One of the truly strange things to reflect upon is the idea of how much location affects outcomes — and the ways this can be alternately interpreted as arbitrary, serendipitous, or just the vicissitudes of reality. Without getting too grandiose here, I’ll keep this reflection to the topic of religious publishing in west Michigan.
On the one hand, the idea that, if you are someone interested in publishing work who lives in or around Grand Rapids, you will likely find employment with one of the prominent religious publishing companies in the area, seems unremarkable enough. After all, an unusually high proportion of work in and around Washington DC involves the federal government.
On the other hand, this seems different from that example. There is no reason there needs to be an overabundance of religious publishing and a dearth of other kinds of publishing in the region. Often, I delight in these regional quirks, but there is a potential issue of equity here. Despite the truly welcoming and inclusive spirit of a company like the Press, I can certainly imagine someone nonreligious or someone who practices a faith other than Christianity feeling like taking a job at a company that publishes almost exclusively Christian-centered (or at least Christian-rooted) work simply isn’t an option. This is borne out in the demographics of who works at the Press — the vast majority of my coworkers are either practicing Christians or formerly practicing Christians.
In this respect, someone like me would have an opportunity to work in publishing that someone else wouldn’t — assuming they didn’t have the means to move to a new location. This seems problematic to me in a way that goes deeper than the issue of a certain region not having any publishing options. There’s a potential coercion and power dynamic at play, where a certain privileged group has a particular opportunity that another doesn’t.
I’m not sure what a solution is in this case. It’s an unfortunate outcome that probably can’t and shouldn’t be mitigated through law. But I do wonder about the possibility some sort of government-backed incentivization program in regions like west Michigan — where it’s shown that a publishing industry of at least one kind is sustainable, and so, presumably, a publishing industry of another kind might have at least the basic infrastructure to succeed (not least of which would be employees who transfer between the religious and nonreligious publishers as they’re able and interested in doing so). Since publishers barely sell their books in a local context anymore, the idea of a market would be moot.
I’m not sure how far this concept could or should be extrapolated, but I know that it’s something I think about a lot when it comes to religiously based or religiously associated organizations. A similar example would be when a certain town or region only has a religious college — might there be a case to be made for government to incentivize a second option for the sake of equity?
No matter how forward-thinking and inclusive a company, a college, or a church is, there are real limits to a religious organization’s accessibility. While the free market struggles to open the doors to those on the margins, government may be able to play a vital role.