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Corporate America and Theocracy
For instance, this ADage article on Tyson Foods' 'Giving Thanks at Mealtime' program. NEW YORK (AdAge.com)--Tyson Foods wants people to have a wing and a prayer.Tyson has long been a financial supporter of the Christian Right, not to the extent that Frank Perdue has, perhaps, but its support has been significant. The chaplains the article mentions, for instance, are nearly all Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists, or both. So far as I know, not a single one of them is a Muslim or even a Catholic. Some are mainstream centrists (Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist), but very few. That's OK in-house, but when you start injecting religion into your marketing, you're playing with fire and Tyson obviously knows it. "People are not just buying our products, they're buying us and they're spending more and more time looking on the Internet and elsewhere to find out, `what does this company stand for,' " said Bob Corscadden, Tyson's Chief Marketing Officer. Consumers researching Tyson are likely to find on the Net a chronicle of Tyson's long history of accusations of labor violations and illegal political gifts. So a little religion couldn't hurt.Indeed. One has to wonder how long the 'interdenominational' aspect will last given John Tyson's personal orientation as a born-again, evangelical Christian and the Christian Right's infamous intolerance even of mere nods in the direction of other faiths. One is almost forced to the conjecture that Mr Tyson is most likely under tremendous pressure to drop the non-Christian booklets from the Tyson distribution list. Or one would be if one didn't know that Mr Tyson has a much bigger pie to offer the Christian Right. Tyson has no plans to use direct faith-based efforts for its traditional advertising in the near future. But its ongoing "Powered by Tyson" campaign is based on a larger brand promise of proudly powering the world that rose directly out of Mr. Tyson's Christian values in addition to the idea of protein as power, according to Craig Bamsey, director-business strategy at Faith Popcorn's BrainReserve.Ms Popcorn is no fool. A little too ready to see the world in a slight, ephemeral trend, perhaps, but not a fool. Her reputation is based on her ability to be ahead of the curve. If she's seeing religion as a powerful marketing tool in the future, she's probably right. Certainly it would be no surprise to discover that the Christian Right is thinking along the same lines. What does it mean for us? Maybe nothing, but we've all seen apparently loopy fundamentalist campaigns turn into commonly-accepted belief. Bill O'Reilly et al are busily trying to do that very thing with their idiotic 'Save Christmas' campaign. If Tyson's 'powering the world with religious protein' concept sells, pretty soon everybody will be doing it, and mixing religion into absolutely everything will become 'normal'. It's a small step from there to the majority religion (or the religion that claims to be the majority) flexing its perceived muscles to force their version of religion to the top, effectively pushing everyone else out. The fundamentalists and Dominionists can't win unless their version of Christianity is perceived to be not just the most common but the dominant one, the one and only religion practiced by the vast majority of Americans. Alliances with corporations could be an enormous help. Suppose US corporations became over the next ten or twenty years carbon copies of the military and sports worlds in the way they try to force fundamentalism on employees. Suppose that you took a job and quickly learned that unless you go to the 'right' church and 'bear witness' in the 'right' way every morning at the compulsory prayer breakfast, you won't have that job for very long. Suppose every corporation became a fundamentalist annex where non-believers were subjected to ridicule, abuse, forced 'exorcisms', and even beatings. And let's further suppose that globalization has removed once and for all any hope that there will ever be enough jobs here for every American to have a decent one, that a permanent job-blight has settled on the country. That is, after all, the road we're going down. In fact, after the last five years of Norquistian economic policies, we're almost there. Suppose all that were true? How far do you think we'd be from theocracy then?
Corporate America and Theocracy | 21 comments (21 topical, 0 hidden)
Corporate America and Theocracy | 21 comments (21 topical, 0 hidden)
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