So say the authors of Left Behind. Glad we've got that cleared up.
On a vaguely related note, why is Christian popular fiction so awful? I've read a fair sample of the big names--Frank Peretti and of course, a few of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Left Behind novels.
I don't think they're bad because of the religious aspects; though I'm not myself a believer, I have a healthy respect for other peoples' faith. Besides, if I can suspend disbelief for Dark Knight, I think I can manage a few demons and angels.
The problem is, the writing is dreadful. The Left Behind series reads like it was written by a fourteen year old B student with a HUGE crush on Jesus Christ. To call the characters cardboard cutouts would be an insult to paper dolls, which are vastly more realistic than anything created by Messrs Lehaye and Jenkins. The dialogue reads like it's been triple-starched. And the plot belongs in a churchyard.
Peretti is probably the most readable of the major Christian fiction writers, yet it still puts me inexorably in mind of Mark Twain's evisceration of James Fenimore Cooper.
There's no reason this should be so; religious faith is one of the great human dramas. Nor is it that they are pitched to a general audience; there are a lot of great mass-market storytellers. So why haven't better writers emerged in this genre?
Copyright © 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
It's all about the market.
The Christian Market has demonstrated that they'll buy pretty much anything based on worldview rather than on quality.
The really good authors who write Christian stuff (C.S. Lewis, for example... Tolkien and L'Engle for more Oblique (or "dog whistle") Christianity) tend to not be categorized as Christian, necessarily. Oh, it's there in the background, of course. The focus, however, is on the fact that it's good... and the fact that it's good allows you to overlook the fact that Gandalf was, technically, an angel.
Because, as in Christian music, the message takes priority over the medium. Those who buy it will do so mostly regardless of the quality; those who do not will not be swayed to do so by excellent writing.
I don't mean to rub it in or anything, but how about an acknowledgement that LaHaye's fairly sympathetic demurral:
hardly seems to indicate that he thinks the Obama-as-antichrist rumors rise to the level of, say, a "Protocols of the Elders of Zion level bizarre misinterpretation of another group's symbols"
"why is Christian popular fiction so awful?" Oh, come on, the Bible's quite a decent read if you skip all the begetting.
Yup, it's exactly the same logic South Park parodied in the episode where Cartman starts a Christian rock band because it's the quickest, easiest way to make millions regardless of talent. I still love his lyrics, "I'm gonna get down on my knees and start pleasing Jesus..."
Yes, the begetting is beboring.
I'm curious if you've ever read the Twilight books and if you have what you thought of those. While not traditionally Christian I hear the author's Mormonism colors the tone of the books.
CS Lewis's Till We Have Faces is one of my favorite novels, Christian or non.
Megan I think you should say "modern evangeligal Christian popular fiction" is awful. Christian art once ruled the world. How exactly it went from Paradise Lost to Left Behind is a long, sad depressing story. That being said, Ann Rice's book on the childhood of Jesus that came out a few years ago was very good. I am told the Lowlands of Scotland series by Liz Curtis Higgs is very good, but I have never read them.
I think you confuse bad evangelical writing for all Christian writing.
There is nothing hard to understand here- most published writing is terrible. Works of good writing is more rare than is generally believed, because if you are interested in the subject, you will overlook the bad writing for the most part.
The same applies to music and other art forms.
Thanks for the link to "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." It is far and away my favorite Twain essay, and quite possibly the funniest thing he (and perhaps anyone) ever wrote. I have read it many, many times, and I laugh out loud every time.
This is like pulling down the latest paperback silliness in fantasy or sci-fi and asking why it is so bad. As Yancy already cited Gresham's Law: 90% of everything is crap. If you want better Christian fiction, check out Gilead by Marilynn Robinson and also its sequel that is coming out next month.
Whenever the message matters more than the story, the book is generally terrible. Paradise Lost is magnificent and packed full of religious meaning. And Milton said that his purpose was to "justify God's ways to men." If that had really been his purpose, though, I doubt he would have made Satan the most memorable and compelling character in the epic. Great storytellers are great storytellers because they care, first and foremost, about the story.
But when the author is genuinely setting out to deliver a Message, he'll violate pretty much every "rule" of great storytelling. Characters won't be well-defined and rounded; they are merely functionaries in The Plot, not real people doing real things. The Moral and the Theme will be batted over your head every few pages. The reader will be preached at endlessly. Good characters will be Good and bad characters will be Bad; there will be no such thing as a compelling villain who can really challenge the hero, nor will there be a compelling hero who is a person, not a pose.
Christian pop fiction is bad because the authors are obsessed with telling a Christian Story with a Good Message. They are not interested, like Dante or Milton, in telling a great story. It's a shame. Many of the world's greatest stories were inspired by religion and religious belief. It's hard to believe that someone could make the apocalypse boring, but I couldn't even get through the first book in the Left Behind series.
