Reading Evangelicals

How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith

Daniel Silliman

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467462921
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The story of five best-selling novels beloved by evangelicals, the book industry they built, and the collective imagination they shaped

Who are evangelicals? And what is evangelicalism? Those attempting to answer these questions usually speak in terms of political and theological stances. But those stances emerge from an evangelical world with its own institutions—institutions that shape imagination as much as they shape ideology.

In this unique exploration of evangelical subculture, Daniel Silliman shows readers how Christian fiction, and the empire of Christian publishing and bookselling it helped build, is key to understanding the formation of evangelical identity. With a close look at five best-selling novels— Love Comes Softly, This Present Darkness, Left Behind, The Shunning, and The Shack —Silliman considers what it was in these books that held such appeal and what effect their widespread popularity had on the evangelical imagination.

Reading Evangelicals ultimately makes the case that the worlds created in these novels reflected and shaped the world evangelicals saw themselves living in—one in which romantic love intertwines with divine love, humans play an active role in the cosmic contest between angels and demons, and the material world is infused with the literal workings of God and Satan. Silliman tells the story of how the Christian publishing industry marketed these ideas as much as they marketed books, and how, during the era of the Christian bookstore, this—every bit as much as politics or theology—became a locus of evangelical identity.

1

The Romance of Abundant Life

Janette Oke’s Love Comes Softly

The station wagon sped across the Canadian prairie in the summer of 1977. Inside was a full and happy family of six headed for vacation at a nearby lake. Four teenage children were in the back. Edward Oke, the president of Mountain View Bible College in Didsbury, Alberta, was driving. And in the front passenger seat, Janette Oke, forty-two, with a pad of paper on her knees, was writing. This was her novel. Her dream novel. She was writing a romance, set on a prairie like the one rolling by, where a woman found love through hardship—human love but also divine. It was a simple story but filled with Oke’s faith that God wanted people to flourish in their everyday lives and that they could live their best lives if they would submit and accept God’s love. She didn’t know it, but this novel would shape the evangelical imagination. It would sell more than one million coupes, inspire countless new authors, and launch an industry of religious fiction that would serve as the site for an ongoing discussion about what it means to believe in Jesus and live out the reality of that relationship in modern-day life. But at the moment, Oke was just trying to get her plot on paper.¹

Oke (pronounced “oak,” like the tree) was not a professional writer. She worked at a newspaper once while her husband was in seminary in Indiana, but she was in the accounting department. She had written stories as a child. She had written some poetry over the years too. She was so busy, though, with her children and church work and accounting jobs, that she couldn’t really write seriously. She once looked at a mail-order writing course offered by the Christian Writers Institute, in Wheaton, Illinois. She scored well on the aptitude test but decided the course was too expensive.

But she had an idea for a novel—“I don’t know if a writer can tell you how he or she gets ideas,” Oke would later say. “Ideas come”²—and she felt like she had to write it. She didn’t know whether one could write a romance novel that had this theme—a religious romance, where the narrative of falling in love is intertwined with a story about finding faith. She read a lot of romances, usually more than one hundred per year.³ She got them at shopping centers in Calgary, the only place near her home where you could buy books at that time. None of them were Christian. The authors didn’t seem to see or know how human love could be an analogy for one’s relationship to God. In fact, few of the characters in the novels ever prayed or went to church or read the Bible, though the books were often set in very religious periods of time.

They didn’t have religion in those books. What they did have was sex.

There had been a notable shift in the popular romances of the time. The first really successful commercial paperbacks had been gothic romances, starting with Phyllis Whitney’s Thunder Heights and Victoria Holt’s Mistress of Mellyn, both published in 1960. They were novels about mansions and isolated women falling in love with wealthy, mysterious men. The market was soon flooded with similar stories. Between 1969 and 1972, about four hundred new gothic romances were published every year. They were primarily sold in department stores and grocery stores—sometimes even packaged in deals with laundry soap. Women could buy them even on the prairie in Alberta, where there were no regular booksellers. The romances did good business, but a slump in sales in the early 1970s prompted publishers to look for something new. Soon, the book racks in Calgary were stocked with alternatives, which industry experts called “sweet savage” or “erotic historical” romances. They were also called, more popularly, “bodice rippers.” The first one, Kathleen E. Woodiwiss’s novel The Flame and the Flower, starts with a rape. The heroine’s clothes—notably the bodice of her dress—are ripped off in one early scene by the man she will, by the novel’s happy resolution, love and live with ever after.⁴

Oke didn’t like these books. She didn’t like the sexual violence, but it wasn’t just that. She understood that life was a struggle and bad things happen. She understood sorrow. She liked stories about women faced with real challenges. But in her own life she overcame through faith, and that never happened in the romance novels. For her love was also about belief, and how you lived out your belief in practice, in your “Christian walk,” and she wanted a novel with a story like that.

