We are to proclaim, not pacify; we are to herald, not huckster.
If bunyan’s Pilgrim were to return today, 300 years after his progress to the Celestial City, he would undoubtedly be shocked at the proliferation of Vanity Fair. But perhaps he would be even more shocked at the extent to which some modern-day pilgrims have adopted the merchandising techniques of Vanity Fair, becoming peddlers of God, retailers of religion. Is there a ring around the clerical collar?
One important issue is whether obedience in carrying out the Great Commission justifies the use of Madison Avenue methods of promotion and marketing. The meaning of the commission is clear; it is the means that are in question. Does, or should, propagation of the gospel entail the use of propaganda? Are we to be advertisers as well as ambassadors?
Some answer in the affirmative, with a rationale that goes something like this: “Aren’t Christians in the business of selling, retailing the greatest product in the world? If so, why shouldn’t Jesus Christ be promoted and marketed effectively?”
The influence of the adman on the churchman is, of course, by no means new. In a book entitled The Man Nobody Knows, published in 1925, Bruce Barton argued not only that “the real Jesus” was the “founder of modern business” but also that “he would be a national advertiser today … as he was the great advertiser of his own day.” If Jesus was the model “businessman” and “salesman,” the argument continues, shouldn’t his followers be merchandisers of the Master?
Modern retailing of religion takes various forms. There is a prominent variation of “McLuhanitis” that implies the medium—practically any medium to impress people and draw them to a church—is the Christian message. Thus, some have built multimillion-dollar cathedrals to attract people. But in communicating the gospel, the medium is not the message and must never be considered such; rather the message—Jesus Christ and him crucified—constitutes the medium. “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me,” Christ said (John 12:28). It is he, the message, who is also the medium, doing the drawing. On the basis of Christ’s words, “No man can come to me except the Father which hath sent me draw him” (John 6:44), it can be said that no one is ever truly drawn to Christ by gospel hucksterism. A basic scriptural principle, then, is that whereas religion can be hawked—as it has been for centuries—the gospel of Jesus Christ must not be.
In addition to the danger of confusing message and medium, there is also prevalent an unfortunate mixing of means and ends, whereby Christians use Mammon’s means to achieve spiritual ends. Such a philosophy seems to be based on the premise that although salvation ultimately comes by grace through faith, communication of the gospel depends upon our use of clever Madison Avenue propaganda techniques that cost a lot of money. Implicit in this notion seems to be a basic lack of confidence in the power of the gospel itself, making it necessary to “sell the package” or, in the words of Emory Wade, preacher-turned-adman in a recent novel, “sell the trimmings, not the turkey; sell the tinsel, not the tree” (Jack Ansell, Gospel: An American Success Story, Pyramid, 1973). Accordingly, “retailers of religion” insist that “it isn’t creative unless it sells” and “Scripture won’t sell unless you sugarcoat it.” Furthermore, once people are attracted to the church by the edifice and program, nothing must be said to disturb them. Because people may be disturbed by such unpleasant words as: sin, iniquity, guilt, punishment, judgment, damnation, holiness, self-denial, and others. Such terminology must be avoided in favor of more euphemistic language.
Also to be avoided at all costs is anything potentially controversial, lest people be turned off—and away—from the church. The intent is not to controvert, arguing negatively against, but to advert, downplaying everything negative and intensifying everything positive for the purpose of turning attention to. But how, one might ask, does this philosophy square with the scriptural admonition to “rightly divide the word of truth,” a word that includes numerous unfashionable negatives, the unpleasant realities of sin and its dire consequences, as well as unpopular polemics?
