christianity: a case study

Christianity was the first and most successful corporate story. It has developed brands and assets that have thrived, globally, for nearly 2,000 years.

A promising start-up

Christianity started small, as one of the many tiny dodgy sects in the Middle East. A few guys wrote a biography of a man called ‘Jesus’ based on second or third hand testimonies, which became a global best seller. Actually they wrote conflicting stories but for simplicity let’s say it was one book. The most successful compilation became known as the New Testament.

The religion started to gain market share in the competitive Eastern Mediterranean market, especially in Greece. But the first big breakthrough came when the franchise arrived to Rome. It was an instant hit with the plebs, the women and the slaves, all demographics that had been largely ignored by marketers up to that point. Rome had a tradition of free market and religious tolerance: you could pick and worship any big or small god you’d fancy in the Greek-inspired Roman pantheon and immigrants were allowed to worship their ridiculous foreign gods, provided they didn’t question the official Roman gods. During the Empire, Romans got bored of their old-fashioned gods and became increasingly fond of foreign, exotic deities. Isis, in particular, a sexy skinny Egyptian goddess, was quite fashionable. However, the official Roman religious staff grew uncomfortable with the success of ‘Jesus’. How come people would prefer to worship some miserable Jewish guru who died two hundred years ago rather Mighty Jupiter or the many utility gods Rome had temples for? Worse: the followers of ‘Jesus’ who started to call themselves ‘Christians’, seemed to believe that there was only one god, their own, and no other. They argued that Jupiter, Ares, Aphrodite were lies, that it was ‘bad’ to worship the ancient gods. And finally that mix of foreigners and stinking plebs started questioning the social order. That was too much too quickly and Roman competition authorities promptly made the sect illegal.

Some creative Roman emperors who liked combining order and entertainment had Christians eaten alive by lions in public. That was over-reacting and it backfired badly. Decadent Romans had gone soft and were no longer so fond of public bloodshed. The gruesome execution of Christians attracted public sympathy and turned out to be the most fantastic PR platform for early Christianity (later in Christianity, Christians would organise their own martyrdom industry, by sending their most fanatical members to suicide missions in deep pagan territories). Every lion meal drove new recruits and soon there were simply too many Christians and not enough lions. So Roman authorities gradually gave up on killing them off. Besides Christians sympathies were now running everywhere: many upper class kids – perhaps brainwashed by their Irish or Polish nannies – became fans of Jesus. The new religion was also attractive to intellectuals as it incorporated some elements of fashionable Greek philosophy.

Key success factors

The second massive breakthrough came when Emperor Constantine made his coming out as a Christian and legalised Christianity in 313 BC (the ‘Constantinian Shift’). Soon after that, in 392 BC, Christianity became the official religion of the Empire, leapfrogging a ‘legal’ free market stage. The other religions, the old ones, all of them, became illegal in the Empire. Like Communism later, in a master stroke, Christianity went from underground activism to absolute power.

At that point, Christianity changed its nature forever and soon developed an approach that made it global, allowing it to convert many nations and outlive the Roman Empire.

To the powerful it promised ‘give us legal monopoly over religion and education, and we’ll provide soft power, making sure peasants pay their taxes to you and fight for you if axed to’. That was the basis of many win-win deals with Constantine’s successors and pretty much every reasonable European ruler, from Louis XIV to Napoleon, from Clovis to Mussolini, from Charlemagne to Franco.

To the wealthy, it promised: ‘give us donations and we will keep the workers quiet, telling the poor fellow that the next life will be luxury; and by the way we can intercede with God to offer you a fast track to heaven if you are interested.’

To the poor, it promised: ‘Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. Obey the powerful and the rich, don’t kill other people (unless your king or priest asks you to), and your afterlife will be wonderful because Jesus loves you, yes you. He’s not showing it on a daily basis but that is part of a plan to fool the rich, hence the misery and suffering. But he really cares’.

To men, it promised: ‘Women are sinful and impure; they have always been witches and bitches (except your mum and the Virgin Mary). So it’s okay to beat your wife a bit. If you don’t know exactly why, she does.’

To barbaric tribes it said: ‘If you convert now you will be loved by Jesus and become friends of Rome (or Spain, or England). You can continue to worship your pagan fertility goddess provided you call her Virgin Mary (and don’t tell anyone I told you that). Make up your mind quickly ‘cause I have three other tribes to see today. If we don’t have an agreement you’ll have to deal with those soldiers behind me and, believe me, you really don’t want that.’

To the medieval knights / conquistadores it said: ‘Rather than wasting your time raping dirty farm girls in cold wetlands, killing each other when drunk and plotting against your king, why don’t you take a holiday in Palestine/America?
There you can:
• Free Jerusalem/America from the infidel,
• rape local hotties,
• indulge in sanctified rampage and blessed looting,
• come back full of gold to impress your mum and cousins,
• while we’ll make sure your wives behave in your absence.
PLUS:
• if you die over there, all your sins and atrocities will be written off and you’ll go direct to heaven!
AND ANYWAY:
• if you stay you’ll probably die from the plague next year

So what are you waiting for?!

To the Spanish, it said: ‘God is Spanish’. To the French, it said: ‘God is French’, etc. etc.

As one can see, the Christian church had a good word for everyone. It was capable of reaching out to every interest group. No wonder it thrived for so long, all around the world, in all segments of society.

