MANY Religious orgs. have long been recording sermons and lectures on both television and radio stations, with Christian organizations utilizing this practice most frequently in the United States. This is not, however, all that they're doing.
The other day, amidst a barrage of TV commercials I was doing my best to ignore, I suddenly heard a deep voice. If I was searching for something to believe in, the voice said, the answer lay in the United Methodist Church. The confusion I felt at having missed half the commercial soon gave way to the realization that I had actually just witnessed an advertisement not for a cleaning product or a restaurant or waterproof mascara, but for a church.
Churches are essentially places of worship, communities of people who share the same ideals and beliefs. Turning to television as a means to "spread the word" seems like an effective, well-conceived approach, especially given the masses of people that will watch it every day. There seems, however, to be something fundamentally wrong with commercializing a religious organization that claims to uphold the church as something spiritual and not material. The official online ministry of The United Methodist Church, www.UMC.org, states, "Church carries a lot more importance and has more soul than a building." While this statement might make for a profound and devout idea, it is rendered worthless when religion starts being treated as something to be sold.
From the 1970s until the late 1990s, religious ads on television consisted mainly of public service announcements aired for free. Now, however, churches are turning to paid advertising to deliver more overtly self-interested messages: to give a denomination a distinct brand, to drive up attendance and contributions and to raise the pride of current members.
This year alone, for example, United Methodist Communications spent a whopping $1.5 million on its fall advertising campaign, which included two different commercials that aired on 21 major networks, with Spanish translations also being broadcast.
The church's "Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors." campaign, which began in 2000 with an $18 million four-year budget, was approved a $25 million budget in 2004. Not only do they run commercials during Easter, Christmas and back-to-school periods, they also offer $1 million annually in matching funds to local churches, districts and conferences. The funds can be used for placing television, radio or cinema commercials, outdoor media or a combination of these media types.
It seems to be working, too. Barna Research Group collected data on first-time visitors and weekly worship attendance from 149 United Methodist congregations across the United States. Since 2000, when the campaign began, to 2004, first-time attendance went up by 14 percent at those churches, while overall worship attendance increased by six percent.
The United Church of Christ similarly spent $1.7 million. "We have to engage the world," says the Rev. Robert Chase in the church's Web site. "We can't sit back and expect that people are going to come to us any other way." Their commercials offer the message, "God doesn't reject people. Neither do we," and specifically shows gay couples, immigrants and the disabled. "The main thing ads do is make your own members feel good -- and that ain't a bad thing," Rev. Eric C. Shafer, director of communications for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (which began a $7 million campaign in 1999) said in a Washington Post interview.
Several trends have combined to produce this advertising boom, but the most important seems to be membership decline. The UCC has lost 150,000 members in the past decade. The Episcopal Church has lost nearly 200,000. And the Presbyterian Church has fallen by around 2 million members since 1983.
"We're not looking to draw people away from a religion that they find meaningful. But for those who are looking for something, we believe they will be more likely to find what they want and need if we are brave enough to tell them what we're about," Rev. Tracey, organizer of the UCC campaign, said in a Christian Science Monitor interview.
Apparently, this is enough to justify the selling of denominations as if they were clothes brands. Spending millions of dollars to promote acceptance when congregations could be out there actually using the money to show acceptance, is turning the Christian faith from a spiritual pursuit to a business organization. "God is still speaking," proclaims a UCC ad. That may be so, but one thing is for sure: It isn't His voice we hear in those commercials.
Andrea Arango's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at aarango@cavalierdaily.com.
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