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

After a half-decade of stagflation, how do you make capitalism fun again? This was the challenge administrators at Oklahoma Christian College took on in the late 1970s. Their answer took the form of a multi-million dollar "edutainment" center called Enterprise Square, USA. Employing animatronics, puppet shows, video games, and cutting-edge interactive multimedia, Enterprise Square took visitors on a grand tour of the American free market, hopefully leaving them enchanted enough at the end to buy one of the gift shop's "I <3 CAPITALISM" bumperstickers. This paper examines the "aesthetics of persuasion" (to borrow James Bielo's term) developed within Enterprise Square's exhibits, scripts, and displays. The paper situates Enterprise Square's edutainment efforts within a larger history of American Christian projects that embrace and promote capitalism as God's will for the United States, and it seeks to develop a language for identifying ongoing attempts to baptize capitalism as the economics of Christianity.