No argument with this, at all. It is very frightening.
My own shopping these past years has been tremendously curtailed - I only rarely go into bookstores anymore. I’ll have to take your word for this, and just cringe some more.
I know. I keep trying to tell myself that if they’re that poorly written, no one could possibly be influenced by them. Then I remember things like Johnathon Livingston Seagull, or more sinisterly - The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
On preview: straight man, that’s certainly one. I was actually thinking of certain authors of romance fiction when I made my comment - not simply the overtly religious imprints, but many of the more mainstream romance novels have the character’s relationship with their religion and God as a signifigant part of the plot.
Other books I’d consider Christian include C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, and many others.
Exapno Mapcase, I’ll respond to your latter post in another post later on. I see what you’re saying but I still intend to debate some more on that topic.
Speaking as a former fundamentalist, I can tell you that all of that combined is the biggest part of it. I’ve never read the “Left Behind” series because by the time they came out, I’d already abandoned that level of my denomination. However, back in the day I was head over heels with LaHaye’s predecessor, Frank Peritti. His first novel, “This Present Darkness”, was very much like the present day Revelation theory that you’ve mostly seen about since the LB books came on the scene in 1995.
Anyway I did read this type for the reasons mentioned… I liked thrillers and this one was “safe” (no worries about the subject matter sending you to hell), I wanted to know what I’d be in for if I ever renounced Christ and of course, everybody was into it. If you were immersed in the entire culture as I was, I would’ve been remiss if I hadn’t, especially since that was basically one of my favorite hobbies.
Now that I’ve anecdoted everyone to death, I’ll pose my own question please. Do you find any compassion in there? Whenever I followed along with the Darkness works, I of course felt that they were mainly to help get the entire world saved by showing them the peril they persisted in. Hence, compassion. However, now I’d view that a lot differently. But from a purely subjective outsider’s opinion, what do you think? Would there be any chance in hell (heh) that something like this could convert you, drive you further away or just make you assume the author wasn’t quite __________? Thanks for your answers.
Just a nitpick, though. Orson Scott Card is a devout Mormon and many of his books directly - the rest indirectly - reflect his faith. Without getting into the debate over whether Mormonism is Christian or not, I think that the Christian publishing world considers Mormon fiction to be a separate category. And while specialty Christian publishing houses existed earlier, as a publishing category and phenomenon the field really has only existed for about two decades or so, long after Canticle was published.
Exapno, you’ve pretty much hit on what I was going to post.
Again, one of the reasons I am reading this series is to get some insight into what is arguably an insidious cultural force. The books are horribly anti-Semitic; many of the Jewish characters end up converting, and there seems to be an effort to target Jews for conversion efforts. This, of course, mirrors the real-world efforts of some denominations to convert Jews, the most notorious being those of the Southern Baptist Convention. FWIW, the Anti-Defamation League denounced these efforts as recently as 2005. The national Convention has publicly renounced that position, and I can’t find a current position statement at the SBC’s website, but there’s no reason to think the evangelizing has stopped, at least at the local level.
Also FWIW, the series is very anti-Catholic. Very few priests are raptured, and those who are are described as not following the Catholic orthodoxy. The man who ascends to the papacy after his predecessor is raptured ends up being the Pontifex Maximus of the new one-world religion although the belief structure of that religion is not specified in any depth. I’m not far enough into the series to know whether the Church is the Whore of Babylon as it is in Jack Chick’s universe, but I’m be willing to bet that it will be.
Throw in a little paranoia about the United Nations and one-world government and it’s not hard to see how LB would appeal to at least the very conservative fundamentalist segment of the American population that feels marginalized because of their beliefs. The writing is very easy to read, so its accessibility to the uneducated is another selling point.
What I am questioning is the series’ appeal to the wider audience. Was it the books’ popularity? Was it morbid curiosity? There has to be a reason for the distribution outside the usual Christian-bookstore market.
On preview, DanBlather, that’s about the funniest thing I’ve read all day.
