstrate how corporate designers and business friendly artists partnered with enterprise evangelicals to proselytize capitalism to the scores of tourists, school children, and church groups who visited the edutainment center during its two decade run. 

Utilizing Bielo's analysis of how playful aesthetic encounters can engender "plausibility immersion" and drawing on unique archival research undertaken at Oklahoma Christian University, I will guide readers through a tour Enterprise Square, USA and illuminate how a particular group of enterprise evangelicals sought to make capitalism attractive to American Christians. In the paper, I will outline a brief history of Enterprise Square, USA and discuss how studying it's creation helped spark my larger research project outlining a 200 year tradition through which American Christians have actively embraced and promoted capitalism as God's economic will for the nation, a tradition I call "enterprise evangelicalism." Further, I'll explore the concept of "edutainment," understanding it as a kind of aesthetic pedagogy, and I will show how edutainment methods were created and deployed at Enterprise Square, USA to help its visitors fall in love with capitalism. (To wit: The gift shop of Enterprise Square, USA sold bumper stickers that read "I <3 CAPITALISM.") Finally, I will imagine the kinds of "freedom" the aesthetic imagination of enterprise evangelicalism, as instantiated in Enterprise Square, USA, cultivates: a freedom to consume and a freedom to dominate.  

It is my hope that this paper can also contribute to the unit's examination of the aesthetics of fascism. An abiding thread of enterprise evangelicalism is their assumption that markets help sort out the kinds of humans who should dominate from those who should be dominated, the righteous from the sinners. Enterprise Square, USA creates a kind of technicolor theodicy that blames the poor for their own poverty and glorifies the virtue of the rich, virtue that is displayed and confirmed by the very fact of their wealth. (No where is this dynamic more directly seen than in Enterprise Square's "Hall of Giants," where 20 foot busts of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and others loom over visitors inviting their craned-necked admiration.) Enterprise evangelicals sometimes try to obscure their fundamental embrace of radical inequality as a constitutive part of their economic vision, but their art betrays them, even when that art is manifest in strange forms like Enterprise Square's alien puppet shows or animatronic barbershop quartets.