Now, if you want a good story about the apocalypse, try Good Omens. :)
Yes, it's pop "Christian" fiction, most of which is some kind of genre, and further, some kind of imitation of whatever genre fiction is selling in the secular market - that is awful.
(There is "Christian" chick-lit, complete with covers featuring spikey, flowery drawings of gals striding purposefully with shopping bags. I have done my time at the Christian Booksellers Marketing shows.)
It's awful because it's preaching and pedantic. It's not literature, and makes no attempt to be. It's conveying a lesson, neatly packaged, satisfying and non-scandalous to the believers.
But of course, as another points out, this is not the be-all and end-all of the intersection of Christianity and literature. Graham Greene? Evelyn Waugh? Updike? Flannery O'Connor? Dostoevsky?
I'll leave the rest to Flannery:
...the artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists.
(There is "Christian" chick-lit, complete with covers featuring spikey, flowery drawings of gals striding purposefully with shopping bags. I have done my time at the Christian Booksellers Marketing shows.)
Er. That itself must be a sign of the apocalypse. Forget the stories, it's time to start praying...
I think the bar does get lowered considerably for Christian works.
There is the siege mentality that celebrates any Christian art, and thinks it needs to be nurtured and not criticized, so Christian writers are not pushed to greater quality.
Hey, it's Amy Welborn! I had no idea you read McArdle. :)
For religiously themed fiction from a very skewed point of view:
http://www.amazon.com/Lamb-Gospel-According-Christs-Childhood/dp/0380813815/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218817689&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Stupidest-Angel-Heartwarming-Christmas-Terror/dp/0060842350/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218817689&sr=1-6
What do you think about the quality of writing in the Bible? I have to say that I think the story of Joseph and his brothers, the book of Esther and the last half of the first book of Samuel (the stories of King Saul and King David) are really well-told stories.
CS Lewis has been mentioned.
Stephen Lawhead is also pretty good, though I haven't read many of his books, and what I did read I read a long time ago.
Basically everything Elizabeth said above. She pretty much nailed it.
The Left Behind books suck aesthetically because they're not art. They're pornography. Their main appeal is prurient. They're filled with gratuitous torture and murder and there's a BIG ORGASM at the end. It's even called the "Coming," albeit the Second one.
This sort of garbage can be enjoyed as comedy by non-fundies. Just as "The Omen" (the original one) is one of the funniest movies of all time, the Cloud Ten endtimes movies are real yuk-fests if you're in the right mood. The one with Gary Busey, Howie Mandel, and a just-post-psychotic break Margot Kidder is a classic of bad film.
Although I hesitate to judge other people's relationship with the divine, I think that most Christian "art" these days is junk because the authors/artists have a superficial relationship with their religion and/or god. In fact, I remember a quote from Bono saying something like the best music comes from those who are running to or from god. I feel like much Christian art (especially music) these days is made by people who never took their faith beyond the gradechool level. This leads to art that lacks the honesty, introspection, and confusion that naturally comes with someone truly trying to understand a particular religion and/or version of the divine. These also happen to be the same components needed to make all great art, religious or not.
DS,
I agree completely. I had never thought of it that way, but that is a great point. Christian "pop" music is as bad as Christian writing. But it also lacks any kind of introspection or metaphor and is thus about as unclever as possible and bad art.
All genre fiction is atrocious. Have you looked at "literary" fiction these days - relentlessly horrible doesn't even begin to describe how painful reading that crap is.
Bridget Jones - crap. Shopaholic - crap (I kind of like it, but it's still crap. I'm also straight, goddamn it!) Tom Clancy - crap (crappier the further removed from Red October - damn successful writers becoming impervious to editing). Harry Potter - crap (see Tom Clancy. You'd think she was getting paid by the word like Dickens, rather than by the book. She should have broken the series up into 35 books, would have made FAR more money, if that's even possible). Sex and the City - crap (slutty, materialistic, fun as all hell and should be taken as instruction, sans golddiggng, for girls in major cities. Yes I am a libertinistic libertarian.)
John Derbyshire is right (I hardly ever say this, as he's a Buchananite who wants to surrender the world to whatever authoritarian comes up, apparently was a Maoist during college, and is shockingly racist) about Pop Culture being filth. Of course our definition of filth differs - he's worried about the slatterns that I love, while I just acknowledge that nearly all cultural products are crap.
The worst, of course, is the schlock produced with the aim of being HIGH CULTURE. Shakespeare was popular (see all the sexual puns), Oscar Wilde was popular (ditto), classical music was popular, opera was popular. People treating art like srs bzness make depressingly boring, bad art. Good art is only found decades and centuries after it was made - it speaks to the human condition across generations, surmounting fashion, fads, intellectual dismissal, repression, etc. thanks to its innate honesty and beauty.