The LB books sell for the same reason that porn sells. They’re specifically directed to appeal to some very base, simplistic and prurient emotions. They are essentially Christian Fundamentalist hate porn. They’re not much different than something like the Turner Diaries only the bigotry and violent hate fantasy is religious instead of racial. The bad writing is as incidental and irrelevant as the bad acting or writing in porn. Writing, plotting and characters are all kind of beside the point. What sells the genre is the sex and the “sex” in the LB series is the whole fantasy of God coming down to kill anybody who disagrees with a very narrow and extreme (not to mention Scripturally suspect) kind of religious view.
If you’re interested in a well-written series with the same basic plot (tho some cool twists) may I suggest James BeauSeigneur’s THE CHRIST CLONE TRILOGY (In His Image, Birth of an Age, Acts of God). If there were any justice, THAT would be the best selling
Apocalyptic series of the last decade.
Another novel, privately published, not really literary, but quite the gut-punch (think PULP LEFT BEHIND FICTION- the Apocalypse according to Quentin Tarantino) is
Brian Caldwell’s WE ALL FALL DOWN.
Bear with me here, the computer I’m using hates me, and obviously Christian Fiction. I’ve lost two versions of this post, so far, and I hope not to lose another, but…
To address the most recent of your points first - let me discuss a bit about why I mentioned Orson Scott Card, and that specific work of his. I agree he’s a very open Mormon, and has used his fiction to proselytize for his religion, some works more than others, of course. But I choose specifically to mention Speaker because it read to me as a very favorable view of Catholicism, both the cultural aspects as well as the religious ones. I know, when the next book in that series came out, I’d had a book store clerk complain to me that the author had spent much of Xenocide giving a positive view of Mormonism. I told the clerk I’d expected him to give equal time in the series to his own religion, after the good words he’d given Catholicism in the previous book.
I don’t equate Catholicism with the whole of Christianity - but even if you accept the idea that Mormonism is outside of Christianity (a position I agree with some days, and disagree with others) I think Speaker should count as well-written Christian fiction, on it’s own. (Before you go off on this, please read the rest of the post - I’ll explain the definition I’m using, and I realize that for most people in this thread it is a highly flawed definition.)
Which brings us to the points you’d raised in post #19 in this thread.
After thinking about things overnight, I’ve come to the conclusion that in addition to my errors from going with outdated data, what we’re really arguing rests in different definitions. And for the sake of this discussion your definition is the mroe common one - which makes it, I believe the more correct one.
I’m an SF/Fantasy reader, mostly. I read other fiction, as well, but I tend to look at a lot of things through the filter of someone who has felt in the past that his taste in fiction is being marginalized, because the Powers That Be don’t think that serious literature can be written within that genre. If a book has things that I consider SF (especially) features, such as not-yet realized technologies, taking place in the future (at the time of the writing of the work), or simply an exploration of current trends taken to extremes, I’ll tend to think of it as SF. Whether or not the marketing, or the readers, agree with me or not. So, I view such relatively recent works as The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Time Traveller’s Wife as SF, even though I’d met and talked to several people telling others that it’s okay to read them, they’re not really SF.
So, when I think of the expression Christian fiction, I use the same decision tree. Is the work in question one where the story has questions of Christian faith and morality as a signifigant, and sympathetic, part of the plot? If the answer is yes, I will tend to think of such works as Christian fiction, whether they were marketed that way or not. Hence my view of things like Canticle for Liebowitz as being Christian fiction, even though it predates, as you say, the modern publishing model of Christian fiction by several decades.
What I have to accept and concede, however, is that while my definition is not invalid - it’s also not the common perception. You, and others in this thread, are talking specifically about things published as Christian fiction, not fiction published in other genres with a Christian worldview.
Which brings me back to where we’d orginally had our rupture - when I started talking about “well-written Christian fiction.”
What I was thinking, when I used that phrase, was that it described that subset of well-written fiction which happened to have a Christian worldview. I tend to be very suspicious of ‘message fiction,’ to use Robin’s excellent phrase. In my experience (which I have to admit is out of date with respect to the publishing genre of Christian fiction) most message fiction begins with a message, then tries to fit a plot around that. Characters sometimes even get into the writing. More often than not the works I’d read seemed to have characters that were little more than a return of Everyman , with all the individuality that implies.
