Wal-Mart Cloaking Redbook Cover. Launches American Magazine. News @ 11.

The superficial sauciness of the latter-day Redbook notwithstanding, Wal-Mart's decision to chasten the magazine seems bizarre, but the chain's demonstrated desire to please Christian groups sheds some light. A month before cracking down on the women's magazines, the $244-billion-dollar-a-year chain—which is responsible for 15 percent of all magazines' single-copy sales—banned Maxim, Stuff, and FHM. The purported reason was "customer complaints," but the announcement came simultaneously with Wal-Mart's nomination to the Christian Merchants program run by Kingdom Ventures, a development organization that has established a private-label direct mail catalog and plans to launch free Web sites for every Christian church in the country. The Christian Merchants will be allowed to sell their wares through the Kingdom Catalog and through iExalt.com, the portal of the faithful. This means an open line to the hundreds of millions of church-going consumers, who spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year. "Our Christian Merchants initiative aims at providing approved companies with easy access to millions of Christians," Gene Jackson, the president of Kingdom Ventures told Business Wire. "Personally, I would feel much better buying clothes, gas, or computers, knowing that they help increase the church's positive influence in our country. In fact, the items purchased could remind us of our relationship with God," he said. He denies that Kingdom Ventures exerted any pressure on Wal-Mart to clean up its aisles.

Well, if the Kingdom didn't put the fear of God into Wal-Mart, maybe it was the vast sexual-discrimination suit filed by seven California women who complain of a pattern of harassment and unequal pay and promotion scales. The case, which could set a new record for civil-rights class-action suits and cost the company billions of dollars, comes to court at the end of July. Insiders have hinted that the sanitized stores exhibit the advice of a defense attorney, not an evangelist. "Judging by their covers, those covers might certainly be viewed by some as portraying women in a way [Wal-Mart] wouldn't want to reinforce, given their current problems," a plaintiff's attorney told Women's Wear Daily. (Might the policy to protect gay workers from discrimination, announced July 1, be part of the same legal strategy?) Whatever the reason for the censorship, the loss of the men's magazines and the diminished desirability of the women's titles makes room for a new women's glossy that Wal-Mart has just helped launch: American, a lifestyle magazine with a patriotic thrust. If American reflects the principles Wal-Mart has lately espoused—prescriptive religion, sexism, corporate strong-arming to prevent unionization—it is bound to be dirtier than Redbook.