Sun, Dec 28, 2003 page12

• The great Christian cash-in

  Characters such as Jay Jay the Jet Plane are being packaged for both mainstream audiences and Christian youngsters, a lucrative strategy that is being repeated elsewhere

  • By Julie Salamon / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  When David Michel quit his job nine years ago, he wanted to do something to influence young children like his own. That was the genesis of Jay Jay the Jet Plane, the perky character he created and named for his 2-year-old son and who now appears on 258 stations on PBS's coveted children's programming schedule. Jay Jay's adventures carry messages meant to teach children gentleness, patience and friendship.

  But Michel, who holds a master of divinity degree from Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, also wanted his animated airplane to spread the word of God.

  

  Christian marketers peddling television programming, books and other forms of entertainment have adopted a strategy of designing separate pitches and packaging to sell the same products to religious and secular customers -- two groups who are often wary of each other, if not openly hostile. Jay Jay the Jet Plane has separate children's products for the general and Christian markets

  PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

  "It's very tricky because the markets are very separate markets," Michel said. "And each market is substantial."

  So he used a marketing approach that others are now trying -- designing separate pitches and packaging to sell the same products to religious and secular customers. So Jay Jay presents himself in two versions, one secular and one Christian.

  Evangelical Christian marketers often don't want their products tainted by association with a secular culture that many in their audience regard as hedonistic, vulgar or even demonic.

  "What is really unique about a Christian record or book isn't the label but the message," said Bill Anderson, president of the CBA, formerly known as the Christian Booksellers Association. "The question is: Does the message of this book or CD align with Scripture?"

  Similarly, mainstream consumers are generally wary of religious products, particularly those associated with evangelical Christianity, a label that today often has a political connotation as well. The rock band Creed, for example, whose lyrics often deal with spiritual matters, states on its Web site that it is not a Christian band.

  So Jay Jay gets marketed very differently to each group.

  Columbia TriStar sells Jay Jay videos like Something Special for Everyone and Good Friends Forever, linked to the PBS shows.

  But Tommy Nelson, as the children's division of the Christian publisher and distributor Thomas Nelson is called, has its own Jay Jay line earmarked for Christian families. These videos, with titles like Fantastic Faith and God's Awesome Design, are geared to refer to specific Bible verses. The same division between secular and religious is also the rule with Jay Jay books and toys.

  The strategy meets Michel's two goals.

  "For me," he said, "Jay Jay is both a television show and a mission."

  For established mainstream publishers and distributors, the Christian market has become too big -- and too lucrative -- to ignore. Last year an estimated US$4.2 billion in Christian-oriented books, music and other forms of entertainment were sold, often in Christian superstores, according to the CBA.

  Publishers Weekly, the book industry's trade journal, reported last year that religious titles were at the top of its annual lists of both best-selling fiction and nonfiction for 2001, the first time that had had happened.

  This growth has led to a sometimes uncomfortable marriage of the sacred and the secular. Contemporary Christian music companies, once independent, have been bought by huge music conglomerates like BMG. Time Warner (owner of HBO, the television home of the gleefully vulgar Sopranos, Sex in the City and G-String Divas) has an evangelical division for books, based in Nashville, Tennessee, that includes the Warner Faith imprint, specifically for Christian audiences, and Walk Worthy, for Christian African-American audiences. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. owns Zondervan, a Christian publisher. Ruder Finn, the public-relations firm, promotes religious titles through a specialized division.

  Michelle Rapkin, director of religious publishing at Doubleday, had made plans to publish Circle of Grace, a new novel by Penelope Stokes, next summer under two imprints: Doubleday and Waterbrook, the religious imprint of Random House. Until now Stokes' work has appeared almost entirely in the Christian market, and Doubleday was hoping to expand her audience without losing established readers.

  But a few weeks ago Rapkin said Doubleday had decided to publish Circle of Grace alone.

  "It has to do with the delicacy of the CBA market and the real delicacy of that line one has to walk," said Rapkin. "It's actually a tightrope."

  There were two problems with publishing the novel under a Christian imprint, Rapkin said. One of the characters, a young woman, becomes an Episcopal priest, and that could offend those who rely on CBA retailers to filter out material that they consider objectionable, she said. Another character, a middle-aged woman who undergoes therapy and discovers she has submerged her personality her entire life, unleashes her fury in salty language.

