For a long time, I’ve been watching the shakeups going on in the world of AAA video games. It’s impossible not to draw some parallels with Christianity’s decline in America! But a few days ago, a game developer (or “dev”) offered advice that stopped me in my tracks. It was so perfect, and yet I knew Christian leaders would not understand it even if they ever saw it. Today, let me show you what this game dev said, and why it’s such great advice for Christian leaders. And then, I’ll show you why they wouldn’t bother listening to it if they heard it.
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SITUATION REPORT: Path of Exile dev offers incredibly good advice for more than just game development
Path of Exile is a mostly-single-player fantasy roleplaying video game released in 2013. Its co-creator, Chris Wilson, recently started up a new studio of his own to work on a new game. On May 26th, he offered some advice for game developers (“devs”):
[T]here’s one thing he [Wilson] avoids when trying to decide on a path forward: surveys. Why? Well, he sums it up neatly with a quote from Magic The Gathering head designer Mark Rosewater: “‘Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them.’
He goes on to explain that players can offer invaluable insights about where the game is flawed or failing. But taking their advice about fixes is a drastic error. Almost none of them are professionals in the gaming industry, so they don’t understand critical game stuff like balanced equipment and difficulty levels. They don’t need to understand that to play.
That advice sounded eerily like something Christian leaders should hear. It’s not the only time I’ve seen something in the video gaming industry that reminded me of the religious world, either. Today, let me show you those similarities—and why religious leaders are extremely unlikely to heed any of the good advice game devs could offer them.
Christian leaders still have no real idea why they’re in decline or what could fix it
First, let’s briefly cover the situation in the American Christ-o-sphere. Christianity’s decline continues, though actual affiliation levels have somewhat stabilized for a bit. At least, it’s stabilized till Gen Alpha hits adulthood in a couple of years. Early indications suggest they’re even less likely to affiliate with Christianity than Zoomers are.
Absolutely nothing Christian leaders do seems to have any impact whatsoever on membership levels in churches. They can be super-nice and do lots of charity. Or they can pound Bibles all day long and bellow about sin. Or they can try their best to chain members to authoritarian power structures—even though they don’t actually have any real temporal power over members’ lives. It doesn’t matter what they try. Churches bleed members and close anyway.
Over the years, we’ve had some fun examining why Christian leaders think they’re in decline. They’ve proven completely incapable of accurately naming the real reasons. They always have been.
- In 2014, we covered the “baptism drought” of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). At the time, they offered five nonsensical guesses about why most churches weren’t baptizing anyone but very small children. They were positive that if they found a way to repackage their core message for Millennials and celebrated baptisms better, things would turn around.
- In 2018, we talked about evangelicals blaming women for their decline. See, churches were just too feminized. It scared off all the hardline-but-delicate evangelical men!
- In 2023, Dan Foster at Medium made a few guesses that entirely missed the reality of his religion’s decline. He thought that if Christians acted more like he imagines first-century Christians did, that would fix everything.
- That same year, 2023, Russell Moore declared that if evangelicals stopped being so darned nostalgic, they’d have more revivals. And Tanita Maddox suggested that older evangelicals use social media to privately message teenagers to invite them to church functions, and yes, it was as horrifying as it sounds.
Across the years, evangelicals tend to insist that if they just find a better way to phrase their ideas, that’ll reverse the decline. They have a posture problem, to use Preston Sprinkle’s phrase, not a message problem. Ever.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a really good Christian guess about why they’re in decline. Christians tend to insist that the solution means adopting their idea of perfect Christianity, no matter what kind of Christians they are.
Like video game players, they know when something’s wrong. But they can’t ever understand why, much less fathom how to fix it. Every time I see a conservative video-game commentator freak out over “woke games” and the “modern audience,” I think the same exact thing. Nobody would care about a game’s ideological slant if it were a fun game. A game’s “wokeness” isn’t actually the problem with it. It’s something else, something far harder to catch in a bottle and describe.
The real problem feeding Christianity’s decline and video game publishers’ woes: Consumers must be wooed, not commanded
In both church and the gaming industries, I see a disparity, an asymmetry, between players/members and devs/leaders. But those with power in both industries can only command when those below them allow.
I’ve yet to see Christians, particularly evangelicals, who understand that it’s the loss of temporal power that spelled the end of Christianity’s cultural dominance of America. Once upon a time, Christians could make life very difficult for people who steadfastly refused to join and support churches. And they did exactly that. They tied visible adherence to Christianity to patriotism and Americans’ most idealized qualities. In that environment, dissenters became fair game for “Christian love.” At the very least, a dissenter could expect the loss of friends, their marriage and family, and their livelihood. In some areas, they even faced violence and property vandalism and destruction.
But after WWII, Americans began moving around like they never had before. And in that movement, they discovered freedom from church-based control. It became much easier to leave oppressive churches and religiously-dominated small towns for cities full of people who didn’t know them—or care about where they attended church.