Some (evangelical) Christian art will be seen as stuff for the ages. Can't tel you what it is - really not my scene - but I'll place huge money on it not being the Left Behind series. P.O.D., Creed, Jars of Clay, Sixpence None the Richer, etc have all had reasonable success on mainstream charts despite sledgehammer obvious Christian lyrics and group names. Incomprehensible lyrics have surely helped somewhat (P.O.D., some Creed) while people's inability to understand the allegories helped others (SNPTR took their name from C.S. Lewis and had a hit with a song about making out with Jesus!). Not saying that cross-over Christian pop/rap/rock isn't crap, but that it's not necessarily crappier than the rest of what's out there.
P.S. I'm a libertine agnotheist with a seriously heavy science background. Just couldn't let all of the Christian genre be painted with the brush of Left Behind or (shudder) Kirk Cameron.
OK, so I know this isn't gonna endear me to many, but don't you think the fact that this guy felt the need to reassure the flock that Obama isn't the anti-Christ kind of proves many people take the Obama/anti-Christ meme seriously?
Freddie, the question was never whether there are some idiots who take it seriously, but whether McCain was pandering to them with his ad.
It's like if Obama put out a commercial allegedly pandering to, say, 9/11 Truthers. We know they exist, we would just want to know whether Obama is courting them or not.
Hey,
Kiss me is about making out with Jesus? I always thought it was about making out with another girl. The whole part with the female protagonist telling her lover to wear "your flowered hat" and going off in the woods, always struck me as talking about two young girls going off into the woods to make out. I guess maybe the "trail marked on your father's map" could be some vailed reference to the bible, but it is no more overt than my reading it as about two girls making out. I suspect it is about neither. Most pop song lyrics are driven by the same reason Paul Simon gave Mickey Mantle when Mantle asked why Simon asked "where have you gone Joe Dimagio" rather than "where have you gone Mickey Mantle", sylables man sylables.
I always thought Dickens was a bit overrated (not as awful as Steinbeck though). The last Clancy book I read was the Bear and the Dragon (where NATO stops a Chinese invasion of Serbia) and he pretty much lost me at that point. I know that there have been at least two more books in the Ryanverse that followed but I haven’t been able to generate enough interest to read them.
As far as Harry Potter goes, I loved the books initially but after having a year to reflect on Book 7, my opinion of them has gone from “love” to “like.” The Dresden Files are a much better series and Jim Butcher has managed to build on each previous book in a way that keeps the story fresh and I’m looking forward to book 11 (of a possible 23) next summer.
Can anyone point to the bible verses that have the AntiChrist appearing before the Rapture? While the vision stuff can be hard to set into firm timelines, I'm pretty sure appears in the description of what happens to those Left Behind.
On Christian fiction, I'd recommend some of Connie Willis's short fiction. (She's a sci-fi writer.) Miracle has my favorite dramatic short story from anyone, in any genre, Epiphany. Which is about belief, and doubt, and how the one thing we know about prophecies is that they never turn out to mean what people thought. Silent Nightreflects on what Mary and Joseph looked like--a poor homeless couple--and how the people rehearsing the Christmas pageant at church feel about such people. Newsletter has nothing to do with religion but does pose the excellent, thought-provoking suggestion What if we knew there'd been an alien invasion because people at airports suddenly started followed all the boarding instructions?
On Hey's point, I believe one reason Harry Potter did so tremendously well was that it Had A Plot. And for adults who love to read but want something to happen beyond the characters sitting there developing angstily, those have been hard to come by. Also explains the resurgence of the Mystery genre in the 90s--mysteries have to have a plot. Some of the best writers--I especially liked Tepper's two mystery series, writing as Orde/Oliphant--managed to do lots of other interesting writing around the mystery plot, but they snagged us with the promise that something would happen in this novel.
I believe one reason Harry Potter did so tremendously well was that it Had A Plot.
Indeed, that seems to be key for blockbusters. You certainly don't read Clancy for the sparkling dialog and complex characters.
I was thinking more along the lines of that T-shirt and the controversy around it. But that's a fair point Rob.
There are or used to be in many strip malls great big bookstores, indistinguishable from Borders except that all the romance novels are certified Christian romance novels, all the sci-fi is Christian sci-fi, and so on throughout the store. "Christian" means "put out by a publisher who publishes nothing else." No book by a "mainstream" publisher will be found in the store however orthodox its content No Lewis, no Tolkien,* no Madeleine L'Engle. It's the label that counts. The faithful are presumably told: Buy all your books there and you will be safe from contamination.
Personally I have always thought that Christian chick lit, Christian pop music, etc. are like vegetarian hot dogs and hamburgers.
*Incidentally, the pioneer graphic novelist Jack T. Chick, in one of his works, exhorts parents to keep their offspring away from Narnia and Middle Earth at all costs.
