What is the Evangelical Industrial Complex (EIC)? Some Christians believe that a powerful evangelical “celebrity machine” exists in the visible Church. What exaclty is the EIC? According to dictionaryofchristianese.com: Major publishers of Christian books, music, and other media as alleged to be secretly, if informally, in league to promote and support selected high-profile Christian pastors, preachers, authors, and musicians in order to continue to make money from sales of books and other media products. Such promotion and support is alleged to be behind the downplaying or eliminating of any criticism or scandal that touches these high-profile Christian leaders.
Over at Messed Up Church, blogger Steven Kozar has penned a thank you note from the EIC — it’s satire:
We would like to take a moment and thank the untold millions of Christians out there for their unwavering and mindless commitment to our Christian celebrities, perky conference speakers and megalomaniac pastors. Thank you so much for refusing to take your head out of the Evangelical sand over the past year!
Because of you and your unquestioning support, we can continue to invent new catchphrases and slogans every few years in order to sell more conference tickets, books and assorted merchandise. Our marketing people are working tirelessly behind the scenes to invent yet another profitable product disguised as “Christian literature.” But let’s not stop here, there’s still plenty more we can do.
Working together, here’s just some of what we can accomplish in the New Year:
- We can continue to crank out motivational speech mediocrity with mega-church appeal; with all the theological depth of a one-day-only, self-help workshop run by teenage shopping mall food court attendants.
- We can transform the transcendent and Holy God (who spoke the entire Universe into existence) into your personal assistant, life coach and dream interpreter. He doesn’t mind at all!
- We can normalize heterodoxy and heresy, and turn sound doctrine into the exception-not the rule. Remember, we determine orthodoxy; your job is to happily go along with us. You’re AWESOME!
- We can give lip service to the Bible while continuing to ignore much of what it actually says. Better yet, we can take a half verse and slap it on a coffee mug and it’ll sell!