Voting with Your Checkbook: What Every Christian Should Know about Boycotts

What do tuna fish, bleach, green grapes, candy bars, deodorant, and gasoline have in common? They have all, under specific brand names, been the targets of consumer boycotts. Take tuna, for example. Consumers became outraged when they learned that methods used to net tuna for commercial processing were also netting and killing dolphins. Activists targeted three major brands of canned tuna, representing 70 percent of the tuna sold in the United States. In early 1990, all three companies agreed to purchase and process only “dolphin safe” tuna. The strategy had worked.

The case with deodorant was somewhat different. It represented an effort to influence the standards of television programming by exerting pressure on a company that advertised on objectionable shows. In 1989, CLeaR-TV (Christian Leaders for Responsible Television), which represents Christian organizations and Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches, urged its supporters not to buy Mennen products for a year. The real target was the programs. CLeaR-TV argued that Mennen bought advertising during television shows that contained excessive violence, sexual explicitness, profanity, and anti-Christian stereotyping. While Mennen pulled its advertising from one objectionable show, it resisted taking any further action.

What motivates involvement in such boycotts? Two major reasons, heeding conscience and changing society, led evangelical Christians to support many nineteenth-century “boycotts” (refusing to buy slave-grown cotton and sugar, for instance). When conscience motivates a boycott, we simply avoid buying products from companies whose policies violate our values. These values include standards of morality, human dignity, or social and environmental well-being.

Using a boycott to bring about social change is more complex, and lies at the root of many recent boycotts that target the entertainment industry. Boycotting in this instance involves organizing the collective action of as many consumers as possible. They pool their economic power in order to achieve a specific moral goal by refusing to purchase the products or services of an offending company or individual. The goal of the boycott might be to redress an injustice or to urge compliance with higher ethical standards.

When Boycotts Are Bad

While a boycott is attractive because it employs nonviolent means, and can engage many people without placing cumbersome burdens upon them, there are drawbacks.

Theologian and ethicist John Macquarrie has called the boycott an “indiscriminate weapon” that is “bound to hurt a good many people other than those at whom it is aimed.” He counsels, “The Christian must consider each case very carefully and decide whether the harm that will be inflicted on innocent people will be outweighed by the eventual righting of wrongs through the pressure exerted.”

Innocent people who might be harmed by a boycott include the employees of a targeted company. The vast majority of them probably have no say about the offending policy or practice, yet their livelihood depends upon the economic performance of the company in question. If a boycott is successful in drastically cutting the sales of a company’s products, it may also hurt the company’s employees and suppliers.

In order to minimize this negative impact upon innocent people, Macquarrie urges organizers of a potential boycott to calculate the probability that it will be swift and successful. If the outlook is poor, Macquarrie suggests using a token boycott—lasting one day or one week, for instance—to draw public attention to the injustice without hurting innocent parties.

But a boycott is a form of coercion, nonetheless, and therefore represents serious moral action. Before considering a boycott, a group should make sure it is seeking a just and reasonable action from the offending party. Further, a boycott should be enacted only after all other lesser means of persuasion have been exhausted. A group’s concerns should first be expressed directly and privately to the offending party, allowing opportunity for response without public pressure or coercion. If it fails to respond or refuses to negotiate in a satisfactory manner, then a stronger and more public appeal may be made. If the offending party continues to remain intransigent, then a boycott may be called to pressure it for a satisfactory response.

Boycotts, however, are notoriously hard to start and even harder to end. Starting a boycott depends upon getting information out to as many potential supporters as possible. Often this is done through a variety of means, from newsletters to speeches. When a company finally makes a satisfactory response, organizers let supporters know and call off the boycott. In reality, however, boycott organizers often do this with less urgency and through fewer avenues than they use to launch the boycott. An organized and ongoing group such as CLeaR-TV runs this risk less, because it has an established mailing list and sends regular updates to supporters.

The Limits Of Boycotting

Can the boycott be overused as a tool for social change? As boycotts have become a more frequent phenomenon (there were more than 200 under way in 1990), some observers are starting to ask if the practice is being overdone. Because boycotts give clout to concerned groups outside decision-making structures, the tendency to resort to boycotts—and to do so as an intervention of first rather than last resort—is growing.

