Meghan O'Gieblyn on the church's market-based failures
"Despite all the affected teenage rebellion, I continued to call myself a
Christian into my early twenties. When I finally stopped, it wasn’t
because being a believer made me uncool or outdated or freakish. It was
because being a Christian no longer meant anything. It was a label to
slap on my Facebook page, next to my music preferences. The gospel
became just another product someone was trying to sell me, and a paltry
one at that because the church isn’t Viacom: it doesn’t have a
Department of Brand Strategy and Planning. Staying relevant in late
consumer capitalism requires highly sophisticated resources and the
willingness to tailor your values to whatever your audience wants. In
trying to compete in this market, the church has forfeited the one
advantage it had in the game to attract disillusioned youth:
authenticity. When it comes to intransigent values, the profit-driven
world has zilch to offer. If Christian leaders weren’t so ashamed of
those unvarnished values, they might have something more attractive than
anything on today’s bleak moral market. In the meantime, they’ve lost
one more kid to the competition."
—Meghan O'Gieblyn, "Sniffing Glue," originally published in Guernica (2011), now collected in Interior States: Essays (2018)
—Meghan O'Gieblyn, "Sniffing Glue," originally published in Guernica (2011), now collected in Interior States: Essays (2018)