Christianity: A Brand in Crisis – Part 3
Defining Christianity’s Purpose and Ideal Brand Position
When developing a branding strategy for our clients, our firm begins by trying to uncover and understand the organization’s true purpose. In many cases, this involves a discussion with the founder or leaders of the organization to ask them these questions:
- Why was the organization started?
- What problem were you seeking to solve when you started the organization?
- What is the passion that is the driving force behind the organization?
For example, Southwest Airlines built their company with a laser-like focus on their purpose to “democratize the skies”. They strive to provide the best combination of low fares and convenient service for their passengers. Southwest CEO, Herb Kelleher, said that there have been a number of cases where managers within the company came to him with well prepared plans of how to make money from offering meals on their flights. In each case, he turned them down because offering meals means raising the cost to the passenger, which means diverting away from their purpose. The result of this strong adherence to their purpose? Southwest is one of the most successful and profitable airlines in the world because people understand their brand promise and the company delivers on it over and over.
So what is the purpose that defines Christianity’s brand? Of course, Jesus could not be directly interviewed to discuss His true purpose, but delving into the red letters within the Bible – the actual words of Jesus – provides a strong sense of the purpose that He set out for His followers. Here are some of His key statements that relate to that purpose:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.
Matthew 22:37-40
A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.
John 13:34-35
I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.
Matthew 25:40
You could certainly go through the red letters of the Gospels and select other key passages, but these provide a strong sense that the purpose is based on love above all else. He also speaks consistently about serving the needs of the least of these – the poor and the marginalized in the world and showing mercy and forgiveness.
If you look at the current perceptions of Christianity that were illustrated in UnChristian (any-homosexual, judgmental, hypocritical, sheltered, too political, proselytizers), love, although clearly the central theme in the teachings of Jesus, does not show up on the list of most common perceptions. Conversely, if you look at Southwest Airlines, the actions of the members of the company are aligned with the purpose that has been defined and, in turn, their customers understand what the company stands for. The actions of Christians, in a general sense, appear to be out of alignment with the true purpose.
In the days of the early church, there were examples of thousands of people at one time being converted to “The Way”, as following Jesus was called at the time. “The Way” enjoyed substantial growth and, if it were a business, one could say that it had an extremely successful launch and quickly gained a solid share of the market. Sometimes its members strayed from “The Way”, requiring recourse to correct its direction. In much the same way as a directive from a company CEO, some of the letters of the apostles were written to bring the early church back on track and on purpose.
As with many organizations, growth provided challenges to adhering to the original purpose of “The Way”, which eventually became known as Christianity. Decisions, probably with good intentions, were made by church leaders to put rules and rituals in place to try to dictate a common set of beliefs and guide behaviour among followers.
Many of these rules and rituals have their foundation in the Bible. Bruxy Cavey, in his book The End of Religion, explains it this way: “The rules and rituals of the Bible are like a map that leads to a great treasure, though they are not the treasure itself…Religious people often tend to confuse the treasure map for the treasure.”
Companies that experience significant growth in their workforce often try to guide the behaviour of their staff by putting codes of conduct or policy manuals into place. Such direction can dictate behaviour from a top-down approach. However, successful companies like Southwest Airlines have found that it is more powerful when employees buy into a purpose whole-heartedly and are equipped to reflect that purpose in their day to day activities.
Somewhere along the way, a large enough number of Christians have stopped reflecting the purpose of the faith. For the general public to form perceptions that Christians are anti-homosexual and judgmental rather than loving and merciful, gives evidence that there is a serious misalignment. This is the underlying reason why Christianity’s brand is in crisis.
The next post will deal with some practical steps that can be taken for Christianity to take corrective action, borrowed from the business world.
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If you missed it, check out Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog series.
I strongly encourage you to read unChristian for yourself to learn the full extent of these issues.
Photo from http://matthewpaulturner.net/ – I highly recommend his blog.
Hi Terry,
I agree that there is a branding issue for Christianity but I think the core reason for it is that there is no evidence for the fantastic claims made in both the old and new testament. The biggest problem for Christianity (and any religion) in my opinion is that as people increasingly employ their critical faculties, and as they demand extraordinary evidence to back extraordinary claims, ancient texts just don’t cut it. My generation, at least most of the people in my personal circle of friends, don’t have an affinity for believing in things based on authority or superstition. You can put aside all of the history of violence, the current hyper-politicized Christian right, the Christian lead campaigns against women’s reproductive rights and equality for homosexuals, etc., you can remove these issues from the equation altogether and Christianity will still be left without a reasonable, sensible, foundation. Christianity still will continue to make claims that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water, came back to life, is the only way to heaven, etc., and these things simply don’t resonate as reasonable claims. When critical thinking is applied, the central tenets of Christianity become suspect and placed in the realm of myth and fantasy along with the claims of every other competing/conflicting religion and the rest of the thousands of gods humans have invented over time.
It’s not just Christianity though, it’s any belief system that requires faith in order to believe it is true. These belief systems consistently contradict what we have come to learn about the way the world really works since the time those claims were first made. If something, like the Christ story, is going to contradict the way that we know the world works, it’s going to require something much more enticing than an ancient text, the fear of hell or the promise of salvation for critical thinkers to suspend their sense of reason and to cease from not only criticizing those claims but to accept them as true and then jump over to get in line to worship that specific god over all of the other gods who make the same claims to be true. The branding issue as I see it lays at the core of the magnitude of the claims put forward by the Christ story. While the rituals/practices/personalities/tone of the believers change over time, that core story can’t be changed, and so that element of the branding crisis will remain no matter what the publics perception of Christians comes to be.
