COMMENTARY : Nation’s Evangelicals Find Madison Avenue

The exhibit hall of the convention center here measures nearly 300,000 square feet, the size of six football fields.

All of that space was recently filled with the display booths of more than 1,300 companies, all seeking to peddle their wares to the owners of more than 5,000 Christian bookstores, most of them owned and operated by evangelicals. This convention of the Christian Booksellers Assn. ranks in the top 5% of the estimated 6,000 trade shows held annually in the United States.

Statistics alone, however, cannot begin to convey the scene. Christian bookstores are big business, taking in an estimated $2.7 billion annually, and vendors trying to reach that market have swallowed Madison Avenue, feathers and all. Publishers’ displays have flashing lights, deep-pile carpeting and illuminated panels featuring color photographs of their authors. Many offer discounts, free shipping or gifts of various kinds to attract the attention of bookstore owners.

If the competition is intense, the market is also expanding. George Gallup projects that the demand for religious books will increase 82% by the year 2010. Word Inc., a publisher of evangelical books, is now a subsidiary of ABC. Rupert Murdoch, best known for his tabloid newspapers, owns Zondervan Publishing House, which in turn owns the copyright for the immensely profitable New International Version of the Bible.

Books and Bibles, however, represented an ever-diminishing proportion of the merchandise for sale here. Music is big too. But you would have been hard-pressed to find something as traditional as George Beverley Shea’s rendition of “I’d Rather Have Jesus,” which he sang in Billy Graham crusades. The music here ranged from country sounds to rock and even punk rock, all with a distinctively evangelical message.

There were bumper stickers that read, “In Case of the Rapture This Car Will Be Unmanned.” T-shirts sport a variety of apocalyptic slogans or poke fun at evolution: “From Goo to You by Way of the Zoo.” There were thousands of Bible totes, some of them leather, others quilted and lacy, designed to protect the cover of your Bible from wear and tear.

There are those, of course, who have pointed out the irony of ostensibly pious entrepreneurs who profit handsomely from the sale of religious goods.

There is more than a little truth to that observation, but I prefer to see the Christian Booksellers Assn. as a metaphor for a broader development within American evangelicalism over the past two decades. The convention symbolizes a larger accommodation to American culture on the part of evangelicals generally.

When I was growing up within the evangelical subculture between 20 and 30 years ago, the most stinging epithet you could level against another believer was that he or she was “worldly.” As evangelicals have emerged from their subculture into the larger culture in recent years, that suspicion of “worldliness” has dissipated.

The rhetoric of caution against the corruption of the world persists in evangelical circles, and there are still a few preachers who inveigh against the evils of dancing, drinking, card playing and other “worldly” behaviors. But most evangelicals view the larger culture with ambivalence.

Whereas materialism and affluence were once regarded as species of sin, evangelicals in the 1980s sought to claim their share of the good life, and many invoked God to validate that quest.

In the end, the undeniable excesses of the Christian Booksellers Assn.’s convention tell us less about the business of evangelical publishing and retailing than they do about the accommodation of American evangelicalism to the values of the larger culture. While the rhetoric of separation from the world continues, evangelicals have, in fact, made themselves rather comfortable in that world.