Consumer and direct-mail markets converted Oliver North into a profitable evangelical celebrity.

Evidence

That same year North published Under Fire with Zondervan, a Christian publisher recently acquired by Harper and Row. The memoir sold 650,000 copies and ended up on both the New York Times and the Christian bestseller lists, and the royalties helped cover North’s considerable legal fees. He gave frequent talks at evangelical churches, too, speaking (for undisclosed fees) about his devout faith and criticizing the media; he joked that he read the “Washington Post/Washington Compost” and the Bible—because he “wanted to see what both sides were up to.” North also appealed directly to conservative “armchair activists” to raise money, both for legal expenses and to fund his failed congressional campaign. With the help of direct-mail strategist Richard Viguerie, who provided him with select lists of conservative voters, North targeted key demographics: “anti–gun control, pro-life, school prayer, strong defense, anti-gay, and the like.” All told, North brought in around $16 million in a single year through direct mail alone, an unprecedented haul. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 290

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences Du Mez’s method: Christian identity transmitted through consumer culture (books, merchandise, direct-mail fundraising) rather than pulpit theology.
• ADDENDUM: The commercial-artifacts transmission Du Mez documents here parallels the consumer-culture scaffolding in my trees-as-infrastructure piece (commodity chains creating identity) — the marketing machinery, not doctrine, is what sold North to the faithful.