A strategy employed in various forms by both the adman and the gospel evangelist has been the personal testimony. Admen for centuries have been persuading individuals of high repute to induce the rest of us to buy products they praise. Of course, the testimonial was used by the apostle Paul, who on important occasions told his Damascus road experience (Acts 22:3–21; 26:4–23). But in recent years the device has been abused in both camps. The adman often abuses the testimonial sell on two counts: expertise or ability in one area, such as sports or entertainment, does not necessarily qualify an individual to offer advice in another area; and seldom does the testifier personally use the product he promotes (although recent rulings have sought to remedy this). The religionist, who may or may not offend in these two ways, has tended to abuse the testimonial by overemphasizing, sometimes to the point of romanticizing, the “before” in order to accentuate the “after.” Thus, in a kind of perverse felix culpa (“fortunate fall”), the newly converted ex-con, white collar criminal, drug addict, alcoholic, hard-rock singer, or madam describes in graphic detail his or her sordid past, almost to the point of glorying in it. Often, their books become best-sellers, they are touted as spokesmen of the Christian faith, and they are prematurely given places of leadership, in violation of 1 Timothy 3:6.
The apostle Paul warned against the tendency toward religious hucksterism that adulterates the very message it purports to “sell.” A similar problem existed in the Corinthian church. Paul speaks sternly of the many who “hawk God’s word for gain” (2 Cor. 2:17, Weymouth), who “peddle the Word of God for profit” (NIV), “whose idea in-getting out the gospel is to make a good living out of it” (LB). The Greek word kapeleuontes, used here for the only time in the New Testament, denotes the act of retailing merchandise; and because first-century hucksters gained the reputation of increasing their profits by adulteration, the term came to denote a corrupting, an adulterating, of the product—in this case the Word of God.
The passage specifies two quite diverse ways of presenting the Christian message, and the distinction between them is crucial in the church’s task of presenting Christ to the world. One way is that of sincere propagation of an unadulterated gospel through the agency and medium of God in Christ. (The English word sincere is derived from Latin sine plus cera, “without wax”—alluding to the deceitful practice of filling cracks in pottery with wax. The Greek word for sincerity is eilikrineias, “judged by sunlight,” suggesting a spiritual pun.) The other way, the more popular way in Paul’s time and perhaps in ours, is that of manipulative propaganda, peddling an adulterated message.
Paul seems to suggest that the adulteration is the inevitable result of the peddling. Propaganda (the term having become pejorative since its original use in the Catholic Congregatio de Propaganda Fide) denotes the effort or activity by which an initiating communicator seeks to alter the attitudes and especially the actions of others by appealing to certain needs or predilections. The propagandist appeals largely to the emotions and nonrational experience.
Can—and should they if they can?—Madison Avenue’s secular propaganda techniques be used to disseminate the Christian message? What happens when the churches seek to package and market Jesus Christ? Perhaps answers to the second question will provide a basis for an answer to the first. Jacques Ellul, in his book Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (Vintage, 1973), argues that “every time a church tried to act through the propaganda devices accepted by an epoch, the truth and authenticity of Christianity were abased.” By acquiring power and influence that are of this world, he argues, Christianity integrates itself into this world, thereby “losing its spiritual part” and “transmitting only a false Christianity.” “Christianity ceases to be an overwhelming power and spiritual adventure and becomes institutionalized in all its expressions and compromised in all its actions. It serves everybody as an ideology with the greatest of ease, and tends to be a hoax. In such times, there appear innumerable sweetenings and adaptations, which denature Christianity by adjusting it to the milieu.” In short, the Christian message loses its saltiness and becomes sugary.
Propaganda, by its very nature and methodology, is not propitious to authentic Christian belief. “What is effective in the service of Jesus Christ,” Ellul notes, “receives its character and effectiveness from Jesus Christ”; propaganda, on the other hand, receives its effectiveness from media manipulation and reflex action conditioning.
Propaganda euphemizes, offering falsehood that is not quite false and truth that is not quite true; authentic Christianity offers a cross, to many a stumbling block, a scandal, downright foolishness. Propaganda tends to separate thought and action, appealing to the emotions, bypassing or short-circuiting God-given intellectual faculties; authentic Christian experience is balanced, involving the whole man—intellect, emotion, and will. Propaganda, in superficially appealing to the lowest common denominator of human nature, tends to dehumanize; authentic Christianity, by offering a divine nature, makes man more meaningfully human. Thus propaganda tends not only to dechristianize the message but also to dehumanize the recipient—and perhaps the messenger as well. Peter warns of those who, “with feigned words, make merchandise” of many (2 Peter 2:3). “In their greed for money they will trade on your credulity with sheer fabrications” (NEB).
