I remember flinching for the dashboard as if that was going to help. The car was careening toward a snake-like elbow in the track. I glanced at the driver expecting him to slam on the brakes and save us from catastrophe. He looked almost bored; I think he may have even yawned. The car glided smoothly in and out of the turn as if it had prepared its whole life for that moment. As he accelerated out of the curve, the driver apologized for not going faster. Apparently, if you’re not wearing a helmet — and I wasn’t — drivers are only allowed to take the track at 70 percent speed. This was part of my “research” for the new account I had been assigned — Porsche Cars North America. At the time, I was working for an ad agency. The people at Porsche had taken us to a racetrack to develop an appreciation for their product. Apart from nearly soiling my drawers, it worked.

My role as an account planner in advertising was to serve as a kind of consumer anthropologist. Basically, I was to keep my finger on the pulse of what consumers influenced and what they were influenced by. There were no rules for this task, no formal training, no manual — just raw intuition, ingenuity, and a dose of insanity. As a result, I got to explore all kinds of strange things.

Much of what I did involved getting consumers from our target demographic to tell me things that they didn’t want me to know about intimate parts of their lives. My task was to unearth what we called “The Leverageable Insight.” Or put another way, the thing we could best exploit. Basically, the deeper we probed into people’s lives, the better. When you tap into the most intense or emotionally poignant experiences, you discover the trigger for all consumer impulses. The next task was for the creative team to find a way to associate that deep spiritual or emotional experience with our brand. If we were successful, the consumer soul would imprint to our brand the way a newborn babe imprints to a mother while nursing. In a very real sense, I spent seventy hours a week promoting a kind of counterfeit gospel. I wasn’t offering cheap grace mind you. Ours was an expensive gospel — somewhere between $80,000 and $120,000 depending on what level of salvation you could afford.

It was through a series of events and realizations that I came to terms with the fact that what I was really offering was antithetical to my most deeply held beliefs as a Christian. I was in the engine room of consumer culture — arguably the greatest threat to the gospel the world has ever known. It was a dangerous cocktail of this realization plus the experience of God’s call in my life that led me to leave my lucrative and enjoyable career in advertising to attend seminary and eventually accept my calling as a pastor. That shift felt like spiritual whiplash, but it was also like coming home.

DUSTING OFF MCLUHAN

In my pursuit of greater expertise while I was working in advertising, I inadvertently unearthed a thinker who had been considered irrelevant for decades. He was an obscure literary professor who applied his skills to the study of media and communication in contemporary culture. In unexpected fashion he exploded onto the scene and garnered national media attention. It seems he could predict the future and anticipate changes before they happened. In 1967 he decorated the cover of Newsweek and Life in the same week (Barbra Streisand was the only other person to do so).¹Newsweek said his “theory of communication offers nothing less than an explanation of all human culture, past, present, and future.”² The New York Herald Tribune declared that he was “the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov.”³ His name was Marshall McLuhan. And chances are he’s the most important thinker you’ve never heard of.

McLuhan died in 1980 at the low point of his popularity. Oddly enough, the thing that made him so popular was the very thing that made him drift into obscurity. Shunned by academia as unconventional and increasingly opaque to the masses, he was relegated to the attic of pop culture history where his ideas began collecting dust. I stumbled into that attic in the late 90s, dusted off a book and began reading. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, the scales suddenly fell from my eyes. I had an awakening. Suddenly, I saw two things very clearly: the glaring immorality of my profession and the profound implications of McLuhan’s thinking for people of faith.

He was able to see things about the nature of communication that no one else could see. Although frequently overlooked, few things are more important to a faith like ours. Remember, Christianity is fundamentally rooted in a communication event. The entire basis of our religion is predicated on God revealing himself to humanity — communicating to and with us. His self-revelation, or message, was delivered in a myriad of media including angels, burning bushes, stone tablets, and even a donkey. God is in the communication business. So in a sense, any serious study of communication is a study of God.

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

Evangelicals seem to be aware of this relationship between communication and the gospel. You’ve probably heard the saying, “The methods change, but the message stays the same.” There it is — the rallying cry of the evangelical church. It is the North Star that guides the most forward-looking leaders of the church. It serves both as a shield defending against the flaming arrows of those who cry “heresy” and as a catalyst for creativity and innovation in ministry. As long as you don’t change the message, anything goes for the methods of communicating it.

This view is based on a simple metaphor of media. Media and methods are merely “tools” or “vehicles.” They serve as neutral conduits, or pipelines, useful for dispensing the gospel. It’s like the plumbing in a house that carries water from the water heater to the faucet. We don’t think much about the pipes until one springs a leak.

However, this metaphor is a major problem. It prevents us from seeing the truth. The truth, as McLuhan famously observed, is that in fact the medium is the message. It’s a cryptic little aphorism that stands in direct contradiction to the evangelical rallying cry. He meant that the forms of our media, regardless of their content, have the power to shape our minds and our messages. In other words, you can’t change the methods without changing the message. So in this view, the content of any medium is really the magician’s sleight-of-hand to distract us from the trick being played on our minds. We sit and gawk at the banality of a show like American Idol, appalled by the hideous vocal offering of the latest contestant. All the while we remain totally unaware that the flickering mosaic of pixels slips the watch from our wrists and re-patterns neural pathways in our brains. In reality, media are much more than neutral purveyors of information. They have the power to shape us, regardless of content, and thus cannot be evaluated solely on their usage.

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