A disturbing article appeared in Advertising Age this week about churches in America increasing their marketing budgets. That’s right during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the folks in charge of saving souls are worried about branding. Apparently church-going has dropped among 18-34 year-olds and churches are afraid that their “brand” has gone stale or become “uncool”.
The article explains that, Marketing alone isn’t to blame for religions’ faltering — an influx of new religion choices via immigration, the rise of the megachurch and widespread criticism of organized religion all play a role — but marketing is increasingly the tool of choice for religions seeking to reverse the trend.
“Look at the parallels between religion and marketing, and it’s almost identical. People become attached to a religion in the same way someone takes on a brand,” said Mara Epstein, author of “Brands of Faith,” and associate professor of media studies at Queens College. She and others contend that it is marketing, and our consumerist society, that has given people the idea they have a divine right to choose whatever they like — and to treat faiths just like they’d treat any other brands, switching religions or choosing to have none.
Umm, its not deodorant or a razor blade. Its supposed to be a moral compass, a guide to better living with your fellow man. I would hope that religion could engender greater loyalty than a $5 footlong from Subway.
The United Methodist Church launched a $20 million campaign last week to specifically reach 18- to 34-year-olds with a “Rethink Church” message. The UMC has done national advertising for several years, but this effort is aimed at not only the younger generation… Street teams, door hangers, T-shirts, Twitter and Facebook are included as campaign media, along with network TV, radio print, mobile, e-mail, outdoor and event sponsorships.
How many people that have lost homes or a job could you feed with $20 million? How about the church that does the most good wins. Not the one with the slickest ads or the biggest seating capacity. Let’s leave that to professional sports teams.
The megachurches and seeker churches are packing the pews by offering professional-level entertainment, while traditional churches struggle to drum up enough in the collection plate to pay expenses.
“Why go to the old boring stale church down the street when you can drive 15 miles out to the suburbs and feel like you’re pulling up to Target? They’ve got music, lights, sound, things for the kids to do. It’s DisneyWorld inside their doors,” said Brad Abare, founder of the Center for Church Communications.
Since when is church supposed to be entertaining? Beyond a few guitars and a kickass pipe organ what more do you need? Call me old fashioned but aren’t church and religion supposed to be about helping the poor.
From a strictly Christian perspective, I can remember Jesus going on about the poor, not hitting every town he and the apostles cruised through and putting on a Cirque du Soleil show.
Got your Trinity right here
Oddly enough Rick Warren, founder of Saddleback Church, shed some light on this when he noted the split in philosophy in what American Churches were doing. Speaking at the Pew Forum’s biannual Faith Angle conference on religion, politics and public life in 2005, Rick Warren noted:
But what happened is Protestantism split into two wings, the fundamentalists and the mainline churches. And the mainline churches tended to take the social action issues of Christianity – caring for the sick, for the poor, the dispossessed, racial justice and things like that. Today there really aren’t that many Fundamentalists left; I don’t know if you know that or not, but they are such a minority; there aren’t that many Fundamentalists left in America.
Anyway, the fundamentalist and evangelical movement said they were just going to care about personal salvation when they split from the mainline churches. What happened is the mainline churches cared about the social morality and the evangelicals cared about personal morality. That’s what happened when they split. But they really are all part of the total gospel – social justice, personal morality and salvation.
And there is my problem– this ridiculous idea that personal morality will lead to salvation. Somehow if I’m a selfish bastard, I tell other people how to live their lives based on my own myopic views, and ignore all pressing social and economic inequality I’ll be rewarded at the end. Right.
What ever happened to austerity? I look to the Catholic nuns. Choosing to live a simple life in the service of something greater. Keeping your head down and teaching, working in hospitals, doing missionary work, etc. Not this boastful self-aggrandizing that seems aimed at emptying people’s wallets and forcing mindless group-think.
I don’t think that throwing a new coat of paint on it and hooking it up to the Internet is going to make people want to go to church again. Start with the basics, stop telling people what they want to hear and stop thinking that faith should be a commodity that’s bought and sold like a 3G iPhone. It doesn’t need to be new and improved it just needs to work for those seeking higher ground.
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