There’s a quiet engine humming just beneath your attention. It shapes how you think and, in time, how you live. Can you hear it? Entire business models run on it, and they profit not only from your money but from your focus.
This engine is called marketing, and it rarely rests.
Marketing is one of the most formative powers in modern life. A primary reason why it’s so formative is that it encompasses a wide variety of talent. Marketing is a collaborative craft that is done by analysts, to whom numbers speak and patterns surface; by creatives, who make what catches the eye; by writers, who find fitting words to qualify an audience; and by strategists, who piece it all together. As a team, they decide who will be seen, what will be said, and how often you’ll be asked to care. If you can direct attention, you can disciple desire. That’s what marketing does.
There’s a fundamental problem with marketing, and it’s the same problem with any profession: work can be done for good, and work can be done for harm. This truth comes straight from the two trees in the early pages of Genesis: life received from God by trusting his definition of good (us choosing the tree of life), or trusting our own (us choosing the tree of the knowledge of good and evil). Marketing can serve the good, and marketing can corrupt. We are responsible for the difference.
Dorothy L. Sayers, in her essay Why Work? written in the shadow of World War 2, insists that the worth of work is measured not by the paycheck it yields but by the worth of the thing made. If the thing we make is shoddy or deceptive, no amount of profit or piety redeems it. But if the thing is good, true to reality, and fitted to need...it will help people.
Sayers presses further: the so-called “secular” vocation is sacred as such. A man or woman called to carpentry, bookkeeping, or copywriting is no less called than a preacher. The Church’s concern, she argues, is not only wages and humane hours, but the nature of the work itself. Work should be the kind that a person can do without degradation; no one should be driven by economic pressure into labor that is “contemptible” or “soul-destroying.” We must be able to serve God in our work, because the work itself is a medium of God’s creative care.
Work should be good. Part of making it good is naming who it serves. Spoiler: it isn’t us.
In The Freedom of a Christian, Martin Luther writes: “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” Freedom in Christ does not terminate on the self; it turns outward as service. In a fallen world, “ruling” creation looks like serving our neighbor within our stations and crafts. For marketers, that means our strategies, claims, and cadences are ordered to the neighbor’s good, not to our self-justification.
Luther names the end of our work, which is love of neighbor. But loves are led. The practices that capture attention and guide action give our freedom its shape. Marketing orchestrates these practices, which is why formation, not just information, is another issue entirely.
James K. A. Smith argues in Desiring the Kingdom that a Christian critique of culture can’t stop at worldview analysis. We must look into identity-forming practices, often called liturgies. We don’t just ask what a message says; we ask what a practice does: What vision of flourishing is embedded here? What sort of person will repeated exposure make me become? That’s cultural exegesis.
Sayers tells us that work should be good. Luther tells us who the work is for, which is our neighbor. Smith shows how the things we love in life are trained through liturgies. Marketing, because it assembles practices that capture attention and guide action, inevitably disciples desire. The only question remaining is, toward what?
What I suggest is this: Marketing is public speech, and under Christ’s lordship, it can be practiced as a vocation that stewards truth, honors agency, and matches real needs with fitting goods. To do this, we must approach marketing from the perspective of the “How do I love my neighbor?” framework. And here’s how.
First, we must recognize that in order to love our neighbor, truth is to be over everything else. Before truth is a claim we make, it is a Christ we meet. The concept of truth is found throughout the book of John, starting with the fact that the Word became flesh “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14), and that “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (1:17). Later Jesus names the claim outright: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (14:6). His mission is to bear witness to the truth (18:37), and he promises that those who abide in his word “will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (8:31–32). The Spirit he sends is the “Spirit of truth” who dwells with us (14:17), and in his priestly prayer, Jesus asks the Father, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (17:17).
If Luther shows us that human freedom is for the service of neighbor, John shows us how freedom is given and guarded: by abiding in the One who is truth and by being sanctified by his true word. This makes Christian speech an act of witness, not of spin. Our claims must match evidence, costs and limits should be named up front, no simulated urgency, and a refusal to promise what the product or service program cannot deliver. Luther also writes, “The very highest worship of God is this that we ascribe to him truthfulness, righteousness, and whatever else should be ascribed to one who is trusted. When this is done, the soul consents to his will.” Love of neighbor begins with truthful speech.
