The Big Sort (26 page)

These days, people are unlikely to meet many at church whose politics differ from their own, so the forces of group polarization are at work within the sanctuary, too. "To the extent that people receive information from congregations, they are likely to have that information reinforced by the people they worship with," Green told me. "It's like having a big filter. You get some kinds of messages, and those messages are reinforced ... There has been a lot of emphasis on this happening with conservative Christians, but of course it happens across the board. This kind of filtering happens in liberal churches, too." The lesson learned in scores of group polarization experiments is that like-minded groups grow more extreme over time. And that is exactly what Green has found. "Overall, particularly among the large white religious communities, there does seem to be that hardening," Green said in 2004. Since his first polls in 1992, traditionalist Evangelicals "have experienced a steady Republican shift." Meanwhile, the political makeup of modernist mainline churches also has changed drastically—"from 50 percent Republican to 26 percent."
³⁸

Are Green's religious types also segregating themselves geographically, with traditionalists settling in some communities and modernists in others? Bob Cushing and I have discovered that men and women of every faith (Evangelical, Catholic, Jewish) are more politically conservative in heavily Republican counties than are those of the same religious description in Democratic landslide counties. That's because there are more religious
traditionalists
in Republican counties. For example, 45 percent of the population in heavily Republican counties attends regular Bible study or group prayer meetings. By contrast, only 28.7 percent of the population in heavily Democratic counties participates in such activities.
³⁹

Rick Warren's wildly popular book
The Purpose-Driven Life
begins with a challenge to Americans' post-materialist self-centeredness: "It's not about you." In the sense of the Great Commission, that is exactly right. Life and the church are about finding salvation in Christ. The imperative of "like attracts like" evangelism, however, caters to the individual from the time the convert first answers the call to worship. Whenever the evangelist Billy Graham issued his altar call, inspired people would stream to the foot of the stage to pledge their lives to the church. At that first moment of their new faith, Graham made sure the freshly converted were met by volunteers of the same age, sex, and race.
⁴⁰
The shepherding of people into their proper "homogeneous units" begins at the beginning. Which raises a question: in this world of segmented Sunday school classes, stopwatch-timed sermons, "people like us" altar calls, and preachers in market-tested cruise ship attire, isn't there something very pervasive that's
all
about you?

"My contention is that McGavran was never really heard in North America," said Eddie Gibbs, the Donald A. McGavran Professor of Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary. McGavran came to his strategy because of his commitment to the Great Commission. Warren repeatedly makes the same point—that the homogeneous unit principle is simply a way to make it easier for people to become Christians. Whereas McGavran was a missionary building bridges from castes or villages to Christ, today's churches define tribes in the same way people are attracted to different sections of a shopping mall. McGavran hired an anthropologist to understand the multiple meanings of human affinity in China. Megachurches today consult with Disney about how to design parking lots.
^*

The successful North Coast Church in Vista, California, follows a fundamentalist doctrine: the inerrancy of the Bible, water baptism, and the "imminent" Second Coming of Christ. North Coast has found an innovative way to grow through the homogeneous unit principle, beaming a central service to video screens in different meeting places. Everyone hears the same sermon, but everyone listens in a place with its own special "ambiance." The venues in 2007 were described on the church's website in terms that almost parody brand-defined, music-segmented, American mall-speak. In the central church, North Coast offered "a full worship band, Starbucks coffee, and a 'Barnes & Noble' style bookstore in the lobby." At the "Country Gospel" venue, North Coast adopted
Hee Haw
informality, encouraging just-folks, "Y'all come on over and ... join us for some bluegrass/country gospel." The "Traditions" hall provided "an intimate and nostalgic worship experience led from a baby grand piano." At "The Edge," churchgoers could count on "Starbucks coffee, Mountain Dew, big subwoofers and teaching via big-screen video."

The goal of the church in other times was to transfigure the social tenets of those who came through the door. Now people go to a church not for how it might change their beliefs, but for how their precepts will be reconfirmed. "I find very little evidence that churches are really transforming their congregations," University of Maryland political scientist James Gimpel told me. "It's rather quite the reverse. Ministers depend on pleasing a particular congregation for their longevity. The last thing they want to do is offend those people or try to transform their viewpoint.... It's conformity all the way." We have more choices than ever before in the hundreds of religious niche markets. But given a choice, we select sameness. This was hardly Donald McGavran's intention when he came upon a church community that was losing members and introduced a young generation of ministers to missionary techniques discovered in India.

"The church needed to be birthed within ... indigenous cultures and take on that indigenous expression," Eddie Gibbs told me. "It was a missional principle, and when it came to the U.S., it became a marketing principle: how to gather more people like us. [Churches] picked up the tactical parts, but I'm not too sure they understood the deeper mission implications. And they didn't really address the cultural implications, because mission morphed into marketing."

If everyone agrees with you, where's the fun?

—
GUY BARNETT
, founder of Brooklyn Brothers advertising agency

 

A N
EW
Y
ORK
adman began an article in a 1973 issue of the
Journal of Advertising
with an odd question: "Are Grace Slick and Tricia Nixon Cox the Same Person?" Traditional advertising research in the early 1970s would have taken this question, plugged in demographic data, and answered, with quantifiable certainty, "Yes, they are." Both were white, rich, educated, urban, from upper-income homes, and between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. They had even attended the same college.

