An endowed chair and a Masters’ program in religious reform will be established in the Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, funded by donations from the Walton and Tyson families, university chancellor White Chancellor “W. C.” John announced this week, accompanied by spokesmen for the Tyson and Walton families and the holographic image of Sam Walton.
“This new program in religious reform will complement the Tyson-sponsored professorship of religion in business and the Walton-funded program in educational reform,” John said, “and will focus on bringing sound business standards to religious practice. Northwest Arkansas and the surrounding states have long provided homes to groundbreaking servant-leaders and minister-managers. Oral Roberts, Billy Jim Hargis, Gerald L. K. Smith, and other pioneers of the profitable pulpit put modern marketing techniques into their ministries. This new program will move business methods beyond the management of ministry and into the practice of religion itself. It will join economics to ecclesia, logistics to logos, and strategic management to the saving of souls.”
“We’ve got to replace soft hearts with hard numbers!” said the holographic image of Walton, which appears every year during the Miracle of the Incarnation segment of the Wal-Mart shareholders meeting. “Let the competition spend a million dollars to claim one soul. We can get salvation for you wholesale!”
Asked about the inspiration for the project, a Walton family spokesman said, “This was first discussed shortly after the death of Helen Walton. Family members were asking, ‘How could a merciful god take Sam Walton and leave Helen all alone till years later, applying the estate tax to their wealth twice? Wouldn’t a loving god have taken them at the same time, leaving their heirs in a far better financial position?”
When reminded that the Walton family had successfully lobbied the state legislature so that the state estate tax did not apply to Helen Walton’s estate, the spokesman replied, “My point exactly. ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ Hezekiah 6:1. That’s the sort of ecumenical entrepreneurial thinking we hope to encourage.”
Chancellor John continued, “This is by not by any means a Christians-only program. It’s not bible-based, but numbers-based. For instance, one of our faculty members from the management department is looking into claims that fewer than ten percent of the followers of Yahweh go to heaven, while over half of those who worship Odin arrive in Valhalla. He’d like to get numbers like that for all religions.”
The holographic image of Sam Walton said, “The logistics department has a woman applying Zen Buddhism to mountain-top strip mining in West Virginia. She told me, ‘First, there is a mountain. Then there is no mountain. Then there is–but it is a mountain of profit!’ ”
“The finance department is engaging in a long-term study of Mark 8:36: ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ Their preliminary findings show that gaining a dominant position in the emerging Chinese market is worth between seven and nine percent of one’s own soul. A similar position in India is worth three to four percent; South America, two to three percent, with an additional percent uptick for Central America and Mexico.
“These are the sorts of real-world findings our Walton-financed program in educational reform has been producing all along,” John said. “For instance, we discovered that program has resulted in a thirty-five percent increase in prayers of supplication among parents, forty-nine percent among students, and a whopping one hundred and sixty-five percent among public school teachers, while prayers of praise and thanks have increased by seventeen percent among businessmen, forty-five percent among private school teachers, and seventy-nine percent among preachers. You just can’t ignore what numbers like that tell you. As we choke off support for the public schools, we expect that trend to increase.”
The holographic image of Sam Walton continued, “Wal be nimble, Mart be quick! We’re gonna cut off Target’s–”
“Air supply,” interrupted chancellor John, as he pressed the mute button on the holographic display unit, leaving the image of Walton to make a squiggly with its hips.
A Tyson family spokesman added, “We, too, believe this new program will be of great benefit to our business. One of the new markets in which we’re investing a small but significant portion of our soul in is the Santeria market. With this new program, we’ll be able to develop chickens for sacrifice that will allow more powerful spells to be cast, and divination further into the future. Once we’ve done that, we plan to extend the prophecy of Herbert Hoover by putting a chicken into every car in every garage. Mobile sacrificial chickens will replace radar detectors, as they’ll also be able to detect drunk driving roadblocks and cruising patrol cars looking for overloaded trucks. We’ve got a strong interest in this technology.”
“We would like to announce that we’ve added local ministers H. D. McCarty and Ronnie Floyd and developer Sal Salmonella to the advisory board for our Civil Engineering department,” continued chancellor John. “They’ll be the first speakers at the new Developer’s Prayer and Resurrection Circle, meeting on the site of the proposed Divinity Hotel.”
“It’s never too late to fix your mistakes,” said the holographic image of Sam Walton. “Don’t let the sun go down on you before you repent!”
“At this time, we’re not appointing a program chair,” said chancellor John, “although we do have a candidate in mind. We’re waiting till after the Republican presidential primaries are over, at least for some people, to enter those negotiations, but I will say that we can make a more attractive offer than a guest-hosting slot on The 700 Club.”