If truth governs what we may say, proportion governs how much and how loudly we say it. We must consider what “enough” actually looks like, as good stewardship sets limits. With truth as our foundation, we turn next to how we deliver it: through proportion, ensuring our methods serve rather than overshadow the neighbor's good.
As Smith notes, we are formed less by messages we agree with than by practices we repeat. Marketing often scripts belonging. A purchase is rarely a one-to-one transaction of problem and solution, as it also acts as a ticket into a community, a badge of identity, or an imagined future. That’s why a car can feel like joining a tribe, or a shoe like membership in a story. Those liturgies of belonging train desire toward “more.”
So a Christian account of marketing has to build in a ceiling. What does that look like in practice? Refuse to signal scarcity when supply isn’t scarce; name the trade-offs rather than hiding them; resist practices that manufacture shame. Tell the truth about the good a product or service can deliver—and to whom—and then stop. Qualify the audience that can genuinely benefit, and don’t entice those who can’t into wasting time or money. Proportion asks not “How much can we get?” but “How much is fitting for the neighbor’s good?”
Proportion names a limit, and love honors it. But limits aren’t only about how loudly we speak to those with margin. They’re also about whom we choose to speak to at all. If truth says what a thing is and proportion says how much to say it, then charity asks to whom, and sometimes answers: not to them, not like this, not for this product.
Much marketing assumes a customer who has time, money, and attention to weigh options. Many don’t. And some industries exist precisely to exploit this. They do not solve a problem so much as create dependency; they feed on the vulnerable. You know the patterns: promises of quick money with no real path to a durable livelihood; schemes that dress speculation up as “opportunity”; products that turn compulsion into revenue. Sports gambling is a ready example, which is designed for constant engagement, engineered urgency, and the illusion of control.
A Christian account of marketing cannot prop up those economies. Some work simply isn’t ours to do. Where the product itself preys on scarcity or compulsion, the faithful move is abstention. Where the product is good but the risks are real, the faithful move is protection through plain language and the humility to say, “This isn’t for you,” while pointing them elsewhere. If work should be good, as Sayers insists, then the way we bring it to market must be good as well. It should be true to reality, fitted to need, and incapable of thriving on another’s harm. Luther’s pastoral rule still applies: spare the weak, resist the stubborn.
All of that calls for self-examination. Before we brief a campaign or ship a headline, we should submit the work to a simple vocational examen, asking whether it is true, whether it loves our neighbor, and whether it is proportionate. Let’s name those questions plainly and let them govern our next steps.
1) Is it true?
Are our claims sized to the evidence? Do we disclose limits, costs, and trade-offs up front? If a tired, distracted neighbor skimmed this once, would they still understand what they’re agreeing to?
2) Does it love my neighbor?
Who benefits, and who could be harmed by this product or service? Are we qualifying the audience so that those who won’t genuinely benefit aren’t enticed to waste time or money? Are we protecting the vulnerable and preserving dignity in our language?
3) Is it proportionate?
Have we set caps on frequency and retargeting? Are we resisting faux urgency and outrage bait? Is the cadence fitting for the goods we’re offering, and bounded in time?
If any answer is “no,” do this:
Revise the claim to fit the evidence. Restore plain language and disclosures.
Restrain the method. If needed, lower cadence, remove urgency devices, and add friction where risk is high.
Refuse the tactic, channel, or product. Freedom in Christ includes the freedom to say a costly no.
Marketing’s engine will keep humming. Our task is not to mute it but to steward it. Freedom in Christ releases us from self-justifying metrics to the craft of truthful speech.
The Church’s charge is as practical as it is theological: to form people who can make good work. Work that tells the truth, fits real needs, and refuses to thrive on another’s harm. Or, in Dorothy L. Sayers’s enduring words:
“If work is to find its right place in the world, it is the duty of the Church to see to it that the work serves God, and that the worker serves the work.”