Christian Marketing – Making Money from God
Christian Marketing’s Negative Influence on our Vocabulary
"Radical: Taking back your faith from the American Dream" by David Platt is not radical at all and would better be titled "Reshaping the American Dream to incorporate your faith" which seems designed to inspire a few extremely wealthy to give out of their abundance and allow everyone else to continue to live the American Dream. This is just one example where a large book publishers uses marketing to co-opt terminology. In this case the new monastic movement has been focusing on separating faith from the American Dream. The problem is that there are no similarities between The New Monastic Movement and David Platt’s mega-church. Multnomah made a large amount of money by using the title and their marketing to grab customers who unknowingly purchase a book that is marketed as being in the same genre as Shane Claiborne and others.
The Loss of Meaning from Christian Marketing
I have seen the same thing happen with dozens of terms of course it is not new to our generation. Constantine saw the advantage to his personal plans of teaming with the church and its growth and instantly a term for years that had been derogatory became culturally acceptable in order to identify with the Roman Emperor. The same thing has happened with very specific terms like "evangelical", "charismatic", "Pentecostal", "fundamental", and more generic terms like "missional" (the sheer number of books published about missional church in the last decade was overwhelming and mostly disappointing), "the way", "Jesus follower", "relational", and many others. The impact of Christian marketing has done a lot of damage cheapening what it means to pursue God, but the impact on our vocabulary is devastating. I have been talking with others who have similar views to mine and no matter how we try to describe and define the good news we want to share, someone takes what we are using and sees a chance to make money publishing a book that does little but corrupt the terms and make things a muddy mess for those who are in a relationship with God and those who are not. "In a relationship with God" is another term that was introduced several decades ago and is now used by dozens of denominations and churches with a variety of meanings.
