Last week Brazos Press and I agreed on a title for my forthcoming book. The title is: Our God Is an Awesome Brand: How Evangelicals built America’s Most Powerful Religious Movement. When the title was floated to me, I had an uncontrollable knee-jerk response. I have had this involuntary reflex to the term “awesome” since 2010, when I first realized that nothing is awesome but God alone.
God Alone Is Awesome
When I was in my late twenties, I thought everything was awesome. The Harry Potter movies were an awesome franchise. My adult indoor soccer team had an awesome night of play. We just bought an awesome minivan. I just came from an awesome party. Thankfully, a loving friend brought my overuse of the word awesome to a sudden halt.
When I was an associate pastor in Tulsa, we had staff meetings every Tuesday following our Monday day of rest. I was a relatively young associate pastor, and the worship pastor had taken me under his wing. I don’t even remember what I offhandedly mentioned as being awesome that day in staff meeting. I just remember his response to it.
“You know, Joey. Nothing is awesome but God.” By the way, you have to say that quote in British to get it right.
The Jesus Juke was a rather recent cultural meme at the time. I’m almost certain I referred to his comment as one, which startled him. Afterwards, he followed up with me. Our conversation was filled with his intensity and care, characteristics of his disposition. My heart recently had been taken captive by the Reformed Resurgence movement, of which he had long partook, so I was still getting a hang for all the ins and outs of what others might just simply call legalism.
He painstakingly explained to me the creature and creator distinction. He used the illustration of two buckets: one for the creator and one for creatures. The creator bucket has space enough to contain all that is God. The creature bucket is limited by all our human limitations. When we peer into the creator bucket, we should be overwhelmed with amazement. Awesome is the most fitting way to encapsulate the accumulation of all that God is in his creator bucket.
I recall walking away from that mind bending and mind-blowing conversation filled with a new awareness that I should not apply the term “awesome” to the profane. It is a term that describes what the creaturely response should be to encountering the attributes and properties that belong to God alone. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
One thing I have learned about my evangelical world is that we have sacred cows you do not touch. Because of this, when I received the recommended title for Our God Is an Awesome Brand from the publisher, I wholly anticipated the lightning rod potential of the title. First, it is a pun derived from one of blessed Rich’s songs. Second, it requires wit and satire to really get at the title’s meaning. Third, it exposes an idol tendency of evangelicals.
I’ll handle these lightning rod issues in respective order.
Concerning Rich Mullins
I cannot overstate the extent of Rich Mullins’s musical and ministerial influence upon my early evangelical life. My evangelical coming of age was in the last half of the 90s, so I never had that sensation of purchasing a fresh new Mullins’ album as it released. I bought Songs I and Songs II through Columbia House Music Club, and I know I listened to them on repeat while reading Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel. Why? Because Mullins was a self-confessed ragamuffin and so were those who played with him (iykyk). Frankly, I cannot separate thinking about that book and Mullins’s music. The two are indelibly intertwined. The contemplative life and the life of self-denial fittingly describe that of a monk, Brennan Manning, and Rich Mullins.
To this day, when I hear an artist like Andrew Peterson introduce the same sort of storytelling and artful use of a hammered dulcimer, I am comforted that ragamuffin’s still exist and they haven’t all been snuffed out by the evangelical industrial complex and its business-like, transactional systems.
Mullins’s life tragically ended far too soon. Those who followed his music and have been shaped by his sage influence know what a big loss he was for evangelicals. Rich’s death was not just a huge loss for CCM, but it was a huge loss to a renewal movement on the cusp of resurgence. Thankfully, subsequent to losing Mullins, we saw the ascent of artists like Caedmon’s Call, Shane and Shane, and Andrew Peterson, who carried on Mullins’ attitude of not cleanly distinguishing craft from calling, of not falling into the trap of producing bangers for production value and market value alone. If Mullins were with us today, you wouldn’t catch him checking CCLI records on Mondays to see how it might impact his future revenue stream.
