Canadian Christian Booksellers Association at Bene Diction Blogs On

Canadian Christian Booksellers Association

Canadian Cynic does snark.
Very well I might add, a Canadian Jesus General.

I can’t comment there, for some reason my sign in for blogger/Google works when it feels like it. Which is almost always never. Good thing, I might have just tried to leave a comment and neglected to share this tidbit.

I was unaware the Canadian Christian Booksellers Association had gone belly up.
I’m surprised, not surprised.
Irrationally relieved perhaps.
I had friends that started a religious bookstore and sold it in deep discouragement some years later.
They got fed up having to sell Jesus junk and CCM and way to many sappy religious greeting cards and Christianity lite bestsellers like Joel Osteen.
Really fed up.
They started off carrying books and when I helped out stocking shelves and cleaning the store I got to read them. Good books, not so good books.
Once the Association took off, people’s tastes changed as marketing to evangelicals homogenized.
‘Marketed to’ church people read Osteen, not Tozer, when they bothered to read.
The book section shrank every year, and my friends seemed to wither with it.
Some consumers like shiny Jesus junk and can’t wait to get their hands on the next Wowship CD.
Sad but true.
I wish the 186 bookstore owners well.

Oh right. Canadian Cynic. Point taken.
Nicely done.

Published 9 months, 2 weeks ago

2 Responses to “Canadian Christian Booksellers Association”

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1 Mark Byron on Nov 17th, 2007 at 5:50 am

CCM as Commercial Christian Marketing. The Christian merely modifies the marketing and the commercial modifies the Christian.

Many of the book publishers are secular, and apply the same techniques to Christian books as secular best sellers, marketing Joel Osteen and Rick Warren like John Grisham and Tom Clancy.

Left Behind started the trend of Christian themed (yes, a schlocky premillennialist tale to the purists, but Christian nonetheless) mass-market publishing, and we’ve started to get use to the mass-marketing of Christian books. Some of the mass-market stars are OK (Warren, for example) but most lean towards name-it-and-claim it style Pentecostal, or Word-of-Faith-lite evangelicals like Bruce (Prayer of Jabez) Wilkinson.

The other CCM, the music one, has begun to track the top-40 pop milieu, as it become another genre like Country or Jazz or R&B. For instance, Casting Crowns is playing the big Rupp Arena in Lexington this weekend and getting front-page coverage on the weekend magazine of the Lexington paper, getting the same treatment that other pop stars would.

Mass market winds up bringing money which brings in commercial interests; that winds up turning things into something commercial and spiritual, serving both God and mammon. Jesus talked about stuff like that with the Laodiceans, and reached for the barf bag.