We had an interesting conversation at the Suds & Salvation back on June 29…exploring how Christianity “competes” in a world full of all kinds of brands that make all kinds of promises about how to improve (or save) your life.
We live in a branded society. No big surprise there. Over the past 50 years, corporations (both for-profit and non-profit) have shifted their strategic efforts as much or more to the attention of brand identities as to improvements in the actual products and services they sell or provide. In a very real sense, the brand has become the product; we purchase the brand as much as the branded object. Product performance used to be enough; now it’s personality that counts. The brand is the single most important asset of any company, and its management is a primary concern.
By focusing on branding, companies hope to make their logos into a lifestyle, an image, an identity, or a set of values. Brands should, at their best, emote a distinct persona which will be taken on with zeal by consumers. When it works at its best, a brand will colonize the mental space inside each of us. They are meant to win share of mind for a particular proposition, thus influencing the choices we make about our identity. So it is: our relationship to the brands we buy has an influence on who we are as persons.
Christians recognize, however, that there is another brand at work in the world. This brand is one you cannot purchase at any price. It comes to us entirely as a gift. It is traced upon us in anointing oils at Holy Baptism or in times of illness and need. It is retraced in ashes at the beginning of Lent, and marked again on us every Sunday…perhaps even every morning when we rise. This brand…the mark of the cross…comes only as a gift from a loving God. And, like the secular brands that are as omnipresent for us as the air we breathe, it is about a way of life that identifies us…in this case, with the very life of God in Christ Jesus.
Dear sisters and brothers, we are called to think about what we purchase, what we give space to in our lives. So it's reasonable to ask: where and how is the Christ brand visible upon, within and through us?
