This was not where Michael Tang saw himself. Not at a market, not behind a card table, not observing an adolescent leaf through laminated pictures of Augustine and John Calvin the way one might leaf through a pack of Premier League stickers. Tang had spent years immersed in a PhD program in theology, the kind of work that most people never read—the kind that exists in faculty meetings and footnotes. Then, somewhere between the dissertation drafts and the silent panic of not knowing what to do next, he made a choice that, depending on who you asked, seemed either inspired or a little insane.
He converted everything into trading cards.
It sounds like a joke until you look at the cards themselves, which are glossy and expertly crafted, with a condensed biography on the back and a theologian’s face on the front. Influence takes the place of statistics. Major works and martyrdom have taken the place of player history. Holding centuries of Christian thought in your palm, condensed into a format that your twelve-year-old nephew might actually pick up voluntarily, is strangely satisfying.
Tang appeared to realize—possibly even before he could fully express it—that intelligence was never the real obstacle to theology. It was the format. The concepts weren’t too difficult. It was packaged. Church history, with its heretics, exiles, schisms, and fires, is truly fascinating, and academic writing has a special talent for making fascinating things seem unapproachable. A 400-page monograph simply doesn’t read that way.
According to reports, a nearby Soho creative agency took notice. Purchasing decks and talking about them over coffee were teenagers who had never willingly touched a theological textbook. For anyone who has spent years in the academic pipeline, that detail is worth pondering because it reveals something unsettling: the format, not the audience, was always the issue.
Of course, this is not a completely novel concept. In 2012, Zondervan released a set of cards called Theologian Trading Cards, which were created by Norman Jeune III and included 288 historical figures from Christianity. These figures were arranged into teams, such as the “Orthodoxy Dodgers” for heretics and the “Wittenberg Whistle-Blowers” for early reformers. At the time, reviews complimented the idea while subtly pointing out that Charles Spurgeon was somehow absent. The cards found a respectable but somewhat restrictive audience in Christian classrooms and homeschools. It felt like the ceiling was fixed.
Tang’s project appears to aim for something different: an actual collectible rather than merely an educational supplement, something with the cultural significance of a pastime rather than the obligatory feel of a curriculum resource. It’s still genuinely unclear if that holds. Jesse Backstrom, an economics professor at Texas State who researches the card industry, has shown that the trading card market is infamously erratic. He characterizes it as an outdoor marketplace where real-time economic experiments take place. The psychology of scarcity, market manipulation, and asset valuation all occur on cardboard.
As this develops, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that Tang’s gamble is essentially a question about the direction that theological culture wishes to take. Churches are expanding in some areas while contracting in others. The hunger persists; in a different story, a campus chaplain found that trading his church office for a coffee shop table led to unexpected conversations. People continue to search. Now they are simply looking through different doors and into different rooms.
It seems that Tang passed through one that no one had considered opening. It’s still unclear if the cards outlive the novelty or discreetly vanish into a box in someone’s attic. However, people are currently purchasing them. That in and of itself is unexpected enough to have significance.
