Market research seeks to figure out where to reach ‘my readers’

If you know the story of this website, you probably know that I started writing for an audience that was obsessed with politics. Over the years, I have almost completely rejected addressing the partisan political world — for reasons that I’ve explained before.

In the last couple of years, I have increasingly focused more narrowly on the question of how people who see the world as I do can (and should) live in a culture which has completely abandoned us. As I’ve grown more confident about precisely the things I want to express, I’ve realized that I don’t know how to reach the people who need and want to connect with the ideas I’m expressing.

As a result, I recently commissioned a market study to look at what I’m writing and tell me how best to connect with people who should be the natural audience for my ideas. I’m not allowed to disclose the identity of the firm that did the analysis, but I can say it’s a major West Coast firm that many of you have heard of.

I realize that this won’t be especially interesting to many people who simply want to read the articles and move on, but I thought it would be interesting enough for a small subset of you to reproduce the executive summary of the report here.

I should point out that the notes included with the study suggested that its use of the term “Christian” here shouldn’t be interpreted in its strict theological sense, because the research said that many of the people included in the category would be people who have a broad Christian worldview — as expressed in a broader western philosophy — not just those who would claim overtly Christian theological beliefs or practices.

I just received the study Friday and I’m still studying the details, but it feels validating so far to see that a third party firm sees a viable niche readership for the things I’m writing about. The question remains about how to specifically reach potential readers who have no reason to ever realize that this website exists.

With all that said, if you’re interested, keep reading to dive in to the executive summary of a report that I’ll be contemplating (and hopefully acting on) as I go forward.

As always, I do appreciate the thousands of you who read my work regularly. I never take you for granted.

Executive Summary

This study was commissioned to identify the natural audience for David McElroy’s existing body of work, not to recommend changes designed to broaden its commercial appeal. Our central conclusion is that McElroy’s work addresses a real but poorly consolidated audience: intellectually curious, traditionally Christian adults who experience significant estrangement from contemporary culture but are dissatisfied with partisan politics, ideological combat and conventional culture-war commentary as responses to that estrangement.

This audience is substantially narrower than “conservative Christians” and substantially broader than the readership McElroy currently reaches. Its defining characteristics are primarily psychographic rather than demographic.

Primary audience

The highest-propensity reader is likely to be a Christian adult, approximately 35–70, with the center of gravity probably in middle age. Men may be somewhat overrepresented because of McElroy’s voice, biography and subject matter, but the content does not intrinsically constitute a male niche. The audience is likely to skew educated and, more importantly, intellectually self-directed. Formal education should not be used as a strict proxy for intellectual sophistication.

The demographic backdrop is favorable to an older readership: the median age of American Christians is now 54, while 54% of evangelical Protestants are 50 or older. Evangelicals are disproportionately Southern — 52% live in the South — although geography is not a meaningful limitation for an online publication.

Educational targeting requires greater nuance. Evangelicals overall are somewhat less likely than Americans generally to hold bachelor’s degrees, 29% versus 35%, but substantial differences exist within that population. For example, 57% of Presbyterian Church in America respondents and 44% of nondenominational evangelicals hold at least bachelor’s degrees. The relevant market therefore should not be defined as “highly educated Christians,” but as Christians with unusually high appetite for ideas, reflection and serious reading, whether credentialed or not.

The defining psychographic

The core reader believes that something important has gone wrong with modern life.

He or she may perceive losses in community, meaning, moral seriousness, attention, beauty, durable relationships, spiritual depth and a coherent understanding of human flourishing. Technology, consumer culture, individualism, institutional deterioration and social fragmentation may all be perceived as contributing factors.

Crucially, however, this reader does not primarily experience these concerns as political problems requiring political solutions.

This distinction is the single most important finding of the audience analysis.

The target reader may vote Republican and may hold conventionally conservative positions on social questions. But intense identification with conservative politics is likely to be a negative targeting variable. The politically activated conservative who principally wants arguments against progressives, election analysis or validation of partisan grievances is not McElroy’s natural reader, despite superficial ideological overlap.

