My Trip to Christian Supply

Or: Why can't more Christians be original?

Yesterday, my mom walked into my room and invited me to join her on a trip to Christian Supply, a local Christian bookstore. She had a coupon that expired today, and I had nothing better to do, so I went. Luckily, I brought my Clie with me, so I could shoot some photos. Unluckily, the Clie's camera isn't a very good one, so please bear with the low-quality images. Click the extended entry link below for my photo-essay.

The first thing you see as you come in the right-hand entrance is this:

You know, I'm not sure how this thing fits in with "Thou shalt not make any graven image," but, hey! What do I know? Here's some more selections from the Christian Supply Wall o' Idols:

That's a very specific demographic.

I mentioned one of these before, but now they've come out with two more magazine-esque versions of the Bible(!) I'd be embarrassed to take one of these to church, myself. (I just use my Clie. It's a very useful tool.)

Notice one of the headlines on the Refuel edition: Today's hottest songs. I wonder if they're planning to put out a new issue every month. The top headline is: Girls, cash, and cars. Yep... Appealing to preteenage boys' greed and libido is definitely the best way to sell the Bible.

Next!

As we skim the back cover (link to image) we see this quote: "Revolt against the cheap substitutes the world calls the 'good life' and become a part of the CrossCulture." Ah, so we'll also appeal to the teenage drive for rebellion to sell our books. OK. Oh, and let's also change some of the "lingo"--Christianity just has such a dull ring to it. Let's have our marketing guru's come up with the best new name for the Christian life they can.

Seriously though, despite the marketing spin, I think this book might actually be worth reading. Another line reads "It's about daily sacrificing your selfish ambitions" and another says "What you will find is a call to total commitment and surrender to the one person who is able and willing to transform you into the person you were truly meant to be." It's at least somewhat creative, which is more than I can say for a lot of products in the store, such as this:

"In a horrifying vision, Chelsea Adam has relived the victim's last moments." Mmm-hmm. Wasn't this also the premise of an NBC drama called The Profiler? Cross out "psychic" and refer to her "new-found Christian faith" instead, and you've got the makings of a great book!

Then you've got the people who profit off of other people's work by attacking it, such as these two:

Key quote from the second book (images here and here): "According to information compiled from a number of web-sites, Pokemon, short for pocket monsters is an RPG/simulation Game Boy game released in 1995 by Nintendo of Japan."

I'm sorry, but it takes just a little bit of credibility away from you when you cite "a number of websites" as your primary source. Reading through the pages I glanced through, it became evident that the author's primary sources were sites like this one which insist that the Pokemon franchise has occult ties and that its authors are probably agents of Satan. As one who played the original GameBoy game, I can tell you that their claims are way, way off-base. But it's not my purpose here to refute this book's premise or its poor arguments, nor to question whether poorly-reasoned attacks on harmless children's games are tantamount to the boy who cried wolf, nor even to point out the obvious pun between the book's title and it's subtitle. My purpose is instead to point out how too many Christian authors are trying to sell books on the coattails of other people's hard work instead of creating their own original ideas.

On that theme, we have this:

Compare this

to this:

My mom believes that the book with headphones came first; I'm not too sure.

On the other hand, there's no questioning what inspired this T-shirt:

The middle line reads "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." Due to a bit of a hand shake, the rest is illegible. But you can definitely see which movie series they're trying to cash in on. If I had done this photo-essay a few years ago, I could have shown you many more marketing style T-Shirts, like the infamous "Godweiser" shirt. But, fortunately, the time of that particular fad is over.

I'll end with one other, much more original idea, what I've chosen to term the Tub o' Religion:

Here's to more original ideas like this one! Good night!

Posted by Blog Jones at July 1, 2004 09:33 PM | Category: Religion