So she wrote one. Then she sent it to one of the publishers that published the paperbacks stocked in the Calgary stores, and got a rejection note. She put the manuscript in a drawer. “I’ll give it to you,” she told God, “so you’ll be free to bless it, Lord.”⁵

Six months later her husband brought home a book about how to get published and a list of evangelical publishing houses. Would they print it? Did they publish romance novels? She didn’t know, but the answer was no. At the time, there were no Christian publishers regularly publishing any fiction, let alone popular romance novels. But that was about to change. Oke sent off six query letters and waited.

The History of Evangelical Publishing

The time was right for an evangelical romance novel. Evangelical publishing was coming into its own, emerging out of the history of American publishing as a solution to a particular market problem. At the end of the nineteenth century, general trade publishing was booming, and the number of new titles printed in America every year tripled between 1880 and 1900. Population growth and rising literacy rates meant an increasing number of readers. Advances in printing technology meant that mass publishing was cheaper, improving profit margins. At the same time, family-owned publishers such as Lippincott, Harper, Scribner, and Houghton Mifflin reorganized as corporations. They professionalized, capitalized, and made bookselling a big business.

But the burgeoning book industry was constrained by problems of distribution. “Book distribution,” writes historian Michael Winship, “has often posed a more difficult problem for publishers than book production. This is especially true in a country like the United States in which production facilities, largely concentrated in eastern urban publishing centers, had to reach a diverse population spread over an extensive area.”⁶ Winship counts only 3,500 bookstores in America in 1914.⁷ These were mostly in urban centers, inaccessible to a lot of people. There were other ways to sell books, however. Publishers used traveling salesmen to peddle subscriptions across the country. This worked well for certain titles—Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, for example—but not for the thousands of new books published every year.

The problem of distribution was felt, especially, with religious titles. It wasn’t profitable to produce a book that would, by its very nature, exclude potential readers. If you could sell a title at only a few places across the country, you didn’t want one that would only interest Methodists. So there wasn’t a lot of religious publishing, even if people were pretty religious overall. In 1900, American publishers released 6,356 new titles. About 7 percent of these were categorized as religious. Religious books sold a little better than poetry and drama, though not nearly as well as fiction.⁸

Where religious publishing thrived was with denominational publishers. This is because a denomination could double as a distribution network. Clergy across the country were linked through their institutions, and they were interested in buying books. Thus, at the start of the twentieth century, religious books were mostly produced by denominational presses. In 1915, the Federal Council Year Book identified 389 Protestant presses—but not for Protestants generally, or even for broad groups of Protestants. The publishers were divided by denomination. The prolific Methodists printed sixty-nine newspapers and had several book publishers. The smallest Protestant group on the list, the six-hundred-member Church of God, Adventist, had two papers.⁹ “Denominations were,” writes historian William Vance Trollinger Jr., “the organizational structure for American Protestantism between 1880 and 1940, and they were the critical locus of identity.”¹⁰

Whatever theological similarities a Methodist might have had with a Mennonite, Methodists and Mennonites were distinct textual communities. These religious groups can both be called “evangelical,” and will be by historians who use an ahistorical theological definition of the term. In their historical, day-to-day reality, however, Methodists and Mennonites were separated. Methodists, according to Trollinger, put out “a cascade of hymnals, Sunday School and Vacation Bible School materials, evangelical tracts and a variety of other religious books and booklets.”¹¹ They were by and for Methodists. The publishers might occasionally turn an eye to non-Methodist book buyers, but they couldn’t really reach them. Just getting books to non-Methodists would be an immense practical problem, requiring new, non-Methodist channels of distribution. To appeal to a non-Methodist book buyer, further, they would presumably need to produce books that were less distinctively Methodist. If they did that, they ran the risk of alienating their core clientele.¹²

The same was true for Mennonites. The Mennonite Publishing House put out 262 books and pamphlets between 1908 and 1945.¹³ It was a small business, but it was successful because it served a niche market. These were Mennonite publications, produced, distributed, and consumed by Mennonites. They were not readily available to “evangelicals” generally, and it wouldn’t have worked, financially, to try to sell Mennonite books as evangelical books and to stop serving their distinctive niche.

