What Does Google Have to Do with the Gospel?

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Collin Hansen: The search bar is a spiritual battleground, but it’s one that many Christians have neglected to the detriment of a questioning world. If you search on Google for who is Jesus, you’ll find some excellent websites like crossway.org on the first page, but you’ll also find jw.org, which according to Amazon, is the largest Christian website in the world. Yeah, you heard that right. There are no ecumenical councils at internet headquarters to rule out heterodox groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That’s why The Gospel Coalition has launched a new campaign called Hope for the Searching where we want to propel biblical, orthodox answers to the top of Google searches, whether those answers come from TGC or from our friends and partner ministries like Desiring God and Crossway. Joining me on The Gospel Coalition Podcast today to discuss the search bar as a spiritual battleground is TGC senior editor Brett McCracken. His sense of our current media landscape has inspired me with hope for God’s work in our day as we seek a digital reformation. I hear so often from listeners of The Gospel Coalition podcast, and I think this vision will inspire you as well because we need your help. Thank you for joining me, Brett.

Brett McCracken: Thank you, Collin. Great to be with you.

Hansen: All right. Let’s just start with the basics. What is this Hope for the Searching campaign, and why now for TGC?

McCracken: Yeah. So, as you said in your intro, there’s this idea that the search bar is a spiritual battleground. It’s where people go first today when they have a question, spiritual or otherwise. So, you have people who maybe in previous generations would go to a person, a pastor, a seminary, or some trusted source in their life with these important questions. And now, people go to Google. People go to…they type in their questions on the internet. So, the stakes of the search bar are huge in today’s world. So much of the debates of our age begin there, so many trajectories that people go on in their lives start with what they find when they search for things online. So, we are looking at that as a digital ministry, as a Christian website that uses the internet as our primary medium of ministry. We’re seeing that, you know, this really is the great spiritual battleground of our day, so we want to bring light to that space.

We want to bring hope to those who are searching. So, we came up with this idea for a campaign with that as the name, Hope for the Searching, to just bring some kind of organization and strategy to take what we already do to the next level at The Gospel Coalition to provide resources that are true, to provide answers and things that offer true reliable hope to a space that we all know is often not full of truth and not full of hope and actually often more full of grief and despair. Yeah. So, Hope for the Searching is the name of this campaign. It’s a three-year initiative that we’re gonna kind of launch here at the end of 2019, but it’s really gonna kick off in 2020 and go through 2022. And the goal, I think we’re targeting 100 million people. Is that the latest number you’ve heard, Collin?

Hansen: It is, 100 million annual users at tgc.org.

McCracken: Yeah. So, we kind of have that goal, that metric we’re looking to reach that many people with this kind of hope, with these solid answers that they can trust, truth that they can trust. So, it’s a fundraising campaign. So, we’re raising funds that are gonna help resource us as we try to take what we already do to the next level and improve the content we’re providing, how we provide it, how we reach people, and just to be smarter and savvier with all that we do.

Hansen: Yeah. And just to give people, I think sometimes we throw around big numbers, like 100 million and people don’t really have any sense of being able to compare it to anything else. And so, we have in the last 10 years, a little over 10 years, about 12, 13 years, we’ve been able to get to 31 million annual users, which is significant. It puts TGC within the top 15 largest Christian websites in the world. But 100 million would certainly help us to make a significant dent in terms of directing people away from some of those other…especially the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses who are currently near the top of those rankings, those page rankings, and those search rankings and help to propel us there.

But again, not just us. There’s also a vision to be able to help other orthodox ministries, like a couple that I mentioned, Desiring God, among them to achieve that goal as well, to assist them wherever we can because this is not about any one ministry. This is a campaign that’s ultimately about the users, and it’s about the kingdom of God. So, why don’t you put a little bit of some tangible sort of examples onto this? Like, what are we hoping to accomplish with this? Give people a sense for…I mean, it’s an audacious goal to say from 31 million to 100 million annual users. How does TGC propose to be able to…

