5 Arguments Against the Use of Marketing and Media in Church

American Evangelicalism has always been media savvy. From Charles Fuller to Billy Graham, mass media has been used for conveying the information of the gospel to multitudes. More recently, we’ve pressed into television, advertising, branding, and multi-media to attract crowds and convey the message. Video-venues (part of the multi-site church approach) are the latest accepted innovation.

Simultaneously, the American church is in a crisis of attendance and character and the missional conversation is partly about rethinking ecclesiology for just that reason. I think this necessitates rethinking our use of modern marketing methods and media technology as well. I have five concerns:

The Tendency Toward Deception:
Advertising is an inherently deceptive medium. Whether we’re producing a T.V. commerical or designing a flyer or video, the purpose is usually persuasion and that plays upon our innate desire to be seen as better than we really are. Rather than check this tendency with open humility, we often go the other direction: creative exaggeration. Brochures, websites and promotional videos portray “shiny happy people” and the promise of easy triumphalism through pixelated filters. This is the peddling of image through desire, just like a typical car commercial or beer ad. The subtle yet powerful message is, “Buy what we’re offering and you can be just like the people in this ad.” But we can never be like the people in those ads because they don’t actually exist.

Emotionally targeted advertising is a poor substitute for having an identity derived from being created in the image of God.

Artificially Exaggerating the Mundane:
One of the most effective means of containing people is to make ordinarily mundane things seem more exciting. On TV and film this is achieved through artificial “technical events” like cutting, panning, fading, adding musical scores, special effects, etc. All this adds the illusion of motion and depth to an otherwise boring experience (television and video stripped of ornamentation are inherently flat and boring).

We do essentially same thing with church services, youth gatherings, and childrens ministries. We build worship music sets and preach messages engineered to produce an emotional crescendo, or use the gimmicky minutia of American teenage culture as accouterments to the scriptural text. This kind of hype creates a false perception of reality and an self-defeating default perspective because we become over-stimulated to the point where the normal level of hype has now become the new mundane. When our old techniques aren’t working anymore we must ramp up to the next decibel.

Hype is a poor substitute for cultivating eyes and ears faith so we can recognize the movement of God in ordinary things.

The Mediation of Experience:
People tend to think they’ve experienced something simply because they saw it on television. Millions of tweens think they know the Jonas Brothers because of the Disney Channel. In my generation we thought we knew Monica and Chandler too.

A weekend outreach may become a life-changing experience for many people. But when we show a video recap of it on Sunday, hundreds or thousands suddenly own the experience. Because they belong to a church that does those kinds of things, they see themselves as participating in that reality. But they’re not. The more technically proficient the media, the more vicarious appropriation occurs and the more people are kept in a stasis where they don’t leave (the root meaning of the word entertainment). This same vicarious mediation can occur with preaching, and is likely to occur when the real people have been replaced by photon-facsimiles in video-venues.

Mediation through technology is a poor substitute for discipleship praxis.

The Trap of Professional Branding:
Being an American consumer requires I maintain an ongoing suspension of dis-belief. Wal-Mart tells me in a thousand ways that they care about my well-being. But they don’t. As a savvy consumer I’m aware of this. It’s an open secret I’ve known since I was 4 years old and my parents taught me to watch TV commercials with suspicion. But even though I know this I suspend my dis-belief while consuming because I want to believe their products will make me happier. I’m willing to try it on the off-chance it’s an accidental truth. This creates an internal dichotomy wherein I love the merchant (if I like their products) and distrust them at the same time. But I go along with the charade as long as they’re the best or the cheapest – or both. This is an ingrained consumer response to ever-escalating marketing efforts.

When churches engage in the same marketing practices we stimulate the same double-minded response. If the marketing materials are good, people are impressed because professionalism is a highly effective selling point; the appearance of competence makes the suspension of dis-belief easier. But what we reap in return is not covenant commitment, it’s brand loyalty. This cripples churches in the long run because it’s only a matter of time before someone else offers a better or cheaper Jesus product. Worse, it debilitates the believer’s capacity for faith because our implied message is that Christianity is just another dubiously-motivated product in the marketplace.

Branding is a poor substitute for genuine spiritual power.

The Deterioration of Kinship Communities:
Mass-communication is inherently fascist-leaning because it atomizes and immobilizes people in order to shape behavior (there’s no need for dictatorship in nations saturated by television). The result is passive consumer-spectators. This same phenomenon occurs in churches that depend on mass media. There’s a reason for this: small communities (families, tribes, etc.) adhere to one another through gifts, mutuality, and affection, and they communicate values and traditions through those resulting kinships. That is the currency of small groups. But among larger populations people can’t maintain a plenitude of kinships. That’s where the mass media and the marketplace enter. The marketplace allows for the mediation of relationships in a large population because cash allows for interaction liberated from relational obligation. Mass media fills the communication gap created by the loss of kinships and, in a feedback loop, supplants them at the same time, driving the population toward the market instead. Hence, the larger the group the more consumer-oriented it must become by necessity, the more it must rely on mass media to create unity, and the more the population will be passivized. In fact, the larger the population, the more it is necessary to create passivity in order to govern. I’m convinced this is a major reason why mega-churches struggle to become genuinely missional.

Mass media and marketplaces are poor substitutions for genuine community.

Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting that media can’t be utilized by the church with integrity. I think it can be, and I have friends who do – but it must be done with tremendous caution keeping these inherent dangers in mind and countering them intentionally. Ultimately, I think the key is to use these media to tell the truth and distribute power – no small task given that these aims are generally opposed by the mediums which distort truth and aggregate power by design. Telling the truth and empowering people through mass media is somewhat akin to making peace with war.

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