Cerulean Sanctum

The Problems with Christian Fiction

2009-11-11T17:39:18Z

I had H1N1 a couple weeks ago, and it seemed to me the best thing to do while hacking up a lung was to read something escapist. You’re less likely to notice the sickness when you’re lost in another world.

I’ve been trying to read a wide variety of contemporary novels to see what resonates with people. Honestly, I’m mystified at the bestselling novels because I find them exceptionally formulaic and not all that intriguing.

But what I find to be the most disheartening news comes from the A-list Christian authors of today. I can’t remember the last time I picked up a novel by a Christian author that I found worthwhile.

Now I have to qualify this comment by saying that the Christian book market is a woman’s market. One of the most damning statistics is that the vast majority of Christian men never pick up a book after they graduate from school—save for the Bible (and I can attest that a lot of them don’t pick up that book, either, if our rampant biblical ignorance is any indication). Christian women drive nearly all the sales of Christian books, including Christian fiction.

So there’s a lot of Christian chick lit out there. Newsflash: I don’t read novels that cater exclusively to women. Christian novels aimed at women could be Pulitzer Prize-worthy and I would not know it. (So if you’re an author of Christian novels that cater primarily to women, you can take what I’m saying with a grain of salt.)

I’m speaking of mainstream Christian fiction that appeals to both sexes or leans toward male readers.

Below are the top problems I continue to find in Christian fiction. Some of these problems are inherent to all fiction, while some are exclusively issues in Christian fiction.

1. Authors still struggling with the Gospel and what it means to be Christians who write novels

What makes a novel Christian? Increasingly, it’s hard to tell. It used to be that a novel would inevitably have a clear “THIS IS HOW TO BECOME A CHRISTIAN” chapter in it, usually depicting a character’s conversion. A few Christian authors still attempt to shoehorn such an obvious presentation into their books— and I have yet to read one of those that doesn’t feel forced. However, the trend in the most recent books has been away from proselytizing, possibly because it has felt forced and seems to bring a story to its knees—and not in a good way. What we see now are “Christian” books that contain the following:

A Christian character or two (though the characters are almost always nominal or backslidden Christians beholden to some mistaken beliefs about Christianity)
A story that contrasts “genuine” Christianity with some flaky, cartoonish, fundamentalist version
A story that incorporates the symbolic elements of Christianity but stripped of their inherent meanings (such as depicting angelic beings who don’t match the Bible’s descriptions of angels)
A pendulum swing away from goody-two-shoes heroes to ones that are almost ridiculously “overflawed”
No real evidence of anything inherently Christian in the novel except that it was written by a Christian

While I don’t read as many hamhanded Gospel presentations as I once did, the trend seems to be moving toward attacking other Christians. I know that two books that I selected randomly to read during my flu both set up aberrant straw man Christians sects for pummeling. This is a wrongheaded trend, as it seems to muddy the waters. If that many bogus or flawed Christian sects exist, why consider Christianity at all?

2. Increasingly high suspension of disbelief

Many of the mysteries and thrillers in Christian novel circles call upon readers to invoke an almost inhuman ability to suspend disbelief. All fiction requires an author to stretch credulity, but what I’m reading in Christian novels today is simply over the top. One story I read asked the reader to believe that an entire town quickly and elaborately conspired to deceive one visitor. What made it worse was that the visitor could have easily been sent on her way with what she wanted, with no need for the massive ruse. The “sorry we all lied to you about everything, ma’am” ending should have been written as “the author apologizes for jerking your chain for no rational reason for the last 250 pages.” In short, for those novels that are clearly not in the fairy tale or magic realism categories, the villains are too much, the escapes too implausible, the mysteries too out there, the finales too good to be true, and on and on and on.

3. Mimicking the trends in secular writing and publishing

I’m seeing more A-list writers co-authoring books with newcomers. While this has been common in the secular publishing world, the Christian publishers are now joining in. I also believe it is clear that these are less full co-authoring efforts and more riding the coattails of the A-lister. Christian publishing already tarnished its reputation with the practice of uncredited ghostwriters writing the books of nationally known pastors and Christian celebrities. Let’s not make this worse by tacking on an A-list name to a book written almost entirely by an unknown.