McCracken: So, the way we’ve kind of broken down the Hope for the Searching campaign is three parts. So, we want to create more content and more ways to reach more people. So, the first of those three things is more content. We want to create more gospel-centered, high-level quality content, so we have specific initiatives in that category that we’re hoping to raise funds to be able to do things like the series that we’re calling kind of the basic series of creating really well-designed webpages with multimedia resources to answer the basic questions in theology. Who is God? You know, who is the Holy Spirit? What is salvation? What is the gospel? Knowing that there’s lots of people across the world who are either new Christians or just asking these questions out of curiosity, and, you know, you can’t get more important than some of those basic questions. And so, we want to offer just kind of entry-level answers that are solid and true, because as you said, Collin, if you Google some of those questions today, sadly, the things that rise to the top on search rankings are not helpful resources, Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons, other kind of skewed answers that people find first. So, in the kind of content category, we want to create, yeah, just more resources that are answering those questions.

So, the second category I mentioned is more content in more ways. So, that gets at, like, the different forms of media and technology that we want to improve. So, in this category, we want to make a big move in the podcast area. So, we’re talking in a podcast. Currently, we have, I think, three podcasts, but we’re vastly expanding that in 2020 and hoping to continue to expand that. Podcast, as we all know, is one of the exploding forms of communication, so we want to grow in that area. We’re redesigning our website. We always want to be on the cutting edge of how we do web ministry, and it’s just always changing. So, that requires resources and investment. Video as well. We have plans in that area and then, like, an updated TGC app. So, there’s lots of things in that category that we want to do to not only create great content but deliver it to people in all the latest cutting-edge ways that serve them in the way they want to be served content.

And then finally, the more people aspect of this campaign really has to do with… One of the hardest things about the internet, it seems like it would be the easiest, but it’s actually kind of complex because there’s just so much content out there. It’s hard to sift through it, so connecting the right people to the right content is a challenge. So, that’s where things like Google Search advertising which you can target, that really finally is something we want to invest in so that we’re actually showing up in the right people’s searches when they’re searching for things. And a lot of this has to do with how we organize our content, so we want to improve the organization and the navigation of our content. So, archived content, we want to make sure that that’s being sorted through and presented so that it shows up in searches and creating indexes of sermon audio. Those are just some of the ideas. So, yeah. That’s kind of a quick overview of the aspects of the Hope for the Searching campaign.

Hansen: Very good, Brett. I think sometimes it’s helpful to peel back the curtain because a lot of people who are listening here and are…you know, people who love what we’re doing at TGC and want to support us, don’t necessarily understand why we make certain decisions or just sort of how we arrive at those decisions. But let’s talk a little bit about just the nature of online publishing then, instead of some of the challenges that we face. So, there’s a lot of untruth on the internet, and a lot of it is made to look fairly truthful there, and it confuses people. And, in fact, just as you and I have been talking, a friend of mine texted me a website, and it’s a website that looks pretty good, and it looks pretty credible, but it’s full of complete and total fabrications and lies that are intended to destroy people and reputations and ministries who are doing good for the kingdom. So, help people to understand a little bit of what that looks like in terms of the Google rankings. Like, how does Google handle things like truthfulness or credibility or things like that? Sort of what’s the landscape look like in that regard?

McCracken: Right. Yeah. I mean, in theory, Google is…you know, they want to be in the best interests of the user, so they want to make sure that they’re kind of weeding out the falsehoods and the fake news and the bad resources. So, they’re trying their best to discover that, and so things like reliability and the amount of trustworthy websites that are linking to things increases rankings. You know, the way the internet works, everyone I think knows these days is there’s this kind of viral aspect where if you’re quick to the punch, if it’s a hot take, you know, if it’s a incendiary headline, that sadly gets clicks and that can kind of gain momentum. And that has incentivized the media producers who rely on clicks and rely on web traffic to create that sort of content, and it just creates this beast that is constantly feeding on things that are maybe a little bit untrue and a little bit misleading because that’s what’s incendiary. That’s where it gets clicks. But Google, in terms of search, in theory, it’s a longer game.

