by Bill Bishop
There is no longer national "brand loyalty" in regard to religion. There are, however, local micro-brands. Ministers "try to market their church, to find a niche, whether it's being open to gays or lesbians or being strong as a pro-life church," Henry Brinton, an author and Presbyterian minister in northern Virginia, told me. "It's really finding a niche in the religious marketplace and then exploiting it." A minister's job these days entails more than transforming the spiritual lives of congregants. A minister keeps his pulpit by providing the type of services expected by his particular niche market. Trinity became a "reconciling" church, the name Methodists use to describe gay-and-lesbian-friendly congregations. Lutheran churches of the same persuasion are "reconciling-in-Christ." Presbyterians have "more light" congregations. The United Church of Christ has "open and affirming" churches. Some Unitarian churches call themselves "welcoming." And there is an "Evergreen" association within the Baptist Church. What tells more about a church these days, its denomination or whether there's a little rainbow flag attached to its welcome sign? The answer is the flag. Just as the political differences among states are not as great as the political differences among communities, the greatest political disparities are among individual churches, not denominations. Forget whether the church is Baptist or Episcopalian. The important question is whether the service begins with praise music, Handel, or Sting.
Sunday Morning's Big Sort
The discussion going into and coming out of the 2004 presidential election was about the relationship between church attendance and voting. Sixty percent of those who attended church once a week voted Republican in both 2000 and 2004. But that rough statistic misses what's happening within communities and within churches. Trinity's members go to church once a week, and they vote Democratic. Tarrytown's members also go to church every Sunday, and that home to Texas Republican governors, the minister told me, "tends to steer to the right." The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in the late 1950s, "The most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o'clock on Sunday morning." King was referring to racial segregation, and his observation may be as true now as it was then. But today eleven o'clock on Sunday morning is politically segregated, too. In the late 1990s, Diana Mutz, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist, surveyed people about their partners in political discussions. "Overwhelmingly, people said the people they met in church were extremely homogenous with them politically," Mutz reported. Church congregations, she wrote, exhibit "strong, extreme homogeneity." There is political discussion within churches, Mutz found, but because it takes place among like-minded people, the discussion tends to reinforce the beliefs of the group. Thus, the result of political discussion in a church built around homogeneous units is greater homogeneity in attitudes.31
The University of Akron's John Green has conducted polls about religion and politics since the early 1990s. Rates of church attendance have been a crude way to measure faith and politics; Green has dug deeper. He asks about the nature of personal beliefs—for example, is the Bible inerrant?—and uses this information to classify respondents as traditionalist, centrist, or modernist.32 A traditionalist Protestant church member would attend church often and believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God. A traditional Catholic would fully accept the authority of the pope. The Second Baptist Church in Houston is a traditionalist church. In 1999, for example, during the festival of Divali, the church distributed a booklet warning that Hindus were under the "power of Satan."33 The church is "famous for its extensive program of (conservative) political activity," and a picture of George W. Bush hangs on the wall in the church's office.34 By contrast, Trinity United Methodist's exploration of "creation spirituality ... an eclectic tradition that honors women's wisdom and the cosmologies of indigenous cultures around the planet" might resonate with a modernist mainline church member.
When Green used those designations of belief to examine voters, he found the real religious divide. Thirty-two percent of modernist Evangelicals were Republican in 2004, compared to 70 percent of traditionalist Evangelicals. Similarly, 26 percent of modernist mainline church members were Republican, compared to 59 percent of traditionalist mainline church members. The categories formed a straight-line trend: the more traditional a person's religious beliefs, the more Republican his or her political beliefs.* Voters who considered the Bible the inerrant Word of God were odds-on members in good standing of the Republican Party. Put a candidate in place of a generic party label, and the divide becomes even deeper. In the spring of 2004, Green found that among likely voters, a whopping 81 percent of traditionalist Evangelicals planned to vote for George W. Bush. Modernist evangelicals, however, favored John Kerry by more than 8 percentage points. Traditionalist mainline churchgoers favored Bush by 34 points. Modernist mainliners favored Kerry by 41.6 points.35
As Americans have sorted themselves geographically, they've sorted themselves religiously, too—and just as unconsciously. "People don't say, 'What's the most Republican church in town?'" Green explained to me. "They say, 'Where is the church that is most like me?' Which means that nine out of ten people in the church are going to be Republican. And it happens with liberals as well." The large churches, most of which follow McGavran's church growth techniques, are almost invariably traditionalist. Only 7 percent of the 1,210 megachurches counted in 2005 described themselves as "moderate." (That's as far to the left as the designations went.) Eight out of ten fell into traditionalist categories—charismatic, Pentecostal, fundamentalist.36 By Rick Warren's estimation, 85 percent of the Saddleback Sams and Samanthas in his church voted for Bush in 2004.*37
