Jeff Sharlet, the voice of NYU's religion-and-media blog The Revealer, excoriating — once again — the New York Times for reporting — once again — that "evangelical[] [Christians] are good at marketing." Sharlet is commenting on a Times article which profiles a major player in the world of Christian P.R. firms, and it's true that the article seems to reflect a whole slew of tired clichés about the true, interior, private nature of religion and so forth. Mainly, Sharlet is justly amazed at the Times' seeming unwillingness to recognize that an evangelical Christain P.R. mogul is doing political, this-worldly business, not just acting on some kind of ethereal, pure, spiritual or moral plane. Here's Sharlet's money quote:
Why does the Times ignore Ross' politics? Perhaps because it's bound by the press' traditional, mainline Protestant understanding of religion, as other than politics, and private, to boot. Or perhaps for the same reason that it keeps rediscovering the political and cultural savvy of the Christian Right — confronted by a radically different way of knowing the world, and one that seems to have greater traction in American thought than the Times' style of rationalism, the paper of record practices the outdated politics of last century's mandarins: containment. That is, it seeks to wrap up the epistemological challenge of the Christian Right in the amusing language of marketing: Capitalism, the story implicitly suggests, blunts the extremism of every political ideology. It's safe, so long as it sells.That's the key idea, here, I think, the one at the very end: the idea that Christianity is tamed and made safe for popular consumption by portraying it as a kind of "lifestyle brand" (see snurl.com/faithmarket) for another perspective on this). The assumption is that since religious actors are all acting under the shared, levelling cultural umbrella of mass consumer capitalism — which, of course, they are — all religious actors must also have adopted the kind of ironic, postmodern, don't-take-anything-too-seriously stance that Times readers associate with that culture.
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