At the turn of this century publishing was in trouble. Nobody was buying books…except the ones written as “inspirational” stories. That created a burgeoning demand for works of fiction that would appeal to Christians. It also resulted in a burgeoning supply of people who wrote works designed to appeal to Christians. Some major authors like Anne Rice even underwent timely conversion experiences that enabled them to capitalise on the trend. Other major authors well-known in secular circles wrote under pen names to market books in the profitable Christian Fiction genre.
That’s when I started to get really cautious about “Christian Fiction” and the theology therein. I’ve been a Christ-follower since the age of four. I grew up in the church environment and–like everyone else in that society–I am no stranger to the people who use a presumed shared faith to sell things.
“Brother, I’d like to talk to you about your family’s insurance needs.”
“I’ve gotten into this wonderful new hobby called scrapbooking/needlework/candle making/jewelry making. I’m hosting a party at my house so all you girls in the Sunday School can come and hear more about it. It’ll be a Christ-honouring time of fellowship and fun!”
“Sister, I understand you might be in the market for a vehicle. Come by the lot and I’ll show you what I’ve got in mind for you. It’s a special car I’ve had set aside just for a member of the church family who had a special need.”
Sometimes the salespeople are motivated by a genuine servant’s heart and desire to help. Other times they’re wolves fleecing the sheep. You never know for sure but after a few years you learn to be on your guard. (When you in turn go into business for yourself, you also get used to the people who expect you to give them things for free or for discount. The True Believers will get you coming and going.)
So now that there are a metric ton of books aimed at the Christians with disposable income, leisure time and desire to not read cuss words or sex scenes, I am what is known (derisively) as The Theology Police. I know that among writers the general feeling seems to be “hey, you can accept dragons and vampires and ghosts. Accept that the theology in my book isn’t going to be entirely orthodox to Christianity in general!”
Here’s my take on it. You are taking advantage of a niche market. That niche market has concrete expectations that are the very definition of what makes it. Why is it bad for people to expect you to play by that market’s rules?
Let’s say you wanted to take advantage of the burgeoning gay fiction market. Like the Christians of the 90s the homosexual marketplace is growing because it has disposable income, leisure time and an easily definable set of expectations. I’d think that if you decided to sell books marketed as Gay Fiction that had a homosexual male main character who ended up falling in love with a woman you’d be not only foolish but also taking advantage of your readers presumptions. They gave you ten bucks expecting something. In return you gave them pretty much the exact opposite of what they were looking for.
So why is it any different to give Christians a book where the main character is a Christian but everything else that happens to her is decidedly not Christian in scope?
You can call me the Theology Police all day long. I just prefer to think of myself and others like me as Christians who’ve been taken advantage of once too often.
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The irony of all this is that I generally don’t enjoy “Christian Fiction” precisely because so much of it is theologically unorthodox and so much of it is also of very poor quality. I’ve read a few lately that are okay quality-wise but I’d just as soon read from the General Market where I’m being sold stories without an accompanying niche marketing tactic.
I think i understand what you’re saying but just a comment about Anne Rice. She was very Catholic and her daughter died. Took her a while to come back to the “Church.” So I can’t say that her timeliness was really culturally/financially motivated. Most of her vampire books had definite Catholic mad at God issues.
Not sure about the whole idea of inspirational as a genre. Many great christian fiction are not inspirational at all. Am not sure if Christian fiction should inspire or reflect. There are also stories that are Christian doctrine but not Christian worldview or Christian morality, and all kinds of permutations. So the Christian fiction theology is complicated. When it comes to Christian theology and small press, though, I agree. If someone has a company and needs to make money and sells a certain product to a certain group of people (not all Christians but to a small white North American Christian middle class population) then the publisher should know what his product is. And who his consumers are.
When i read Christian fiction by Black folks or Christian fiction by Native Americans or Christian fiction by non-evangelicals i don’t generally expect the fiction theology to be what American white Christian middle class folks would require. It depends on the customer.
Ok, but we both agree a novel isn’t a sermon, isn’t the Bible or even a Commentary. And there’s a vast difference between a Christian-themed or Biblical-worldview work of fiction, and pulling a bait and switch on your audience.
Fiction supposes the reader can navigate what is (hopefully) an internally consistent and credible story. Ghosts, demons princes, zombies, (fast or slow) aliens, dwarves/elves, superheroes, FTL travel, are plot devices, tools, conventions, tropes, whatever to provide tension and entertainment.
Screwtape Letters, This Present Darkness, and the bloated Left Behind saga can all be scrutinized for dubious theology, yet they work as fiction. (OK, maybe not LB, but you get my point.)
