Is celebrity culture eroding American evangelicalism? This publishing insider says 'yes'

Evangelical Protestantism, by most accounts the largest camp in American religion, has run into various troubles lately, as The Guy and many others have chronicled.

Now there’s ample Internet buzz about Katelyn Beaty’s diagnosis of one factor in a new book from a major evangelical publisher that’s well worth coverage: “Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits are Hurting the Church.”

Make that hurting the “White Evangelical” church.

The type of personality cults she describes are pretty much absent in “mainline” Protestantism, Black Protestantism (there are some glaring exceptions in the health-and-wealth world), Catholicism and other U.S. religious bodies. By coincidence, Rodney Palmer, an American Baptist who teaches preaching at Palmer Theological Seminary, echoed her concerns just last week in an article for the progressive Baptist News Global website.

Inevitably, Beaty has much to say about the media that we practitioners and consumers should ponder.

She’s a well-marinated evangelical as author, former print managing editor of flagship Christianity Today magazine and currently a New York-based acquisitions editor with Baker Publishing Group, one of the majors whose Brazos Press division published “Celebrities.” (Note the company’s other book imprints: Baker Books, Baker Academic, Bethany House, Chosen, Revell.)

For this reason, The Guy finds especially newsworthy — and gutsy — Beaty’s chapter treating the evangelical book industry, which is said to pour “jet fuel” on the type of fandom, branding and marketing she decries.

The bottom line, here: This bite-hand-that-feeds angle alone offers a strong story theme that journalists could draw from this book.

Time for a solid update on the changing realities in U.S. evangelicals' retail business

Hammered by superstore chains and then the online omnipresence of Amazon, America’s bookstores are struggling.

Thus there was more sorrow than shock when the Southern Baptist Convention’s LifeWay Christian Resources announced on March 20 it will close down its chain of 170 brick-and-mortar stores, which sell books, Bibles, curriculum and a variety of other religious products.

Baptist Press reported the gap between LifeWay stores; sales and operating expenses grew from a manageable $2.3 million in 2010 to $35.5 million by 2017. That year, LifeWay’s chief rival, Family Christian Resources, shut all of its 240 retail locations, following the 2013 demise of the United Methodist Church’s 38 Cokesbury stores.

The Baptist collapse raises two themes for solid stories, the limits on what products religious stores should be selling, and the ongoing disruption as U.S. religious retail, dominated by evangelical Protestants, shifts toward online and phone-ordering operations. As a company, LifeWay will continue alongside the likes of family-owned Christian Book Distributors. There will be ever fewer independent stores surviving to serve as local ministry and fellowship centers.

On the first theme, officially Christian stores obviously are not going to sell lottery tickets, randy novels and movies, pop music that degrades women, or books that deviate from their faith’s doctrines. The Baptists’ no-no’s include the prosperity gospel and accounts of purported visits to heaven. Some respondents danced on LifeWay’s grave over the way its policies reflected the Southern Baptists’ narrowing definition of doctrinal fidelity.

The most-discussed example occurred in 2012 when LifeWay refused to sell “A Year of Biblical Womanhood,” a slightly sassy book on the gender wars by well-known author Rachel Held Evans, published by Thomas Nelson, an evangelical subsidiary of HarperCollins that’s based in Nashville, the same city as LifeWay.