G.R.A.C.E.: “God’s Riches at Christ’s Expense.” B.I.B.L.E.: “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” Acronyms like these are a common feature within the preaching and practice of a certain kind of popular American Christianity. What do they reveal about that distinctly American expression of religion? How do they relate to the influence of corporate and consumer culture within popular American Christianity? What does it mean for a church to be “on-brand,” and what does it mean that some Christians think about their faith and practice in these terms? Can explored these questions and more in this episode.
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Axis Mundi You're listening to an irreverent podcast.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a podcast series on the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Delighted as always to be with all of you who are taking the time out of whatever else it is that you are doing to listen.
Always want to reiterate that we cannot do this without you.
Appreciate the support, the feedback.
You can always reach me, Daniel Miller, Swag, Daniel Miller, S-W-A-J, at gmail.com with the proviso that I know I do not respond to as many emails as I should.
I am so sorry about that.
I get funny emails from people prodding me for not responding to all my emails, but I do work on it.
I do appreciate the feedback and the insights, especially for this series, which comes in many ways from you, from the ideas and thoughts and topics that you have.
Before we get started, I do want to just let people know and remind them if you go to straightwhiteamericanjesus.com and look around at the information we have there.
Lots of information, lots of resources, but we also have a series coming up, excuse me, a seminar coming up with Sarah Mosliner.
Those of you who've listened to us for a while know that Sarah's a friend of the show, has co-hosted from time to time, and appeared a lot of times on the show.
Really one of the experts on purity culture and offering a seminar with us end of this month, end of April, I believe the 27th.
I'm not sure if I have the date right because I don't have the website and the information right in front of me.
Take a look at that.
If it's something you're interested in, the information is there.
I would love to have you.
I've said before, Sarah's work is something I use every time I have to teach.
On purity culture or present or anything like that.
So really valuable opportunity.
So just be aware of that.
Diving into today's topic, I want to thank listeners again for, you know, always bringing themes to my attention.
But I heard from some listeners and sort of over time and I went back and pulled some of these out.
And so there have been several who brought a theme to my attention that I really hadn't thought of.
For the series, but the more that I read their emails and sort of saw this pattern developing, that's what decoding is all about.
Finding patterns.
I thought it really deserves decoding.
And I've heard from several people that I'm not completely sure what to call it.
But the more I've thought about it in preparing this episode, the more I think it really comes down to sort of branding the church in particular ways.
It's making sure the church stays on brand.
And so that's the theme for this episode is staying on brand.
And as the description suggests, I see a clear connection here between this idea of branding and the sort of the consumerism and the influence of corporate culture on Probably all of American religion, but certainly a subset, a subculture within the American religious landscape.
And what I'm thinking of takes shape in the form of clever acronyms and slogans to keep churches' mission statement or their vision statement and their theology front and center to not just their congregation or their parishioners, But to the broader world, and I want to thank our listeners.
I don't usually call listeners out by name, but I want to thank Stephanie for providing a bunch of illustrations of this.
I've heard some of these.
Some of these floated around churches that I was a part of.
I never would have remembered as many as Stephanie did, so I'll just throw some of these out.
But these are the acronyms.
So, FROG, F-R-O-G, Fully Rely on God.
BIBLE, B-I-B-L-E, Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.
Lots of us who grew up in a particular kind of conservative Christian, Biblicist tradition.
I grew up with that one.
Basic instructions before leaving earth.
Soap.
Study, observation, application, and prayer.
Grace.
Another good religion word.
G-R-A-C-E.
God's riches at Christ's expense.
I heard this in sermons.
I saw this on t-shirts.
We had youth group activities built around this.
I had a theology professor in seminary who would use this acronym to help us remember things.
Joy, Jesus, others, and you.
Faith, another good Christian word.
F-A-I-T-H, forsaking all, I trust him.
Fear, F-E-A-R, false evidence appearing real.
There's kind of a dark one.
Die, D-I-E, departure into eternity.
This is the theme that lots of people have reached out about that sort of got my attention and got me thinking was this use of acronyms.
People who would be like, either, again, they have somebody in their life that's just like, every time I talk to this person, there is some new acronym for their religion, some new clever term where each letter stands for something about their faith, and they're sort of sharing it for everybody.
Or people would grow up in churches and they remember this, again, as I've described, right, in youth groups or in sermons or maybe it's like a Bible study theme or a sermon series, right, with this acronym name.