Every reader views a story through their particular lens, and I’m not convinced the author is responsible to smooth out any/all patches that might possibly prompt ‘cognitive dissonance’. If they did, the result would be so insipid, so feeble as to be voiceless and irrelevant.
Well, I don’t necessarily agree that a novel isn’t a sermon, and that’s where we’re in a different camp. I think that some novels are clearly meant as polemics, and that’s when I’m especially guarded.
Ghosts and demon princes, to use your analogy, and witches are plot devices and tropes. They are fine if you want your novel to be sold to people who don’t have the same beliefs about ghosts and demons and witches.
My argument is not that those things can’t be used. My argument is that if you want to use them as your tropes, conventions, whatever, you get used to trying to sell in a different marketplace. Make your peace with being outside the comfort zone offered by having a “Christian” publisher and a defined, targeted marketplace of Christians.
OK. I agree: you market yourself/work specifically as “Christian” to the Christian demographic, you’ve got to play by their rules.
That’s not my thing, so I’m looking at it different. And while I’ve read too many polemics disguised as novels, I never thought they were good ones.
I’m of the opinion one of the reasons Christians (in general) don’t make good films or books is that they’re forever freighting them didactic. They don’t understand or lack confidence in God, the audience, and the medium, and so yank on the choke collar whenever they suspect it might stray.
Well, I agree entirely with this. I hate polemics. And I hate didactism in any fiction of any type. (S.M. Stirling’s love affair with Paganism in his post-apocalyptic series was just as nail-pullingly didactic as anything I’ve read in the Christian sphere.)
But then again, I am a firm believer in Christians writing well and selling good stories to excited readers. I’ll be honest, I don’t like the “Christian Fiction” market. But I know that it exists.
It just seems to me that there are a lot of authors who want the comfort of being Published By Christians For Christians but also like the freedom to write whatever they want. It doesn’t work that way. (You also can’t write pro-Communist screeds for Heritage Magazine.)
Maybe I’ve been a freelancer too long. Maybe I’ve spent too much time writing for clients. I believe that you write for your audience, you write what you’re paid to write.
Conversely, if you hand me a book from Bethany House that you bought at Family Bookstore and tell me “here’s a great Christian Horror Novel!” and there are women who are witches I’m going to cry foul. Yes, I read and love Harry Potter. But Rowling had the great good sense to not slap crosses and angels all over the spine of those books.
I KNOW how big a deal Christian Marketing is for books. I have a mother that only reads things that come from Christian bookstores. Most of her friends are the same way. And they’re all middle- or upper-middle class. It’s nice knowing that those Red Hat ladies who have clubby lunches every week will buy your book, read it, tell their friends to read it. Those ladies are a large part of the reason why the Christian market thrives when nothing else does.
I have seen firsthand the battle between writers who feel they must follow every rule for Christian fiction and the writers who want more freedom in content and theology. I think they are both right. I personally don’t like the sanitized, formulaic, standard “Christian fiction” fare, but I believe wholeheartedly that it has a right to exist. There is a huge demographic of readers exactly as you have described who *want* that kind of book, and the Christian publishing world is doing exactly what they should be doing by giving it to them.
For those of us who want different though, we need to step outside that box. We need to shake off the Christian fiction label and stand in our own space.
I don’t normally do this, but I had a post up at New Authors’ Fellowship about a year and a half ago that addressed that war and where I stand on it, and it got quite a bit of attention, getting referenced by several other bloggers. So, here’s the link, if I may…. http://newauthors.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/put-down-your-sword-and-write/
Anyway, great post.
I can’t believe that was a year and a half ago. I remember reading it back then and it seems like maybe three months ago. I just reread it and I do agree wholeheartedly.
Anyway, my stance on this has become a lot firmer in the last three years. If you want to write something not bound by the “rules” (although to me theology is a bit different than “we don’t say ‘panties’”) of the established Christian-targeting fiction market then do. Write what you want to write. Tell the story you want to tell.
Just don’t try to shoehorn it into a marketplace where it doesn’t belong. The vaunted Christian Fantasy everyone points to with that “but..but..but..” face–Lewis and Tolkein–wasn’t published in the Christian-targeting fiction market. It was published in mainstream fiction and, like all great fiction, found its way to the readers who were meant to have it. (In the cases of Lewis and Tolkein that’s a lot of different types of readers, too.)
My complaint is when people want the market and complain with the strictures that go with it.
Right now there is a wide variety of market options for fiction–writers haven’t had this much variety in decades, perhaps ever. You can go with a small press who targets outside the CBA (as you have done), you can self-publish, you can go mainstream.