To my mind the first, and most vital, test of any work of fiction is: Does this story work for the reader, viewer, or listener? If a work cannot pass that first test, it fails of the label ‘well-made fiction.’ Again, my experience with message fiction is that the writer’s first test, and even more importantly the publisher’s first test, is: Is this the right message? If the answer to that is yes, it seems any other storytelling sin is forgivable.
Now, one of the links you’d provided mentions that modern Christian fiction is “not your grandmother’s Christian fiction.” It’s quite possible that in the time since I last looked at the publishing genre of Christian fiction they’ve fixed what seemed to me to be the major flaw in their offerings.
Given the success of the Left Behind series, in spite of the problems I keep hearing about it, I’m not so sure they have. And not so sure that their target audience shares my view about the primacy of the story over anything else.
Oh, for Robin, another question for you, if I may: I know you’ve said you’re a Jew, but do you mind sharing what branch of modern Judaism you belong to? Just an idle curiousity, of no particular importance, so if you don’t care to answer, I won’t be bothered. (Though I’d be shocked to hear you were orthodox or ultra-orthodox.)
My evangelical SIL loaned me a few of her LB books a few years ago and said, “These are the best books I’ve ever read.”
Keep in mind, I am not fond of her, so that already colored it, but I tried to read the first book and couldn’t. It was just awful. Awful writing. Awful plot. Awful characters. This coming from someone 15years deep into reading romance novels*.
This divide between defining sf as a literature and sf as a marketing genre has shaken the field for decades. In the minds of all but the tiny fragment of writers and readers who prefer sf as literature, the battle ended long ago. SF is what is marketed as sf. (That includes fantasy. I often joke that if you pick up a book today and it has on the cover a picture of a person in uniform carrying a Jack Kirbyesque-gun, it’s sf. If it has on the cover a picture of a person in uniform carrying a sword, it’s fantasy. That’s how formulaic the U.S. marketing has become.)
You can talk about literature using Christian themes, but as you now acknowledge nobody else will be using that definition except in specialized situations. Christian fiction is a marketing and publishing genre.
As a marketing genre it faces some of the same strains that the romance genre does. At the same time that many practitioners decry the image of romance as women’s porn, every publishing house - except the Christian romance publishers - is coming out with ever more racy and explicit lines of sexy romance. There are several romance publishers that now do nothing but erotic romance.
So when DtC calls the Left Behind series Christian porn, I think he is quite right, even though that would hardly be a fair assessment of the larger world of Christian publishing. But as we’ve seen on video and DVD and the internet, there is a huge and enthusiastic audience for porn in their favorite fetishes. This happens to be one of them.
Heh. A flaming sword and a pair of stone tablets wouldn’t convert me, so I can’t image that some badly-written book could pull off that trick.
Seriously, it’s like taking a work of bondage and torture snuff porn to a girl on a first date and asking if the book could convert her to the lifestyle. Ain’t going happen. It’s a fantasy for those already inclined to the fetish.
There’s a distinction to be made here between fiction written from a Christian perspective and fiction marketed as being Christian fiction. Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is never marketed as Christian fiction, although he was a devout Catholic at the time he wrote it, and it has Christian themes. I’ve never seen it labeled or sold as Christian fiction. Orson Scott Card’s books are never marketed as Christian fiction, although he’s a devout Mormon. It’s not even a matter of whether most Christians consider Mormonism not to be part of Christianity. It’s just not marketed as Christian fiction because Card and his publishers don’t make any attempt to sell it as such. (It appears, though she doesn’t talk about it much, that J. K. Rowling is a devout Anglican and she would say that there are Christian themes in her books. Try to convince most fundamentalists of that.)