  "It probably wouldn't shock you or me or very many people, but there are those who don't want to see it on the page if it has the Christian stamp of approval," Rapkin said.

  Two years ago Doubleday tried to capitalize on the success of Philip Yancy -- who has sold 5 million books in the Christian market -- by publishing Soul Survivor, his 15th book, as a mainstream title. While it was hardly a disaster (the book sold 110,000 copies), the publisher was disappointed. In paperback Soul Survivor will appear under both the Doubleday and Waterbrook imprints.

  Many Christian books and music titles have become huge successes in the mainstream world, available not only through religious retailers but also at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com. Some classics, like Lord of the Rings, find a warm reception in the Christian market, and many writers and musicians, like the novelist Jan Karon or the singer Amy Grant, cross over to the secular side.

  Rick Warren, the pastor of Saddleback Church, in Orange County, California, a megachurch on a 120-acre campus where about 19,000 people attend services every week, is author of The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? It has been on The New York Times' advice and how-to best-seller list for 11 months, having sold more than 11 million copies.

  Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, examined the Saddleback Church for Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a book he wrote with Lewis Feldstein. On a book tour, Putnam said, he was struck by the audience's reaction when he spoke about Saddleback.

  "My audiences," he said, "are largely NPR-type audiences: intellectual, a little left of center and for the most part uneasy about the potential political influence of these groups."

  He said he was "shocked at how allergic much of my audience was to the idea that there is something of interest in this religious group."

  Despite the immense popularity of Christian authors, who are superstars in some parts of the country, they have been largely ignored by much of the mainstream news media, including The New York Times, further encouraging a dual marketing strategy.

  Sharon Farnell, managing director of the "faith division" of Planned Television Arts, owned by Ruder Finn, has found it difficult to get bookings for her authors.

  "Those books sold at the level of a John Grisham book or J.K. Rowling book, but it was so hard to get coverage," she said of the best-selling Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels by Tim LeHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.

  The ninth in the Left Behind series, Desecration (Tyndale), sold nearly 3 million copies.

  "Even Rick Warren, the `Purpose-Driven Life' guy, has gotten very little coverage," Farnell said. "They're very resistant to giving coverage to something applicable to evangelical Christians."

  By comparison Grisham's legal thrillers are routinely published with a first-print run of 2.8 million copies, while Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, fifth in the Harry Potter series, sold 5 million copies in its first 24 hours. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake climbed onto The New York Times best-seller list for eight weeks this fall; the book's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, has 200,000 hard-cover copies in print.

  The evangelical link is a source of frustration for authors and musicians who are Christian but do not consider their works as proselytizing.

  "It's easy to get pigeonholed, to have readers expect conservative religious perspectives and predictable outcomes," said Stokes, the novelist whose previous nine books were sold through the CBA market.

  There are those who feel that those spiritual issues and Christianity itself -- no matter what denomination -- have become suspect.

  "I do notice how people are very comfortable talking about Buddhism and Eastern religions and taking them very seriously," said Carolyn Carlson, executive editor at Viking Penguin and a minister's daughter. "But if you were talking about the same religious experience in a Christian context, I think people would be uncomfortable talking about it."

  Karon, one of Carlson's authors, is a superstar among those who began with a Christian imprint. Her Mitford novels feature the life of an Episcopal rector. Her books have sold 15 million copies; the latest, Shepherds Abiding quickly appeared on the New York Times best-seller list after it was published in October. Yet Karon's work is rarely reviewed in the mainstream media -- outside of People magazine -- and when it is, the critics can be snide.

  Voicing an often-repeated complaint, Carlson of Viking said:

  "A distance has grown between cultural czars and people who like to read. I went to Harvard, I am a minister's daughter, I've read all the great books that are out there, and I love these books, too."

  Yet for believers, maybe that dissonance is a good thing. There are those who argue that the very success of Christian marketers puts the purity of the faith at risk.

  "The market and capitalism just do not respect a lot of the things religion traditionally has respected," said Alan Wolfe, a professor at Boston College and author of The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith (Free Press), in which he argues that popular culture has altered the form of American religion.

  "Money is very powerful, and God is very powerful, and I think money usually wins," he said. "At least in this world."
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