But conventional marketing research was blind, wrote John E. O'Toole, president of Foote, Cone & Belding Communications. Wasn't it obvious? "Go ask Alice, I think she'll know." As would anyone. The lead singer for the psychedelic rock group Jefferson Airplane was nothing like the blond-haired daughter of President Richard Nixon. Grace Slick originally wanted to name her daughter god but settled for China. Tricia Nixon married a Republican presidential aide on the White House lawn. In 1970, when Slick was invited to a White House reception for Nixon's fellow Finch College alums, the Secret Service stopped the singer when she tried to bring along her "bodyguard," Yippie founder and Chicago Seven defendant Abbie Hoffman. (The two said they intended to spike the president's iced tea with LSD.) Unless advertisers could learn to distinguish the composer of "White Rabbit" from the president's daughter, O'Toole wrote, marketing research was useless.

O'Toole argued that statistics on income, age, and education had lost relevance because there had been a "Revolution of the Individual" in the United States. The advertising executive didn't acknowledge having read about Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs or Ronald Inglehart's silent revolution. But he was describing the same phenomenon—the explosion of self-expression in a post-materialist economy. People were no longer willing to be treated as part of a mass because they didn't think of themselves that way, O'Toole told his fellow marketing executives. They were growing their hair long and "forming liberation groups: black, feminist, gay, consumer, anything." O'Toole wrote that marketers had snoozed through the revolution and insulted customers by discounting "their intelligence in favor of some vast common denominator." It was 1973, but advertisers continued to "shout at a crowd rather than talk to persons."
¹

O'Toole's manifesto appeared just three years after Donald McGavran published his 1970 masterwork on religion and homogeneous units,
Understanding Church Growth.
Although the two were writing for radically different audiences on wildly different subjects, McGavran and O'Toole reached remarkably similar conclusions: people lived, bought, and worshiped in groups "united by common attitudes or lifestyles or perceptions of themselves." Those were O'Toole's words, but they could have been McGavran's. The ministers who listened to McGavran, such as Rick Warren (see
chapter 7
), created the megachurch. Those in the commercial world who followed O'Toole devised the kind of target marketing that transformed modern business—and in 2004 helped win the presidency for George W. Bush. Both movements reinforced and deepened the segmented and segregated lives Americans live today.

Most of the language Americans use today to describe politics can be traced to the decades just after the Civil War. In the late nineteenth century, political races became "campaigns." Politicians referred to "precinct captains," "old warhorses," "rank-and-file voters," "last-ditch efforts," and "battleground states." Political campaigns mimicked the tactics as well as the language of the battlefield. They were mass endeavors: people rallied; they turned out for speeches and marched in torch-light parades; they literally donned the uniforms of their parties. In the 1870s, the Republican glee club in one Indiana county put forty singers and an organ on a wagon drawn by six horses.

Although we've retained the language of post—Civil War politics, we long ago lost the style. By the summer of 2006, politics had turned from a mass undertaking into a calculated exercise of social segmentation and niche marketing. Both parties had pollsters in the field asking questions they hoped would help identify likely Democrats or Republicans so that the parties could isolate and target individual voters. Democrats were startled when Republicans in 2004 plucked out likely supporters by their choices in magazines and liquor. These were advertising strategies that businesses had used for decades, and to catch up, Democrats quickly hired their own marketing firms. By the time of the 2006 midterm elections, both parties were segregating, slicing, and separating voters.

Political marketing has always lagged behind commercial merchandizing. Politicians adopt new techniques long after they are proven in the commercial world. The parades and horse-drawn choirs of the late nineteenth century were abandoned in part on the advice of John Wanamaker, President William Henry Harrison's postmaster general and the originator of the department store.
²
Wanamaker and others realized that the military style of campaigning was good at turning out voters, but the turnout was indiscriminate. Campaigns of the late nineteenth century energized friend and foe alike. Wanamaker argued that people shouldn't be whipped into a fury or paraded down the street. Voters ought to be approached as individuals, as consumers. Instead of spangly party uniforms and pipe organs pulled to mass rallies by horses, Wanamaker advised, politicians should use a new weapon to contact voters individually: advertising. A politics of mass movements would become a politics of mass marketing.

The parties began printing millions of newspapers. They dispatched speakers to thousands of clubs to discuss the issues of the day. The candidates spent money on postage, not torches. Illinois Democrats in 1892 distributed 1.9 million pamphlets in twelve languages and mailed 2 million pieces of literature across the Midwest. Instead of ginning up crowds of party supporters with marches and rallies, the new merchandising style of political campaigning focused on the undecided voter.
³
Political advertising was coming from the world of the department store, and it was all about mass marketing to individual consumers.

Business at the beginning of the twentieth century was all about getting big. Between 1898 and 1902, in a massive wave of mergers, 2,653 firms consolidated into just 269. "With remarkable swiftness," historian Daniel Pope wrote, "large-scale corporate capitalism had appeared."
⁴
Mass production, with its heavy capital investments, demanded mass markets. "The essence of manufacture," wrote a DuPont executive at the beginning of the twentieth century, "is steady and full product."
⁵
Marketing was geared to encourage allegiance to the new national brand names: Coca-Cola, Quaker Oats, Kodak. By 1930, the fifty biggest American corporations accounted for half of the nation's industrial production.
⁶

National advertising and mass merchandising worked for ketchup, cigarettes, and sweet, brown-colored water, and it was soon employed for political candidates as well. No parades, just facts. No brass bands, just pamphlets to be read by atomized voters. The merchandising technique elected candidates, but it devastated democratic participation. Turnouts in national elections dropped from 80 percent of eligible voters in 1896 to under 50 percent in 1924.
⁷
Democracy was no longer a craft skill; it was a commodity of mass production. Voters weren't owners of a process; they consumed a product, democracy, designed by department store moguls.
Nation's Business
, the publication of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, eagerly anticipated the 1956 presidential campaign, when "both parties will merchandise their candidates and issues by the same methods that business has developed to sell goods."
⁸
Those methods, however, were about to change, both in business and in politics.