Monday, February 28, 2011

Christian outrage publicity

I groaned upon reading a friend's recent Facebook update promising a review of the latest scandal-courting pop-fiction rewrite of the life of Jesus, Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. In our pop-cultural world, getting noticed is by far the most difficult feat. Any author who monitors his or her Amazon sales rankings can attest as much. Blogs and tweets and vanity presses—which once were supposed to empower the talented but voiceless—have instead created a cacophony from which scarcely any influential voices emerge.
One easy way for an author to break out is to offend Christians—easier, apparently, than writing something beautiful or profound. Literary merit cannot explain the meteoric rise of mediocrities like Dan Brown. Stephen King (yes, that Stephen King) called Brown's novels "the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese," and each of The Da Vinci Code's predecessors sold fewer than 10,000 copies.

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Another thought experiment: Imagine if a journalist called a Christian leader to ask about Brown's latest Rome-based conspiracy theory, and the leader said, "That's a pretty tame theory. The Bible's own conspiracy theory is much wilder. It says that God is plotting to overthrow every worldly power and establish his own rule once and for all. And the entire Christian church is in on it." The magnitude of God's plan hardly needs exaggeration: This is the God who, when it came time to pick teams, chose an old man, then a tiny nation, then the youngest son of Jesse, and ultimately the life of a commoner from Bethlehem—and with this roster undertook vanquishing the mightiest empires of the world.
 Christian B Hays,  Christianity Today

He also refers to how a video game company cashed in on Christian outrage by hiring people to pretend to be a Christian protest group when launching their latest game!!!  Here's the link.

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