Over the next few decades, it became easier and easier for Americans to drift away from churches. With so many moving targets, “Christian love” couldn’t focus on them all. Worse, punishment for dissent didn’t draw many people to churches. Instead, potential new recruits had to be wooed. They had to be won, just like any other consumer in any other marketplace.
I’m seeing the same thing happening in video games, particularly in the super-expensive arena of AAA blockbuster games. Studios spend hundreds of millions of dollars on these games, while funding agents demand significant input into its themes and characters. They try to make something that will appeal to enough consumers to justify the expense of making the game. But increasingly, these games aren’t doing well. Flops like Concord and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League speak to consumers’ dissatisfaction with this too-many-cooks development process.
Meanwhile, games that know their audience and care only about pleasing that audience skyrocket to success. Dark Souls looked at the increasing ease and handholding of video games, said “screw that noise,” and delivered the intense, incredibly difficult experience their audience craved. But I don’t think many Christian leaders even know what audience they want to find, much less what consumer experience they want to focus on offering.
The new normal amid decline: A religious marketplace where Christianity is just another product
I don’t think most Christian leaders like knowing that they need to find an audience, much less a consumer experience they can actually deliver consistently and reliably.
Evangelicals today mock and hate the “seeker-sensitive model” that megachurches like to use. As Calvinist hardliner Paul Carter wrote in 2019 of one church he attended that used that model:
“[W]e would get people in the door by playing contemporary music, singing contemporary songs, speaking contemporary jargon and addressing contemporary issues. Then at some unspecified point in the future we would transition into more meaty and substantial things.
Reminds me of the 2010s joke about “Contemporvant” churches:
That said, when we look at churches that are actually growing, they are usually megachurches. And megachurches tend to use this very model. When a megachurch comes to town, it’s only after extensive market research on par with a fast-food franchise. They know exactly who their potential customers are, and they know what those customers want in terms of programs and perks. The planners of these churches even pick their locations for specific reasons. Nothing’s accidental about a megachurch. It grows because it’s positioned to grow—naturally.
However, most pastors who start churches don’t do anything close to that level of research before opening their doors. They might vaguely think that an area “needs” a church of their doctrinal positions, or that they’d like to live around there. Or maybe they claim that Jesus totally told them to open a church there, like they weren’t even thinking about it beforehand.
Market research is anathema to most church pastors. Perhaps it feels too earthly, too untrusting of Jesus. Their attitude means that consumer choice is the one force they absolutely are not prepared to face, and it’s what really spells the decline of Christianity.
Consumer choice stymies churches and video game sales alike
Church leaders really have only themselves to blame for this new normal for their product (active membership in their churches). Even the hardliners who insist that pastors only need to “preach the Word” cheerfully position their product as a life-enriching, life-changing, life-enhancing one. I can see why. In the absence of being able to force people to join and support churches, their target customers must be made to feel that church membership is somehow essential in other ways. Simple doctrinal agreement isn’t enough.
For example, the site for Grace Baptist Church tells potential visitors that their church provides “a life-changing experience with God.” This attempt at marketing can be traced through their Wayback Machine history. Back in 1998, they only assured visitors they “have a place at Grace.” But by 2012, their site promised they were “changing lives that change the world.”
They’re certainly not alone. Most churches position membership the same way. Trevin Wax, a Southern Baptist Calvinist hardliner, clearly loved telling us all in 2015 about a church he attended as a kid that changed his life—he calls its approach “God, not gimmicks.” He clearly attributes this church’s success to divine approval. He derides anything else as “gimmicks.”
The magic formula doesn’t work everywhere, alas for Christians
But for every church that succeeds like the one in Wax’s post, another dozen fall apart despite using much the same operational formula and holding the same doctrinal stances. He’s just one of thousands of other onlookers who are convinced they know exactly how to keep a church from disintegrating, but he’s just as clueless as all those YouTube gaming channel guys who think they know exactly how to make a game a bestseller.
In the end, I don’t know the answer that could reverse any one particular church’s decline. I only know what won’t work, what doesn’t work, what can’t work. I see their game’s pain points, their flaws, their systemic problems. Like this game dev Chris Wilson is wise to note, that doesn’t mean I can reverse a specific church’s decline.
But then again, neither can the Trevin Waxes of the Christ-o-sphere, nor any other onlookers. The answers are not cut and dried or able to be boiled down to a Jesusy-sounding one-size-fits-all approach.
Religious consumers don’t have all the time in the world to waste on broken church-marketing promises, any more than gamers have all the money in the world to buy all the new video games. So we must prioritize. And that’s exactly what we do.
NEXT UP: Speaking of Trevin Wax, this Calvinist hardliner tries to make the SBC’s current purity spiral sound perfectly divine. See you soon! <3
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