These days, people are unlikely to meet many at church whose politics differ from their own, so the forces of group polarization are at work within the sanctuary, too. "To the extent that people receive information from congregations, they are likely to have that information reinforced by the people they worship with," Green told me. "It's like having a big filter. You get some kinds of messages, and those messages are reinforced ... There has been a lot of emphasis on this happening with conservative Christians, but of course it happens across the board. This kind of filtering happens in liberal churches, too." The lesson learned in scores of group polarization experiments is that like-minded groups grow more extreme over time. And that is exactly what Green has found. "Overall, particularly among the large white religious communities, there does seem to be that hardening," Green said in 2004. Since his first polls in 1992, traditionalist Evangelicals "have experienced a steady Republican shift." Meanwhile, the political makeup of modernist mainline churches also has changed drastically—"from 50 percent Republican to 26 percent."38
Are Green's religious types also segregating themselves geographically, with traditionalists settling in some communities and modernists in others? Bob Cushing and I have discovered that men and women of every faith (Evangelical, Catholic, Jewish) are more politically conservative in heavily Republican counties than are those of the same religious description in Democratic landslide counties. That's because there are more religious traditionalists in Republican counties. For example, 45 percent of the population in heavily Republican counties attends regular Bible study or group prayer meetings. By contrast, only 28.7 percent of the population in heavily Democratic counties participates in such activities.39
It's Not About You—Except When It Is
Rick Warren's wildly popular book The Purpose-Driven Life begins with a challenge to Americans' post-materialist self-centeredness: "It's not about you." In the sense of the Great Commission, that is exactly right. Life and the church are about finding salvation in Christ. The imperative of "like attracts like" evangelism, however, caters to the individual from the time the convert first answers the call to worship. Whenever the evangelist Billy Graham issued his altar call, inspired people would stream to the foot of the stage to pledge their lives to the church. At that first moment of their new faith, Graham made sure the freshly converted were met by volunteers of the same age, sex, and race.40 The shephe
rding of people into their proper "homogeneous units" begins at the beginning. Which raises a question: in this world of segmented Sunday school classes, stopwatch-timed sermons, "people like us" altar calls, and preachers in market-tested cruise ship attire, isn't there something very pervasive that's all about you?
"My contention is that McGavran was never really heard in North America," said Eddie Gibbs, the Donald A. McGavran Professor of Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary. McGavran came to his strategy because of his commitment to the Great Commission. Warren repeatedly makes the same point—that the homogeneous unit principle is simply a way to make it easier for people to become Christians. Whereas McGavran was a missionary building bridges from castes or villages to Christ, today's churches define tribes in the same way people are attracted to different sections of a shopping mall. McGavran hired an anthropologist to understand the multiple meanings of human affinity in China. Megachurches today consult with Disney about how to design parking lots.*
The successful North Coast Church in Vista, California, follows a fundamentalist doctrine: the inerrancy of the Bible, water baptism, and the "imminent" Second Coming of Christ. North Coast has found an innovative way to grow through the homogeneous unit principle, beaming a central service to video screens in different meeting places. Everyone hears the same sermon, but everyone listens in a place with its own special "ambiance." The venues in 2007 were described on the church's website in terms that almost parody brand-defined, music-segmented, American mall-speak. In the central church, North Coast offered "a full worship band, Starbucks coffee, and a 'Barnes & Noble' style bookstore in the lobby." At the "Country Gospel" venue, North Coast adopted Hee Haw informality, encouraging just-folks, "Y'all come on over and ... join us for some bluegrass/country gospel." The "Traditions" hall provided "an intimate and nostalgic worship experience led from a baby grand piano." At "The Edge," churchgoers could count on "Starbucks coffee, Mountain Dew, big subwoofers and teaching via big-screen video."
The goal of the church in other times was to transfigure the social tenets of those who came through the door. Now people go to a church not for how it might change their beliefs, but for how their precepts will be reconfirmed. "I find very little evidence that churches are really transforming their congregations," University of Maryland political scientist James Gimpel told me. "It's rather quite the reverse. Ministers depend on pleasing a particular congregation for their longevity. The last thing they want to do is offend those people or try to transform their viewpoint.... It's conformity all the way." We have more choices than ever before in the hundreds of religious niche markets. But given a choice, we select sameness. This was hardly Donald McGavran's intention when he came upon a church community that was losing members and introduced a young generation of ministers to missionary techniques discovered in India.
"The church needed to be birthed within ... indigenous cultures and take on that indigenous expression," Eddie Gibbs told me. "It was a missional principle, and when it came to the U.S., it became a marketing principle: how to gather more people like us. [Churches] picked up the tactical parts, but I'm not too sure they understood the deeper mission implications. And they didn't really address the cultural implications, because mission morphed into marketing."
8. ADVERTISING
Grace Slick, Tricia Nixon, and You
If everyone agrees with you, where's the fun?
—GUY BARNETT, founder of Brooklyn Brothers advertising agency
A NEW YORK adman began an article in a 1973 issue of the Journal of Advertising with an odd question: "Are Grace Slick and Tricia Nixon Cox the Same Person?" Traditional advertising research in the early 1970s would have taken this question, plugged in demographic data, and answered, with quantifiable certainty, "Yes, they are." Both were white, rich, educated, urban, from upper-income homes, and between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. They had even attended the same college.
