Politics & Power Quote by Bruce Barton

Barton’s line is a baited hook: it flatters modern commerce by recruiting the most untouchable brand in Western history. Calling Christ a “national advertiser” is less theology than a cultural power move. It tells early 20th-century America that the marketplace isn’t a regrettable necessity sitting beside moral life; it is the engine of moral life. If Jesus were alive now, Barton suggests, He’d be buying reach, scaling a message, optimizing attention. That’s not a metaphor in passing. It’s a blueprint for sanctifying persuasion itself.

The subtext is a defense of the salesman at a moment when corporate capitalism was exploding and its public image was shaky. By reframing the Gospel as “advertising,” Barton smuggles religious legitimacy into the new profession of mass persuasion and, in return, imports business logic into faith. “He thought of His life as business” is the most revealing phrase: it collapses vocation and salvation into the same managerial posture - purpose, strategy, outcomes. The implied audience isn’t clergy; it’s executives and strivers who want to feel that ambition can be righteous.

Context sharpens the intent. Barton, a bestselling author and ad man, wrote in an era when advertising was becoming a national force - radio, magazines, consumer psychology - and when Protestant America was negotiating its relationship to modernity. The provocation isn’t accidental; it’s rhetorical jujitsu. If you can make Christ an adman, you don’t just defend advertising. You crown it.