MURKETING

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In Consumed: Shade Clothing: Threading between the gospel of fashion, and the Gospel.

Chelsea Rippy enjoys browsing through fashion magazines, watching “Project Runway” and shopping. Actually, the shopping bit is only partly true; she enjoys it up to a point. Sometimes it takes her much longer than she’d like to find the right clothes, partly because she is stylistically finicky, but mostly because she is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and hopes to follow its teachings on the matter of modest dress. So low-cut jeans, tiny T-shirts and dresses with plunging necklines pose problems. Or they did, before she decided to start her own company, Shade Clothing. She was 29 and a mother of two, and her specific goal at the time was to build a business around resolving the hip-but-modest dilemma for other young Mormon women. …
Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site, via this no-registration-required link.

Related links: Shade Clothing; Brother For Sister; db clay; LDS publications including “The Latter-day Saints Woman.

Cell Your Soul

Robert Lanham, perhaps best known for his Hipster Handbook, has a new book coming out in September called The Sinner’s Guide to the Evangelical Right. In connection with that, he’s started a Web site, which includes a blog (and an amusing quiz, among other things). Checking this out today, I was interested in an item about Catholic Mobile, which “provides families and individuals with inspiring Catholic content in English and Spanish that will enrich their daily wireless experiences.”

This translates into things like Catherine of Siena phone wallpaper (pictured) and “Ave Maria” ringtones, prayers and Catholic news delivered to your phone, and even a “Saint of the Day” service. “Make your phone 100% Catholic, too,” the site says.

Evanglical Right.com asks: “Is your phone a secular humanist, a Jew, or a Muslim? Do you know where your phone will spend eternity? Has your phone ever taken communion or confessed its sins to a priest?”

Believing In Believing

An essay in the New York Review of Books by Freeman J. Dyson, reviewing a book called Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennet, has some interesting passages in relation to the recent post here on varieties of belief:

Dennett … observes that belief, which means accepting certain doctrines as true, is different from belief in belief, which means believing belief in the same doctrines to be desirable. He finds evidence that large numbers of people who identify themselves as religious believers do not in fact believe the doctrines of their religions but only believe in belief as a desirable goal. The phenomenon of “belief in belief” makes religion attractive to many people who would otherwise be hard to convert. To belong to a religion, you do not have to believe. You only have to want to believe, or perhaps you only have to pretend to believe. Belief is difficult, but belief in belief is easy. Belief in belief is one of the important phenomena that give a religion increased transmissibility and consequently increased fitness….

Dennett has an easy time poking fun at the modern evangelical mega-churches which pay more attention to the size of their congregations than to the quality of their religious life. The leaders of these churches are selling their versions of religion in a competitive market, and those that have the best marketing skills prevail. The market favors practical convenience rather than serious commitment to a pure and holy life…

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.

Archival Consumed: “The Purpose-Driven Life”

One central message of the book ”The Purpose-Driven Life” is this: ”It’s not about you.”

Who wants to hear that? Millions of people, apparently. The book, published by a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and written by Rick Warren, founder of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., is the No. 1 seller at religious bookstores tracked by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. It is also available in traditional bookstores and even Costco, and has been on the New York Times Advice best-seller list for more than 60 weeks; at the end of March, it was in the top spot.
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