Been enjoying this series as I have small fascination with all of the different gods people believe in, why they believe in them, and what they do because of it. If you ever have any questions you wanted to bounce off a friendly neighbourhood atheist, I’m your man!
Thanks for your thoughts Mark. Your point of view is respected and appreciated. From a strict branding perspective, putting the core issues of faith that you mentioned aside, Christianity has experienced periods of incredible growth. In those times, one must assume that Christians were more closely aligned to the purpose of the faith. As well, although Christianity has major issues in the western world, there are places in the world where it has huge growth, such as South Korea. I can’t say for certain why that is, but I’d bet that perceptions of Christianity are far different than those in North America.
Hi Mark,
There are several surviving accounts of Christ’s life outside of the Bible by Jewish scholars. Most famously Josephus among others. Will people,doubt the existence of MLK or Nelson Mandella in 2000 just because there’s no physical evidence of their lives other than some ancient stories?
But I would wonder about the current experiences of people who claim divine intervention in their own lives today. Or the experiences in the hearts of men and women who face dramatic changes in their lives, once devoid of hope or love, and find these not in earthly things, but only in finding the love of God.
We do have a branding problem. People are seeing the church by the things you describe, and I think we both know the church is not these things. Then church is where people come to learn about the goodness of God shown in Christ Jesus, learning the commands of Jesus as described in Terry’s post.
This is the image the church needs to show. It needs to tell the world that the popular views of the church is not the church of Jesus Christ.
The first leaders of the church showed the importance of this good news. They gave their lives for the cause. The cause of showing God’s love to the world.
Thanks for the discussion!
-nick
Hi Nick,
I personally don’t really have any particular problems with the possibility that Jesus may have actually lived, that’s reasonable enough. Mohammed, Joseph Smith, and L. Ron Hubbard also lived as well, we know this with even more certainty. The issue isn’t so much wether or not they actually lived though, but the fantastic claims they each make such as the claims of being born of a virgin, the trinity, the resurrection, the notion of sin, the miracles, heaven, hell, or intergalactic warfare in the case of scientology, or Joseph Smith’s claims to have deciphered golden tablets using a seeing stone in a top hat. The claims that require faith to believe are the claims that create a massive branding issue for all religions for critical thinkers.
And yes people do claim divine intervention in their lives and having enriching experiences that they attribute to God for improving their lives. You will find these kinds of claims attributed to dozens of different Gods, in pre-Christian history and currently. To the critical thinker and those with cursory knowledge of neuroscience, that doesn’t constitute evidence that any of those Gods are real, rather it points to the enormous power of our own brain to generate powerful images, feelings, and thoughts which we can interpret in whatever way we wish.
Even though I personally don’t need to focus on the social issues that the church engages in to reject the claims of the faith, we should be honest about what is actually in the text that informs the narrative on things like homosexuality, for example. All of the Abrahamic religions agree that it is immoral because there is a theme that wherever you find mention of homosexuality in any of the texts, it is denounced. While there are very few references to homosexuality in the New Testament, where you do find reference to it, it is in very negative terms (Romans 1:26-27, Corinthians 1 6:9-10, Timothy 1 1:9-10). If the bible was neutral on homosexuality rather than negative towards it, Christianity wouldn’t have the branding issue of being perceived as homophobic because there’d be no biblical foundation for it.
Thanks for the reply Terry,
I guess my point is that you really can’t just put the core issues of faith aside when trying to take an honest account of what the branding issues facing Christianity are. They are the core issues, and therefor are the branding issues that will remain even if all of the other issues you mentioned are somehow corrected for. For some people the core tenets are all that are needed to be known to have a negative perception of the faith. For example if I knew nothing about Christianity or its historical violence and ongoing homophobia, sexism, etc., and someone came and tried to sell me on the Christ story, I wouldn’t need to know anything about those other issues for me to perceive that story as just another in a long line of religious myths and to be suspect of whoever was trying to sell me that bill of goods as a fact. There’s a number of books I’ve seen by Christians talking about why people are leaving the church and they cite all of these reasons that you are, and that were pointed out in the research, but they don’t seem to address the “because it’s an unlikely story that doesn’t make sense to critical thinkers” element of why people leave the church.
I agree there are some areas in the world where Christianity is growing. There’s a large evangelical growth in a number of African countries as well such as Uganda, which is due to the influence from American evangelicals who have travelled there to instil their brand of Christianity on the region. Many different religions are enjoying significant growth in different areas of the world including Islam, Mormonism, and Scientology. Religious growth (when not “spread by the sword” or imposed by a country’s government) is usually a result of whoever has the most money or the most active and effective missionaries, and not because one religion is any more true than any of the others. People don’t often tend to wake up and decide to become a member of one religion or another, it takes some organized proselytizing to accomplish that, especially when it’s the growth of one particular religion in a defined geographical area. In that sense, the brand of Christianity is not only competing with critical thinkers, but with every other religion that is trying to gain market share. It’s really interesting to view faith in terms of corporate competition because the analogy is very spot on, religions compete for adherents in much the same way companies compete for consumers. It’s kind of like soft drink companies. There’s a lot of different kinds of flavours and colours and different ingredients, they all make certain claims and have certain brand appeals and advertising strategies, and they are all trying to win over each others customers, yet there is a significant segment that can’t bring themselves to buy in to any of the various brands because they just don’t think it’s healthy or sensible to drink pop.