Christian publishers, it seems, are facing a downturn. Christianity is simply so entrenched in American society that I haven’t thought much about the implosion of this formerly-humongous industry. But after decades of fantastic sales, Christian publishers face a decline that they might not be able to stop.
Sometimes, a sign of Christianity’s decline takes me by surprise. This was one of those times. Let’s dive into the rise of Christian publishing—and get a peek at its looming crisis.
(From introduction: Lonnie Frisbee’s secret life; Rumors and legal fights about Larry Norman; Keith Green’s life and death. Carman’s “Sunday’s on the Way.” Michael W Smith’s “Our God is an Awesome God.” The oldest flute.)
What Christian publishers were doing way back when
Way, way back in the late 1980s, when Biff and I were dating, we’d often visit a particular Mexican buffet restaurant after Sunday morning services at that first big Pentecostal church we attended. This buffet was located in a strip mall in a rougher part of Houston some distance away, but it was 100% worth the drive. After church, a bunch of us would head out there, park in its rubble-filled, poorly-paved parking lot, and indulge in the only sin allowed to us: Gluttony.
Afterward, Biff and I would walk across that perilous parking lot to a small Christian bookstore further down the strip mall. Since the neighborhood was largely Mexican, it catered to both evangelicals and Mexican Catholics. There, one could buy everything from prayer candles in jars and sacks of Communion wafers to Jack Chick comic books and tracts (many of which condemned Catholicism). This quiet, dimly-lit shop also sold decorative items, wearable stuff like shirts and tote bags, and books.
Pentecostals had not yet fused with evangelicals, so I barely even looked at the books on this shop’s shelves. Our church had its own bookstore. It mostly peddled testimony memoirs, huge Bible studies about our specific differences from other Christian flavors, Endtimes prophecies, and hairstyling guides for women. (Pentecostal women back then didn’t cut their hair, ever—or at least they weren’t supposed to!)
Even then, I didn’t read many Christian-aimed books. Pentecostals tend to go full throttle on the Bible being their only authority source, so most of the stuff evangelicals have on their bookshelves today wouldn’t have appealed at all to someone like me back then. We didn’t need lifestyle guides or long printed sermons about this-or-that culture-war topic. And evangelicals weren’t having a lot of trouble recruiting, so they didn’t really need many evangelism and apologetics guides.
(See also: I bet you had no idea that soulwinning was this easy.)
All of this was about to change very quickly.
Christian publishers found their footing in the aftermath of the wild and wooly Jesus People Movement
Many years ago around the 1960s, evangelicalism experienced a serious cultural moment. Some religious historians call it the Jesus Movement, its adherents the Jesus People. Others refer to it as the Jesus Revolution, as per the recent evangelical movie’s title.
Whatever you want to call it, the results are the same: Young adults discovered the intense, orgiastic, highly-subjective nature of evangelical worship—and found that they resonated with it. They definitely preferred it to the dry, stuffy churches they’d attended as kids; in fact, they thought it compared very well with even the weird New Age stuff their peers were doing. Evangelical churches were so eager to reap the benefits of this movement that they even mostly overlooked the frequent hypocrisy and instability of this movement’s biggest names.
Between the late 1960s and late 1970s, hundreds of thousands of those young adults swarmed into evangelical churches—and then, once well-indoctrinated, created their own. Willow Creek Community Church is one of the best-known churches to get founded by those converts, but oh yes, there were many others.
The legacy of the Jesus Movement might well be evangelicals’ lasting desire to inject Jesus-osity into every single part of their lives. Keith Green, one of the best-known musicians of this movement, even put that desire into words and verse in his song “Make My Life a Prayer to You.” The Jesus People didn’t want to Jesus only on Sundays and Wednesday nights. They wanted to Jesus 24/7: at work, at play, at rest. Jesus had to imprint everything they did, consumed, decorated with, read, listened to, felt, wore, said, thought.
The only roadblock they faced was a simple lack of enough Jesus-ified products to make that dream a reality. But that situation, too, would change quickly. Those young Jesus People slowly settled into jobs and careers with incomes. They not only wanted Christian stuff, but could easily afford it.
The rise of Christian publishers
In a lot of ways, the rise of Christian publishers probably echoes that of “Contemporary Christian Music,” or CCM. Even back then, evangelicals already had a basic publishing industry. At least a half-dozen big Christian publishers existed by the mid-1970s. It included names like Dwight Moody’s Revell Press and his distribution company, the Bible Institute Colportage Association (BICA, which eventually became Moody Press), Sovereign Grace Publishers, and the Evangelical Press Association (EPA) and Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA).