Or sometimes you'll see it on a church billboard when you drive by where they've got like the word spelled out vertically and then like horizontally they tell you what each letter stands for, that kind of thing.
I remember these.
I never, as I said, would have remembered this many without Stephanie.
So thank you, Stephanie.
And I've had so many people reach out and ask just sort of like, what the hell is going on with this?
Like, what is this?
And so that's what I want to sort of dive into and think about, I've been thinking about, is What is going on with this?
And my first thought is actually a historical one, okay?
At its most basic level, obviously, slogans like these, they serve as mnemonic devices for remembering and communicating religious teachings.
So, for example, the B-I-B-L-E, Bible I, Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, it captures a view of what the Bible is for a certain kind of Christian, that it is More or less, God's instruction manual.
I think even maybe more sort of telling on this notion of learning is grace, G-R-A-C-E, God's riches at Christ's expense.
What is the doctrine of grace?
It's the doctrine that God forgives us and makes the means possible to save us, despite the fact that we are not deserving of this.
It's attained through the death and sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
So we gain what?
We gain God's riches at Christ's expense.
It's a way of trying to remember the rudiments of a pretty complex theological doctrine in a straightforward way.
So it's basically this kind of mnemonic device for teaching.
And strictly speaking, they're not new.
The most well-known historical Christian, one of these that will come to mind for some of us, and again comes for me, is the acronym TULIP, T-U-L-I-P, which is used to remember the so-called five points of Calvinism within Reformed Christianity.
A particular brand of Christianity gets its name, Calvinism, from John Calvin, second generation reformer, very famous for his doctrine of predestination and so forth, and a very specific conception of salvation.
If you ever see a church with Reformed in the name, right, it's coming out of the Calvinistic tradition, Presbyterian churches, and so forth.
And there is also a form of Reformed or Calvinistic theology that's kind of a hallmark of, you know, sort of really theologically conservative American Christianity at present.
And they came up a long time ago, centuries ago, with this notion tulip.
Which stands for, you know, total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints.
So if you learn this phrase tulip, you're learning the theology in a nutshell of Calvinistic theology.
And these mnemonics are not unique to Christianity.
People with sort of a passing awareness of different religious traditions You might have heard references to the five pillars of Islam.
What is that?
These sort of five central components or teachings of Islam.
The three jewels of Buddhism comes to mind.
And Buddhism has others, the five-fold path and so forth.
In all of these cases, These things, which are not all acronyms, but I think they're unified in this kind of mnemonic function, right, of helping us remember things, they're devices that are used to simplify the teachings of these traditions and to present them in a way that can be communicated, learned, and recalled easily.
And I should also say they can be shared easily, they can be transmitted easily.
And I think that's important because these three traditions at any rate, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, they're three missionary traditions.
They are three traditions that historically took shape by going out and trying to win converts.
And so if you're wanting to spread the teachings of the Buddha, the Dharma, If you are wanting to spread the teachings of the Prophet or the revelation of the Prophet Muhammad, or you're wanting to go and spread the teachings of Jesus and Christianity, these are ways of trying to communicate these to an audience that is not going to be maybe familiar with your culture, that might be illiterate, and so forth.
So I think it's not surprising that these examples that come to my mind, at least, are unified in so-called missionary traditions.
Doesn't mean there aren't other examples.
That I'm probably not aware of.
I'm sure that when people are training for, you know, young Jewish men who might be training for their bar mitzvah or something like that, they may well have mnemonic devices to help remember certain things and so forth.
But in these traditions, these are examples that I know of.
So I think that this is the other one example is that there's a history of this in a certain kind of religious tradition of which Christianity is one.
There's also a way where this fits naturally into Christianity in this sense, which is that Christianity, I think arguably more than any other religious tradition, And I think especially Protestantism, those of you from a Catholic background can, you know, argue this point with me and I'm open to hearing it.
But I think within a Protestant tradition in particular, Christianity has developed as a tradition that is focused on doctrine and right belief, what we call orthodoxy, believing rightly.
And so acronyms and other mnemonics are useful for teaching Christian belief to parishioners, not just for spreading the faith, but for teaching what for many Christians is a core dimension of Christianity, which is the beliefs that one has to hold, the doctrines.
It can be useful.
And, again, adopt grace, God's riches at Christ's expense, or whatever.
