Selling Jesus

What's the solution to declining church attendance? Well, if you're the United Church of Canada, I guess it's a dumb, "provocative" ad campaign.

The United Church of Canada hopes an ad featuring a can of whipped cream and the question, "How much fun can sex be before it's a sin?" will fill its pews as Christmas nears.

Ah, yes, because nothing gets me in the Christmas spirit (or the churchgoing mood) like thinking about sex involving whipped cream.

The country's biggest Protestant denomination launched an advertising campaign on Tuesday meant to provoke debate on the "deep and persistent attitudes and images of organized religion."

"In order to get past those stereotypes, we thought we needed an ad campaign that was different, had a head-snap to it, that people would have a second look," Keith Howard, executive director of the campaign, said in an interview.

I'm sorry, but this is just incredibly fucking lame. Church is church (though this sounds like a pretty liberal denomination—they seem to be in favor of gay marriage) and all the "edgy" ads in the world aren't going to change that or get people in the pews.

The C$10.5 million ($9.3 million) campaign targets 30- to 45-year-olds and rotates six images though December issues of Canadian magazines and newspapers as well as Web sites.

One asks, "Does anyone object?" to an image of two plastic toy grooms on a wedding cake. Another features a child sitting on Jesus's knee in the traditional Santa's village of a shopping mall, and asks, "Would you still take your kids?"

What does that even mean? If your goal was to irritate and confuse me, then bingo! If your goal was to get me to go to your church, not so much.

Didn't some church here in the States try something like this a year or two ago? I doubt it got them any more parishoners, either. I'm not a religioous guy, but something tells me people don't want a church that's pretending to be something else, like a sociology course at a liberal arts college.