The Devil Has all the Best Stories Theologian James Smith says that marketing is the answer to Christianity's decline. Not an advertising campaign, but a serious rethink about engaging the imagination, and tackling such tricky concepts as love, longing and erotic desire. Transcript James Smith : ( In interview ) Marketing understands that we are not primarily thinkers. Marketing knows that we are primarily lovers, and so marketing doesn't try to communicate information to us about products to convince us to buy them; it tries to co-opt us into a whole story about what happiness is, about what the good life is, and thereby tries to capture our imaginations and our loves and our longings so that we think happiness, the good life, is found in association with that stuff. David Rutledge : Theologian James K.A. Smith. And if you're wondering why he's talking about marketing and love in the same breath, then listen on. James Smith wants to understand why the secular world is so successful in engaging our imaginations, and whether we can apply this understanding to reviving the Christian message. Not that James Smith is advocating anything as crass as a marketing strategy for Christianity. The first of his recent New College lectures at the University of New South Wales in Sydney was entitled 'Erotic Comprehension: The Bodily Basis of Meaning'. Embodiment -- the part our physical bodies play in shaping our minds -- has long been a problem for Christian thinkers, particularly the reformed church, with