But as the “product-to-consumer” model of the secular corporations became normative, the now corporate church followed suit—with a wrenching twist: It went from selling salvation to the heathen to selling religion to its own clientele. That this was a step onto a slippery slope should be obvious. Given the time it would take for the mid-twentieth century to arrive, “the church” (the markeetor) would be redefined as “the clergy,” and “the consumers” (the marketees) would go from being the “lost” out there to the “found” in the pews. The church, having once been an obligational society (however imperfectly defined), would now degenerate into a consumer-driven marketing operation dedicated to the servicing of existing accounts.
This downhill slide had relatively little effect on the national denominational churches because they were already so committed to the corporation model that they were far down the slope of corporate futility. But what it did to the local units of those churches was devastating. Under the medieval version of the Christendom model, a parish church in a given place was simply the church of all the citizens in that place, just as the church at large was the church of all the citizens of Europe. And it was “catholic,” at least in one sense, because everybody available (provided you didn’t count too carefully) was in it. If the local churches of the Middle Ages fell somewhat short of the best definition of catholicity, they were still such random grab-bags of high and low, rich and poor, wise and foolish that they looked like a fair approximation of universality. And for a while, the state churches of the Reformation managed to keep up that same, everybody-belongs appearance. But as the splintering of the church progressed—and, in particular, as it progressed to the New World—the pretense of catholicity became harder and harder to maintain. The churches were by then competing versions of the Christian religion: a given town could have several such churches; a given city, dozens.
However, as the nineteenth century wore on into the twentieth (and the corporate model became increasingly consumer-driven), the local churches became little more than franchises of brand-name businesses vying for market share. Membership statistics and financial viability were made the measure of every unit’s success or failure. And when you add to that the tendency of American demographics to change more and more with each passing year, you get the whole passel of undesirable results in which we now find ourselves. For one thing, denominational “brand loyalty” has given way to church-shopping. Born-and-bred Methodists who move to Phoenix, for example, may try a Methodist church there; but if they take exception to the cut of the minister’s jib, or the quality of the choir, or the dowdiness of their child’s Sunday School teacher, they may hie themselves to the Episcopal church—until, of course, they move to Tulsa, where the search for the right religious shop begins all over again.
— Robert Farrar Capon, The Astonished Heart
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