Brand Name Faith

Gone are the faith conversations of my youth. Back then, we were all Christians. The questions were about "what brand?" Lots of jokes revolved around church denominations. Brand religion still hangs on among the less acquainted, who speak "church" to religious functionaries. The language is about being baptized Methodist or wed by the priest (shorthand for Roman Catholic). But in public conversation, brands are nearly dead. More accurately, Christian has become one of the brands among Hindu, Baha'i, Muslim, Hebrew, etc.

At a recent family reunion, one of my nieces took me aside. She asked me to explain to her the bewildering variety of Christians about which she had heard. What makes a Baptist different from a Methodist, from an Episcopalian was her line of inquiry. I was enormously uneasy about this. It offered no avenue into the heart of faith. Faith as brand ignores the questions of the heart. It concentrates instead on superficialities, church attire. Much later it dawned on me that she was asking about brands. What a wonderful reflective moment we might have shared, had we thought a bit about the purposes and effects of a brand name culture.

Since then, I have been looking at branding as a feature in itself. Brands began as a sign of ownership. Early on, they are about possession. One brands a property. My cow, My beer, My buggywhip were the sine qua non of branding. Only later, when mass communication appeared a brand identified me. It is no longer my beer, but it is me! I not only use Budweiser, I am Budweiser. This shift produced great profits for those who held the trusted brands. (Naomi Klein, the Canadian writer has done a wonderful job of tracing the history of branding in her book, Logo, so I won't repeat her efforts here.) What bridges the transition from "brand as owning" to "brand as identity" is the intense focus on me, my and mine. Branding is the source of the cultural habit that everything "it is all about me."

As branding matured in the television age, it became a way to squeeze out the competition. Folks would pay more and seek out a brand simply because they knew they could trust it. The seamy side of the story comes when this trust shifts to identity. Then a brand becomes a bludgeon with which to club the competition. Branding narrows the market choices. It also narrows the human identity. Of course, political operatives soon discovered that same power. Parties, policies and candidates began to become part of the brand. Ad man H. R. Haldeman pioneered this approach in Richard Nixon's White House. It was he who branded Nixon the candidate of the Silent Majority, a dubious demographic. To one degree or another political campaigns in the mass media have been about brands. (eg Morning In America, Where's the Beef?) Fatally, they also came be be about a synthetic reality.

As I noted above, branding is no stranger to American Christianity. We have been branding from the very beginning. Some say that the population of the colonies rested on the free exercise of brands. (as long as they were Christian) Of late, Christian brand competition have become so complex that folks have begun to check out. Worse yet, it has created a bumper sticker shorthand and identity religion. Happily the superficial language of "faith as brand" is beginning to lose its grip on the public mind. That is a good thing.

Branding in religions is about creating division, limiting competition and finally market domination. By no stretch of imagination can any of these be the core mission of any faith. They are not virtues. As brands are now showing themselves to be a diversions in the commercial and political realm, religious brands are faltering too. Amid the rubble, hucksters of brand speak about the "rebranding" of failing products and ideologies. But the public sees the emperor walking around without naked. At last some sanity.

But we will still need information about products, politics and faith. George Barna, the guru of the religious focus group, recently noted, "Faith is increasingly viral rather than pedagogical."* The adage of faith, that it is caught not taught, may open a way to a new conversation on the subject. (I say may, because branding has made the public intolerant of conversation in sentences longer than sound bites.)

But this opening has breathed new life into our congregations We now can offer frameworks, skeletons, within which a search receive and interpret their faith can thrive. I can hardly wait to replace the "medical model" of faith (something you have to do that makes you better) to faith as collaboration. Such a shift holds great promise not only for the faith communities, but also for all who live around those who practice faith. At the very least, we can use a little respite from all the alternate realities that religious marketers have piled upon us in recent decades.




*www.barna.org/barna-update/article/12-faithspirituality/15-christianity-is-no-longer-americans-default-faith