I wrote this in 2022 and never posted it. While working on my Substack newsletter this week, I dug out this file and am posting it here with no edits to its original form.
In late 2020, I read Jesus & John Wayne by historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez. In this work, Du Mez focused in on evangelical culture and I found her book super interesting in the ways that it connected dots from my youth. One of the things Du Mez examines in her book is how the market gives shape to evangelicalism. I am definitely interested in evangelicalism as defined by consumption and so when, in late 2021, I saw Du Mez posted a conversation she had with journalist Daniel Silliman about his academic thesis turned book, Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and A Faith, my curiosity was piqued.
I am an avid reader with some legit evangelical culture credentials in my background, I was of course, intrigued by such a book and right away put it on my TBR.
Silliman chose to examine five particular books based on the fact that they were popular in the market and each represented some sort of marker moment in the Christian publishing/selling arena. When I initially picked up his book, I thought it could be interesting to read the fiction texts alongside his commentary, and so first up – Love Comes Softly by Janette Oke. I read a lot of Janette Oke books when I was in junior high and early high school and fully expected to gag my way through this time around, but was instead surprised to find it pretty pleasant, easy reading. Good for bed time! 🙂 I hated the “pioneer dialect” the characters spoke with, but thankfully this only came out in their conversations. They did their thinking in standard English.
The story could be picked apart, of course, but I can’t see any reason to do so. In his text, Silliman used this book to illustrate the nature of the evangelical spotlight on the flourishing life.
The idea is not that if you trust God and have faith you will get whatever you want, but that if you trust God and have faith God will give you what is best for you. You will flourish in the immanent frame and have abundant life in your regular, normal day-to-day. This theology does not promise a life free from pain and sorrow, but rather that God will carry you through and comfort you.
Silliman notes As Oke would later describe it, characterizing her own books, “It isn’t that God protects us from all these tough things in life – what I want to emphasize is the fact that he’s there to help us through those things….He’s holding you steady. He’s going to see you through.”
I believe this too. And not because I read Janette Oke books when I was a young teen.
So far, so good. Next up, This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti. Silliman says, In the early 1980s, stories of cultural subversion and behind-the-scenes subterfuge were quite popular in the general market….Americans also liked stories about occult-ish forces scratching at the edges of realism.
I am not inclined to read in the arena of Occult-ish forces scratching at the edges of realism, and though I read this book in my youth too, I expected to be a bit creeped out this time around. In fact, I was mostly just annoyed. Silliman writes,
It’s a thinly veiled allegory for the social concerns of the Religious Right, who feel like they’re losing control of America. It’s the anxieties of conservative white Protestant men translated into a fantasy of cosmic struggle. Their fears – from feminists in higher education to the displacement of the patriarchal father to the possibility of consequences following accusations of sexual misconduct – are strung together into a narrative. It’s true Peretti also seems concerned about things like global capitalism, which was not an agenda item for the Religious Right, but that may be the author’s idiosyncrasy. Mostly, the “spectrally macabre” plot to take over the town can be neatly mapped onto the Religious Right narrative of cultural subversion and the “stealing of America.”
Indeed this is what it felt like to me, and I couldn’t get through it.
On to the next book, Left Behind. Whew. This series was coming on scene when David and I were serving as youth pastors at a Mennonite Church in Oregon, and I read the first in this series to see what the talk was all about. That was enough. I just didn’t care.
Silliman writes that this best seller became a common cultural landmark, helping people position themselves and say what they believed and how they believed and what belief was like for them, personally, in contemporary American life.
Having just given up on reading This Present Darkness, quitting was now an option in my reading project and so it was easy to give up on Left Behind when I discovered a few chapters in that I still didn’t care.
The fourth book in my project was The Shunning by Beverly Lewis. This was the first of the texts that I’d not read before, and honestly, now that I’d given up on two books, I absolutely expected this would quickly go by the wayside too. I mean, Amish Romance?!? So I was surprised to find myself intrigued by the story, and though I skimmed my way through pretty big portions of the writing, I tracked the story all the way to the end because I wanted to know what happened.
Silliman says
….in the mid to late 1990s….The idea of flourishing was individualized. Evangelical belief, these megachurch pastors said, wasn’t about packaged conformity but about discovering your true self, becoming that self, and satisfying your deepest most personal desires. When Lewis’s manuscript showed up at evangelical publishing houses in 1997, the theme resonated. The fiction was articulating something evangelicals were feeling. He writes….The Amish were a setting for her (Lewis’s) story, a screen for her projections…They were examples of the deep damage of inauthenticity.
Authentic/inauthentic. Flourishing or not. These were not the themes I tracked with as I read, but rather, as I was also reading Charles Dickens’s Bleak House at the same time, I often found myself making comparisons as I thought about themes of mothers, children, and secrets. Perhaps I missed the whole point of The Shunning. 😉 But I don’t think so.
I think I read an engaging story. The writing itself was mediocre. I imagine if I hadn’t been reading for this project, I probably would not stuck with the story long enough to get hooked. (And this raises an entirely different point about writing as art – if the writing is not particularly good, by certain measured standards, but the story is engaging, enjoyable, or thoughtful, is it still good art? And who decides?)
Finally, The Shack. This was published in 2008, when I was still early in my brain injury recovery, which was one of the reasons I didn’t read more than the first chapter or two the first time around – reading was extra hard work back then. (And the setting + kidnap/murder of a child are other reasons why.)
When I sat down to read it this time, I figured I’d probably moved on past these obstacles, and it seems I had. But I then I discovered a new obstacle – I didn’t feel like reading a story that seemed like a shell constructed to house some particular theological points. The particular story+message aren’t especially interesting to me right now. Perhaps it is my timing. It’s not so much that I don’t appreciate the conversation re: the Trinity and how we understand and relate to God, and I’ve encountered the author, Paul Young, alongside Brad Jerzak in recent years and have stopped to listen in on their conversations with interest. Perhaps I’m just more inclined to engage the theological ideas without the shell of a story. I didn’t finish this one either.
**Notes February 2025 : If I remember right, I started another Janette Oke book after Love Comes Softly, probably the next one in the series. Judging from my reading record from that year, I did not finish it. I also remember getting a copy of one of her Biblical fiction books, but did not read very far into it.
I went on from here to read Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels by Valerie Weaver-Zercher, which was really interesting, well written, and a good place to stop.