"Incidentally, the pioneer graphic novelist Jack T. Chick, in one of his works, exhorts parents to keep their offspring away from Narnia and Middle Earth at all costs."
That was a good idea on his part. Those kids might learn to read a novel and stop reading comic books. Where would that leave him?
"Incidentally, the pioneer graphic novelist Jack T. Chick, in one of his works, exhorts parents to keep their offspring away from Narnia and Middle Earth at all costs."
That was a good idea on his part. Those kids might learn to read a novel and stop reading comic books. Where would that leave him?
Everything that is good or interesting in literature comes from a willingness to ask questions for which there are no good answers, to tolerate ambiguity, to contradict oneself, and to look at the things that we are usually terrified or ashamed to look at.
There are many Christian authors who can do that, but Christian publishers want to sell certainty and cheerfulness.
In general, anything whose primary selling point is that it's Christian is terrible. Christian pop music, Christian mass-market fiction, etc. But there are all sorts of people producing Christian works that are worth consuming on their own merits. For example, there are lots of bluegrass and folk musicians who write a variety of songs, some of which portray a sincere Christian faith while others cover typical topics like relationships or what have you. (Blue Ridge is a fantastic bluegrass group that has some very inspiring songs, even to this non-believer.)
Others have mentioned Graham Greene's work and Ann Rice's very good fictionalization of Christ's childhood. Mary Doria Russell writes books that are very much about the big religious questions but are also just plain good books - Megan, you should read The Sparrow if you haven't. It raises questions rather than harping on answers, and as such is thought-provoking for people of any faith or those, like you and me, who aren't believers but are friendly to religion. And Orson Scott Card, who's a Mormon, as done some novels about women of Genesis that, as I recall, are quite good. (That said, of course his Ender series has gotten worse the more he's brought his beliefs into it, but there are other factors at work as well.)
Freddie writes: "I know this isn't gonna endear me to many, but don't you think the fact that this guy felt the need to reassure the flock that Obama isn't the anti-Christ kind of proves many people take the Obama/anti-Christ meme seriously?"
Pay close attention to exactly what LaHaye said and you'll realize that he wants to keep that meme (holy fucking shit, I'm as tired of that word as I am of "gin up") alive.
"“I can see by the language he uses why people think he could be the antichrist,” adds LaHaye," and that's what he really knows people will remember. He's a preacher, a professional communicator, and he chose his words carefully. Anyone who thinks this wasn't deliberate is naive.
"For example, there are lots of bluegrass and folk musicians who write a variety of songs, some of which portray a sincere Christian faith while others cover typical topics like relationships or what have you."
There is a Woody Guthrie song called "Blood of the Lamb" that is on the Wilco/Billy Bragg Mermaid Avenue II record that is fabulous. Everything that "Christian Music" isn't.
John quotes and writes: ""Incidentally, the pioneer graphic novelist Jack T. Chick, in one of his works, exhorts parents to keep their offspring away from Narnia and Middle Earth at all costs."
That was a good idea on his part. Those kids might learn to read a novel and stop reading comic books. Where would that leave him? "
Chick's main product has been his tracts, which aren't aimed at kids and aren't "comic books." They're mostly sold in bulk to particularly dimwitted evangelical groups. They feature rabid anti-Catholicism and relentless gay-bashing.
They fit right in with the muttonheads at Bob Jones University, in other words.
Dorothy Sayers, of the Lord Peter Wimsey series--herself a Christian apologist and popularizer--actually had a pretty good insight in the preface to her anthology "The Man Born To Be King", a series of twelve radio plays (!) commissioned by the BBC (!!) during WW2, about the life of Christ (highly recommended, BTW).
Basically, her point was that deeply religious people are very concerned that *every aspect* of the art be "properly Christian". In consequence, these well-meaning folk often sacrifice the art for the evangelism. Sayers' own view: "If it isn't great art, it will never be great evangelism."
My reference to Chick as a "graphic novelist" was a joke and not fair to anyone who has never picked up a Chick tract off the sidewalk. Sorry.
They are everything ML&J says, but they work very effectively as narrative in their extremely, extrememly crude way. If you start reading one you have to read to the end to see what happens. (What happens is always that somebody goes to Hell for one reason or another. In the instance I was referring to, it was because he played Dungeons & Dragons. Which occasioned the warning against Tolkien.)
Flannery O'Connor answers Megan's question:
"The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns . . . by beginning with Christian principles and finding the life that will illustrate them. . . . The result is another addition to that large body of pious trash for which we have so long been famous."
Of course there are and have been lots of great Christian authors who do not write trash. O'Connor springs to mind, as do Ron Hansen, Jon Hassler, Shusako Endo, Sigrid Undset, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Regina Doman, Georges Bernanos, Robert Hugh Benson, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Walker Percy, and many more.
