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Have the days of Christian Media Come and Gone

Digging through some older files I landed on this Newsweek article from Jun 4, 2009 by Lisa Miller.  She talked about the final run of the magazine Today’s Christian Woman, founded in 1978, set to rest in Sept/Oct 2009.

That’s not the big story, though, as the entire print & magazine industry is in the toilet and Newspapers and mags are scrambling to remain relevant and fight for new market share on the Web and across new mobile platforms like the Kindle and the iPad.

Miller quickly moves away from the economics of it all and delves into an interesting observation which I think would make Bob Briner (Mr. “How can Christians impact the secular world if we’re huddled in our Christian Ghetto preaching and ‘amening’ ourselves”) very happy.

(EXCERPT)  TCW‘s death signals something much bigger: an end in America to the perceived separation between the secular and the evangelical worlds. Not 10 years ago, the conventional wisdom as reflected in much of the mass media held that evangelical Christians led completely separate lives from everyone else.

They went to separate colleges, they married each other—and they shopped at Christian bookstores, where they could purchase books, records, magazines and tea napkins produced and distributed by Christian-owned companies. Only secular people shopped at Barnes & Noble. So separate were the two worlds that Christian bestsellers rarely showed up on the New York Times bestseller list—and when they did (as with Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind books), the secular media treated the authors and consumers as oddities. In December 1985 the hip, Andy Warhol-founded Interview magazine did a piece on Bourke and TCW. “It was very much a look-who-we-discovered approach,” says Bourke.

Now, though, Christian and inspirational stories are widely available in secular places. O, Redbook and Good Housekeeping regularly run the kinds of articles that TCW once considered its bread and butter. On her Web site, Oprah currently features an interview with Queen Rania of Jordan, in which the queen says that she and her husband strive to raise their children “like any other family.” “The most important thing,” she says, “is to instill [in your children] the right values.” Barnes & Noble and Borders—not to mention Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart—carry a wide variety of Christian and inspirational books, magazines and music. Even the most committed Christians no longer have to shop only at Christian stores or buy only Christian media. “I don’t shop at a Christian bookstore,” admits Ginger Kolbaba, the current editor of TCW. “Not when I can go online.”

Even more important, evangelical Christians are less willing to identify themselves as a coherent group embodying one set of values. As a result, it seems Christians are more willing to take their parenting and relationship advice from secular sources. “This next generation, they can read a marriage magazine or a parenting magazine and filter it through their Christian world view without saying, ‘I need Today’s Christian Marriage or Today’s Christian Woman’,” says Don Pape, publisher of trade books for David C. Cook, a Christian publishing firm.

“I can pick up a music magazine and I don’t need a writer to say, ‘You will like this because it’s a Christian artist.’ I can do that myself. I think that’s one of the issues.” In the old days, efforts by Christian or secular companies to “cross over” into foreign turf were considered quixotic. But the popularity of the book The Shack and the music of Carrie Underwood, not to mention The Passion of the Christ and the selection of Kris Allen as America’s newest Idol, demonstrate how defunct the conventional wisdom has become.

Whaaaaat? Christians thinking for themselves?  Not being spoonfed from a secret underground theological brain trust that would be the Christian equivalent of N.O.R.A.D.?   Not being whipped into a frenzy and panicked by media mouthpieces and self-proclaimed society watchdogs?

Well, then who’s going to get the end times word out to the armed militias stockpiling weapons and AK-47s in our basements?  Oh don’t worry, Silly, Glenn Beck’s not going anywhere for a loooong long while.  So there’s that.

Anywho, at this point, I’m pretty sure we owe Amy Grant an apology for crucifying her in the 80s for [gasp] “crossing over” like that.

Turns out she was just way ahead of her time with that whole “being salt and light” heretical thinking.  Cause let’s be honest, it’s so much easier to shoot the enemy than it is to love them.

Read the FULL ARTICLE HERE at Newsweek.com which has nothing to do with Militias, Glenn Beck, Amy Grant or any of my other rants, but does have some interesting, balanced insight into Christian Publishing.

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