Also, Christian fiction’s identity crisis continues unabated, as few authors have figured out how to create a genuinely Christian genre. Too many Christian authors still watch what sells in the secular world and ape the trends. This gives us little more than derivative, lower-quality, less creative works that do nothing to enhance the stature of Christian fiction. We need works that set the standards, not mimic them.

4. Pulp writing out of A-list authors

I keep hearing the names of the next set of “literary” authors that will save Christian fiction. Then I read their books and encounter the same bush league writing issues.

One issue that seems to dominate the Christian novels I’ve read lately is what I like to call “John Vowed Never to Return to His Hometown” Syndrome. Christian authors LOVE to employ this trick of constantly reminding readers chapter after chapter that the hero John vowed never to return to his hometown—when we all know that John’s inner struggle mandates returning to his hometown. All authors do this to some extent, but again, it seems to be hammered in Christian fiction.

I’m also bothered by the emphasis that plot takes over worldbuilding, as if Christian authors are racing to tell their stories, neglecting to employ all the standard storytelling devices that root readers in the novel. Character and setting descriptions and mood are often passed over, leading to a tenuous hold on readers. I know I put down more Christian novels than secular ones simply because the author hasn’t spent enough time drawing me into the world of the novel.

Christian novels also seem to have a higher likelihood that the author will spend a lot of time recapping events. Often, the protagonist’s inner dialog is constantly rehashing what happened in the previous chapters.

Boring! I read the previous chapters. I don’t want to read them again!

In the same way, Christian fiction suffers highly from a hero running an inner dialog that asks questions beneath the reader, as the reader clearly knows that the hero’s speculations are wrong. There’s a difference between keeping the reader and the hero in the dark and flat-out lying to readers with obviously bogus speculations. Good writers do the former not the latter.

Given some of these issues, it makes me wonder if the authors are just not that good or instead genuinely believe their readers can’t follow what they are writing. Then again, if readers can’t follow the writing, perhaps the author IS bad.

Lastly, I’m bothered by the excessive padding I read in novels. All modern novels suffer from this, but the Christian novels I’ve read of late are plagued by it. What makes this even more remarkable is that I’ve already noted that many Christian novels lack sufficient worldbuilding. If those elements are missing, what’s being padded?

Too many authors repeat elements of the story or revisit a pattern of character behavior with slight modifications. I read one novel by a Christian A-lister where the middle chapters consisted of the same two groups of people wandering around in the woods, going through the same motions, asking most of the same questions, ad infinitum. Tedious is the word that springs to mind.

And it’s tedious because there wasn’t enough story to make a full-sized book. Yet authors can’t get shorter books published because publishers blanch at the thought of printing something for adults less than 250 pages.

5. Unreliable reader reviews

It bothers me that readers rate so many books so highly on Amazon.com. Let’s be honest here: The average book is fair to good. That’s two to three stars. And while most books are overrated on Amazon, the reviews for books written by Christian authors are stellar to the point of being ridiculous. Either readers of Christian fiction are afraid to voice a genuine opinion for fear of hurting an author’s feelings or they simply can’t distinguish a great book from an average one. Either way, the result leads to unreliable reviews. This helps Christian fiction improve not one iota.

I have more opinions on this issue, but these five points highlight the major problems.

If you read (or even write) Christian fiction, I’d like to hear your comments!

This feed is from Cerulean Sanctum (http://ceruleansanctum.com), a blog by Dan Edelen that covers issues facing the American Church.

The Problems with Christian Fiction

Your Best Dog-Licked-Sores Life Now

2009-11-09T13:53:55Z

“There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’ And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house—for I have five brothers—so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’ But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’ And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’”
—Luke 16:19-31

What do you wanna bet that this passage is never preached by Joel Osteen, Rod Parsley, Ken Copeland, Paula White, or anyone else of their ilk?

This feed is from Cerulean Sanctum (http://ceruleansanctum.com), a blog by Dan Edelen that covers issues facing the American Church.

