Keith Plummer on Merchandising Christianity

I don't know about you but I hate going in Christian bookstores these days.  We've got a little Christian bookstore near the church that I sometimes go to, and the staff there is very friendly and helpful, but it's become your typical Christian house of kitsch.  Keith Plummer has blogged a bit about this lately and today he did a post on this weird desire we have to stamp a religious symbol or Christian slogan on stuff and sell it as "Christian merchandise." 

If you had asked me before about this stuff I would have said that this kind of Christian merchandising is driven by consumerism or greed, or to speak more theologically, by a ghetto mentality that misunderstands what Christian separation is all about.

But Keith takes a better approach, linking this stuff to a faulty view of creation.

Link: The Christian Mind: Driving the Marketplace Out of American Christianity.

I think there's another reason behind the impulse to stamp a Scripture verse on every imaginable object. In large part we have an anemic doctrine of creation. Our conviction that God is the maker of heaven and earth should be evidenced in more ways than ongoing debates with evolutionists. Certainly, there's a need for such apologetic activity but the doctrine of creation, like all biblical doctrines, is not given primarily for the purpose of our defending it but for our living it.

How do we live the doctrine of creation? By affirming along with God that his creation, though cursed on account of humanity's rebellion, is still good and is given to us to richly enjoy with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:4; 6:17). As Michael Wittmer says in his book, Heaven is a Place on Earth:

    Because we know that this creation is the good gift of God, we are not only permitted but encouraged to enjoy it as is. Unlike those who think that worldly objects are somehow enhanced by stamping Scripture verses on them, Christians who understand the goodness of this world celebrate the freedom to enjoy God's creation as is. We no longer need to sanitize secular items with our sanctified slogans to make them suitable for Christian consumption....In fact, our feeble attempts at baptizing creation tend to cheapen both it and the gospel (p. 66-67).

If believers really grasped this, many Christian businesses would go belly up and perhaps Christian "bookstores" would become bookstores again.

Related Tags: Church, Christian, Christians, Christian retailing, Christian merchandising, Christian kitsch, Creation