I spent a few years writing children's TV cartoons for Nickelodeon, but produced by a company headed by Southern evangelicals. The basic problem was that they never wanted the protagonist to do anything bad. You can't drive a story that way.
I don't think Christian religious popular lit is intrinsically much worse than Socialist Realist literature. The crappiness tends to stem from the same dogmatic attitudes. You can point to the great Christian believer writers of the past, Dickens or Dostoevsky, but almost everything that's great in their work isn't Christian, and most of what's Christian in their work is pretty tedious, or only works if you think of it as tragically false or absurdist/ironic. The second ending Dostoevsky tacked onto "Crime and Punishment" is a good example -- where he argues that if you just stick criminals in a nice patch of Siberian countryside they will all have revelations and be cured by Christ. 300 pages of excruciatingly insightful psychology, and he tops it off with this? It only works if you think of it as an absurdist exposition of its own tragic impossibility, like the little shiny mechanical bird at the end of "Blue Velvet".
Dickens wasn't a Christian, but a deist at the most. He wasn't about to say so out loud and drive away the paying public.
While we're doing corrections, "90% of everything is crap" is not Gresham's Law, but [Theodore] Sturgeon's.
My reference to Chick as a "graphic novelist" was a joke and not fair to anyone who has never picked up a Chick tract off the sidewalk. Sorry.
They are everything ML&J says, but they work very effectively as narrative in their extremely, extrememly crude way. If you start reading one you have to read to the end to see what happens. (What happens is always that somebody goes to Hell for one reason or another. In the instance I was referring to, it was because he played Dungeons & Dragons. Which occasioned the warning against Tolkien.)
The basic problem was that they never wanted the protagonist to do anything bad. You can't drive a story that way.
That sounds like Jack Ryan to me.
Hm. Evidently if you are in a thread on which you have commented, and hit Refresh, and then click "OK when you get the message about POSTDATA, your post gets put through again. Sorry about that.
"They feature rabid anti-Catholicism and relentless gay-bashing."
I have never read Narnia but have read LOTR and if there is rabid gay bashing and anti-catholicism, it is pretty well cloked and not obvious in the text. Perhaps, Sarum is the pope and the Shire merry old England breaking away or is it that Sarum is Hitler and the Shire Switzerland. And of course Tolkien was a devout Catholic so any anti-Catholicism would be news to him. Tolkien was always very clear he was writing a story that was supposed to be a good myth and had no bearing or reference to the real world. The only place in the entire LOTR which he ever admitted was an explicit Christian reference was when Gandolf stood on the bridge in front of the demon of the first age and said "I am keeper of the flame". Tolkien once told Lewis that was meant to be a reference to Christianity.
Try Charles Williams, Descent Into Hell: a brilliant piece of (mystical) Christian literature, complete with ghosts, doppelgangers, succubi, and more. Oh, and based heavily on Dante's "dream of the Siren" from Purgatorio.
I hated The Sparrow.* It seemed to embody everything that Elizabeth spelled out...except that the caricatures served questions instead of easy answers. Close enough though.
I don't know about CS Lewis being left out of the Christian genre. He's a pretty admired figure in Evangelical circles, for his non-fiction as well.
*Hey, how do I italicize that?
Orson Scott Card's "Tales of Alvin Maker" were pretty good, as I recall - they were basically a Modern Fantasy retelling of the Joseph Smith/Mormon Church establishment myth. (This is what I've heard - I've never read the book of Mormon myself.)
John, the whole anti gay-catholic thing was in reference to Chick, not Tolkein.
For anyone interested in a very good, fast paced Christian adventure, I highly recommend P. Robertson's "The End of the Age." It's like "Left Behind" on crack, and will rock your world.
And for those of you knocking Kirk Cameron, I'd gladly watch whatever he's in over the pap n' crap featuring girly men like DiCaprio, Damon, and Shia LaBeuf. Hollyweird needs to get a clue.
"For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." I Corinthians 1:18
Basically, you all can eat a bowl of dixx!
The reason it's largely crap is that the "Christian" in Christian fiction/rock/etc is a marketing strategy, not a genre. Anything that's good that deals with Christian themes will be marketed to a general audience. What's left over will be marketed to those who are only interested in material that has Christian themes. Of course, the result of this is that things going though those marketing channels get a reputation for low quality, so marketing something through those channels hurts its general audience appeal, so the level of quality necessary to make marketing to a general audience appealing is lowered, which forms a nice little feedback loop which repeats until the quality level remaining in the Christian marketing channels is so low that it would only appeal to people who are only interested in material that has exclusively Christian themes.
On the occaision that material with general audience appeal gets placed in the Christian marketing channels, the resulting backpedalling is informative.
For anyone interested in a very good, fast paced Christian adventure, I highly recommend P. Robertson's "The End of the Age." It's like "Left Behind" on crack, and will rock your world.