These are things that work well for that, for teaching theology, teaching right belief to people who are not trained in theology, to people who are not going to read theology books, to people who maybe, you know, coming to church on a Sunday, that sermon, that's all the theology training they will ever receive is what they get there.
Slapping it onto a t-shirt and having a youth event about it with lots of pizza and basketball and like whatever else always comes with church youth group stuff, but also teaching some theology while you're at it.
It's a catchy way that people can remember this.
So I think that on one hand, This is a continuation of a tradition that has been around for a long time, and it fits within Christianity, or a certain kind of Christianity, with this focus on belief and orthodoxy and so forth.
But I also think there's more to it than just history here, because you don't see all these acronyms in Christian history.
If you went back to, I don't know, the church youth group of my parents or grandparents, I don't think that they would have had all of these.
I think there's another dimension to this sloganeering impulse, and this is what really comes to mind for me.
If I sort of listen to what my body tells me, I get tensed up and anxious and a little bit angry when I hear these slogans, and it takes me a minute to have to come down from that and figure out, like, why am I feeling what I'm feeling?
This is the other kind of impulse to this sort of sloganeering and to all of these things.
And when we start talking about decoding what is going on with like all of these catchy phrases and acronyms and so forth, I think this is the part that really stands out to me about this sort of impulse to mark specifically Christian identity in this way.
And when I consider and recall the examples that Stephanie provided or other ones that occur to me, I was immediately reminded of the practice within, again, I think this is mostly conservative Protestant churches, Maybe not only, but mostly, to have mission or vision or purpose statements.
I promise I'm going to tie that together with the acronym stuff.
But if you go to a lot of church websites, and I invite you to do this, especially a big flashy church.
If somebody goes back and listens to the episode I did on Cool Kid Church, that kind of church, if you've got one that you drive by or your parents or your siblings or your neighbor goes to one, Go to their website, look around, and at some point you'll get to the About tab or the Learn About Us.
And first of all, it's set up like it is for lots of other websites.
Go to the About tab, and it will often take you to these statements.
Our vision statement.
Our mission statement.
Maybe our purpose statement.
And it may be that if I say this, or you do this, or maybe you paused it and went and did it for a few minutes, that if you're familiar with a particular kind of church, this might be such a common feature it doesn't even stand out as anything worthy of note.
It's just something that churches do for you or in your experience.
Okay?
But they haven't always been, and I've always felt for a long time and still feel strongly that these statements are significant for understanding some of the driving dynamics of popular American Christianity.
When I was a college student, when I was a seminarian, when I was a minister in, you know, let's say the mid-90s through the mid-aughts or so, developing these mission and vision statements was a relatively new and somewhat contentious phenomenon.
I remember classes where we would talk about developing mission and vision statements and why you needed these.
I remember church meetings where we're trying to work out our strategy and our mission and our vision and so forth.
And these ideas of a mission and vision statement, they were supposed to kind of encapsulate the core values of your church in a way that had not been a typical practice for churches.
Part of this was a result of, I think, an anxiety about a waning cultural influence of the church.
One could not take for granted that people driving around seeing a church or something knew what churches were about or what churches were for.
And so we're going to lay out our core values and our mission statement and vision statement so that people can see this.
And this practice emerged in the context of what is known as the church growth movement.
And this was a movement within primarily conservative Protestant circles that developed plans and strategies to increase the size of churches by winning more converts.
Now, Christianity has always been about winning converts.
But it was couched in the language of church growth.
Just like you would grow some other business, you would grow the church.
And if all of this language to you sounds business-y and kind of corporate and so forth, core values and mission and vision and growth, it was.
Because this arose out of a melding of popular corporate culture, marketing, advertising, and a certain kind of conservative Protestant theology.
If Christians were supposed to quote-unquote win individuals to Christ, then churches should be growing.
And so church growth became a central focus for some churches.
For some churches, I think it became the focus.
Everything was about church growth.
For some seminaries, this became a focus.
You could take courses on church growth.
You might be required to have a course on church growth.
And so this element of corporatizing and consumer culture became a central part of the practice of many, many churches.
Again, primarily theologically conservative churches with this focus of growth and winning converts and so forth.
And so to aid in this growth model, churches adopted different kinds of business and corporate practices.
Because successful businesses, it was thought, were all about communicating their brand and growing their business by attracting new consumers, church growth advocates would talk about needing to do the same thing in church.