Your Best Dog-Licked-Sores Life Now

Splintered Kingdom

2009-11-05T14:44:46Z

I used to always get a laugh when Leonard Ravenhill would comment, “Let’s talk about church abominations…uh, I mean denominations.” Yeah, that one always got me chuckling.

A couple weeks ago, the youth pastor at our church lamented that he couldn’t rally the youth departments of local churches to join together for a big service project in the local community. “Everyone’s afraid some other church’s youth group is going to steal their kids. So they won’t do events like this,” he says. You could see the frustration on his face.

A few miles down the road from me is a church. The sign out front says it’s part of The Church of God of the Mountain Assembly. Well, honestly, for all my experience watching the Church, that denomination was a new one on me.

I would have suspected that The Church of God of the Mountain Assembly may have started out as part of the larger Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.) and splintered off. I’m wrong about that, though. But then our country, by one estimate, has 350,000 churches in it. And if it seems that it has 125,000 distinct church denominations, well, that’s the state of Christendom in the United States. Please don’t blame me if I can’t follow the history of all the schisms. Heck, it appears that The Church of God of the Mountain Assembly itself splintered into four separate groups. What led to that breakup is anyone’s guess.

My guess is that it was over something menial.

Now I’m not singling out a particular denomination for derision. I’m just noting the reality. Frankly, I think the Presbyterians have probably got everyone else smoked with the sheer number of breakaway Presbyterian denominations, especially given the total number of Presbyterians in this country. Even the ones, like the Presbyterian Church in America, that pride themselves on the purity of their doctrine end up breaking down into tinier bits of Christianity over time.

So if The Church of God of the Mountain Assembly and the Presbyterians can’t hold themselves together despite agreeing on major points of doctrine, how likely is it that anyone can bring together an American Baptist church, a Nazarene Church, a Holiness Pentecostal church, and a Wisconsin Synod Lutheran church to do anything worthwhile as a group for the Kingdom of God?

Instead, we all go our separate ways, do our own minuscule outreach projects, and then wonder why nothing great ever gets accomplished for God in our communities.

With his cry of “Can’t we all just get along?” Rodney King proved himself one of the greatest American prophets. Fact is, we can’t all get along. And nowhere does this show more clearly than in the Church of Jesus Christ in America—to our shame.

I’m a Christian first. No other label applied to me by anyone else truly matters. I go to a Pentecostal church, but I’m not really a Pentecostal. I’m a Christian. End of story.

Which is why I’m getting progressively irked by the inability of us Christians to break out of our denominational stupors, reach across the street, and tell the Christians who go to “That Church That Is Not The Same Denomination As Ours” that we all should work together for the common goal of getting the Gospel out.

I want to think that this denominational schism is about something more than money, but in America 2009, it’s probably not. I suspect that too many church and denominational leaders are worried that if they and Church Z work together, their folks will like Church Z better, and then Church Z gets the people—and their precious dollars. And if it’s not money, it’ power and legitimacy. Because for a lot of us, nothing proves our doctrinal correctness more than when our church steals away some other church’s people.

I really don’t want to be that cynical, yet I am.

So we keep fracturing the Kingdom of God into punier bits made in our own image, and along with that fracturing goes the power to effect real change on a wider scale. Rather than risk pooling resources, each church goes its merry way, satisfied with marginal accomplishments, each thinking it’s transforming the nation for Jesus.

Meanwhile, a look at the larger national picture tells an entirely different story.

So when I hear Leonard Ravenhill make his little joke about denominations, I don’t laugh like I used to. If he were around today, I don’t think he’d be laughing, either.

If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
—Mark 3:24

This feed is from Cerulean Sanctum (http://ceruleansanctum.com), a blog by Dan Edelen that covers issues facing the American Church.

Splintered Kingdom

Pro-Life—But Not Really

2009-11-02T02:30:53Z

I don’t normally talk politics here, but an issue facing Ohio voters illustrates for me what is most hypocritical about a wide swath of American Evangelicalism. And it’s a stupid, mindless hypocrisy at that.

Stick with me for what seems like a political tangent at the beginning of this post, because it ultimately leads into a skewering of that hypocrisy.