So, while the kind of clickbait hot take content works well on social media, and social media in recent years, of course, has been hugely important in this industry. There are signs maybe that it’s becoming less important, which is probably a good thing, but search in Google, in theory, is more of a long game. So, they’re looking for the content that isn’t just a flash in the pan trying to get clicks for the next week, but the content that over months, over years continues to serve people well. And so, that’s the sort of content that TGC is interested in creating where, you know, we’re less oriented, I think, around the kind of clickbait hot take responses to whatever the internet controversy of the day might be. We want to create the solid articles, podcasts, videos that answer more timeless questions that people are gonna be searching for and benefiting from for years to come. And we hope, and that part of what this campaign is about is that that will pay dividends over the long haul in terms of TGC rising in those rankings. Google seeing us as one of the most reliable, if not the most reliable producer of the type of spiritual content people are searching for.

Hansen: Yeah, I think the way I often put it is that fear and loathing are sort of the oil that fuels the engine of the internet, and yet what we’re called to as Christians is faith and love, but that’s an effort that is not easy to maintain because of the financial incentives otherwise there. And again, you can look, and you can just see how that works. So, I mean, The Gospel Coalition is not a small website. It’s actually not a very large ministry people can look us up. Our ministry is smaller than a lot of reasonably sized churches out there that you would find. We don’t have a huge staff. We don’t have people making a ton of money for us. It’s just kind of the way things work there. And nevertheless, in the last 12 months, 93 million page views, 31 million unique users. But help people to understand a little bit of what that means in terms of finances for the organization. Like, I mean, this is very different. If we were talking, say newspaper circulation, or if we were talking magazine circulation, you’d be talking about advertising rates and things like that. But what does that mean? What do these traffic numbers mean in terms of say a business model and financing for a ministry like The Gospel Coalition?

McCracken: Yeah, it’s a good question. And, you know, one of the ways we’re unique in this space of kind of an internet content provider is we don’t…whereas a lot of websites rely on web traffic alone, like as the primary source of income because they can charge more for advertising when they have a bigger audience. And when that’s your primary source of income, you’re driven. You know, the click is your taskmaster. You’re like everything you do is about getting more people, getting more eyeballs, and as I mentioned earlier, that creates this beast of like, everyone is looking for the hottest take and the quickest, you know, most incendiary article, and it just feeds this terrible cycle we’re in on the internet.

The Gospel Coalition has the advantage of not relying on web traffic and advertising primarily as our source of income. We get a big chunk of our revenue from events. And we can talk more about this. One of the things I love most about what we do is we aren’t just a disembodied digital content organization. We really emphasize and push these in-person gatherings and this kind of relational network. And those events actually are some of our biggest sources of revenue, which has multiple benefits, but one of them is it frees us up to not be primarily driven by web clicks and building an audience. Now, building an audience is still important. Having 93 million page views in the last year is huge and great for us because what it means is we’re building this bigger audience, this loyal audience that maybe will come to our events and will benefit from the books we’re producing and some of the other resources that we earn revenue from. So, you can speak more to it Collin, but does that kind of help paint the picture a little bit?

Hansen: Yeah, I think so. There’s a couple things just to mention there on top of that that I think might be helpful for people, and one of them is that online advertising just doesn’t really work anymore in terms of, like, raising revenues for ministries like ours. So, I was talking about this with a friend, and let’s refer to our friends at Christianity Today magazine. I used to work there. I’ve written a lot for them. You’ve, of course, written a lot for them, so we really want to see them thrive, going forward as an evangelical witness. We need all the friends we can get working for the kingdom. So, anyway, let’s look at them. Well, it used to be that a seminary would advertise in Christianity Today to be able to reach the people that they recruit for their seminary. Okay. It seems pretty straight forward. And so, the money that would be spent would go to the editors at Christianity Today and the writers at Christianity Today.And all this sort of staff members and support people and to pay for the buildings and all that Christianity Today. Yeah. That’s not really how it works anymore. Now, almost all advertising revenue goes through Facebook and Google, and that means none of that money then coming from Christian ministries, goes to other Christian ministries.

It means it goes to Mark Zuckerberg, and it goes to Google [inaudible 00:17:40] their wealth. So, that’s a totally different…I mean, think of it a little bit like retail where it’s not the case anymore that LifeWay makes money on retail. It’s basically all just Jeff Bezos and Amazon. That’s how they get that money now. So, more or less, one thing I’ve found is that even as a fairly large website in the grand scheme of things within the Christian world and pretty comparable to a lot of big-name websites that you would see out there, it doesn’t necessarily translate to a lot of money or even not much money at all. Still, we get a lot of those traffic numbers. And this is another misconception. We get a lot of those traffic numbers from people who don’t like us or people who don’t know anything about us. It’s not like subscribing to a newspaper anymore. So, it’s just a very different dynamic there in terms of who’s reading you, so they’re not going to support you financially. And then on top of that, because we don’t get a lot of money from advertising and really percentage-wise, we don’t get much money from donors. We’re hoping to increase that.

