Raconteur wrote: ↑Sun May 07, 2023 12:42 pm
To be honest, my gripe on this thread was with what Spiral was saying and after reading back on some of his posts, i was correct.
To quote Spiral from one of his smaller posts -
"More precisely, with Burnley FC being used in an attempt to low-key evangelise"
Right, first and foremost I know I said I'd fk off but my name keeps being mentioned, so here we are. I'm basically Candyman.
Secondly, don't think I can't hear the snark through that comment about a 'smaller post'. It's piteous to behave that way.
Okay, on to the business. This is mostly now a general comment, not any kind of direct response. Rileybobs had addressed some of the badly made accusations made at he and I and I don't think there's much else I can add to what he's said with respect to correcting the misrepresentation of mine and his comments that this documentary is somehow designed to convert people to Mormonism. It's not what we're saying. It's a branding exercise; a branding exercise done in service of evangelical ideals, but it's not being used to proselytise as such, and to imply that's what we're saying is either bad faith or downright ignorant. I was deliberate in using the word "low-key" next to evangelism, because Pace isn't a street prophet, he isn't a door knocker, he isn't handing out pamphlets to passers-by in town centres...that's what the teenagers and young adults at his church do. No, but seriously, Checketts, who sits on the board, was up until a few years ago recently the President of the LDS London Mission. He was openly over here on religious mission. Bear that in mind reading the rest of this post.
Let me approach this from a different angle.
I genuinely believe, and I'm sure many will agree, that we are one of, if not the COOLEST football club currently operating in England. Pace talked about stories in his first interview, and he's on to something. Clubs have narratives surrounding them which informs how they are perceived. Some of that story is natural and organic, other times it's because of a lot of hard work in developing and curating a brand. Think about it. In the last year we've put the old playstyle in the bin. We know now from everything that has come out in interviews that from the minute we sacked Dyche there was a clear direction in mind. The old perception was awful, everyone hated Burnley (so what, couldn't give a pi$$ personally, but it affects the brand). We were basically Stoke in the Pulis years. Dirty, run-down old $hithole with a $hit team playing $hit football, everything is ancient, everything is grey, everything has the stink of pi$$. So we work toward a more beautiful playstyle. That's cool. We hire a young, exciting, up and coming, talented, handsome, well dressed, tactically brilliant, thoughtful and charismatic manager who also happens to be a living legend in English football, so recently a player that he's still in the minds of even the youngest fans. He's also cool as fk. So that's cool. We modernise the ground. That's cool. We liberate the media team and go on a social media rampage in the summer to the point where there were numerous articles written about how cool our reveal videos are. That's cool. We build a young and energetic and aggressive team. That's cool. We have more flair players than we can get on the pitch at once. That's cool. We have (objectively) the coolest looking kit in the league. That's cool. Our shirt sponsor is 'classic football shirts'. That's cool. We dominate games. That's cool. We pi$$ the league. That's cool. We get promoted. That's cool. All this contributes to building a cool brand. We've operated this last year with the energy of a disruptor brand. A new kid on the block. There's a cool factor to all of this.
Now on the other hand, you've got this religion which has this reputation of being practiced by what some would view as cultish weirdos. It's unfashionable, it's a bit conservative, it all sounds really dull and really strange to an outsider. It's uncool. It's VERY uncool. The church's missionaries are sent to England to spread the gospel. But before you can do that you need to penetrate the preconceived ideas people have about the religion. Like I said earlier in the thread, nobody is interested in Mormonism at face value. So how do you intrigue people in order to get them to at least listen? Through branding. You need to lay some groundwork before evangelising in earnest. The same branding principles that have been applied to Burnley FC can also be applied to a religion. But it looks too obvious, too 'youth pastor' cringe to do it at face value. So you place this uncool religion in proximity to something that in incredibly cool: the ascent and rebirth of Burnley FC. Proximity: remember this idea. The idea is for the cool factor to rub off on Mormonism. If people watch a really cool documentary about a really cool club, Burnley FC, and you juxtapose the football story with the faith story, the coolness rubs off on the faith. This cynicism is at the heart of what I anticipate I will find contentious, and the trailer and the title of the documentary are the warning signs that inform this idea of mine.
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