Boarded Up

The first thing that crossed my mind when I saw this billboard was that true believers write terrible ad copy. Not that I'm in the advertising business myself, but I couldn't see this managing to sell Christianity to someone who wasn't already Christian. Despite that, I guessed that this was the exact reason for the sign. Back in the 1980s, researchers Rodney Stark "and William Sims Bainbridge (1985) described the entire West Coast as the Unchurched Belt," and Washington still lives up to that nomenclature, with a 2018 Gallop poll finding that 47% of Washington respondents described themselves as "not religious."

Typically, the billboards that I see that strike me as overtly religious in nature are the anti-abortion messages that wander around the area. They don't explicitly mention faith or religion, but I'm unaware of any secular anti-abortion groups that do large outdoor advertising buys. So this one stood out for the messaging itself as much as its content.

Being the curious sort, I searched the phone number online, and found an article about Christian Aid Ministries and a 2017 billboard campaign in the San Fransisco Bay area. According to the article "the organization puts billboards around a number of highly populated cities in the U.S. and Canada. Anywhere, he said, where people seem to be 'walking away from God and truth'." So maybe I was right about the reason for the billboard being up where it was. Although, neither this specific billboard nor its location are on the GospelBillboards map page. This may, however simply speak to its newness... the billboard seems to have gone up in the past week or two. Overall, the placement may have been something of a miss; the suburbs around Seattle have quite a number of large, conservative churches, so the city proper may have been a better location.

But even there, to return to my earlier point, I don't really see this message resonating. I get the basic message; if someone is worn down by anxiety, they could find peace in faith, but "Surrender to JESUS" strikes me as an odd way to get that across. But perhaps I shouldn't be too critical. After all, even in place like Washington, outright atheism is thin on the ground; most of the "not religious" are believers of one sort or another, they just don't belong to a specific church or congregation. And it isn't as if true unbelievers are any better at coming up with good advertising. Which raises an interesting question: What is good advertising in this instance? And how would one judge? A former roommate once came up with a religious riff on "Got milk?" that I found hysterically funny, and would have made for a entertaining advertisement. But it didn't sway me in the slightest. So was it "good?" Likewise for the billboard, while I suspect that Christian Aid Ministries would be happy to have me join a congregation, am I really in the target demographic? If not, does my skepticism of the ad's effectiveness stem from that fact, rather than any "objective" deficit in the message?

Like I said, I'm not in the advertising business. So I can't really claim to know a good advertisement from a bad one outside of my own experience. But in this case, here I am talking about a random billboard by the side of the road. And maybe that's all that was intended.