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I disagree with this. We need Christian spec fiction in the mainstream CBA market if only so a young christian teen can go into the Christian section of a bookstore and find out that it’s okay to read and write it. The theology police doesn’t simply wan’t specific kinds of works, they often want specific kinds of people, too. Heck, it’s so bad that men don’t even read mainstream Christian fiction at all.
“mainstream CBA market” you’re confusing terms. The CBA market is Christian books. The mainstream market is Barnes & Noble.
“so a young christian teen can go into the Christian section of a bookstore and find out that it’s okay to read and write it.”
If a young Christian Teen can only write what’s already been written they don’t have enough imagination to be a writer. Period.
” We need Christian spec fiction in the [...] CBA market”
Well, then, write some that doesn’t include God being overpowered by aliens or young vampires or other things that flat-out contradict scripture.
Now when I say I’m the Theology Police that’s what I mean. I don’t mean I’m the Cultural Police. If your space alien-fighting good guys drink a beer I don’t care. Aversion to alcoholic beverages is endemic to culture; it is not scriptural.
But if you give me a supposedly “Christian” book that talks about how Jesus is not divine, you better believe I’m gonna raise a hue and cry.
Mainstream Christian=CBA market, versus indie or small net press like Marcher Lord. The net and self-pubs do great things, but they are on the outside looking in.
The thing about teens-look, I don’t know what your denom is like. You’re Mennonite if I recall. But a lot of us had the evangelical Theology police get down on us for liking SF at all. If you’ve never had a parent toss out your perfectly innocent fantasy book because it was fantasy, or had to listen as someone went on about fantasy being of the devil, you know how important it can be for Christian spec fic to get acceptance. Kids get turned away from the faith because of this-they think that what they like is completely incompatible with the Christian faith. If the CBA market just embraced spec fic, we could finally see those cultural attitudes start to lessen, and maybe not drive so many people out to the secular world where Christian fantasy doesn’t even exist.
As for the rest, yeah we are trying. The problem though is that this leads to a lot of safe books, because you can’t anticipate how something with no theology behind it might be regarded. Or what you think is okay for fiction suddenly becomes a stumbling block. Or it punctures cultural beliefs. It isn’t about heresy, but the gray area where people interpret doctrine as it pertains to fiction and the points they make. A writer might make a story about a vampire to show that even monsters can be redeemed, but people will just say “Christian vampires can’t work!” as they read secular vampire books like candy.
“evangelical Theology police”—These people are not THEOLOGY police. They are cultural police. That is a different animal altogether. Theology is straight up What Is The Nature Of GOD. When I say I’m the THEOLOGY police I mean that I’m watching for things like “if they use the Christian God, do they acknowledge the trinity? Do they acknowledge the divinity of Jesus?”
Cultural policing is what a lot of folks confuse with theological police. It’s the stuff that I have no use for. I’d personally entire that the entire book of Revelation is written in the style of a Fantasy book.
I have no use for the “you can’t have drinking/card playing/sexual thoughts in a Christian book” because that’s again, cultural. What one cultural subset of Christianity believes is not theological. I’m a defender of the faith. Not a defender of the faithful’s cherished illusions and practices.
I don’t think there’s always that neat of a distinction. You’re worried about something extreme, but for some, just having the words magic in a book brings up scriptural warnings about practicing it. It’s not cultural in the sense of peaked church roofs because we have snow here-it’s inbetween where theology exists, but matters are either unclear or left to the believers discretion. But the culture behind the theology is constantly hard to the point where it becomes hard or impossible for people to enjoy the church and its art. I don’t think it’s possible or healthy for us to find that solely in the secular culture.
I don’t really have a dog in this discussion, obviously. But, you know, Jewish fiction is fiction written by Jews, largely but not exclusively about Jews, and informed by Jewish history and the experience of being a Jew (which is a pretty wide latitude). The core audience for most of that fiction is and always will be Jewish, but it has wider appeal as well. And I don’t understand why “Christian fiction” shouldn’t be the same thing.* So some of it will be geared to presenting the lived lives of certain individuals who are part of the readership group (whether in realistic novels, romances, SF/F, or whatever), and some will be geared towards examining the problems and challenges of membership in the group. I mean, if you are going to use the phrase “Christian fiction” to mean just what certain marketers want it to mean and nothing else, you might as well call it “product” and be done with it. If you are using it as something more meaningful, let it actually be full of meaning — as full as it can hold.