And for those of you knocking Kirk Cameron, I'd gladly watch whatever he's in over the pap n' crap featuring girly men like DiCaprio, Damon, and Shia LaBeuf. Hollyweird needs to get a clue.
"For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." I Corinthians 1:18
Basically, you all can eat a bowl of dixx!
The basic problem was that they never wanted the protagonist to do anything bad. You can't drive a story that way.
That sounds like Jack Ryan to me.
No, you're totally the forgetting the drinking problem he developed in one of the books. It absolutely crippled the man. I think he was unable to have sex with his wife the week before he saved the world from nuclear annihilation.
I think a lot of the comments above on Christian (really evangelical Christian) book market answer the question pretty well. (Though I can't imaging someone who reads as much economics as Meagan finds a market that sustains bad writing mysterious.)
There are a couple of points on the Contemporary Christian (CC) music market that I think are important. (I play in a Methodist church praise band every Sunday.)
1. Demand is intergenerational. This is probably the main source of the tendency for writers to "be inspired by" 70's pop or 80's power ballads.
2. Songwriters get paid by an organization called CCLI (similar to BMI and ASCAP) for songs that are sung in churches. So there is a financial incentive to write songs that work for congregational singing. Narrow range, melody on the downbeats. These often don't make for good radio songs. Boring to listen to, but good to sing.
3. On the supply side you are seeing one of the first successes of the much lower barriers to entry for recorded music. The CC market is small compared to the larger pop market and labels are designed for low overhead and lower profit. They are not nearly as dependent on hits. Of course, a low barrier means lower average quality. Try going to Myspace and checking out the bands in other genres that never made it over the barrier. CC doesn't look so bad in comparison.
4. There is a surprising amount of money out there for musicians working for churches. Even more than that, churches offer musicians a chance to play in front of a live audience. This is a huge advantage in these times of disappearing live venues. Let musicians play every week and eventually they will start writing songs.
Best christian novel (actually trilogy) of all time: "Kristen Lavransdatter" by Sigrid Unset. (Unset won the Nobel prize for literature in 1928.)
John C. Wright writes a lot of great fantasy using the corpus of Christian mythology, athough the viewpoint is not explicitly Christian. (Ironically, he converted to Catholocism a couple years ago, but that was after he wrote these.)
John quotes me and writes: ""They feature rabid anti-Catholicism and relentless gay-bashing."
I have never read Narnia but have read LOTR and if there is rabid gay bashing and anti-catholicism, it is pretty well cloked and not obvious in the text. Perhaps, Sarum is the pope and the Shire merry old England breaking away or is it that Sarum is Hitler and the Shire Switzerland. And of course Tolkien was a devout Catholic so any anti-Catholicism would be news to him."
Are you on crack, chuckles? My comment was a response to your post about Jack Chick - it had nothing to do with Tolkien whatsoever. And who the hell is "Sarum"? There's a Sauron and a Saruman in LOTR, but no "Sarum."
Go into rehab before you post again, you're humiliating yourself.
An Onyx Mousse: This is like pulling down the latest paperback silliness in fantasy or sci-fi and asking why it is so bad. As Yancy already cited Gresham's Law: 90% of everything is crap.
That would be Sturgeon's Law; Gresham's is somewhat different.
'Pay close attention to exactly what LaHaye said and you'll realize that he wants to keep that meme (holy fucking shit, I'm as tired of that word as I am of "gin up") alive... He's a preacher, a professional communicator, and he chose his words carefully. Anyone who thinks this wasn't deliberate is naive.'
Either that or he doesn't want to be accused of leading people astray in case it turns out that Obama is the antichrist after all. No one wants to get it wrong, not least Mr. Left Behind.
alan writes: "Either that or he doesn't want to be accused of leading people astray in case it turns out that Obama is the antichrist after all. No one wants to get it wrong, not least Mr. Left Behind."
Good point, and there could be another series in it for him. "Left Behind In The Hood." He could get Alan Keyes to co-write it.
Alan Keyes raped my grandmother.
Ann George from Klansville says: "And for those of you knocking Kirk Cameron, I'd gladly watch whatever he's in over the pap n' crap featuring girly men like DiCaprio, Damon, and Shia LaBeuf. Hollyweird needs to get a clue."
Yeah, they should make movies that appeal to dingbats who live in the woods instead of making movies that actually make money.
"Basically, you all can eat a bowl of dixx!"
You'll have to get Jesus to vomit them all up first.
Michael O'Brien, a Canadian author, is an excellent Christian writer. Can't put his books down....quite different than LeHaye.
For what it's worth, Christian worship music is crap, too. The hymns are inspiring and complex, the new stuff is bad seventies rock.
It's the lyrics that really grate; I don't know why or when, but between 1987 or so and now, the average worship song has gone from a 12th grade English level to a 8th grade level. I suspect that it's because modern American Protestantism has become much more emotional in its worship.
