- Original context of piece/excerpt: Minor Masters Thesis, submitted November 2008
- Abstract: A comparison between Catholic and Evangelical Protestant publishing and publishing models. I argue that Evangelicals have been extremely successful in leveraging technological and social changes to keep profitable where religious publishing in other denominations has struggled to remain competitive. I use the case studies of the Left Behind series and The Purpose-Driven Life to illustrate how and why Evangelicals have prospered in the current publishing industry and suggest that there are also theological links between different denominations and their respective relationships to the printed word.
Chapter Seven — Conclusion
Evangelical Christian publishing is at the forefront of technological innovation and consumer-centric publishing. Through a mix of communicable populism, multi-platform content delivery and unashamedly self-referential marketing Evangelical publishers have built a parallel literary and popular culture that defies conventional paradigms because to a large extent it has defined its own. It is a publishing sphere characteristically American and Protestant but both secular publishers in America and publishers abroad have started to take notice of its activities.
Random House (a commercial and multi-national publisher) rather than Tyndale (a niche Evangelical publisher that carried Left Behind) is publishing LaHaye’s current series Babylon Rising, which shows the extent to which mainstream publishers have adapted pragmatically to the contemporary taste for apocalyptic fiction and Christian fundamentalism.
But what strategies have Evangelicals adapted to bring about this state of affairs? What role has faith and theology played in promoting sales and how has marketing operated in an around these aspect of faith?
By connecting books so closely with salvation and the essential Protestant messages of an accessible scripture and justification through faith alone, Evangelical publishers have sewn faith and consumption so tightly that the seams are nigh indistinguishable. The Purpose Driven Life and Left Behind deliberately and consistently blur the line between religious and material consumption, spiritual contemplation and material success. Theirs authors, though professed (and in the case of Warren it would appear genuine) Christians do little to support this distinction and perhaps none is even aware that a distinction ought to be made.
Evangelical Protestantism has not only thrived in a market-driven and individualist economy, its theological underpinnings have to a great extent informed the market’s centrality to American cultural life. Evangelicals proselytise and entertain through books and their relation to the market is unique.
To a great extent this historically unique relationship to the printed word is found in the fundamentals of the Protestant experience. In removing books from their mystical and priestly separation Luther not only empowered the people in terms of allowing them to direct access to the Word. He overturned the existing paradigm of those who bestowed the Word and those who received it, effectively transforming Christendom from a community of receivers to a community of seekers and consumers.
The market, as it were, shifted from one that was liturgically, theologically and hermeneutically closed to one that was open. Christians were no longer constrained to a passive role in the promulgation of the printed word and the generation of meaning. Consumer autonomy was born. If the established church–at that time in Western Europe the Catholic church–was no longer the de jure dispenser of the Word and had to compete with autonomous interpretive cells, then by extension the Word itself could be subject to competition. This has been true not only in the literal sense of competing Biblical translations or exegetical texts that necessarily constitute a bible-centric publishing scene.
The sensibility of competition (between Evangelicals and the Establishment, Religion and the secular) has informed the structure of Evangelical publishing centres just as consumer autonomy has dictated the form and content of what has been published. For Catholics and to a lesser extent Established Protestants, publishing retains more than a hint of the wordy and worthy.
Bestseller titles read almost like monographs: When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist, Prayer of the Heart: The Contemplative Tradition of the Christian East and The Paradox of Power: From Control to Compassion are typical of the tenor of much Establishment publishing, alongside catechisms and prayer books. Aquinas and Merton are perennially popular.
Meanwhile Evangelical publishing flourished in a digital world where multi-platform and real time publication are possible and where customers can in theory access titles at any time. The use of Websites and Web communities has enhanced Evangelical publishing’s digital strategy and positioned it not only as a tool for salvation and hence as a highly desirable and sought after commodity but also as something highly responsive to consumer tastes and an essential binding agent in Evangelical communities.
But whereas Luther–despite his Anti-Catholic invectives–was scholarly and considered, the Evangelical encounter with the printed word has been decidedly more problematic.
The Left Behind case study is perhaps archetypal. By fusing consumption and marketing with the Metaphysical, Evangelical publishers have refuted a deposit of authoritative writings external to Holy Scripture whilst simultaneously rebuilding a new tradition from the ground up. The new Evangelical order is not humanist but apologist. It does not bother overmuch with debating modernism on its own terms and is frequently concerned more with generating publishing revenue than with promulgating an apprehension of God that is scripturally or epistemologically sound. Kyle remarks:
Evangelicals have published many serious and scholarly books and have demonstrated considerable intellectual vitality. But the skyrocketing Evangelical book market rests more on popular publications–both fiction and non-fiction… The types of books that have driven this market relate to personalities, self-improvement, and especially prophecy (Kyle p. 276)
Furthermore, Kyle argues:
Evangelicals have championed the spirituality of the common person against the elite or learned clergy. In doing so they have reduced serious religious thinking to its lowest common denominator. Evangelicalism’s obsession with numbers… has caused the movement to pander unashamedly to the popular values of American culture… they have sanctified large segments of American culture, especially its consumerism and middle-class values. (Kyle p.3)
In a broader context this is perhaps the trade off for exposing religion’s cultural products to the market. Established religion may be characterised by religious indifference and the burden of support by the non or differently-churched, but its role, aside from an authoritarian one, is uninterrupted by need of gain.
If its theological underpinnings are inevitably the ruminations of an educated elite at least complex arguments may be pursued to their logical end. The American experience, for all its verve and vitality, has seen a concentration on numbers and style over substance: big congregations and mass conversions as an antidote to annihilation and its publishing arena big publishing concerns, big print runs and big, accessible ideas rather than complex or nuanced ones.
Evangelical publishers have conjoined sincerity and theological concern with market-driven populism in a way that has at once made their message possible and phenomenally successful.
But in the process of selling Jesus, even if to a captive market, Evangelical publishers have commodified their religion, sacrificing nuanced debate and complex theological questions to the dictates of the market where tastes are dominated by materialism, degrees of biblical inerrancy and “common sense” exegesis.
To some extent these aspects reflect a genuinely Protestant spirituality with venerable antecedents. But the trade off between authenticity and commercialism, an issue as well in secular publishing, has higher stakes in the religious sphere because nothing short of the progress of the human soul, from birth to death, is at issue.
In a publishing arena frequently characterised by sham and ephemera it is for spiritually curious readers of whatever denominational or spiritual persuasion to make the distinction between religion as ineffable rather than a commodity.
Alae Taule'alo 