Problems can result: Targeted organizations may perceive that they are in a no-win situation—that increasingly diverse groups will boycott them for increasingly narrow reasons, no matter how hard they try to be sensitive to moral and social concerns. These organizations may decide, therefore, to chart their own courses without worrying about the clamors of public opinion.

This reaction may be especially tempting when one boycott provokes a counter boycott—as happened, for instance, when national prolife and prochoice factions targeted retail giant Dayton Hudson on the issue of contributions to Planned Parenthood.

Boycotts have also been known to provoke “buycotts,” in which persons who oppose the goals of a boycott are urged to increase their buying from the targeted company. Responding to such trends, a recent article in The Economist warned, “As boycotts become more widespread, more shrill, and more bullying, their biggest victim may not be corporate misbehavior, but reason.”

The proliferation of boycotts could also lead to bewilderment and the paralysis of consumer conscience. Even those who favor boycotts, properly used, feel that the attempt to support so many worthy boycotts is becoming a new form of legalistic self-righteousness. Nearly every day, it seems, organizers ask the public to adhere to ever-new laws of consumer purity.

This can have several detrimental effects. Michael Kinsley of The New Republic observes that “politicizing every economic decision down to which brand of cereal to buy can gum up the gears of commerce, poison social relations, reduce toleration, and strain the national sense of humor.” Some see the increased emphasis on boycotts as evidence of a dangerous factionalism that could threaten to rend the fabric of society.

In order to preserve the moral power of the boycott as a tool of social change in the face of trends toward overuse and trivialization, current observers are adding new guidelines to the traditional ones discussed above. Kinsley suggests the following:

Rule 1: “Don’t use a boycott to deny other people their rights … [or] to discourage purely political activities. (Corporate contributions to activist groups are different. Corporations justify this use of shareholders’ money as a way to improve their image. They can’t complain if the image backfires.)”

Rule 2: Think carefully about boycotts that target one group through action against another group. In this regard, Kinsley notes the distinction in labor law between primary and secondary boycotts. “A secondary boycott is aimed at someone you have no dispute with, in an attempt to get the target to boycott your real nemesis.… Secondary boycotts are frowned upon under the general principle that there’s got to be a limit.”

Rule 3: “A boycott is more compelling if it is aimed at the item [not just the company] that actually causes the offense.”

Rule 4: A boycott should not be a shakedown. Kinsley suggests that Operation PUSH’S attempted boycott of Nike falls into this category.

When Boycotts Work And Why

How effective are boycotts? It depends. Several factors determine the outcome. The broader and more dedicated the group of participants mobilized, the better the chance of success. If a company believes that mainstream consumers have been mobilized (especially those previously loyal to its product), and not just a narrowly focused vocal minority, it will more likely respond positively to the boycott’s goals.

Yet individuals making sound arguments have also been known to influence major companies. Take the example of Terry Rakolta. The Michigan mother wrote letters to companies such as Coca-Cola, Kimberly Clark, Procter & Gamble, and Tambrands urging them to withdraw sponsorship from Fox Broadcasting’s “Married … With Children.” She effectively argued that the show denigrated women and family values and featured gratuitous sex. Continuing to advertise on such a show, she argued, could make the companies unpopular with family-oriented viewers. Rakolta’s efforts met with stunning success. Several advertisers withdrew their ads from the show; others promised to monitor the episodes more closely before puchasing time.

While an individual rarely has such an impact, Rakolta’s story nonetheless reveals that a boycott’s success depends upon more than actual losses in sales. It also depends upon the perceived legitimacy of the complaint, and the company’s sensitivity to public-relations concerns.

A company’s fear of controversy will more often motivate response than fear of declining sales. According to Mark de Bernardo, director of labor law for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “Boycotts create a public-relations problem, not a sales problem.” This applies to boycotts protesting advertising practices, as well. As New York Times writer N. R. Kleinfeld points out, “When you pay $100,000 or $200,000 for 30 seconds on the air, you prefer not to offend anybody.”

Boycotts offer an avenue for effecting change as people grow impatient because lawmakers and regulators are not serving the public’s needs. “People don’t have a lot of faith in legislators and public institutions, so they see boycotts as an effective way to express their views,” observed Todd Putnam, editor of National Boycott News.

