Expanding on the Scriptures : More Than Books on Display at Christian Booksellers Convention

With faces painted blue and green and orange, a group of children dressed as books began dancing about the lobby of the Convention Center in Anaheim, lip-synching the words to a jaunty “Bless the Lord” tape.

Five youngsters disguised as “church mice” joined in the festivities.

Watching over them, executives of the Christian Booksellers Assn. smiled at the performance Monday morning, then solemnly joined with Mickey and Minnie Mouse to cut the ribbon opening the CBA’s 38th annual international convention here.

In fact, the vast gathering had started Sunday with devotionals, a public “expo” of the nearly 400 CBA exhibitors and an inspirational lecture by Nixon presidential aide turned top-selling Christian author, Charles W. Colson.

New Colson Book

“Just because a person is a Christian does not mean he is going to make the best President,” Colson, promoting his new book from Zondervan called “Kingdoms in Conflict,” said. “That’s why we make a mistake when we say ‘Oh, just elect a Christian and it will solve all our problems.’ Bismarck was a Christian.”

Touching also on the Iran- contra congressional testimony of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North--”I envy his chutzpah, “ Colson said. “I wish I had had the nerve to do that during Watergate”--Colson focused on matters of contemporary politics in a way that supported CBA president and chief executive officer William R. Anderson’s contention that Christian publishing is expanding and crossing over into a growing secular audience in large part because it is responding “head-on” to “social issues that in the past we often tended to skirt.”

Christian booksellers’ 37 million retail customers, accounting for $1.4 billion in annual retail sales at 5,500 religious bookstore across the country, are “beginning to look for anchors, structures, things to hold their lives together,” Anderson said. “For example, how to put your marriage back together, how to deal with drugs, loneliness, alcoholism, cancer, success.

“People are interested in what kind of answers the Bible has to these problems,” Anderson said.

Yet out on the 275,000-square-foot exhibit area (“the size of six football fields,” a CBA release noted), among the 1,200 booths displaying titles on child sexual abuse, meditations for athletes or new mothers, intimate marital advice, AIDS, rock-and-roll music and the plight of the Christian single person was what Anderson called “a plethora of products, not just books and Bibles.”

Extensive Array

So extensive was the array of Christian-oriented merchandise that one CBA regular, a representative for numerous Christian publishing houses, was heard to sigh that “one of these years, Jesus is going to walk in here with a whip,” incensed, presumably, at the commercialization of His name.

Close to the entrance of the convention hall were “I Love Jesus” frisbees and “I Am Blessed” jogging suits. One large wholesaler was touting a line of scratch-’n’-sniff Bible bookmarks, along with lion-and-lamb bath sponges encased in clear plastic bubbles. There was Galatians 5:22 wrapping paper (“ . . . The Fruit of the Spirit Is Love”), Christian doormats and heart-shaped, “Let’s Celebrate the Lord” Mylar balloons. Not far from an assortment of inspirational refrigerator magnets, a carton of potted coleus plants professed love for the Lord. Nearby, there were dura-nylon Bible cases, Scriptures soap that invited its users to “wash with the Word,” 12 Disciples wristwatches and erasers shaped like major Bible characters.

“B-I-B-L-E, yes, that’s the book for me,” chirped a $32 Bible Bear (no relation, it was stressed, to the ever-popular Care Bear Bible). A “Joy” doll sang “Jesus loves me, this I know,” and Esperanza, her Spanish-speaking cousin, chanted the tune in her own native tongue.

“The learning process starts with backpacks,” Chuck Such, an exhibitor of Savior-emblazoned school bags and other childrens’ products from Praise Toys of Sarasota, Fla., said.

But not everyone at CBA embraced the five-day merchandising extravaganza with unbridled enthusiasm.

“Jesus junk,” said Nancy Guthrie of Waco, Tex.-based Word Inc., one of the major Christian publishers. “Isn’t it disgusting?”

While noting that 46% of CBA members’ sales are in books and 23% in music, CBA president Anderson did concede that the “holy hardware,” as the profusion of products is also known, does lure customers into Christian bookstores.

“We are finding the more reasons we can give people to go to a Christian bookstore, the more they will go there,” Anderson said.

