COLUMN ONE : Material World of Christianity : From bird feeders to Bible games, religious retailing is a $3-billion business. Some see it as a way to express their identity or to evangelize. Critics question the spirit behind the products.

If Jesus had been in Denver this summer he could have thumbed through the pages of a bulletproof New Testament, posed for snapshots with a super-hero named Bibleman or shopped for a Last Supper paint-by-numbers kit.

Wandering the floor of the Colorado Convention Center, he would have been able to buy a Christian boomerang (“Love always returns”), chomp a Scripture fortune cookie and sniff a balm called Fragrance of Jesus.

All told, he could have explored six football fields’ worth of religious merchandise on display at the 46th annual convention of the Christian Booksellers Assn.

What would he think of this melding of commerce and Christianity?

It’s a $3-billion-a-year question, though hardly a new one. Almost since the Crucifixion, believers have been wrestling with the issue.

And today, with religious retailing booming--and secular companies swallowing up Christian ones--some say it is hard to tell whether the Gospel is something sacred or just another brand name.

Indeed, with the exception of furniture and major appliances, it is possible to outfit an entire home in Christian products--bird feeders to body lotions, luggage to lamps.

CBA President Bill Anderson says such goods are so effective for evangelizing that if Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount today, he would have the disciples hawking merchandise at the back.

Shoppers say the products help them stay focused on God in an increasingly secularized society.

But others find the flood of goods troubling.

“This desire to spiritualize everything reflects an unwillingness to take God’s creation at face value,” said evangelical author Michael Horton, a former pastor. “God doesn’t stamp John 3:16 on sequoias, so why should I have it on my lamp?”

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In a small office littered with everything from St. Ignatius liquid soap to Gummi candy Nativity figures, religion historian Colleen McDannell discusses the quirks and controversies of modern Christian merchandising.

It is a phenomenon, she says, with strong roots in the 1800s, an era of suitcase-sized Bibles, apostle teakettles and the mysteriously preserved remains of a Methodist minister’s thumb.

McDannell, a University of Utah professor who writes on the subject, says such items offer a treasure of insights into American spirituality.

“Everyone laughs at this stuff or calls it terrible, but nobody asks why people buy it,” she said.

McDannell contends that all believers need devotional objects to keep their faith alive:

“It’s tough to [sustain] religious sentiment just in your head. People need to touch, taste and see [the divine] to make it real.”

But lately that need has been playing out in increasingly far-fetched ways. And even the merchants seem a little uneasy about it. At CBA, some refer to the plethora of goods as “Jesus junk” or “holy hardware.”

Part of the discomfort comes from the age-old chasm between the sacred and the profane. Any attempt to combine the two inevitably sounds jarring.

Consider the mission statement of religious publishing conglomerate Thomas Nelson Inc.: to “produce and market products that honor God and serve humanity, and to enhance shareholder value.”

Another company, DaySpring, outlines the history of its Christian greeting card business in a brochure that says, “early in 1973 . . . God [led] us to produce 18 general occasion cards complete with three notes and a corrugated displayer.”

And then there are the products themselves: Auto sun visors that say “Jesus Is Lord” on one side and “Need Help! Please Call Police” on the reverse; neckties in patterns of “angel paisley” or “burning bush;” and Heavenly Touch, “spiritually inspired messages” for your answering machine.

“It’s all based on marketing and having something new,” said McDannell, whose book, “Material Christianity,” is due out this winter. “The more you try to search for something new, the wackier your stuff gets.”

But Horton fumes: “If this were done on ‘David Letterman,’ Christians would write to protest that God was being trivialized and made fun of. Instead, we’re doing it to ourselves.”

Even the faithful have started lampooning the industry.

The Door, a satirical evangelical magazine, recently issued a “Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction” desk calendar containing some of the weirdest Christian products of the last 20 years, including Talking Patty Prayer Doll, Bible gum, crucifixes shaped like oil derricks (from Zales jewelers) and Gold Cross Fragrant Pantyhose.

As absurd as such items might sound, they do serve some critical purposes, observers say. One is expressing identity.

“Forty years ago, everyone assumed you were a Christian unless you spoke out and said otherwise, so people were more private with their faith,” said Linda Riedmann, an employee at the Pink Lady Christian bookstore in Orange. “Now, society has changed. [To] take a stand, you put on a [Christian] bumper sticker or you [use Christian products].”

McDannell adds: “How do you figure out who you are in a world where you can be any thing--where you can even change your sex? Things like music, clothing and art help anchor you into something. . . . It’s a part of asserting your place in a multicultural world where people use objects and icons to say, ‘I am a Mexican American’ or ‘I am a lesbian.’ . . .”

