Reading Evangelicals, By Daniel Silliman

 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2021)

News editor of Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism, Daniel Silliman has given us a candid assessment of the movement, based on five blockbuster books or book series. These crossover books are the public face of evangelical Christianity for most secular readers. Silliman argues they have also set the agenda for current evangelical thought and redefined how many conservative Christians see the world and their role in it.

For example, most Christians once held that an abundant life is one of proper belief and orthodox religious practice, so they looked to books of doctrine and biblical commentary for guidance. Then Jeannette Oke’s novel Love Came Softly dared to reimagine “spiritual fullness as falling in love, and feeling safe, and knowing someone has the best plans for you” (32). It marked a watershed.

Oke’s novel convinced readers that the Christian life is not a solitary intellectual experience, but a relational odyssey with God and those who love us. In the tidal wave of Christian romances that followed, we saw that God can give a believer more than a correct belief system. The pleasure, personal fulfillment, and joy of a romantic relationship are equally important gifts of divine love.

Silliman shows that blockbuster Christian novels have also had a significant impact on evangelical philosophy and doctrine. Crossway Books produced apologetic volumes by Francis Schaeffer, C. Everett Koop, and others who argued that the Religious Right was Christianity’s last bastion against secular humanism. But these books appealed primarily to intellectuals and the discussion of secular humanism was primarily an effete topic. Then Frank Paretti’s novel This Present Darkness catapulted it into the public square.

Another example: Only a few Christians believed dispensational teachings about a global Tribulation and an endtime Rapture of faithful believers until the Left Behind novel series was published. These doctrines were then embraced by many evangelical Christians who had not given much thought to the Bible’s endtime teachings until then.

I believe we can find instructive insights in Silliman’s book. I most appreciated his bios of the authors, which reveal how they came to write these landmark books. Nearly all of them were first-time authors who wrote their books to draw readers into a more meaningful understanding of the Bible or to reexamine their own relationship with God, as William Paul Young did with The Shack.

Another vital subtheme of the book is the current realignment of the evangelical book pubishing industry.  Silliman mourns the loss of Christian bookstores as "discourse communities" where such theological ideas can be discussed and compared. They are fast disappearing along with other brick-and-mortar bookstores. Silliman describes how Christian publishers viewed these blockbuster books with suspicion, then delight and amazement as they racked up sales in the tens of millions of copies. But as bookstores disappear, the cost of marketing books skyrocket and profit margins plummet, so publishers are slashing their plans and merging to survive. For these reasons, the whole landscape of Christian publishing is changing dramatically.

He concludes with two criticisms of these five blockbuster novels:

·       “The novels promoted individualism, first of all. In Oke’s romance novel, the heroine flourished when she realized God’s love for her…[However,] that woman was never asked to imagine how her abundance related to her neighbor’s needs, or how her fullness and flourishing were bound up with that of other people” (190).

·       “The best-selling fiction, second, encouraged readers to oppose pluralism. Pluralism is imagined as the cause of cultural upheaval, and readers are asked again and again to imagine how upsetting difference is. In Left Behind, it is pluralism that prompts crisis.…The novel asks readers…to imagine feeling attacked and imagine defending themselves. Every encounter with difference is presented as a site of struggle” (191).

Fair or not? Constructive or not? Most important: How does our work look in light of Silliman's critique?

Joe Allison writes both fiction and nonfiction, and has been a member of the Indiana chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. His most recent book is Hard Times (Warner Press: 2019). He lives in Anderson, IN, with his wife Maribeth.