Ohio Issue 2 affects farmers who own animals, pushing for the creation of a state animal husbandry oversight commission comprised of in-state farming reps to ensure the humane care of farm animals. Beyond the “fox guarding the henhouse” nature of the bill, many supporters are claiming it’s a first strike to keep such control in-state, preempting similar (and possibly more draconian) measures by PETA, HSUS, or the feds.

I live in a farming area and would like to own animals some day. I have yet to see a “Vote NO on Issue 2″ sign anywhere in my area, and I would suppose that’s largely because farmers around here are scared to death of anything that smacks of commie pinko environmentalists.

Sadly, Issue 2 is akin to being given a choice of which of your feet you would prefer to be shotgunned. Adding more bureaucracy, whether it comes from the state, feds, PETA, or HSUS, is really no choice at all. My choice is that all the bureaucrats would make like lemmings and find a high, oceanside cliff from which to pierce the veil. (Okay, so I’m a wee bit libertarian in that regard.)

I can easily see a future under a YES vote on Issue 2 where it would cost me thousands of state-induced “convenience fees” and a hundred pages of yearly paperwork just to own a couple goats and a half dozen chickens. Let’s be honest: Government loves getting its cut. Problem is, for small farmers like me, it’s death by a thousand cuts. The monstrosity known as agribusiness can absorb this without a blink, but I can’t—and neither can a bunch of my neighbors who have “YES on 2″ signs in their front yards.

Which leads me to the question of why we need Issue 2 in the first place.

Obviously, some farmers in this state did NOT treat their animals humanely. And given that I have yet to meet an Ohio farmer who doesn’t swear some sort of allegiance to Jesus, I’ve got to believe that many of the same people who are upstanding members of their churches are also taking a blasé approach to caring for their farm animals. This holds true for nonfarmers, as a friend sent me a link to a missive circulating on Facebook wherein the conservative, homeschooling, nonfarming author talked about “dumb animals” and the stupidity of caring about their “emotional well-being.”

I am not a vegetarian. I have no ethical problems consuming food animals. I also believe that human beings, who are made in the image of God, are of infinitely more value than animals or plants. That anyone should blur those lines of value is anathema to me.

But I also get a little sick of folks, especially Christians (who should know better), who turn beet red over the issue of killing the unborn yet who seem to have no qualms despoiling Creation. How can a person claim to be pro-life yet show so little care for nonhuman life? I mean, it makes little sense to me to sob over the killing of babies then turn around and hack to pieces a black rat snake in one’s garden for no reason other than not liking snakes. Yet I see such disregard all the time.

Maybe it’s the prevalence of hyperdispensationalism, which fosters a mentality that “it’s all gonna burn some day” and turns some Christians into abusers of Creation. “Tear down the forest and fill in the wetlands so we can make way for the Christian amusement park. Animals don’t have souls anyway, so if we kill ‘em, even indiscriminately, what difference does it make? Why are all those environmental wackos up in arms about another extinct species? And who needs a rainforest anyway if Jesus is coming back to tomorrow? I mean, I just L-O-V-E the rosewood flooring on my 5,500 square foot home I share with my wife and daughter!”

Issue 2 in Ohio would have no reason to be if all “Christian” farmers treated their animals—even those destined for the dinner table—with the respect we should afford living creatures. That many didn’t pretty much ensured that someone with a more holistic view on life was going to step in sooner or later to clean up the mess. In other words, we pooped in our own sandbox and someone finally noticed. Now we’re all in trouble.

It saddens me to no end that we Christians, the ones who more than others should understand our charge to steward the Earth, are often the people who relentlessly abuse Creation. Most of us show little respect for the land, for the plants and animals that live on it. They seem to be a means to an end only, lacking any greater meaning than to fill our guts.

That’s a sad, expedient way of looking at life. All life. And it says something about how little care and the lack of thought we give to the life placed on this small globe by a loving Lord, who said:

Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God.
—Luke 12:6

If we say we are pro-life, then let us respect all life, for all life comes from God and has meaning—even if we are too self-centered to see it.

This feed is from Cerulean Sanctum (http://ceruleansanctum.com), a blog by Dan Edelen that covers issues facing the American Church.

Pro-Life—But Not Really

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