Killing the father

Christianity was soon keen to forget its Jewish origins. You have to kill the father at some point. Later, from the Middle-Ages, Christians re-enforced its crowd-pleasing policy by introducing scapegoats and inner-enemies and distract people from real oppression. Jews – a religious minority that was found a bit everywhere - were an easy target. The rumour grew that ‘The Jews killed Jesus’. For centuries, no-one seemed to notice that the slogan was simply absurd. Perhaps Jews were not a random scapegoat after all – a self-made man is often ashamed of its origins. Anyway, that campaign was so successful that even individuals and rulers that were not very Christian embraced the new gizmo enthusiastically. That’s the secret of social networking and viral marketing: after a while people forget where and when they first heard about a slogan or a rumour. The Church didn’t need to confirm or deny officially that Jews had killed Jesus. It became conventional gossip.

Talking about Judaism, it’s interesting to notice that the inventors of mono-theism let their creature get away and ultimately turn against them. They were not able to retain intellectual property and the fantastic royalties that would have come in time. Perhaps they never saw that monotheism had global commercial potential. So much for the proverbial business skills of the Jewish people.

The Science challenge

Christianity however had to face many a challenge. For instance: science. In truth, Christianity picked the wrong fight with science. The bible was largely silent about it. Genesis, that Jewish myth, should perhaps not have been put into the credo. And where was the need for the Church to be so specific that the world had been created by God around -4,000 BC since no such date was in the Book. Similarly, the Bible said nothing about the shape of Earth or its position in the cosmos, so why bother and waste so much effort torturing scientists to hide the truth in physics or biology.

It was a lost battle in the long term. After having been adamant for centuries that the Bible narrative and the Church commentaries should be taken literally under penalty of death, the Church started to say, in the twentieth century, that we shouldn’t have taken it too seriously. ‘Yes, all right, Earth is not exactly the centre of the universe, even we suspected it. But after all who cares? The love of Jesus is the important thing. Okay we may have over-reacted when torturing those scientists but back then we didn’t want the ignorant crowd to be upset by such revelations’.

A balanced approach to science today is to have a ‘modernist’ pro-science stance for the wider public, while privately flattering the rank and file traditionalists. ‘Some of us still read the Bible literally? Well they may be a little enthusiastic that’s all. Besides the theory of evolution is just a theory isn’t it?’ You don’t want rogue Bible Belt nuts to steal your flock by keeping to principles you just officially abandoned. Throwing in blurry concepts like ‘intelligent design’ might be an efficient red herring to introduce confusion between natural selection and creationism.

Another challenge was recruitment. For many centuries, Christianity offered great job opportunities to the younger sons of the aristocracy. There were basically two careers tracks. Young cynical opportunists were able to rise quickly to the top – bishop or higher - and live in luxury. Poor but clever farmers’ sons also found a great way to escape a miserable life; through a remarkable scouting system the Church was quick at spotting youngsters with potential. Idealist nerds were also welcome, providing missionaries or honest-to-god, low-profile rural priests.

But nowadays rich kids and literate young men have much better career opportunities in financial services or consumer products. Poor black boys can become footballers. White trash can become reality TV stars. Applications are dropping and only ‘idealists’ are interested. And they can be a pain.

In an interesting historic loop, the Church is now back to being a minority, with a bigger proportion of employees sincerely dedicated to God and mankind, just as it was pre-Constantine. It does not mean disaster in business terms. Christianity has lost monopoly but remains legal. The classic product lifecycle theory tells us that a product nearing the end of its life and facing declining sales can still be profitable, simply because the brand is so strong that it requires little marketing investment. For instance, when the Pope visits the UK in September 2010, we called it a ‘State visit’ so all the logistics and security got paid by the British taxpayer, and Catholicism got tens of hours of free advertising on national channels, promoting Catholic schools and warning against ‘aggressive’ secularism. Yes secular democracies may have officially broken from the Church but there are still quite a lot of loopholes for clever marketers.

God is a full-time job

After 313 BC, Christians stopped being a club of gifted amateurs to embrace professionalism. They organised themselves as an army and a bureaucracy. Women
were excluded from any career in the church. One branch, the Catholics, demanded celibacy from their priest. Again that was a mixed option. Being forbidden to have any form of sexuality, no wife and no children, was not exactly great to maintain mental sanity and remain in the right mindset to advise everybody else on family and sexual issues.

Career priests of course have always managed to have a happy sex life undercover, but yet again it’s the idealists who suffered, those who insisted in taking the celibacy rule too seriously. Many of them developed frustration and perversion (chastity of course being the worst of all perversion). Commentators and the wider public are shocked at the apparent paradox that men of god were abusing children on a large scale, or covering for their colleagues doing it, for decades and centuries. But that was the natural yet unintended consequence of a very deliberate human resource policy. Ordinary men or priests are psychologically more likely to use prostitutes or – to the extreme - rape little girls when they are not capable or not allowed to have a normal sex life and family life. Fortunately, and despite all the idealists within, the church has kept the sense of solidarity and togetherness during the scandal, and generally doesn’t let the crowd or the police know about its dirty little secrets.

It is fascinating to see that Catholicism, unlike every other branch of Christianity, insists on male priesthood and celibacy, generating some bad press. I do believe however that the Catholic strategy is right. In the long term, all monotheist religions are going downhill but the more primitive and reactionary, the more likely one religion is to increase its market share in a declining market. They just have to keep their nerves. Forget about winning back the agnostics, refocus on your natural targets. Looking forward, male-exclusivity in priesthood will become increasingly attractive to frustrated men given the growing supremacy of women in many aspects of social life (education, health and soon enough politics).

Not only Catholicism must remain a gentlemen’s club, but I would even advise Catholics to develop their ‘unique selling proposition’ further and go back to all archaic traditions. Latin for instance. As George Brassens put it in a song called ‘Tempete dans un bénitier’ giving up Latin during masses was a terrible mistake, taken in a panic, a token to ‘modernity’ to try and accommodate the ridiculous fashion of the 50s and 60s. At least with Latin, there was a sense of mystery and awe. In French or English, a mass became just dull and pointless.