We don’t get much money from donors either. And so, it means that we depend heavily on our sponsors and especially then related to our events, and then that means that the people who tend to finance the ministry are the people who really benefit from it. And there’s not a lot of that sort of pass-through just using us as a kind of tool or as a medium. So, I think sometimes peeling back the curtain, helping people to understand that might be encouraging to them to understand hopefully that we’re trying to be wise stewards of the money that we have, that we’re able to reach a lot of people that way. But at the same time, there’s more that we could do with some more of that financial support. So, I mean, I think also…I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to say on this, but it just seems like the way we get the message out has changed a lot even in the last few years. Maybe you could describe a little bit more of how the situation is significantly different for us in terms of building our traffic and reaching more people compared to say, you know, circa 2016 the last presidential election.

McCracken: Yeah, I think one of the biggest shifts we’ve seen is the decline of social media as being a kind of primary driver of traffic, and this is something that’s not unique to us. I think you see it. Most people are seeing this trend. So, yeah, two years ago, four years ago, maybe it was like 60% of our traffic was coming from social media at least. And search would have been our second biggest one at that point, maybe 30% or something like that. But now it’s flipped…

Hansen: Twenty-something. Yeah.

McCracken: Okay. Yeah. Now it’s completely flipped so that today I think search is like 60% of our traffic. Google, you know, the various search engines and social media has declined to that kind of 30%, maybe 40%. I don’t know what the current numbers are, but I think today…yeah, I think I’m just looking at the numbers, 64% of our traffic comes from search engines today. It was 46% just 2 years ago in 2017. So, what that means, the kind of takeaway there is, whereas before we were mainly just feeding our fans content, so people who had opted in following us on social media, there was kind of a limited pool of that’s who was being served our content. Now, it’s people who are, like you said, may not even know who TGC is.

They’ve never heard of us, but are just searching these questions and it’s TGC’s content that comes up, and that’s what they click on. We’re seeing more and more of our audience is that sort of person. And so, the way I phrased it in one of my articles or something I wrote recently was that we’re producing content that isn’t just preaching to the choir. Now, we’re able to produce content that changes people’s minds because it’s not just the choir that is reading our content. It’s atheists who are searching these questions, or spiritual seekers wherever they are in their journey who are searching these questions. So, there’s this ability we have, this potential to kind of persuade people in the internet space, which is exciting, and one of the reasons why we’re launching this campaign.

Hansen: Yeah. What you’ve described it as, Brett, is a Digital Reformation. We hear a lot about this digital revolution, but we want to be a part alongside our friends in ministry as a digital reformation. And you’ve likened it to the advent of the printing press 500 years ago and the connection there to the reformation. And I think that’s an apt comparison in a number of different ways. I tell people pretty often that even though we’re a good 20-plus years into this internet age, I mean, in terms of like popular usage of it, you know, at least 25 years into that, we don’t understand the full effects yet of what’s happening. And that’s most prominently understood through things like the smartphone, which comes, you know, quite a bit later and how that’s affecting young children.

I mean, you and I, Brett, are about the same age and we’re not digital natives, but of course, we’re raising digital natives, and that’s going to be a new horizon for them. And I’ve often wondered, I mean, you’ve worked in some higher education, but I’ve even wondered, “Am I gonna recognize elementary school with my kids?” You know, because it’s gonna be so different from what I experienced there. And so, we want to be on the forefront of seeing this as an opportunity even though you and I are pretty well aware of a lot of the drawbacks. So, let’s talk about that a little bit. First of all, let’s talk about it historically, and then let’s talk about it personally. We’re often…you cover arts and culture as our senior editor at The Gospel Coalition, and Christians are often behind the curve when it comes to a lot of those kinds of arts and culture that we often think of there. But with technology, it’s been a different story historically. Evangelicals tend to be early adopters. You look back, and it tends…especially in the last couple iterations, it’s been like say pornography, and it’s been evangelicals, you know, trying to spread the gospel, like those are the two different ways that have really been trying to advance this technology.

