God’s Own Website

The Los Angeles Times reports on some of the goods and services on offer at the annual National Religious Broadcasters convention in Anaheim: biblical health care insurance policies, a raffle for a piece of brimstone from Gomorrah, photos with Jesus and church website design “the way God intended.” The article isn’t news so much as a kitsch report, and a tired one at that, yet another entry in the “Christians are getting hip to marketing” genre. That storyline ignores the last 2,000 years of rather effective marketing, of course, but with regard to the National Religious Broadcasters it also reduces an annual ritual of political and cultural consolidation to a puff piece. In 1980, Ronald Reagan made his implicit pledge to the evangelical right at a meeting of the NRB, and since then it’s been a crucial event in the lives of politicians large and small. The L.A. Times, though, plays it wacky.