Some religious print material crossed denominational lines, of course. A number of ambitious publishing projects at the start of the century brought together various Protestant groups into cooperative enterprises. Significant examples include the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, and the Bible Institute Colportage Association,¹⁴ all of which used colporteurs—book peddlers—to distribute books. Dwight L. Moody’s Bible Institute Colportage Association, for instance, had about one hundred of these booksellers in 1906. Funding came from multiple denominations and from Christians across the denominational spectrum. According to historian Candy Gunther Brown, however, these cooperative Protestant publishing ventures “at no point supplanted denominational identity.”¹⁵ Joint publishing endeavors worked only if the books were sold very cheaply, and if the stream of texts didn’t create a print culture that challenged the denominations subsidizing the cost of the books. This was sometimes stated explicitly. Moody’s group, for example, made it clear that the goal was to “carry the Gospel, by means of the printed page, where church privileges are wanting or not embraced.”¹⁶ The books were not meant to be read by Mennonites or Methodists, or even by Christians who might identify with Moody. They were tools for evangelism, meant for people who had no religious identity at all.

A new, transdenominational print culture emerged with the fundamentalist-modernist controversies. As Protestant denominations divided in theological disputes, the fighting factions sometimes discovered they had allies in other denominations. They sometimes identified more with these allies than with people in their own religious groups. New textual communities encouraged these people to talk to each other and to establish new conversations across denominational lines, establishing new religious identities.

Fundamentalists, for example, could subscribe to the series of books from which they took their name, The Fundamentals. Historian Timothy E. W. Gloege writes that the editors of The Fundamentals sought to “create a generic, nonsectarian, ‘conservative’ Protestantism free from denominational controls.”¹⁷ The editors developed a mailing list of 175,000 religious leaders who belonged to very different religious groups and who disagreed with each other—sometimes fiercely—about theological issues that they considered to be of the utmost importance. The Fundamentals told them that what they had in common was more important than what they disagreed about. Some concurred, identifying with this new religious brand. They subscribed to The Fundamentals and, in doing so, identified themselves with this new conversation. After the first volume of The Fundamentals was published, the editors reportedly receiving three hundred or more grateful letters per day. Pastors from around the country said they didn’t feel alone anymore. The publication, Gloege writes, “created an imagined community of Protestants united in their opposition to theological modernism.”¹⁸ Periodicals such as Moody Monthly, the Pilot, the King’s Business, and the Sunday School Times served the same function.¹⁹

Some denominational booksellers also joined this new, transdenominational Protestant identity. Notable here are the Dutch Reformed publishers in Grand Rapids, Michigan. At first a company like Eerdmans was strictly denominational. William B. Eerdmans Sr. himself was affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church, and so was the company to which he gave his name. The company served the Dutch Reformed immigrants of western Michigan, selling theology books to students at Calvin College and Seminary and then later publishing the school’s professors.²⁰ As Eerdmans expanded, the company relied on the immigrant church as a distribution network. Calvin graduates became pastors around the Midwest, and they and their congregations bought Eerdmans books. As Dutch Reformed immigrants transitioned into English and found their place in America’s religious landscape, Eerdmans helped them maintain their distinct identity.²¹ The publisher acted as gatekeeper. In this role, however, it also started selling non–Dutch Reformed books to Dutch Reformed readers. The Eerdmans brand guaranteed the orthodoxy of American authors who might have otherwise been suspect to devout members of the Christian Reformed Church. In the 1930s, Eerdmans sold the works of fundamentalist Presbyterians such as A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, and people associated with Moody, such as Harry Ironside, a Plymouth Brethren preacher.²²

Zondervan, another Grand Rapids publisher, followed this model. The bookseller was founded when two brothers, Pat and Bernie Zondervan, left the company of their uncle William Eerdmans Sr. and started their own in 1931. The first book they sold was The Virgin Birth of Christ by J. Gresham Machen, a fundamentalist champion in the Presbyterian church.²³ Virgin Birth had been published by Harper & Brothers the year before, to disappointing sales. It was supposed to be a great salvo in the fundamentalist-modernist controversies, but the New York publisher hadn’t marketed the book successfully. Harper & Brothers thought only academics would really be interested in questions of the historicity of Jesus’s birth and the problem of the relationship between what German theologians termed Historie and Geschichte. The publisher priced Virgin Birth at $5 at the height of the Great Depression and sent it out for review to the Times Literary Supplement, Christian Century, the Anglican Theological Review, and Deutsche Literaturezeitung.²⁴ It was also advertised to ministers with a notice in the Religious Book Club Bulletin, a journal associated with the Federal Council of Churches, an institutional enemy of the fundamentalists.²⁵ The publisher was apparently unaware that across Depression-ridden America, there were religious farmers, shopkeepers, and housewives, not to mention Calvinist clergy, who were very interested in these quest...