If you want some excellent Christian Fiction, try the Loyola Classics.
http://www.loyolabooks.org/seriesdetail.asp?prodcatname=Loyola%20Classics&bhcp=1
They are all Catholic books, but all are well written and faith filled.
Thanks for raising the subject. This thread has made me realise that my associative memory/forgetery has thorougly confused the Left Behind series with the works of L. Ron Hubbard. There must be some common element in the unreadableness, lack of characters and inconsequentiality of plot of both. For when I dipped into them, I did realise they were different.
Apart from Scientology and Redemptionist Christianity, does any one know of other religions that have tried to propagate through fiction?
Apart from Scientology and Redemptionist Christianity, does any one know of other religions that have tried to propagate through fiction?
I suspect that the Bhagavad Gita would fill the bill well. BTW, Michael O'Brien's books are both well written and hard to put down. Ralph McInerny (of the Father Dowling mysteries) has also written some decent novels, The Red Hat for one.
Now, Brothers Karamozov... there's some Xian fiction I can get behind!
Klug writes: "It's the lyrics that really grate; I don't know why or when, but between 1987 or so and now, the average worship song has gone from a 12th grade English level to a 8th grade level. I suspect that it's because modern American Protestantism has become much more emotional in its worship."
Here are the lyrics for what is probably the most popular (and omnipresent) of the modern "praise songs":
When He rolls up His sleeves
He ain't just puttin' on the ritz
(our God is an awesome God)
There is thunder in His footsteps
And lightning in His fist
(our God is an awesome God)
Well, the Lord wasn't joking
When He kicked 'em out of Eden
It wasn't for no reason that He shed his blood
His return is very close and so you better be believing
that our God is an awesome God
REFRAIN
Our God(our God) is an awesome God
He reigns(He reigns) from heaven above
With wisdom(with wisdom) pow'r and love
our God is an awesome God
And when the sky was starless in the void of the night
(our God is an awesome God)
He spoke into the darkness and created the light
(our God is an awesome God)
Judgment and wrath he poured out on to Sodom
Mercy and grace He gave us at the cross
I hope that we have not too quickly forgotten that
our God is an awesome God
Refrain x3
Our God is an awesome God
Our God is an awesome God
(Our God is an awesome God)
(Our God is an awesome God)
Stunningly stupid!
A lot of the good writers who happen to be Christian - Tolkien, Lewis, L'Engle - wrote stories, often with a partial aim at children, that were good even if you did not see the religious parallels with Christian themes. My culturally Hindu mom was the one who introduced me to all three not for Christian indoctrination, but because they were good books. Lewis was quite explicit that he did not want the Narnia books to be a type of Christian propaganda and Tolkien was interested in writing a mythology for Britain that it lacked on a comparable level with Scandinavia and tales of Odin and Thor. Since these were books written for multiple reasons, they could be easily accepted by the mainstream. Would we remember "Hamlet," which is full of Christian themes, if it had to adhere to the rules set forth by the Christian market? Of course not. That would have been boring.
To add onto what others have mentioned. A lot of genre fiction written for niche markets is crap. The Twilight books would be crap even if the author wasn't a religious Mormon because most vampire fiction is crap. Just as a lot of vampire fiction gets bought by the type of reader who will read anything just if it has vampires in it, fundie reader will read anything just if it has Jesus or Christians in it. A good friend of mine considers the Left Behind series among his favorite books not because he thinks they're good books, but because they are so bad they become camp. (Ironically, the first time I saw one of the covers, I thought the books were meant to be written with the Anti-Christ as the protagonist, which made them seem a lot more interesting than they turned out to be.)
"And for those of you knocking Kirk Cameron, I'd gladly watch whatever he's in over the pap n' crap featuring girly men like DiCaprio, Damon, and Shia LaBeuf. Hollyweird needs to get a clue."
Cameron made a crappy 80's show and a video of him basically giving a banana a blowjob to prove the existence of god. DiCaprio made The Departed and Blood Diamond, Damon made the Bourne trilogy (and Dogma) and Shia... well, Shia sucks, I give you that, but then Pitt made Fight Club, which was kind of the movie about late 90's masculinity.
Just another angle on what's already been said; if someone offers you "a computer in a phone" or "a computer in a GPS" then there's a design flaw in the product. A well designed product integrates the computer seemlessly into the function of the device.
The same holds true for religious values or beliefs in literature.
Perhaps you should try Michael O'Brien's works.
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/authors/michaelobrien.asp
Michael O'Brien is a tedious Culture War termite.
http://www.ignatius.com/ViewProduct.aspx?SID=1&Product_ID=681&AFID=12&
Jeez, I had never heard of this guy. What a maroon. ML&J, are you some kind of masochist or something?