And sometimes this went to the extreme of describing potential parishioners as consumers, to describing the gospel or what the church is presenting as a product, and so on.
I remember seeing videos from pastors at big megachurches, which were the model of success, just like the Fortune 500 companies, the model of success in the business world of what we all strive to be.
These big megachurches with thousands of members, these became the model of what any church should be, if it could just grow and tap into what God really had for it.
And this starts by knowing what God has called you to be, your mission statement, and so forth.
All of this is the language that was used of consumers and products and so forth.
This was the era of the so-called seeker-sensitive churches and the emergence of some of those megachurches, the saddleback community churches, the big churches like that.
All of this was central to this notion of being a growing church, and it trickled down to become a mainstay of a lot of evangelical church culture.
And this is where I would be at loggerheads with the pastor I worked with because I just didn't buy into this stuff.
I could not articulate at the time why The way that I would be able to now.
But I remember just butting heads with church leadership about this language and using this and conceiving of what we were doing in the church in this way.
It's a contributing factor to why I left evangelicalism.
But all of this is part of what became a part of the evangelical culture that is still very much with us.
Some of that language has been toned down.
I think it's much less common for a church to describe what they're having as a product that they are selling to consumers and so forth.
Some of that language has softened, but I think the impulse is still there.
And this notion of core values and mission and vision is still very much a part of a lot of evangelical church culture.
Which brings us back to the sloganeering and the acronyms because, again, I invite you, look around at some churches.
Often these vision statements, submission statements, they are often formed out of clever acronyms like faith or salvation or disciple or something like that.
All of this is essentially a kind of way of branding the church.
Of making sure the church is on brand and communicating its uniqueness to a world of spiritual consumers.
And on one hand, I always thought this was stupid because like all these evangelical churches that you read all their mission statements, they're all kind of the same because they're all doing the same thing.
They're all going to say something about wanting to win people to faith in Christ and learn how to be devoted Christians or Christ followers or disciples or whatever.
There are only so many ways you can say the same thing because you're not a bunch of different businesses with different products.
But either way, it turns into this notion of a church telling you what its brand is, what makes it it, what makes it the one that it is, the product that it is selling.
And I think that that notion of consumption, marketing, branding, a deep, deep implication of popular American Christianity in American capitalism is all there.
And every time I hear one of these slogans, or see some kid walking around with a church slogan like that on a t-shirt, or I pass a church with this on the signs, or I think about my own experience, this is what comes for me when we decode this.
is a specific model of spirituality as providing a kind of product of potential adherence or converts as a kind of consumer of branding ourselves and letting you know who and what we are and so forth.
So where do we go with all this, sort of tying this together, need to wind this down?
When I give a thought of decoding these slogans and acronyms, there's this historical component.
There's a part of this that's like, okay, this makes sense.
In a certain sense, this is something that Christians have always done of a certain kind.
And yet, I think if we crack the code a little bit further, we find something that is unique, a very uniquely American adoption of corporate culture and the way that that idea of marketing and branding has taken purchase, not just in the so-called cool kid churches, but for many people in the idea of church as such, that you're not a good church if you don't have a vision statement and a mission statement and a core values and all of that.
The final thing to say about this is if that's a part of that kind of evangelical subculture, it also produced a backlash.
Back in the, again, the 90s to aughts, you had the so-called emergent church tradition.
You had kind of paleo church traditions that kind of rejected this.
Some were very theologically conservative.
Some were more progressive.
They took different shapes and so forth.
But you had a backlash against this.
You had people that were driven from the church by this.
I am one of those.
Again, this is part of my story.
And I think you also still have a certain, you know, if we were to come up with a typology of American religion or American Christianity along different kinds of axes, this would be another one.
This, you know, what is the role of corporate culture, this kind of mindset of branding and so forth?
What does that tell us about a congregation or a church or a tradition?
This would be another way to map that out.
So, a lot of interesting stuff in this.
Again, my thanks to Stephanie for some specific examples.
My thanks to all of you who raised questions about this, and as I say, brought to my mind something that I really hadn't thought of as fitting into the series, but I think that it does.
Keep the ideas coming.
Please keep the emails coming.
I always look forward to them, value them so much.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Want to hear from you.
Please keep them coming.
As always, thank you to everybody who takes the time to listen, who supports us in whatever form, those of you who support us financially.
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We thank you all.
And as always, thank you for the kind words and encouragement.
And until next time, I hope that you are all well and wish you the very best.