The owners of those publishing houses quickly began catering to this huge and growing market. Very quickly, though, competition sprouted up in search of those same mostly-evangelical dollars. As one Calvinist evangelical recalls:
The idea of selling print material that contained life-altering truths about the nature of God was irresistible. Five or even seventy-fifty dollars seemed like a small price to pay for a book that would transform your understanding of God. In 1978, as a new Christian, I was drawn to authors and titles that were unfamiliar to me but that filled the shelves of my local Christian bookstore.
These Christian bookstores were largely a new thing as well. Previously, evangelical publishers sold books through their own distribution channels. Christian publishers seem to have come fairly late to the idea of selling their books to shops selling stuff from all sorts of publishers to consumers.
That same evangelical notes, however, that these bookstores’ owners quickly realized that selling apologetics and evangelism guides and Bible study materials wouldn’t pay their bills. They needed products way higher in demand. As he wrote:
Even then it was clear that serious Christian books wouldn’t be able to generate the sales and margins needed to give bookstores long-term viability. In order to cover the costs of operation, the revenues generated by the publication of serious Christian literature would have to be supplemented by best-sellers such as Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth and Roland Buck’s Angels on Assignment, anything by Benny Hinn, Christian rock music, and eventually Christian trinkets.
Sensational prophecy and testimony books, along with popular CCM, began to fill Christian bookstores’ shelves. So did “Christian trinkets” of various kinds.
And this strategy paid off bigtime.
In 1983, the New York Times reported that “Christian Books Sales are Booming.” Indeed, Christian publishers grew way more savvy and sophisticated in their marketing and product lines. As a result, they even began to enjoy great sales in secular bookstores. Even B. Dalton, then a big-box bookstore ubiquitous in malls around America, saw a number of Christian-aimed books pop up on its Top Ten sales list.
Alas, there seemed to be a set upper limit to how many apologetics and evangelism guides and Bible study books evangelicals needed. The boom couldn’t last.
The decline begins: Christian publishers pack Christian bookstores with “Christian stuff.”
It’s important to note that Christian bookstores themselves still enjoyed good sales all the way to about the early 2000s. However, their wares had changed significantly. As our reminiscing Calvinist complains:
But by the mid to late 1980s, there was evidence of a declining interest in the serious things of God. The church seemed to be wearied by the essentials of the faith; surely, there was more to the gospel than the gospel. Christian theology was being replaced by Christian stuff.
This “Christian stuff” included lots more lifestyle guides, relationship manuals, diet books, and oh so many gifts, decorations, stupid gag products like “Testa-Mints,” and equally-stupid T-shirts printed with ripped-off secular slogans like “This blood’s for you.”
Worse, though, at least from that perspective, Christian publishers began churning out books of extremely dubious theological accuracy that nonetheless became huge bestsellers. These included tripe like The Prayer of Jabez, The Shack, and The Purpose Driven Life.
Worse still, Christian publishers began pandering to evangelicals’ fear of death with a new genre, “Heavenly tourism.” These books featured supposed after-death experiences and totes-for-realsies honest-to-gosh visits to Heaven or Hell. At best, these testimonies were errors in perception. At worst, they were solid cover-to-cover lies.
But the very worst for Christian publishers was yet to come.
The decline heats up: Christian publishers feel the burn
For a good couple of decades, Christian publishers had enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with Christian bookstores. These stores operated profitably all over the world. In turn, they fed a steady stream of money back to the publishers who supplied them. By the mid-1980s, Jonathan Merritt wrote for The Week, about 4000 of these shops belonged to the Christian Bookstore Association (CBA).
But the 2000s hit both the Christian retail and Christian publishing industries with a demographic bomb.
Around that time, evangelicalism entered a protracted period of membership decline. The members remaining weren’t visiting brick-and-mortar stores in meatspace anymore to exercise Jesus-themed consumerism of any kind, be it virtuous or swag-seeking. Evangelicals were far more inclined to visit online shopfronts to buy religious products. And that’s if they wished to buy them at all.
By 2008, Christianity Today tells us, those 4000 stores had shrunk to a bit over 2800. In 2014, Tim Challies, a popular evangelical writer, complained heartily about “the state of Christian publishing” even as he praised the industry for giving evangelicals a “golden age” in terms of good books. Then, in 2019, the Southern Baptists’ official bookstore chain, LifeWay Christian Store, folded and closed its remaining brick-and-mortar stores. They moved everything left to their online shopfront.
It’s difficult to say with certainty how many CBA shops are left because the CBA apparently no longer publicly states exactly how many stores are in its club. I went all over its official site to no avail. But Publisher Weekly and WordsRated both estimate that there are fewer than 1000 Christian bookstores left in total, be they CBA members or not. WordsRated even tells us that this figure includes the internal bookshops that churches operate themselves—like my old Pentecostal church did.
