‘Jesus Is Not a Brand’

Christianity Today offers yet another thought-provoking column on the “marketing” Jesus movement. The piece says in part:

The de-churched nature of our theology makes evangelism hard to do without seeming salesy, because churchless evangelism unavoidably promotes a consumerist soteriology. When it’s just you and Jesus, you (the consumer) “invite him” (the product) “into your heart” (brand adoption) and “get saved” (consumer gratification). Certainly God has worked and continues to work through these formulae. His doing so testifies to his grace, however, not to the fidelity of such evangelistic formulations, which, in this culture, inadvertently make Jesus out to be a cosmic version of the consumer brands promoted in the thousands of advertisements each of us sees daily.

Such brands promise to deliver goods—self-esteem, sex appeal, confidence, coolness—that they have no intrinsic capacity to give. Their power is in consumers’ collective willingness to imbue them with that kind of power. In other words, consumerism is impotent to deliver on its promise, and deep down, we know it. Consumerist marketing offers something that just isn’t there.

Here’s another powerful riff in the piece.

In a consumerist society, you are what you buy. Your identity, social location, and self-image are primarily determined by your patterns of consumption, which trump the markers of ethnic background, tribe, religion, and so on that predominate in other societies.

One way to understand consumerist marketing is to look at what may well be its apotheosis: the Macintosh versus PC advertising campaign, which personifies each brand, rendering Mac as a likeable urban hipster and PC as a slightly podgy oaf. The commercials occasionally touch on the legitimate technical reasons to prefer Mac over PC, but the product features are utterly secondary, vanishing behind the personality and style ascribed to the competing brands—and, by extension, their consumers. (Microsoft’s counterattack—an ad campaign featuring happy, quirky people proclaiming, “I’m a PC!”—only solidifies the point.)

These commercials only work because viewers are fluent in their marketing language. Imagine showing the Mac vs. PC commercials to a time traveler from a few centuries back. How would someone to whom the marketing vernacular is unintelligible know that Macintosh is awesome and Microsoft is lame? How would she evaluate the comparative coolness of the clothing, haircuts, body types, and manners of speech demonstrated by the personified Mac and PC?

Marketing is only effective in a society where people are shaped to respond to it.

Read the full piece here.