More suprisingly, C. S. Lewis’s fiction is only marginally marketed as Christian fiction, and his nonfiction is only marginally marketed as Christian nonfiction. I first noticed this when I compared the amount of Lewis’s books sold in a Christian bookstore with the amount sold in Kramerbooks and Afterwords, a bookstore/cafe in Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. It’s about as close as you can get to a hip, bohemian place in D.C. where you can eat and buy books late every night and all night on Friday and Saturday. It has a lot more of Lewis’s books than the Christian bookstores I checked. The fact is that many of Lewis’s fans don’t spend any time in places that call themselves Christian bookstores. Furthermore, the sort of people who do frequent such bookstores don’t quite trust Lewis. His theology isn’t quite fundamentalist enough. He doesn’t deal with the fundamentalist hot-button issues enough. Little of his life story intersects with what fundamentalists think of a Christian background.
Fair enough. I was raised Reform but have not been a “practicing” Jew in quite a while; in fact, I’m teetering on the edge of agnostic.
I don’t see a lot of compassion being expressed. Those people, like Hattie Durham and Chaim Rosenzweig who are refusing to convert, are browbeaten into doing so. Chloe Steele Williams is organizing a co-op for believers to be able to purchase food and supplies. I guess if you have no money, you’re SOL, which would contradict the ethos of taking care of the poor.
These books would not make me want to convert. I’m not motivated by fear and the theology expressed is so far outside my own religious upbringing that I can’t reconcile it. I also think LaHaye is a genuinely hateful bigot, so my feelings are probably colored by that opinion as well.
True enough. It’s certainly not something I’d consider a vitally important issue, but it is a definition that I don’t agree with, no matter how popular it might be. I just have to make sure I remember that whatever logic or reason I might bring to my battle, I’m still tilting at windmills.
Unfortunately, it’s easy to forget (from all the head trauma, I think) that one is tilting at windmills.
Agreed. With you, and with DtC. Anecdote time - I’d had a college roommate who was raised in an SBC church, who constantly tried to calm himself down, when he saw things he felt were injustices in the world, by commenting that “When Jesus came again, they’d be sorry.” It wasn’t that he was a hateful bigot, he just felt that justice was beyond his ability, so all he could do was try to “let go and let God.” It was just his way of doing that was rather disturbing.
He came back to school after some holiday or another, and was suddenly trying to stop using this mental loop. I asked him what had happened, and he told me that his father had heard him using that expression in a rather gleeful tone, and said, “You realize, Peter, you’re going to be rather too busy yourself, then, to care about anyone else’s punishment.” This was such a revelation to my roommate he felt he had to change this behavior. (IMNSHO, this was beginning of his rupture with the church he’d been raised in. He’s now at home in an Episcopalian church, I’m pleased to report.)
From what’s being said here it seems that LB is catering to those people who’d never considered that come Judgement Day they’ll be in the scales, as well. (Or who’d never imagine they have anything to fear.)
Which brings me to another question for Robin, and it’s going back to the LB books for a change.
First: do the books seem to accord with any one standard theology that you recognize? Forex, I’m wondering if it’s based on a Calvinist derived teaching, like that of the SBC.
If they are Calvinist derived, how do they handle the issue between The Elect and the occaision of sin at the time of The Rapture?
Oh, and thanks for answering my nosey question, too, Robin. Which leads to another one: If you were still practicing, would you still be reading these books?
Christians are always amazed to be told that from the outside there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between protestants and Catholics, let alone between the fine shading of protestant sects.
As I’ve said before, I’ve read exactly one of those books. (Book 12, I believe, as I think the title was Apocalypse, but I ain’t going to use the valuable electrons to look that up.) Anyway, my take on it I have also posted before. I believe I called the writing “really bad Tom Clancy.” Actually, not even really bad Tom Clancy, but the stuff that gets sold as “Tom Clancy’s Whatever” (NetForce is one that comes to mind as a series title) with one or two or more different writers, none of whom are Tom Clancy.
Exapno Mapcase, but isn’t that the case for divisions within any faith? In order to understand such divisions, to even see the differences that look so obvious from the inside, one has to have internalized, I think, much more of the precepts of a given faith than is common for outsiders to do.