McCracken: It’s true.

Hansen: So, there are risks and pitfalls of this early adopter strategy, but, of course, great potential with new technology as well. But I just wonder, how do you see TGC doing this of eager to use the technology but cautious about how to be good stewards of it? And I think specifically about what you’ve written related to smartphones because we see a lot of churches now that are pushing for this sort of smartphone church, virtual church. Help us to understand how TGC is processing through that and how you’re processing through that.

McCracken: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot to say there. I mean, just to go back to the historical precedent there. Yeah, I think it’s interesting to see that evangelicals have been so eager to adopt these communication technologies, and it makes sense, right? Like, evangelicals are all about getting the message out, like the evangelion, the good news. We want to get that out there. And any time a new way to do that comes along, whether, you know, it’s the Telegraph or radio, TV, movies and now the internet, you find evangelicals very quick to the punch to leverage it for that evangelical end. And I think that’s largely a good impulse and it’s great that we’re doing that.

Now, the downside, and I talk about this in my article that I just wrote on the Digital Reformation, there tends to be unforeseen consequences with any new technology, and I think it’s to our detriment sometimes that we’re so quick to leverage these new technologies that we don’t think about those unforeseen consequences. Things that…so to take it to the present now with the internet and with apps and I think, for example, the whole, like, church in an app idea, create kind of admirable impulse to want to use mobile app technology as the way people relate to each other, build community perhaps to kind of adapt that to church. But I think there’s kind of severe consequences to thinking that we can replicate the church or that you should replicate the church in a digital technology.

And so, I’m cautious about that. And yeah, to answer your question about how we are careful, I’m trying to be careful. At The Gospel Coalition, you know, we’re very mindful of the way that digital technology and the internet and just this idea of content, this word content that is pervasive now. It’s beginning to replace traditional churches in a lot of young people’s minds. So, you might have a generation Z Christian who convinces themselves that they don’t need to go to a church anymore because they have more Christian content than they could ever, you know, need or find in a church. So, they can listen to Tim Keller’s sermons by Googling that. They can, you know, read great articles from Don Carson or whoever about any theological topic they’re interested in, so why do you need the church? So, there is this real thing that is already happening and that it could very well continue to worsen of digital content replacing the church. So, I think that’s one area where we’re really conscious of not wanting to even give that suggestion to our audience that we are in any way a replacement for the local church.

Hansen: Yeah. We are not a place for you to live out your regular Christian discipleship. Think of us as merely somebody in the supply chain trying to help you and especially your church leaders to be able to serve faithfully in person in their evangelism, in their discipleship, in their preaching, and in all of that. So, we’re not trying to be the front lines. The front lines are people, but we’re back here just trying to support them in that kingdom work. You know, Brett, for all of your knowledge about technology and writing about arts and culture and sort of cutting-edge of things, you’re not a tech enthusiast actually, where you have social media and life online, which is ironic because you also help to oversee our social media efforts at TGC, working full time as an online editor for this digital ministry. So, what makes you passionate about this work and happier than even if you were on a farm living like Wendell Berry.

McCracken: I know. I’m sometimes tempted to just run off to Kentucky and live the Wendell Berry during…

Hansen: Yeah. Certain days on Twitter will make you feel that.

McCracken: Most days on Twitter, I think make me feel that.

Hansen: Oh, that’s true.

