Selling Faith: Marketing Christian Popular Culture to Christian and Non-Christian Audiences

Newswise — As the Christian retailing industry grows, so too grows tension when artists must decide whether to target their message and marketing efforts toward non-Christians.

“The Christian retailing industry has changed and grown since the early 1970s,” says Charles Brown, associate professor of sociology at Albright College in Reading, Pa. “Most, if not all, content was explicitly spiritual until the mid-1980s. That’s changed. And there’s a lot of debate over what is a Christian product as the messages have become less overt.”

Brown is the author of, “Selling Faith: Marketing Christian Popular Culture to Christian and Non-Christian Audiences,” published Spring 2012 in the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture.

Christian retailing is big business – represented by television stations, publishing houses, record, clothing, greeting card and gift companies – and presents unique challenges for those working within it.

“Its members must learn to balance tensions that result of the interaction among art, commerce and faith,” says Brown. “Creators must walk a fine line between being culturally relevant and losing their evangelical distinctiveness. The tension between marketing Christian popular culture to Christian versus non-Christian audiences receives scrutiny by those within and outside the industry.”

His study, conducted through a series of interviews, looks at the various ways – both proactive and passive – that Christian musicians, authors or artists attempt to alleviate these tensions.

“This tension shapes creation, production and distribution decisions,” Brown points out. “For example, one can expect to see greater diversity of products as the Christian industry continues to mimic trends found in its secular counterpart in order to appeal to those outside the subculture. As new styles are generated in the general market, Christian companies will be quick to copy them. This means that many Christian products will likely be sanitized versions of those found in the general market with few pushing the envelope of creativity.”

“Many producers will be forced into positions where they will have to be wary of offending a core evangelical audience that might object to something ‘too worldly’,” he says. “This core audience will continue to influence producers, and the gatekeeping mechanisms that screen out potentially offensive materials will continue to be supported by most of those in the industry.”