Jesus Sells

What the Christian culture industry tells us about secular society.

Jeremy Lott from the February 2003 issue

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In fact, the economic embrace of Christian pop culture by mainstream producers may be straining the original Christian cultural scene. Now that evangelical novelists can be published by secular presses, they can avoid relatively stifling moral guidelines that have been constraining them (no swearing, no sex out of marriage unless it has disastrous consequences, the requisite amount of God talk, etc.). New Christian music acts are now routinely courted by secular record labels. That allows them more freedom to inject their faith into the mainstream culture in a way that simply wasn't done by secular labels before, even while removing the more popular groups from the Christian labels' lists. Christian publishers are being squeezed at both ends as bookstores demand steeper discounts while increasingly influential mainstream agents secure better contracts for Christian writers. In turn, Christian bookstores face new competition from secular bookstores.

Sales of Christian books through nonreligious bookstores are also rectifying a long-running, quasi-conspiratorial grievance of many evangelical authors, because it allows their books to climb bestseller lists from The New York Times to USA Today. Such lists only count sales through mainstream bookstores, which in the past effectively excluded even the most wildly successful evangelical bestsellers from recognition. This division of secular and religious book sales, like the division of secular and religious culture in general, had the effect of removing evangelical culture from the view of those who were not a part of that subculture.

Now that this industry is increasingly in plain sight, its relationship with its consumers can be studied. It turns out that the industry is neither as sinister and monolithic as secular critics claim nor as secular and venal as religious critics fear.

Randall Balmer, the religion professor, describes Christian culture as the product of a separatist impulse that managed to yield results very similar to the secular culture Christians sought to escape. Superficially, he has a point. As I wandered down the aisles of the CBA, I asked the same question: Hasn't the industry simply replaced self-help and pop psychology books with pious variants thereof, the secular Butt Ugly Martians with the religious Veggie Tales, Altoids with Scripture Mints, Beanie Babies with Holy Bears, and secular schlock apocalyptic novels with tamer, preachier Christian schlock apocalyptic novels? On first blush, it sure looks that way.

But the distinction between the material and the sacred, or the commercial and the spiritual, can be tricky. To pick an obvious example, there is no more sacred book to evangelicals than the Bible -- more tradition-minded Christians sometimes accuse them of "bibliolatry," the worship of the text -- and there is no product of the Christian culture industry that is more effectively exploited and marketed than the Good Book.

At the convention were dozens of different translations and paraphrases of the Bible -- the New International Version, the King James, the New King James, The Message -- along with hundreds of specialty Bibles with commentaries (by rock musicians as well as serious Bible scholars), and countless freestanding commentaries on individual biblical books. (The existence of red-lettered editions of the Bible, in which the words attributed to Christ appear in red, serves as the set-up for an awkward situation in Christopher Moore's Island of the Sequined Love Nun. The clueless hero asks a Bible-reading guard if the red writing highlights all the juicy parts.)

Or take other, more suspect items from the convention: those Scripture Mints, holy diet books, spiritual key chains, Thomas Kinkade paintings, biblical action figures -- all items that your local evangelical bookstore is likely to carry. Surely these items are shameless and naked grabs for evangelical filthy lucre. What possible purpose, skeptics ask, can such kitsch serve?

Are many of these products merely a way to make a fast and cynical buck? They probably are. But the more revealing question is not about what the products do for their producers; it is about what they may be doing for their consumers.

The anti-materialistic/anti-consumerist criticism overlooks an essential fact: that material artifacts, even kitsch, can embody real meaning for those who use them.

The products, good and bad, that dominated the CBA both reflected and validated the subculture that generated the demand for them. The people who read the books, listen to the music, hang the Thomas Kinkade paintings in their homes, and use the other products of this industry are surrounding themselves with artifacts that reflect their values and beliefs, that validate who they are. For such consumers, the Left Behind novels, the evangelical pop music, and all the rest serve as the building blocks of a shared evangelical cultural identity. In brief, evangelicals are using the market to fashion and refashion themselves, and to project the resulting identity to others, in just the way that all consumers do.

Therein lies the real significance of the Christian cultural industry. It is fixed enough to support a religious group identity for millions of people but fluid enough to accommodate myriad arguments and interpretations. And it gives this minority religious group the ability to make the wider culture take it seriously -- to punch above its weight in the market contest it has entered.