Evangelicalism: The Marketing or the Message?

Lone Starr: But Yogurt, what is this place? What is it that you do here?

Yogurt: Merchandising.

Barf: Merchandising? What's that?

Yogurt: Merchandising! Come, I'll show you…Merchandising! Merchandising! Where the real money from the movie is made.

-Spaceballs

Christian radio is quite a beast. If you’re in a decent-sized market, I bet you can find five to ten Christian radio stations with a casual tour of the dial. This has become a hobby of mine. On car trips, I like to find preachers or Christian rock, and I’ll listen until the nausea begins to jeopardize my driving. This drives my wife nuts, but she humors me, partly for the sake of the blog and partly because she is just nice and tolerant to a fault. I do think it bothers her, though, that I have Christian radio stations on my preset and I listen to them with our infant daughter in the car. I’ll have to stop that when the little one is old enough to understand.

So one of my favorite stations is run by Calvary Chapel, which is apparently a nationwide network of churches that could be generally classified as evangelical. I can discern no traditional denomination from either their radio broadcast or the bulletin from church this week. I like the Calvary Chapel radio because they have a lot of preaching, often focused on Biblical passages, rather than the almost exclusively pro-life propaganda that one gets from Catholic radio (a blog entry on that later, for sure). Calvary radio preaching is pretty humorous. To give you just a taste, here’s an example. I recently learned that demons are real. Not in some metaphorical or symbolic way, but actually real. And they are out to harm me every minute of every day. But that is good news! Because the only relationship I want to have with a demon is for it to be my enemy. And there is more good news: the Bible says that 1/3 of the angels in heaven fell with Satan*. That means that there are still 2/3 of the angels that are on my side. Therefore, the forces of evil cannot win. It is a mathematical certainty.

Oh my. Yes, this is my entertainment on the way to work in the morning. So when I heard that this radio station has local churches affiliated with it, I had my next church with which to resume the blog project. There were many Calvary churches in the area to choose from. Mine happened to be located in a strip mall. Good start. It is a former supermarket, now selling food for the soul. Man does not live by bread alone, after all.

It was refreshing, I admit, to realize that the beautiful appearance of a church doesn’t matter to many churchgoers. Attendees of this church need no awe-inspiring architecture, no ornate sculpture, symbolic iconography, or even a nostalgic feeling of walking into a church building. In a sense, they are not subject to the persuasive power of those traditional church elements. So is it more about the substance of the message? Perhaps.

The place was full. Not packed, but full enough. So they’re doing something right, I suppose. I continue to be surprised at the success of the evangelical movement, even in a liberal community like mine. But it doesn’t take a theology degree to figure how powerfully influential the marketing is. Unimpressive from the outside, this church was pretty smooth on the inside. The sanctuary is adjacent to a Christian bookstore and Christian coffeeshop. In the anteroom there is a large, flat-screen television showing a feed from the sanctuary. I must have walked by ten greeters, all of whom were wearing matching polo shirts. “Welcome, brother,” they said. That made me all fuzzy inside.

Let’s get to the service. Typical elements of an evangelical service:

• No ritualistic liturgy. The bulletin had a rough outline of a few items, including music, sermon, and collection, but nothing resembling traditional prayers or readings. I’m glad to see they put no more stock in that uninspiring crustiness than I do.
• Contemporary music. There were no hymnals and no organ, just a projection screen with lyrics and an acoustic guitar. They sang 3 or 4 songs in a row to begin the service. For all the popularity of contemporary Christian music, this was pretty boring. One thing traditional churches have going for them: good music. Bach was no slouch.
• A focus on the Bible. Nearly every person walking into this church carried his/her own Bible. That’s not too common. The sermon was based on a specific passage, and the pastor encouraged everyone to read along. This is consistent with the evangelical belief that each individual can experience God directly; no intercessor necessary.
• A focus on the spirit. It’s all about the love, baby. Evangelicals place way more emphasis on the holy spirit than other Christians. This is the third piece of the trinity, and frankly, I never understood why it needed to be separate from God or Jesus. But the New Testament, particularly the book of Acts, places much importance on it, and evangelicals use it as a foundational aspect of their worship. God should be felt in the soul, and each individual should be moved to worship or act on his own, as the spirit dictates.
• Just a tad bit of crazy. The speaker began by saying that Jesus is going to return, and we need to be ready for it, because it might even happen before then end of their church service that morning, and wouldn’t that be awesome. I think he was totally serious. Nobody else in the room let out a chuckle. I had to disguise mine as a cough.

The emphasis on the Holy Spirit is a huge factor in the success of evangelicalism and one of its defining characteristics. It’s all about feeling good. These churches convince people that God has directly touched each of them, that it is God’s love that makes them feel good. Also, if you put your hand in the air, you feel it even more strongly (but not as strongly as those people who put two hands in the air). It is a powerful message. I’m sure this message partly accounts for the stark difference I see in attendance. Most of the churches of European denomination I’ve attended—Baptist, Presbyterian, Reformed, Methodist—are somewhere between struggling and on life-support. But this Americanized brand of evangelicalism is flourishing. What they say must have something to do with it, because people wouldn’t show up just because of the marketing, would they? The radio station, the flat-screen TV, the matching polo shirts, the heavenly smell of God-sponsored coffee? (Slightly tastier than secular Starbucks, no doubt.) Is this why people go? Certainly not. The message must have something to do with it.

But I don’t see it. Seems to me that underneath it all, the same mushy feel-goodery underlies it all. Evangelicalism has watered down the intellectualism of the old denominations, replacing it with just feeling the spirit. But it was mostly pseudo-intellectualism to begin with. Really—can one have an intellectual assessment of demons or supernatural realms or why God makes tsunamis? No. Evangelicalism has simply repackaged the old messages, given them some modern pizzazz, some American flashiness to answer that stuffy European curmudgeonry. A spit-shine certainly can make junk look good.

*(N.B. This postulate is taken from Revelation 12:4, which says that 1/3 of the stars fell from the sky. The mythic book of Revelation is written in symbolic language, and interpreting this passage to refer to angels/demons is by no means self-evident. I think most preachers on the radio expect their audiences to be stupid. Of course, if you are listening to a radio preacher, you probably are. But that doesn’t apply to me, naturally.)