Fans, Believers, and Marketers

From this article, written for the Detroit Free Press and reprinted in the Seattle Times, I learned of Church Marketing Sucks. That site turns out to be a project of a bunch of church marketers, who I guess are trying to shake things up. “We’ve got the greatest story ever told, but no one’s listening,” one of these people is quoted saying. “We think the church has a communications problem. In general, the church has been resistant to the idea of church marketing.” The article says: “Some marketing-savvy Christians believe higher powers need help getting good word-of-mouth.”

This isn’t quite so new as the article implies. There’s a good book called Selling God that lays out the rather long history of the way church culture and pop culture have interacted since the 1800s. Maybe I’ll say more about that some other time, but here’s a relevant quote from that book: “If religion is to be culturally central, it must learn to work with other things that are also central. Previously that might have been feudalism, kings, or Platonic philosophy. More recently it has been market capitalism responsive to consumers with spare time and a bit of money to spend.”
Still, there’s something jarring about religious marketers playing the ‘tude card with a “your strategy sucks” approach. More interesting is that this comes at a time when quasi-religious metaphors (brand “cults,” brand “evangalists,” etc) have become incredibly commonplace is marketing-talk. The book Pyro Marketing baldly suggests that the same tactics that made Purpose-Driven Life and Passion of the Christ into hits can work for any old brand at all.

This article from the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture (Volume XII: Spring 2006) reports on the results of a survey designed to explore similarities and differences among types of secular fans, different groups of religious believers, and, finally, between secular fans and the religiously devout in general. The secular fan categories were music, media, and sports. I don’t think this should be surprising, but maybe it is: The study concluded that there are differences between the religious and secular devotion. (It also found that the answers of the secular fans were similar across different categories of fandom.)

For example, in discussing how they came to their specific devotion (“the indoctrinating medium”), the religious respondents cited parents or other family members, while the secular respondents point to media. Also: “Religious respondents stated that they believed other people viewed their interest in religion to be positive, while the secular group thought others viewed their interest as either neutral or negative.” Religious devotees said “they would pray [for] or love” critics of their devotion. Secular fans said they would “ignore” critics of theirs.

Finally, religious people apparently described the degree of their devotion by how much they would give up for their beliefs — right up to giving their lives, for instance. The secular fans described their degree of devotion by “the amount of time they have spent on their given interest.”

Presumably this is one of the things that makes secular fandom so appealing: You get feelings of community and being part of something bigger than yourself and so on, but you don’t have to sacrifice anything, really. And the more time you spend enjoying whatever it is you’re a fan of — well, that just proves the depth of your commitment.
I’ve been wondering why there has not been been, to my knowledge, any particular backlash from religious believers about the ways in which the commercial, secular-fandom world hijacks their language. But maybe the answer is that religious marketers are too busy hijacking right back.