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Old-time religion these days looks a lot like a business, replete with marketing tools and branding strategies that would make a Harvard MBA green with envy, writes William C. Symonds, in Businessweek‘s current cover story, “Earthly Empires.”
Symonds introduces us several successful “CEOs,” including Joel Osteen, pastor of Houston’s 30,000-member Lakewood Church, which offers parishioners religion as well as “free financial counseling, low-cost bulk food and even a ‘fidelity group’ for men with ‘sexual addictions.'”
Osteen and his counterparts are targeting “a huge potential market — the millions of Americans who have drifted away from mainline Protestant denominations or simply never joined a church in the first place.”
So successful are some evangelicals that they’re opening up branches like so many new Home Depots or Subways. This year, the 16.4 million-member Southern Baptist Convention plans to “plant” 1,800 new churches using by-the-book niche-marketing tactics. “We have cowboy churches for people working on ranches, country music churches, even several motorcycle churches aimed at bikers,” says Martin King, a spokesman for the Southern Baptists’ North American Mission Board.
Branding whizzes that they are, the new church leaders are spreading their ideas through every available outlet. A line of “Biblezines” packages the New Testament in glossy magazines aimed at different market segments — there’s a hip-hop version and one aimed at teen girls. Christian music appeals to millions of youths, some of whom otherwise might never give church a second thought, serving up everything from alternative rock to punk and even “screamo” (they scream religious lyrics). California megachurch pastor Rick Warren’s 2002 book, The Purpose-Driven Life, has become the fastest-selling nonfiction book of all time, with more than 23 million copies sold, in part through a novel “pyro marketing” strategy. Then there’s the Left Behind phenomenon, a series of action-packed, apocalyptic page-turners about those left on earth after Christ’s second coming, selling more than 60 million copies since 1995.
The growth of evangelicals has eaten into the “market share” of older denominations, writes Symonds.
[T]he so-called mainline Protestants who dominated 20th century America have become the religious equivalent of General Motors Corp. The large denominations — including the United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church — have been shrinking for decades and have lost more than 1 million members in the past 10 years alone.
Religion, sex and liberals are the topics under consideration in The Weekly Standard, where Hadley Arkes considers a federal court ruling in uber-liberal Montgomery County, Md., striking down a proposed sex education curriculum for eighth and tenth-graders that, among other things, sweeps away “myths” about homosexuality and same-sex marriage.
“The committee assured students that homosexuality is no more abnormal than left-handedness,” writes Arkes. The new curriculum prompted a lawsuit.
As Arkes notes, Judge Alexander Williams Jr. — a Clinton appointee no less — wrote that he was “extremely troubled” by the willingness of the Montgomery County Board of Education “to venture — or perhaps more correctly bound — into the crossroads of controversy where religion, morality, and homosexuality converge.”
The curriculum, Williams found, went too far in portraying conservative religious views as “unenlightened” and “misguided.” By dismissing those views as “myths,” the educators were restricting the right of those who hold them to freely express their beliefs in the public realm.
The New Yorker offers the amazing story of the double life of Pham Xuan An, a Communist spy in Vietnam, who worked first as a reporter for Reuters, then the New York Herald Tribune, and finally for 11 years for Time. (Alas, no online version is available.) An, the article says, was busy doing more than just filing dispatches to Time — he was also helping the North Vietnamese plan the Tet offensive, which triggered a series of events that effectively ended the U.S. presence in his country. “I was never relaxed for a moment,” he told writer Thomas A. Bass.
Finally, recall the critical acclaim heaped upon last year’s 9/11 Commission report? Ernest R. May, the Harvard historian who helped produce the report’s compelling narrative, offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes recounting of the document’s creation (subscription required).
The 9/11 Commission was “set up to fail,” according to its chairman, Thomas Kean. Yet Kean and his colleagues on the commission saw September 11, 2001 as a “watershed moment, on a par at least with Pearl Harbor.” They also saw a rare opportunity to “try to tell the whole story from both sides.” Kean wanted “a report that our grandchildren can take off the shelf in fifty years and say, ‘This is what happened.'” The fact that the commission achieved its daunting goal, according to May, is attributable to a variety of factors beyond civic vision: The large number of staff members with high-level security clearances, the strong organizational skills of top commission members who devised detailed time lines and managed information gleaned from two million documents and more than 1,200 witness interviews, and a White House far more cooperative than the media perceived.
For anyone who has ever waded through an eyelid-drooper from gray bureaucrats, May’s account of how it can be done is refreshing and encouraging. John Updike’s assessment, published in The New Yorker last year, was correct. The King James Bible was “our language’s lone masterpiece produced by committee, at least until [the] 9/11 Commission report.”
–Susan Q. Stranahan
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.