Many on the socials rightly noted the nod to Mullins’s classic worship song, “Awesome God”, in the forthcoming title. You can’t hear that book title without thinking of his beautiful anthem and one of the most played and sung worship songs of the 80s. Perhaps some younger folks will be introduced and discover afresh the gift Mullins’s music has been for the church.
What would Rich Mullins have thought about a title that gets at something, which is hard for many to name, but is such an undeniable reality of the last century of evangelical Christianity in America? I believe Mullins would have seen the title and perceived the prophetic intent of it. The title makes plain and apparent some things about the last century of evangelical life that we’d wish were not such a feature of the movement, and it does so through wit and satire.
Wit and Satire
I am not gonna lie to you. I’ll be forthright about it. I love Chicago style popcorn. That’s right. I knowingly mix cheddar and caramel popcorn in the same bowl. Don’t hate it until you’ve tried it. There is such an explosion of sweet and savory flavor that hits your palate when you take one of each piece and pop it into your mouth.
The same sort of richness occurs when you read a book that combines the right blend of wit and satire to compelling storytelling and evidence based arguments. Since a book title reflects everything about a book, and it also mirrors its author—the use of wit and satire employed in the title Our God Is an Awesome Brand was a fitting move for Brazos Press. You’ll see more of that throughout the book. If that’s not your thing, and you can’t do anything but syrupy chicken soup for the soul sort of reading, then this book is not for you. On the other hand, if you like sour apple jollies, then you’ll probably like this book. Don’t worry. The wit and satire won’t jump the shark like the Babylon Bee.
An Idol Tendency
“The heart is an idol factory” said one sixteenth century reformer of the Christian Church in his classic compendium of theology. I like that translation of Calvin because it suits a feature of this book. Our God Is an Awesome Brand explores the consequences of the market society. The factory system happens to be a chief emblem of the market society.
Not too long before Calvin, some ingenious and industrious unpropertied Europeans began to experiment with the idea that other means of production might rival agrarian production as being a market for surplus production, production that exceeded subsistence needs for that person and that might then be brought to market for the purpose of making large profits. This idea of mass producing a supply of goods, that far outmatched a person’s need, for the purpose of gaining upward mobility, was quite novel at the time. Previously, you had to be a propertied person producing harvests of crops to have a shot at that sort of opportunity.
The notion of the market society has shaped all of our lifestyles and hopes. It created liberalism and the notion that everyone can pursue happiness and achieve it, with a little bit of hustle. Today, we call this crushing it. In Calvin’s day, men from Geneva had become shopkeepers and tradesmen, producing their own products to give them an improved lifestyle. In our day, many hope for an improved lifestyle by means of the passive income that comes from the influencer hustle. The easy answer and measure for crushing it, as they say, is to have a surplus of folks liking and subscribing your YouTube, TikTok or Insta profile.
While this all too often has been the form of idolatry that attracts individuals away from God, in the era of the market society, the formative power of the market society has also had sway on the function and form of the church. The prosperity that occurred in the post-WWII era of the United States further accelerated the allure and temptation to reduce the church to a business.
I’m not the first person to see this or to approach the study of Christianity and consider these implications. Many have come before me and perfected the art of this sort of cultural and social analysis for studying the history of Christianity. In recent time, historians of evangelicals have done an excellent job of conveying to popular audiences’ aspects of patriarchy and politics that have been formative for the movement. Kristin Du Mez is one such historian, who did this in her book, Jesus and John Wayne.
What I hope I can do for you is to show you the extent to which the market society has shaped the identity of the evangelical church in America. I plan to do so by analyzing evangelicals as consumers, workers, and makers of a brand. In the process, I hope you will see yourself in this story, as I have seen myself in it. I hope you will reject the temptation to commodify one another or reify yourself as a component of the evangelical industrial complex. As I convey this story to you, I hope you will reject the idol of turning a brand into your god or turning God into a brand. I hope you will have a desire to be a ragamuffin like Rich Mullins and Brennan Manning.
If you’re having a hard time with the notion that God can be reduced to a brand, and you’re concerned that doing so is a form of idolatry, then your instincts are right, and you will enjoy this book.
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