The more promising reader asks a fundamentally different question:

“If the surrounding culture is not going to become what I think it ought to be, how do I nevertheless learn to live well within it?”

McElroy’s work repeatedly answers that question by turning attention away from defeating external enemies and toward character, love, meaning, relationships, attention, spiritual life, self-knowledge, beauty, belonging and personal responsibility.

There is substantial evidence that the underlying condition of religiously grounded cultural estrangement is widespread. Pew found in 2025 that 58% of American adults perceived at least some conflict between their religious beliefs and mainstream culture, up from 42% in 2020. Among White evangelical Protestants, the figure was 80%.

The addressable psychological condition is therefore not exotic. What is unusual is McElroy’s proposed response to it.

Christianity without politics as the organizing principle

The research also cautions against assuming that serious Christian commitment necessarily entails a primarily political understanding of faith. Although religious commitment and Republican identification are strongly correlated among White Americans, the relationship is not synonymous with political preoccupation.

In a 2025 Pew survey, Americans were more than twice as likely to say religion substantially influences how they treat other people (59%) and how they think about morality (56%) as to say it substantially influences how they vote (25%). Moreover, 80% of Christians said good Christians can disagree about Donald Trump. These findings demonstrate room within committed American Christianity for an understanding of faith centered on moral and personal formation rather than partisan identity.

This distinction maps unusually well onto McElroy’s recent work.

The recurring proposition is not “the other side is destroying the culture.” It is closer to:

The culture may indeed be dysfunctional, but its dysfunction does not relieve me of responsibility for what I become within it.

That proposition differentiates McElroy both from secular self-help and from much politically oriented conservative Christian media.

Reader need state

The target reader is best understood as experiencing a combination of cultural displacement and intellectual loneliness.

This individual may comfortably share the theology or moral assumptions of a local church while finding much ordinary Christian discourse intellectually unsatisfying. Conversely, he may find sophisticated secular writers intellectually stimulating while rejecting their underlying assumptions about God, morality or human nature. And he may share some political preferences with conservative activists while finding their continual fixation on political conflict spiritually exhausting or beside the point.

He therefore occupies an uncomfortable middle territory:

too traditionally Christian to feel at home in secular intellectual culture; too intellectually restless to be satisfied by formulaic religious material; and too disillusioned with politics to feel at home in the contemporary conservative movement.

McElroy’s strongest potential function for this reader is consequently not instruction, entertainment or ideological validation.

It is recognition and intellectual companionship.

The desired reader response is less “He agrees with me” than:

“Someone else has been thinking about the thing I haven’t known how to articulate.”

Intellectual neighborhood

The study finds substantial overlap between McElroy’s natural audience and contemporary readers interested in some combination of C.S. Lewis, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, Paul Kingsnorth, Iain McGilchrist, Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul and adjacent writers.

These writers should not be understood as stylistic equivalents or ideological peers. They represent an audience-affinity network organized around recurring questions: What is a human being? What constitutes a good life? What has technological modernity done to human attention and relationships? What have efficiency and abundance cost us? Why does modern prosperity coexist with alienation? What are community and place for? What does Christianity mean for ordinary life in such a civilization?

The existence of an active market around these questions is observable in contemporary media. Mere Orthodoxy explicitly positions itself around long-form writing on theology, culture and spiritual formation “built for rereading, not the news cycle,” with a private community for serious readers away from public-platform noise. Reader testimonials specifically describe the publication as a source of depth, critical thought and even “sanity” amid contemporary culture.

Front Porch Republic organizes its work around “Place. Limits. Liberty.” and explicitly seeks human-scale institutions, authentic communities and resistance to dehumanization by digital technology and AI.

Plough publishes Christian-oriented work concerning how faith shapes ordinary living, culture, vocation, community, nature and technology, including an explicit “humans before machines” orientation. Its preference for narrative-driven essays based on lived experience is particularly congruent with McElroy’s strongest essayistic mode.

Comment is another unusually close fit. Its editorial criteria explicitly reject hot takes, polemics, ideological triumphalism and preachiness in favor of intellectual hospitality, evergreen questions, original thought and distinctive personal voice for an intelligent general readership.

