Mainline churches needn’t go the way of patent medicine manufacturers

Mainline churches are in danger of going down the same road as patent medicine manufacturers. Some patent medicines had active ingredients with genuine medicinal properties; they did indeed work, at least some of the time. The problem was that people never really knew which patent medicines worked and which didn’t. The FDA and the press started exposing the dangers of some of the medicines. Over time, the public became aware that many of the manufacturers’ claims were unsupported by the evidence. Sales of patent medicines — even the efficacious ones — dropped across the board.

Now think about some of the parallels:

• Just as with patent medicines, religion sometimes transforms people’s lives.
• But also as with patent medicines, the public is becoming aware that many of the claims made by the ‘manufacturers’ are unsupported by the evidence — were that not so, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris would not be selling nearly as many books as they do.
• To be sure, many mainline churches are still in business. So, too are Geritol and Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. The trend is that mainline church ‘sales’ are dropping across the board as fewer and fewer Americans and Europeans attend regularly.

It doesn’t have to continue that way. The history of patent medicines offers a precedent here too. Few people chew willow bark any more as a treatment for pain and fever. But millions take aspirin, which contains a similar active ingredient. 

In the case of mainline churches, the active ingredient is of course the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law: Put God first, and seek the best for everyone else as you do for yourself.  It’s no accident that this ‘active ingredient’ is at the heart not just of Christianity, but of Judaism and Islam as well.

Mainline churches have a choice:

• They can keep making unsubstantiated claims for their patent medicines, and end up like W.H. Comstock Co. Ltd., the maker of Dr. Morse’s Indian Root Pills: it went out of business in 1960 after years of declining sales; or
• They can reformulate their ‘product lines’ and refocus their marketing to emphasize the ‘active ingredient’ — the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law — and be like the company that developed aspirin, which we now know as multinational giant Bayer AG.