Objects also can keep believers inspired and focused on God. “It’s getting tough out there,” said David McNabb of Dicksons Inspirational Gifts. “We really do need reminders of our faith.”

Shopper Holly Larson of Anaheim said: “Things like framed Scripture [verses] reassure me of my beliefs every day. They remind me of how God takes care of me and how I can trust him and what choices I should make in life.”

Evangelical Slogans

Another aim--one that has caused a rift among Christians--is to convert lost souls.

The products range from Scripture-tagged checks (“Let God use your check-writing to open doors for sharing”) to watches (one has a solitary 11 on the face, so if anybody asks the time, a brochure advises replying: “You see, it really doesn’t matter what time it is; we’re in the 11th hour. Would you like to know Jesus and prepare for His coming?”).

Also available: bumper stickers and T-shirts, some with understated messages (“Truth”), some humorous (“Moses at an early age” shows the young prophet in a wading pool, water parted on both sides of him), and some parroting secular logos (“Jesus Christ--He’s the Real Thing” and “Air Jesus”).

Here’s where the debate starts.

Critics say slogan evangelizing is a turnoff to nonbelievers. “Instead of sitting down and talking to people and listening to them, a T-shirt allows you to just say what you want and walk away,” said Eric Casteel of Celebration Christian Bookstore in Costa Mesa.

But others say that’s OK. Even if someone rejects or laughs at the message, he still has to process a thought about Jesus, said Karen Gibson of Joy Bells Bible Bookstore in Garden Grove.

Not good enough, replied Horton, president of Anaheim-based Christians United for Reformation, a nationwide group pushing for a rediscovery of the ideas of Martin Luther and John Calvin. “We don’t want people to have just any kind of thought about Christianity. We’d like them to hear an argument and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of it.”

Casteel agrees. “I had one customer ranting about those Darwin stickers [a parody of the Christian fish emblem, with feet added]. She said, ‘We’re being persecuted for our faith.’ My reply was, ‘We deserve it, for making our faith two-dimensional.’ ”

Evangelizing is only part of the picture, however.

In essence, some conservative Protestants are trying to create a parallel universe to the secular world. Instead of Disneyland, they have Christian theme parks. Instead of Madonna, Amy Grant. Retailing is a logical extension.

“Name the secular [product] and we probably have the Bible equivalent,” said a sales rep at CBA.

Scones. Mud flaps. Wallpaper. Candy bars. Mouse pads. . . .

Some companies “baptize” normally secular goods--such as framed paintings--by adding Bible verses. Others recast successful products in Christian terms: Bibleopoly stands in for Monopoly.

And no detail is too small to be redeemed. The dice in the game Pilgrim’s Progress has no 6 (associated with evil), but does have a 7 (biblical symbol of perfection).

“It’s not that the [non-Christian] games are bad,” said a salesman. “But people want something that has more value than just fun.”

CBA’s Anderson said believers are seeking ways to “integrate a spiritual perspective into every area of life. They’re realizing [that] the lyrics of a song or the plot of a video can either build up or tear down their values and their lives.”

Such thinking, McDannell said, marks a sea change in American spirituality. “The product has become a sermon; the words of the preacher [have been] replaced by . . . objects. [And] advertising and witnessing are interchangeable.”

Or, as CBA’s mantra goes: “Our motive is ministry. Our message is Jesus Christ. Our method is retail.”

That point was driven home at the convention, when CBA leaders announced a plan to send missionaries to other nations--but not to preach the Gospel. These will be apostles of retail, sent to train new store owners.

Laments Horton: “Jesus didn’t say, ‘Go into all the world and teach the principles of American business marketing.’ ”

But many church leaders seem to have no qualms about Christian merchandising. Some denominations--including the Southern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church USA--even sell or produce such goods themselves.

Old Market

The market for articles of faith is an old one.

The earliest sacred souvenirs--lamps and ampuls filled with oil from Holy Land pilgrimage sites--began cropping up less than 200 years after the Crucifixion.

Next came imprinted lead discs (the forerunners of Catholic medals), jewelry, dishes, statues and cloths that had touched the bones or tomb of a martyr.

In the 8th Century, religious retailers had their first run-in with church officials.

“That’s when you get all these people trafficking in fake relics,” said Lawrence Cunningham, chairman of the theology department at Notre Dame University. “That was the schlock of the ancient world. [And] all kinds of church laws forbade it.”

But other godly goods inspired no such resistance.