Out on the convention floor, Doug Spence of Marcus Wholesalers in the Northern California Gold Rush-era town of Murphys insisted the fare was in no way sacrilegious, or excessively commercial.

“I’m not so sure He would be offended,” Spence said, standing near his display of Jesus Frisbees. “Anything that brings attention to Jesus Christ is all right, as long as it is not derogatory.”

Still, for all the etched-marble faces of Jesus and devotional license plates on display, the CBA convention is marked by a decidedly sober tone. By contrast to the convention of the American Booksellers Assn., a yearly whirl of back-to-back parties and frenetic socializing, the CBA is a major working event at which religious booksellers place fully 19% of their annual retail orders. If ABA is a slick operation characterized by high-tech, attention-grabbing events, the CBA has an almost folksy quality, with name tags that bear huge, capital-letter first names on one line and a second line of much tinier print carrying last name and affiliation.

“This is a trade show, and all of the people are coming here buying their fall and winter merchandise,” said Gordon Lovell of Standard Publishing of Cincinnati. A growing “conservative bent,” with “more emphasis on family and philosophy,” has made religion a “lucrative market,” Lovell said.

Profit Margins Small

Profit margins for Christian booksellers are small, CBA president Anderson said, just 2-4% on an average. But the profile of that religious bookseller is changing, down from a mean age of 54 in the last 19 years to today’s average age of 37. Relegated once to “some kind of subculture,” religious publishing today has soared into the commercial mainstream, Anderson said. As an example, he observed that an estimated 93% of religious bookstores are currently housed in traditional commercial business districts. At its headquarters in Colorado Springs, he said, the CBA receives at least one inquiry per day about opening new Christian bookstores.

For one recent convert to Christian publishing, the attraction was at once an acknowledgement of a “well-defined market”--and awareness of a political and philosophical conservatism that translates into many book sales.

“It’s a market that buys books probably to a greater degree than the general public,” said William Mulvey, founder of the fledgling Mulvey Books and Bull’s Eye Books imprint of New Canaan, Conn. Formerly the chief operating officer of the McCann-Erickson advertising agency in New York, Mulvey, 71, said he ventured into the arena of Christian publishing in part because of a “sophistication in marketing” overlooked by some secular publishers.

“We know from the figures that Christian authors are outselling some of the authors on the (general trade) best-sellers’ lists, sometimes by factors of two and three,” Mulvey said.

Signing autographs at a CBA “personality booth,” one such author, Jerry White, said his six titles for Navpress have sold about a quarter of a million copies, yet they seldom merit attention from secular critics and never from the nonreligious best-seller lists.

“It’s hard to break through,” said White, author most recently of “Choosing Plan A in a Plan B World.” “There’s a moderate crossover, but it still is not as heavy as I wish it were.”

But a growing number of publishers, religious and nonreligious alike, are banking on a burgeoning crossover audience. Not noted widely in the general public for their religious lines, companies like Bantam, Doubleday, Warner Books, Harper & Row and Ballantine were very much in evidence at this year’s CBA convention. Many Christian publishers, for their part, were emphasizing lists of self-help-type titles just as easily found in secular bookstores.

“I think around 10 years ago, there started to develop the idea that there’s no such thing as a secular versus a Christian world view,” said Kenn Heier of Abingdon Press, publisher of “Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society,” by Tipper Gore, wife of Democratic presidential aspirant Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.).

Still, the primary emphasis at CBA was, as its name suggests, Christian. Publishers Celeste and Dave Unfred of Master Books in El Cajon were hoping that the current debate over creationism would boost sales of “The Lie,” a children’s book by Ken Ham that attempts to refute the theory of evolution.

“We feel it’s kind of on the cutting edge,” Dave Unfred said.

But like many exhibitors at the convention, Unfred was sensitive, too, to increased attention thrust on Christian businesses by the widely publicized flap over TV evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker.

“I think the Christian community itself is tightening up” as a result, Unfred said. “People are more interested in making sure that their business is run as we say we should run it according to Biblical principles.”

“People today are caught in the midst of many conflicting voices. They’re searching for answers,” CBA president Anderson said. “Christian booksellers can help them discover answers that deal with every aspect of life--physical, mental and spiritual.”