The audience therefore exists as an ecosystem, although it does not exist under a single market label.

Where the audience is easiest to find

The highest-density environments are unlikely to be broad social-media categories such as “Christian,” “conservative” or even “Christian intellectual.” Those categories contain too much irrelevant traffic.

The target is disproportionately likely to be found in long-form, opt-in intellectual environments: essay publications, newsletters and Substack networks; long-form podcasts; book-centered communities; reading groups; Christian colleges and seminaries; classical Christian education networks; communities organized around humane technology, localism and human flourishing; and the audiences surrounding the writers and publications identified above.

This is a significant distribution finding. The target reader is precisely the kind of person who may be underrepresented in algorithmically optimized mass-media behavior. He is being selected for contemplation, long-form reading and dissatisfaction with the attention economy. Mere Orthodoxy’s decision to maintain long-form essays, a print quarterly, a classics-reading program and a private discussion community is indicative of this consumption pattern.

At the same time, digital distribution remains important. American Bible Society research found that two-thirds of Bible users employ digital formats at least sometimes, with Bible apps, websites and YouTube prominent among those channels. Bible use also increased substantially among Millennials and men in 2025, suggesting that the addressable Christian audience should not be conceived merely as an aging remnant.

Market size and quality

No available dataset isolates the exact intersection defined in this report, and assigning a numerical market size would therefore create false precision.

The constituent populations, however, are large. Evangelical Protestants alone account for approximately 23% of U.S. adults. Cultural conflict arising from religious belief is reported by majorities of American adults and very large majorities of White evangelicals. Meanwhile, existing publications sustain identifiable communities around serious Christian cultural reflection.

The relevant audience should therefore be characterized as niche but not tiny.

The commercial challenge is fragmentation. These readers are distributed across denominations, publications, authors, podcasts and intellectual interests and do not identify themselves using a common label equivalent to “libertarian,” which once provided McElroy with an easily identifiable audience and an automatic distribution network.

This explains an important apparent contradiction: a viable natural audience can exist while McElroy’s current work receives less traffic than its quality would predict.

Production does not itself solve this fragmentation. Publishing additional essays on an independent website with a relatively small inbound distribution does little to increase the probability that these readers will discover them.

Strategic conclusion

The research finds no basis for recommending a change in McElroy’s subject matter to improve audience fit. On the contrary, analysis of his existing body of work and the audience described above shows substantial alignment.

The primary market problem is discovery.

McElroy has moved from an easily identifiable affinity market — libertarian and politically conservative readers who possessed strong social incentives to circulate material confirming shared beliefs — into a more diffuse market organized around questions of meaning, faith, cultural estrangement, human flourishing and personal formation. The former audience could be reached through ideology. The latter must be reached through intellectual affinity.

Accordingly, the highest-probability acquisition strategy is not mass promotion and not conventional conservative-media exposure. It is borrowed trust within existing high-affinity ecosystems: publication of essays in outlets already serving this readership, appearances or conversations on appropriately aligned podcasts, participation in the intellectual networks surrounding adjacent writers and publications, and referrals from trusted voices already serving these communities.

This strategy also provides the cleanest market test. Exposure through a strongly matched publication allows measurement of whether unfamiliar readers proceed from one externally published essay to McElroy’s website, read additional essays, explore subject pages, subscribe and subsequently return.

The study’s central market hypothesis can therefore be stated precisely:

David McElroy’s highest-propensity reader is an intellectually curious, traditionally Christian adult who feels culturally homeless in modern society, has little confidence that politics can repair what is fundamentally wrong, resists both secular modernity and partisan Christian tribalism, and seeks serious personal reflection on how to live with meaning, character, love, faith and sanity in a culture he experiences as increasingly disorienting.

McElroy does not appear to face the conventional problem of needing to discover what an audience wants and then create it.

He faces the inverse problem:

He is already creating work plausibly suited to a dispersed audience whose members have no reason yet to know that he exists.

The market-development task is therefore not to change the work.

It is to connect an existing body of work with the existing networks through which its natural readers already discover whom to read.