Viewer efforts to influence television programming bear this out. More provocative shows came out after the Federal Communications Commission, under the Reagan administration, began deregulating the television industry in the early 1980s. Cost-cutting measures at the networks heightened the problems created by deregulation as the three major networks cut back on staff in their “standards and practices” divisions (responsible for censoring programs).

Grassroots groups of viewers began protesting the resulting vacuum of values. These groups, and others like them, use at least three approaches to express their concerns: communicating views to the Federal Communications Commission, contacting the networks directly, and boycotting companies that advertise on objectionable programs. The last method has seemed to provide the most powerful leverage.

Indeed, companies may be growing more skittish about the content of programs on which they advertise, and the networks are beginning to get the message that the public is not thrilled with their offerings. Howard Stringer, president of the CBS Broadcast Group, noted tersely, “Trash television got in. The viewers revolted.” Meanwhile, according to a Forbes magazine report entitled “Crude Doesn’t Sell,” shows that are both popular and clean are drawing higher rates for ads than smutty shows.

The public widely supports the social-change tactic of boycotts. An independent study, which was conducted in 1989 by Oxtoby-Smith, Inc., a consumer-research firm, found that 68 percent of television viewers believed it was “a good idea for advertisers to stop advertising in programs some viewers found objectionable.” An even larger proportion, 72 percent, believed it was “a good idea for consumers not to buy products of advertisers in programs they found objectionable.”

“Those who advocate a consumer boycott have apparently touched a sensitive, pervasive, and perhaps festering public concern,” observed Oxtoby-Smith president Joseph Smith.

Why Some Still Object

Boycotts are still controversial. Most opponents of viewer boycotts assert that they represent attempts to narrow the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. They argue that boycotters are seeking to impose the standards of certain segments of society upon all television viewers.

Boycotters counter that not only are they not infringing on free speech, they are making use of such freedoms, in a manner open to all Americans. They understand their critics’ sensitivity about imposed standards, because they feel that regrettably low entertainment standards have been imposed upon the viewing public by a handful of network decision makers.

Furthermore, advocates of boycotts argue that the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech does not apply without restriction to the entertainment industry. Regulation is therefore appropriate, just as it is with print and film pornography, in order to reflect and maintain community standards of decency and human dignity.

Nonetheless, most boycotters are seeking to obtain industry cooperation through market rather than legislative avenues. They do not aspire to be dictatorial arbiters of public standards, but rather communicators of standards they feel are being ignored in the quest for ratings and profits. They are using acceptable democratic means that have been used by many other groups.

New York Times television critic Walter Goodman believes defenders of the First Amendment have offered relatively little resistance to viewer boycotts because they realize television is different from books and movies. “Television,” Goodman asserts, “is recognized to be too powerful a social force and too entwined with commercial interests outside the medium itself to be treated like movies or theater or books. In such a forum, pressures are as natural and as justified as they are in a political campaign.”

Most persons who are concerned about the effects of the boycotts, however, hope that advertisers and the viewing public will make a distinction between shows that are objectionable because of prurient content and shows that take on controversial topics. If abortion, for example, could not be dealt with openly on commercial television, First Amendment guarantees would be compromised and the viewing public would come out the losers.

Despite what appears to be an encouraging turn toward acceptance of viewer input, some viewers appear to be more equal than others. New York Times writer Bill Carter observes that “the religious groups’ complaints of the 1980’s were largely dismissed as coming from outside of mainstream American opinion.”

There may be more than a hint of religious and social-class bigotry, then, in the opposition to efforts of groups such as CLeaR-TV and Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association. Evangelicals are labeled as a power-hungry group at the fringes of the establishment, which may explain the sneers and distrust evangelicals’ efforts sometimes elicit. It also explains why Christians resort to boycotts and regard the task as so vital: They do not inhabit the decision-making offices and halls of power, and they must therefore avail themselves of other means offered by a democratic society.

We are entering a period when television viewers are finding a voice to which advertisers, writers, and network executives are beginning to listen. Most of us would like them, at the minimum, to hear the message of Terry Rakolta: “I just want to be able to turn on my TV with a degree of safety about what my children are going to see.”

Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Bel Air, Maryland, and author of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (InterVarsity) and Answering God (Harper & Row), both of which are about the Psalms.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.