*The more I think about it, the more relevant the comparison seems — because the “Christian” in “Christian fiction” describes a minority among Christians among the American reading public and among USian Christians altogether. The position is similar, though of course not identical.
But, you know, Jewish fiction is fiction written by Jews, largely but not exclusively about Jews, and informed by Jewish history and the experience of being a Jew (which is a pretty wide latitude). The core audience for most of that fiction is and always will be Jewish, but it has wider appeal as well. And I don’t understand why “Christian fiction” shouldn’t be the same thing.
I’m not trying to be glib, but I think you’re having the misfortune of coming into the servants’ quarters and thinking that the house is poorly decorated.
There are many Christian Fictions that are as you describe Jewish Fictions. I’ll point for example to Victor Hugo and Les Miserables.
Most of us don’t even use the term “Christian Fiction” for this exact reason. That’s why I’ve tried very hard to specify that I’m talking specifically exactly about a PRODUCT and the NICHE MARKET for that product. I’m not speaking of the entire body of literary work by Christians. I’m not talking about Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee and Victor Hugo and the dude who wrote _Brothers Karamazov_ and Barbara Kingsolver, etc.
So the response you’ve given is a very legitimate one to a conversation that’s been parsed quite a bit, but one to which you have sadly not been privy.
First, I certainly didn’t mean to insult your decorating scheme. (In fact, I’m not sure how I did that, and I hope you’ll explain it to me so I can refrain from similar disparaging thoughts and comments in the future.)
Second, not all writings by Jews are “Jewish fiction.” An immense proportion of writing by Jews in the US are “Jewish fiction,” because so very many aspects of Jewish life, experience, world-view, etc. are “marked” here, in the literary sense. They aren’t taken for granted, and the author’s sense of being a Jew informs the writing. Similarly, not all works by Christian authors are “Christian fiction” in the sense I’m using the phrase, let alone in the sense you are using it — only those works whose authors are writing-while-conscious-of-being-Christian, or writing about themes, dilemmas, or world-views that they themselves characterize as being specifically Christian (in distinction from and possible in opposition to USian or European or Western culture at large). So (IMO) Dostoevsky is clearly writing Christian fiction (by my definition), because he’s dealing with the theology of behavior; Flannery O’Connor is writing Christian fiction because she, as a Catholic, is trying to make sense of Protestant beliefs; Harper Lee is not writing Christian fiction, because there’s nothing specifically Christian either in the topic she chooses, in her characters’ perceptions, or in the way she treats their actions.
And I’d just think that if you’d choose the larger definition of Christian fiction, it would be easier for you to place the specific sort of works that you’re discussing here (in the more limited genre that you are describing as Christian fiction), in various niches of the larger space. And, yeah, some of them would be Christian-fiction-but-heterodox-or-even-heretical (we have to deal with Philip Roth, ya know), and some of them would be a lot less tendentious than that, and some of them would be great literature and some of them wouldn’t, but I think that there’d be less call for the Fiction Theology Police.
I didn’t take it as an insult. I just meant that this has been an ongoing conversation with lots of different rooms and decor schemes and whatnot and it may look like we’re all just bland and lacking depth when you come into this one part of the “house”.
I suppose I differ with you in choosing Harper Lee because Lee did write about very Christian things like self-sacrifice, perfect love, standing up for what’s right in the face of difficulty. Not that Christianity has a corner on those things, but that advancing them is usually the work of someone focused on whatever faith they hold.
My preference as a whole is to let “Christian Books” as the type mentioned here to sink or swim in the larger market just like any other books, because I think that’s how we get quality, representation, etc. But since some members of my faith are chronically separatist and enjoy having protected clubhouses of safety where one can go without hearing “bad” words or seeing bottles of beer on the wall we are stuck with this particular way of doing things.
The thing is, that if I can read To Kill a Mockingbird and think that Atticus Finch is a real mensch, Lee has taken out anything specifically Christian in his behavior. Yes, the things you mention are Christian values. But they are valued by so many moral systems (I would say by all moral systems besides maybe Objectivism) that they lack a specifically Christian framework unless one is provided. IMO, at least.
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Last year I read several books marketed as “Christian”. Some weren’t too bad, but had nothing distinctly Christian in their content apart form an occasional reference to God. However others had very dodgy theology – including the idea that people’s “souls” could could be scientifically separated from their bodies (for purposes I no longer recall, apart from the authors desire to write a ghost story).
I would LOVE to read quality fiction that treated Chrisitan theology with respect. Until I find it I think I prefer to read “secular” literature – at least with that I’m given no unfuliflled expectations regarding its “spiritual” content.