In fact, several heavyweight theologians of the time held that when someone “concentrated on a religious image, eventually the soul could be inflamed with love for the divine,” according to “Material Christianity.” Devotional objects were said to “bridge the gap between the visible and the invisible because they evoked emotion in the viewer. [And] from the emotion comes the desire to live a better life, pray more devotedly or feel healing comfort.”

So by 1517, when the Protestant Reformation began, Europe was inundated with icons and artifacts. And that didn’t change.

“The myth is that [Luther and Calvin] got rid of all this stuff,” McDannell said. Actually, they just replaced “unacceptable” Catholic images with “acceptable” Protestant ones.

Within a few centuries, Protestants even began to eclipse their former brethren in artifact output. By the late 1800s, there were Jesus thermometers, “magic lantern” slides and the first Christian board game, Mansions of Glory.

The era also gave rise to Bibles “so lavish and encyclopedic that they functioned more like religious furniture than biblical texts,” McDannell writes. “They sat majestically on parlor stands and signaled the social respectability of their owners.”

McDannell also contends that Protestants developed their own forms of relics.

In 1775, she writes, military officers and ministers exhumed renowned Methodist evangelist George Whitefield’s body and passed his clerical collar and wristbands among their ranks. The corpse continued to fascinate during the 1800s because Whitefield’s “personal power” was believed to be present in his body and possessions. “At some point, a piece of [his] thumb made its way to the Methodist Archives [at Drew University in New Jersey], where it is preserved in a locked file cabinet.”

“When we look at how Christians use objects, rather than what they say about them,” the distinctions between Protestants and Catholics fade, McDannell writes.

But the current wave of Christian consumerism is largely Protestant-driven.

One reason: In the 1870s and again in the 1950s, Catholic clergy launched a series of attacks against the commercialization and tastelessness of some religious art. Vatican II clamped down even harder, all but killing the market for Catholic goods (although church officials have licensed Pope wristwatches, water bottles and other souvenirs for the pontiff’s October visit to the East Coast).

A bigger factor was the “Jesus movement” of the early 1970s, which combined Protestant piety with hippie counterculture.

These evangelicals considered Christianity a lifestyle, not something to do just on Sundays.

From 1965 to 1975, the number of independent U.S. Christian bookshops soared from 725 to 1,850.

“Many of the people who opened Bible bookstores [at that time] were long on faith and short on finances,” said Columbia University professor Randall Balmer in his book “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.” Some filled out credit applications with “The Lord will provide” scrawled across the top.

Things are decidedly more sophisticated now. With about 5,000 Christian stores dotting the land, religious retailing has burgeoned into a $3-billion-a-year enterprise, triple what it was 15 years ago.

Under the tutelage of Christian consultants, shops are installing CD listening stations, video walls and espresso bars (sort of a Starbuck’s of Bethlehem approach).

Gift items and music have overtaken book and Bible sales, and the industry shows no signs of a slowdown. Baby boomers are displaying increased interest in spiritual matters. And the rise of Christian men’s groups such as Promise Keepers is luring new customers to a market that is 90% female.

Not surprisingly, chains such as Wal-Mart and Target have begun stocking religious products. CBA itself, which drew a meager 279 people to its first convention in 1949, now pulls in 12,000.

But the convergence of capitalism and Christianity poses some thorny theological issues.

One is “mega-corporations buying Christian companies,” McDannell said. “Christian executives are having to explain things like why it’s OK for Zondervan Press [which publishes the top-selling New International Version of the Bible] to be owned by Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins, which produces ‘The New Joy of Gay Sex’--or for Time Alliance [a Christian music company] to be owned by Time-Warner, which published Madonna’s ‘Sex’ book.

“For the most part, suppliers and retailers try not to look too deeply into [such] associations,” she said.

But some offer a defense.

When Charisma & Christian Life magazine was knocked for running ads from Waldenbooks, considered by some evangelicals to be “one of the [nation’s] largest distributors of pornographic materials,” its publisher said “lighting a lamp in the darkness is more effective than screaming about the darkness.”

And companies such as Sparrow Music, now owned by EMI, argue that involvement with secular firms gives them access to a wider audience to promote the Gospel.

Unsettling Idea

So what would Jesus say?

Philip Yancey, a columnist for Christianity Today magazine, said the question is impossible to answer: “He lived in such a pre-technological environment. It’s hard to project” what he would do today.

But others are unsettled by the idea. At CBA, the story of Christ throwing the money-changers out of the temple comes up often.

Some believe he would do the same here. Some think he would be pleased. Steve Fowler, who markets Christian art at CBA, said: “There’s a very fine line between ministry and exploitation. You don’t want to be hasty to judge anyone. But I’ll guarantee you this: God will judge them.”