Does this mean, then, that responsible promotion and advertising have no place in the churches, that Christians should not propagate the gospel persuasively, that, as Bruce Barton asked 50 years ago, other voices should be raised in the marketplace but the voice of Jesus of Nazareth should be still? Most assuredly not. The crux of the matter is whether the authentic voice of Jesus Christ is being heard. Paul kept the fine distinction between clever human persuasion and effective gospel communication clearly in mind. On the one hand he said, “Knowing the terror of the Lord, I persuade men” (2 Cor. 5:11); but on the other, “My speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of man’s wisdom” (1 Cor. 2:4). (The Greek word for persuade is peithomen, “to influence by persuasion, endeavor to convince”; the word for persuasive is peithos, from the same stem but associated with Suada, pagan goddess of persuasion.) There is no contradiction here—just the difference between propaganda and propagation, between peddling and proclaiming.
Perhaps examination of a propaganda paradigm will clarify the differences. Propaganda in any form—whether commercial advertisement, political and governmental persuasion, or “public relations” of various kinds—follows this schema (formulated by Professor Hugh Rank of Governor’s State University in Illinois and endorsed by the Committee on Public Doublespeak of the National Council of Teachers of English):
Intensify own “good.” Intensify others’ “bad.”
Downplay own “bad.” Downplay others’ “good.”
But the authentic propagation of the Christian message follows a significantly different schema:
Intensify divine “good.” Intensify human “bad.”
Downplay divine “bad.” Downplay human “good.”
The secular propagandist intensifies in three major ways: (1) repetition (slogans, brand names, songs, etc.); (2) association (bandwagon, plain folks, sense of roots, testimonials, etc.); and (3) composition (syntax, semantics, etc.) The sincere Christian proclaimer, relying on the intensifying power of the Spirit and the living Word, also employs the three-fold technique. He uses repetition (“precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little,” Isa. 28:10); association (testimonial, promise of fulfillment), and composition (effective use of both verbal and nonverbal techniques).
The propagandist downplays in three major ways: (1) omission (slanted language, euphemism, distortion, half-truths, cover-up, ellipsis, etc.); (2) diversion (red herring, smoke-screening, nit-picking, hair-splitting, focusing on self, ad hominem,ad populum, etc.); and (3) confusion (doublespeak, circumlocution, ambiguity, incoherence, disorganization, equivocation, red tape, etc.).
Downplaying for the Christian proclaimer is considerably different from what it is for the propagandist-peddler. Spurning omissive half-truths, distortion, diversion, and confusion, he presents the message simply and plainly. He “handles aright (literally “cuts straight”) the “word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15); he “declares the word of truth without distortion” (Conybeare). Paul, within a single verse, emphasizes both downplaying and intensifying as spiritual weapons of the believer: “We tear down calculations [or destroy false arguments] and every height that is raised against the knowledge of God [downplay]. And every mental perception we lead into subjection to Christ [intensify]” (2 Cor. 10:5, Berkeley). For the Christian proclaimer, then, downplaying is simply the other side of intensifying; that is, using the positive truth to offset the negative falsehood. The ineffective Christian proclaimer, like the religious huckster, often engages, intentionally or unintentionally, in such negative downplay as hairsplitting, nit-picking, circumlocution, and ambiguity.
Christian believers forget or ignore to their spiritual peril that ancient adage caveat emptor (“Let the buyer beware”), for Satan is the master propaganda paradigm. It could be said that when the world, the flesh, and the devil intensify, the believer should downplay; when that unholy triad downplay, the believer should intensify. But equally as important for believers to remember is caveat venditor (“Let the seller beware”). Which shall we be: hucksters or heralds? Effective Christian proclamation intensifies and downplays honestly, responsibly—the gospel message itself constituting the medium, the means suited to the ends, the motive unadulterated by desire for personal gain.
Carl F. H. Henry, first editor of Christianity Today, is lecturer at large for World Vision International. An author of many books, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.