If any Christians wish to buy the products made by Christian publishers, they overwhelmingly get them through other channels these days. Moreover, many Christian publishers got bought by larger secular ones. In 1988, HarperCollins bought Zondervan, a huge name in the 1970s (and the publishers of the famous Thompson Chain-Reference Bible I borrowed before my debate with that college professor). Then in 2012, HarperCollins bought Thomas Nelson, another big name. Along the way, other Christian publishers merged forces to better meet the decline head-on.
The endgame for Christian publishers: None of it’s helping
Despite this incredible do-si-do going on in the background, it doesn’t look like Christian publishers are anywhere close to being out of the woods. A recent article in Religion News makes that clear:
Shrinking churches means the market for Christian print resources diminishes, too.
Brad Lyons, president and publisher at Chalice Press, a Disciples of Christ denominational press, appeared very somber about the outlook of mainline Christian publishing. “The industry as a whole is under siege,” he said, citing Amazon’s aggressive sales strategies as well as the decline of mainline Protestantism and the growth of evangelical publishing.
I don’t think evangelicals are enjoying a whole lot more success, unfortunately for them.
Between there simply being way fewer Christians to buy the stuff Christian publishers produce and “the 800-pound gorilla in the room” of Amazon, things look bleak. And that’s just what industry observers can ascertain. For some weird reason that I’m totally certain is utterly unrelated to a sense of crushing humiliation, it’s extremely difficult to get any straight answers about anything out of this industry!
Christian publishers have a wide range of channels through which they sell materials, and they don’t even report sales through some of them. And any publisher selling materials straight to consumers from their own website probably won’t report sales through that channel, either.
Once Christian publishers’ wares reach secular outlets, though, they must fight for every inch of those outlets’ ever-shrinking floor space. Additionally, worldwide unrest and conflict has led to an increase in shipping and manufacturing costs from previously-cheap production sites in China and India. Suddenly, they’re not quite so cheap anymore.
The extremely secular advice CBA offers to Christian bookstores is a hoot though
As I mentioned, CBA’s site is very short on metrics and statistics. But it’s longer on blog posts.
One of these offered advice about increasing Christian bookstore sales. I don’t know how feasible these are or even how effective they might be. Perhaps, like all the advice evangelicals create, it’s completely untested but sounds really Jesusy. Let’s check it out:
- Change up the look of the store every so often. Decorate, have seasonal displays, etc.
- Stop selling bad books that don’t sell well.
- Get a feel for who exactly is shopping in your store and cater to their interests.
- Make sure your staff aren’t rude or inept.
- Get your shop’s name into community events by participating in them.
- Get friendly with neighborhood churches and talk to their leaders about your wares.
- Have little “mobile” popup type selling spaces. Sell books on “crowded trains,” in churches, on the streets, whatever. Be sure you get appropriate permission, of course!
- Write editorials and make sure you include your shop’s name on the byline.
- Make a newsletter!
- Give your customers lots of choices about products. Don’t just sell one product.
I take that back. This isn’t untested but extremely Jesusy advice. No, it’s the equivalent of telling adults not to put too many dried beans up their noses. It’s hard to imagine this advice hasn’t already spontaneously occurred to Christian bookstore owners. Really, any bookseller should probably be doing this stuff.
At least it didn’t advise Christian bookstore owners to pray!
Christian publishers’ woes are another sign of the times
Christianity’s decline in membership and cultural power has had a lot of knock-on effects. Most of these affect churches directly: A shortage of qualified pastors and priests, escalating insurance costs, declines in membership and generational shifts causing lower overall donations, etc.
This one’s a little more subtle. Without so many Christians around to buy Christian publishers’ products, obviously that will affect actual dedicated Christian bookstores. In addition, that drop in demand also affects any shop channel selling this stuff.
That Religion News article ends on a more optimistic note, though. As so many publishers and sales channels are doing, some Christian publishers have been trying to create community and emotional ties to their customers. Some are starting book clubs and “a digital visual library” online. Others hold meetings with other publishers to discuss strategies.
That may work a little better than the Khajiit sales approach in Elder Scrolls games: If Christians have coins, these ones have wares.
If these attempts don’t work, though, that’s just part of the marketplace. After all, very few shops sell buggy whips anymore. Maybe one day, Christian products in general will have similar nearly-nonexistent demand.
We can hope!
NEXT UP: A Southern Baptist Convention leader has denied that his denomination faces a systemic abuse issue. We will be helpfully correcting his grievous error. See you soon!
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