McCracken: There’s rarely a good day on Twitter, I find. But yeah, I mean, I think what makes me passionate about this work is just that, the fact that it is such a dark space and, you know, we’re seeing this societally. I’m working on a new book that kind of gets at all of this, and I spend a lot of time just looking at data and statistics about mental illness and things like loneliness on the rise. And I just read an article today about how the life expectancy for the third year in a row has gone down after going up in the U.S. for 60 years, and it’s because of things like rising suicide rates and rising drug overdose rates. And I don’t think that it’s unrelated that the life expectancies have started dipping in the internet age, like in this kind of ubiquitous digital culture that we’re living in.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that mental illness is on the rise. Depression is the leading mental illness in the world. So, all of this, it’s a bleak picture if you look at it, and all of us, I think, just intuitively ignore it. Like, we experience the grief and the anger and the outrage of the internet in our day-to-day experience, and so I think we could be tempted as Christians to just escape, to be like, “I don’t want to be tainted by this phase. I don’t want my kids to have anything to do with this, so let’s just do the Benedict adoption and then, like, run away, throw away our phones and live on a farm.” But as I reflected on this, you know, Christians throughout history in spaces that are toxic, that are dangerous, whether it’s a leper colony or a plague-infested Roman city, they aren’t the ones to leave when everyone else leaves or gets fed up and wants to preserve themselves. The Christians are the ones that stay and try to heal, try to bring light and redemption. And that’s my posture with the internet space. I think that it’s such a dark space. It’s such a place that is creating havoc and despair and literally like suicide and depression.

We of all people as Christians need not…you know, A, we shouldn’t fall in line with that. We shouldn’t add to the darkness and the anger in what we post and what we do online. We should be light in the darkness. And so that’s why I feel called to this. That’s why I love The Gospel Coalition because I really do think we are part of the solution. We’re trying to bring light to the darkness, Hope for the Searching as the name of our campaign is. And so, I want to be like those Christians who went into the plague-infested city knowing that they could very well be infected by it. And it’s a real risk for myself, for you, for all of us, editors, who work in the online space. It’s not like we aren’t affected by it. I think, you know, even on our best days, it makes us cynical. It kind of adds to our own kind of anger tendencies perhaps, and so we’re not naive to the risks, but I still think it’s worth it that we’re there. We’re in that space. We’re trying to help people find truth and battle the darkness by adding light.

Hansen: Well, I’ve been so encouraged by this podcast, Brett. I think it helps people to understand sort of the stewardship and seeking before God to be wise about the opportunities that he’s given us, the platforms that he’s given us. Ultimately, in the end, just to be faithful to Him and to be faithful to His people. And I just hope it encourages people to know a little bit of what happens when they support TGC, when they write for us, which is a great way of supporting TGC that we don’t take for granted people who write for us, who don’t get paid to do that. They just volunteer to do that. One of my favorite things, I’ll never forget, years ago, Brett, I would sit there every day, and I’d say, “Lord, I don’t know what we’re gonna publish tomorrow,” and it was just like manna. It was just like something would just pop up, and then somebody would just gifted us this manna of a gospel-centered article for me to be able to publish on our site.

Now, we have a more sophisticated operation. We’re not depending quite in the same ways for that manna or sustenance that next day. But now we really have a lot of experts like you able to help lead us in these ways who are great, not only understand the landscape and not only understanding your particular area of study, which is in arts and culture and film in particular but on top of that, just to have such a love for God and a love for the church and trying to raise a family within this culture. And so, it’s encouraging there for people to know and them to get a sense for when they’re supporting TGC in this way, it’s the work of people like you that they’re able to make happen. And so, it’s to help people to know a little bit more just as we wrap up here, how they can support the Hope for the Searching campaign at TGC. And again, obviously, just by listening and sharing this podcast and articles, they do a lot of good, and, you know, again, the best feedback I get is from our listeners of “The Gospel Coalition Podcast.” But how can folks help with this campaign and join in this Digital Reformation?

McCracken: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we want you to be a part of this. We want those who benefit from these resources and who feel what I was just describing about the internet being this overwhelmingly dark place usually full of untruth and bad information. Like, if you want to be part of the solution, you know, join us, invest in this work, and it doesn’t have to just be TGC like you said in the beginning. There’s other ministries that are doing great work, and we want to come alongside them, and part of this campaign is having meetings and kind of summits with people like Desiring God, and other Christian organizations doing good work online. And so, yeah, we just would love your support and prayer, sharing The Gospel Coalition with people who don’t know us yet who could benefit from our resources, and yeah, financially supporting us. Maybe becoming a monthly supporter, giving whatever you can, but just to buy in, to be that tangible kind of investor and supporter to be part of what we’re hoping is a digital reformation.

Hansen: Amen. Thank you, Brett, for joining me on The Gospel Coalition Podcast and for doing excellent work for us at TGC.

McCracken: Thank you, Collin.