The Billboards The Billboard Company Rejected

If you’ve been following this space for a while, you probably already know about the billboard campaign I ran last month in support of the launch of my book Godbreathed.

The basic idea was to reappropriate the sort of fundamentalist billboard scare tactics I grew up seeing - and still see - driving up and down the interstate in the American South; signs like “Do you know where you’ll spend eternity?” or my personal favorite in Alabama “Go to church or the devil will get you!” Instead of trying to literally scare the hell out of people, I wanted to offer folks good news. You know, evangelism.

The three signs I ended up running take verses and/or assumptions about the Bible and turn them on their head. Read together, they also capture the basic message of my book.

God didn’t write the Bible. People did.

It’s ok to admit when the Bible is wrong.

You are not going to hell.

Not surprisingly since I ran these in the buckle of the Bible Belt - downtown Nashville - some folks weren’t as enthused about them as I was, particularly the notion that people won’t be spending eternity being tortured in hell. There’s probably an entire book to be written about just how badly some Christians want to see their neighbors burn in hell, but that’s not the story I’m here to tell today.

I want to share some of the billboards that didn’t make the cut.

And by “didn’t make the cut” I don't mean I chose not to run them. I mean they were rejected by the billboard company’s legal department, a company with no professed religious affiliation, for being “misleading and offensive.”

To be fair, my first submission was…intentionally provocative and perhaps offensive to those it describes, but it certainly wasn’t misleading, at least not in the sense of misrepresenting the facts. In fact, it was little more than attaching a name to a description given in Ezekiel 16:49, a verse that describes the sort of animosity towards the poor and needy that the Republican Party wears as a badge of honor.

I simply called attention to that fact and the response I received from the Lamar legal department was a “hard no.”

So I tried again.

Since they said the first billboard was “misleading and offensive” I tried an even more literal interpretation of scripture. This time a passage from Numbers 5:22 that describes an apparently God ordained abortion.

Alas, apparently pro-life billboards are not misleading or offensive, but pro-choice ones are.

Both of those options were obviously also political in nature, so I thought I would try something more straightforwardly biblical since I knew citing the transfiguration of Christ to make the point “Jesus was trans” definitely wouldn’t get approved by what I was beginning to suspect was a legal counsel also working for the Southern Baptist Convention.

So I tried this one.

John 1:14 quite clearly says Jesus, not the Bible is the Word of God, but still no dice.

I was told by my sales rep, a genuinely helpful gentleman who I got the sense was just as confused and frustrated as I was and was doing his best to help me out, that I could had qualifications like “I believe” but that would…well…dampen the effect I was trying to have.

In total, we ended up exchanging something like 73 emails before I was finally able to get approval for the billboards that did make the cut. And I’m glad they did. The response I received was overwhelmingly positive, particularly from atheists and agnostics who were grateful to finally hear actual good news for once from a Christian.

Weird how people respond better to actual good news than fear-mongering and sanctified bigotry.

Anyway, personally I find the pathologically dishonest pro-life billboards far more misleading and the giant gun store billboard near my kids’ school (both hosted by Lamar) to be much more offensive than anything I submitted, but I’m not a Christian fundamentalist.

I’m sorry, I meant the legal counsel for a billboard company.

(For the curious, here’s the link that appears at the bottom of all the billboards: godbreathedbook.com)