But conventional marketing research was blind, wrote John E. O'Toole, president of Foote, Cone & Belding Communications. Wasn't it obvious? "Go ask Alice, I think she'll know." As would anyone. The lead singer for the psychedelic rock group Jefferson Airplane was nothing like the blond-haired daughter of President Richard Nixon. Grace Slick originally wanted to name her daughter god but settled for China. Tricia Nixon married a Republican presidential aide on the White House lawn. In 1970, when Slick was invited to a White House reception for Nixon's fellow Finch College alums, the Secret Service stopped the singer when she tried to bring along her "bodyguard," Yippie founder and Chicago Seven defendant Abbie Hoffman. (The two said they intended to spike the president's iced tea with LSD.) Unless advertisers could learn to distinguish the composer of "White Rabbit" from the president's daughter, O'Toole wrote, marketing research was useless.
O'Toole argued that statistics on income, age, and education had lost relevance because there had been a "Revolution of the Individual" in the United States. The advertising executive didn't acknowledge having read about Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs or Ronald Inglehart's silent revolution. But he was describing the same phenomenon—the explosion of self-expression in a post-materialist economy. People were no longer willing to be treated as part of a mass because they didn't think of themselves that way, O'Toole told his fellow marketing executives. They were growing their hair long and "forming liberation groups: black, feminist, gay, consumer, anything." O'Toole wrote that marketers had snoozed through the revolution and insulted customers by discounting "their intelligence in favor of some vast common denominator." It was 1973, but advertisers continued to "shout at a crowd rather than talk to persons."1
O'Toole's manifesto appeared just three years after Donald McGavran published his 1970 masterwork on religion and homogeneous units, Understanding Church Growth. Although the two were writing for radically different audiences on wildly different subjects, McGavran and O'Toole reached remarkably similar conclusions: people lived, bought, and worshiped in groups "united by common attitudes or lifestyles or perceptions of themselves." Those were O'Toole's words, but they could have been McGavran's. The ministers who listened to McGavran, such as Rick Warren (see chapter 7), created the megachurch. Those in the commercial world who followed O'Toole devised the kind of target marketing that transformed modern business—and in 2004 helped win the presidency for George W. Bush. Both movements reinforced and deepened the segmented and segregated lives Americans live today.
From Torch Lights to Image Tribes
Most of the language Americans use today to describe politics can be traced to the decades just after the Civil War. In the late nineteenth century, political races became "campaigns." Politicians referred to "precinct captains," "old warhorses," "rank-and-file voters," "last-ditch efforts," and "battleground states." Political campaigns mimicked the tactics as well as the language of the battlefield. They were mass endeavors: people rallied; they turned out for speeches and marched in torch-light parades; they literally donned the uniforms of their parties. In the 1870s, the Republican glee club in one Indiana county put forty singers and an organ on a wagon drawn by six horses.
Although we've retained the language of post—Civil War politics, we long ago lost the style. By the summer of 2006, politics had turned from a mass undertaking into a calculated exercise of social segmentation and niche marketing. Both parties had pollsters in the field asking questions they hoped would help identify likely Democrats or Republicans so that the parties could isolate and target individual voters. Democrats were startled when Republicans in 2004 plucked out likely supporters by their choices in magazines and liquor. These were advertising strategies that businesses had used for decades, and to catch up, Democrats quickly hired their own marketing firms. By the time of the 2006 midterm elections, both parties were segregating, slicing, and separating voters.
Political marketing has always lagged behind commercial merchandizing. Politicians adopt new techniques long after they are proven in the commercial world. The parades and horse-d
rawn choirs of the late nineteenth century were abandoned in part on the advice of John Wanamaker, President William Henry Harrison's postmaster general and the originator of the department store.2 Wanamaker and others realized that the military style of campaigning was good at turning out voters, but the turnout was indiscriminate. Campaigns of the late nineteenth century energized friend and foe alike. Wanamaker argued that people shouldn't be whipped into a fury or paraded down the street. Voters ought to be approached as individuals, as consumers. Instead of spangly party uniforms and pipe organs pulled to mass rallies by horses, Wanamaker advised, politicians should use a new weapon to contact voters individually: advertising. A politics of mass movements would become a politics of mass marketing.
The parties began printing millions of newspapers. They dispatched speakers to thousands of clubs to discuss the issues of the day. The candidates spent money on postage, not torches. Illinois Democrats in 1892 distributed 1.9 million pamphlets in twelve languages and mailed 2 million pieces of literature across the Midwest. Instead of ginning up crowds of party supporters with marches and rallies, the new merchandising style of political campaigning focused on the undecided voter.3 Political advertising was coming from the world of the department store, and it was all about mass marketing to individual consumers.
Consuming the Vote and Segmenting the Market