Marketing Your "Product"

We live in a world of competing ideas. If you want an idea, concept, notion or strategy to win out over others, you need to be able to market it in such a way that it can enjoy mass appeal. You need to show that it answers the basic questions, it will provide meaning in people's lives and it certainly doesn't hurt if you can offer some enticements to seal the deal.

Most people understand this methodology when it comes to the field of politics or the land of consumer products, but they don't think it applies to religion at all. Religious belief is an altogether different animal. But is it really?

Ancient religious proselytizers were working in a competitive environment. They were trying to get people's attention and hold it, tell a story that could occupy a special place in their spiritual lives. For a religion to thrive, it had to offer at least as much as the competition. So religions naturally evolved in the direction of successful rivals, just as rival softwares are forced by the market to adopt one another's best features.
~ from Chapter 12 of The Evolution of God by Robert Wright ~

Wright lays out a strong case -- one that I definitely subscribe to -- that religion isn't a different animal at all. Like every other human-constructed ideation, it must be marketed properly to have the desired effect: millions upon millions of believers.

A successful marketing campaign must attune itself to the period of history it occupies. Your ad campaign must tap into what people currently desire OR you must at least understand current sensibilities in order to create the needed desire that does not yet currently exist. If you fail to package your product in the right way, it will easily fall into the dustbin of history.

This obvious fact seems completely lost on modern day fundamentalists of all religions, particularly evangelical Christians here in the US. They want to return to the marketing campaigns of yore without the realization that what appealed to early societies, no longer applies.

Can you imagine what it would be like if, instead of focusing on religion, these folks targeted consumer products in the same way? They would demand that the companies who sell Pepsi Cola or McDonald's hamburgers eschew modern day ad campaigns for those we watched in the 1960s! While those ad campaigns were considered cutting edge in their time, today they seem silly and antiquated.

After watching these two ads from the 60s, are you now burning to rush out to buy a Pepsi and a burger?

Times change and the world of ideas changes too. What may have worked for and spoken to people living in the area of the Mediterranean Sea in the first centuries of the Common Era no longer works for nor speaks to sufficient numbers of people in these modern times. If religion hopes to survive, it needs to get with the times or it will soon find itself in the proverbial dustbin.