Marketing faith

Poker chips with religious messages? Golf balls with scripture passages? Dead Sea Bath Salts?

Christians are selling their faith, from coffee mugs to games to scripture mints. Retailers like Wal-Mart are welcoming them and pushing their merchandise.

Christ-based diets alone have generated tens of millions of dollars: Body by God, What Would Jesus Eat?, Lose it for Life, The Maker’s Diet. The author of the latter, Jordan Rubin, has opened his open nutritional-supplement company, Garden of Life. It was featured on Entrepreneur magazine’s “Hot 100” list and had $43 million of sales in 2004.

Overall, Christian-based merchandise has become an annual $4 billion rage, according to America’s Research Group. After years of a sex-fueled culture that features raunchy pop music and trashy clothes for young teenagers, Christian marketers are pulling off a profitable backlash, especially in the evangelical sphere.

But not all Christians are happy about it. Why, they ask, did Jesus tell the rich man to give away everything he owned? Is it not easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to gain heaven?

One of the earliest commentators on this passage, Pope Clement, said Jesus primarily wanted the man “to drive from the soul the vain thoughts about wealth, the excitement and distress related to it, the worries that are the thorns of existence and that suffocate the seed of life.”

Yet the merchandising entrepreneur is precisely the type of person who thinks about wealth: how to create it, how to increase it. He thrives off “the excitement and distress related to it.” It’s not surprising that some ministers are skeptical.