The depressing part is all the reviewers on Amazon nodding their heads solemnly.
Left Behind seems like the left side of my back side.
I also have a real problem with some of the other authors of religious books. It seems they always say the same thing again and again...wait a minute...so does the Bible!
BUT the difference is the Bible is free of charge and the authors of the "again and again writing" just make the moolah!
Maybe these guys and girls just need to concentrate on what is important and not just put forth what should be in "your discernment."
If I read the word "discernment" one more time again I shall smash my computer and just read the written word of God and the saints!
You need to read REAL Christian writing and historical fiction.
Have you ever read 'The Silver Chalice' or 'the black rose' by Thomas B. Costain
or 'The Robe' by Lloyd C. Douglas(or his "Keys to the Kingdom"?)
or "Quo Vadis" by Henryk Sienkiewicz
or Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace,
or 'Augustine Came to Kent' by Willard and Mary Beth Owens. How about 'Son of Charlemagne' by Barbara Willard and Emil Weiss, or 'If All the Swords in England: A Story of Thomas Becket' by Barbara Willard, or 'The Hidden Treasure' of Glaston by Eleanore M. Jewett, or 'Towers in the mist' by Elizabeth Goudge and the rest of her 'cathedral trilogy'(one of my all time favorites, she is a very poetic writer), or "The Song at at the Scaffold" by Gertrud Von Le Fort(tear jerker), ANY Louis De Wohl novel such as "The Golden Thread", "the Spear" or "The Restless Flame: A Novel About Saint Augustine", or if you like good apocalyptic *fiction* the novels like Father Elijah: An Apocalypse
by Michael D. O'Brien and the rest of his books are all on amazon and well worth the read.
Don't waste your time with "Left Behind" garbage, or even Peretti, not unless you want to cough up a hair ball.
Ugh.
Bodie and Brock Thoene produce very decent well researched reading material as well.
Dina
You need to read REAL Christian writing and historical fiction.
Have you ever read 'The Silver Chalice' or 'the black rose' by Thomas B. Costain
or 'The Robe' by Lloyd C. Douglas(or his "Keys to the Kingdom"?)
or "Quo Vadis" by Henryk Sienkiewicz
or Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace,
or 'Augustine Came to Kent' by Willard and Mary Beth Owens. How about 'Son of Charlemagne' by Barbara Willard and Emil Weiss, or 'If All the Swords in England: A Story of Thomas Becket' by Barbara Willard, or 'The Hidden Treasure' of Glaston by Eleanore M. Jewett, or 'Towers in the mist' by Elizabeth Goudge and the rest of her 'cathedral trilogy'(one of my all time favorites, she is a very poetic writer), or "The Song at at the Scaffold" by Gertrud Von Le Fort(tear jerker), ANY Louis De Wohl novel such as "The Golden Thread", "the Spear" or "The Restless Flame: A Novel About Saint Augustine", or if you like good apocalyptic *fiction* the novels like Father Elijah: An Apocalypse
by Michael D. O'Brien and the rest of his books are all on amazon and well worth the read.
Don't waste your time with "Left Behind" garbage, or even Peretti, not unless you want to cough up a hair ball.
Ugh.
Bodie and Brock Thoene produce very decent well researched reading material as well.
Dina
Bob_R,
At the risk of hijacking the thread, the converse is a big problem, too: CCM hits that are absolutely unsingable by the congregation.
I simply cannot believe that no one has mentioned
Ted Dekker, his works are incredible...another
really, really good book is "Lord of the World", my Robert Hugh Benson...I have read it several times and I never cease to find something new in it...and I don't read books twice.. Do yourself a big favor and try both of these authors.
Kirk -- you're darn tootin'. I'm tired of having the latest CCM single being projected onto the church screen and have the congregation basically stand quiet because they can't hit the high notes or any notes, for that matter.
The trends away from choir robes and the organ haven't been good for church music. American Idol's recent insistence that if you can't sing well, you must keep your trap shut hasn't been good for it either.
From what I know and in my humble opinion, current worship music stinks. While ML&J does not prefer "Our God is an Awesome God", it is sing-able, at least.
Klug says: "While ML&J does not prefer "Our God is an Awesome God", it is sing-able, at least."
I just wonder why anyone with any taste would want to sing such gibberish. I also think that it implies that "our god" has some rival gods that aren't quite as awesome. Sis-boom-Baal!
Damn, religion is some funny shit.
Re: From what I know and in my humble opinion, current worship music stinks.
One reason I am very glad to be an Orhodox Christian. We make no pretense about being "contemporary" in our art and music. We've used the same music (and hymns) for centuries, allowing only very gradual modifications. Most of what we use is either Slavic polyphony from the Remaissance era (yes, Eastern Christiandom was influenced by the Renaissance too) or even older Byzantine chant-- or some cross between the two. And most of it is very singable. The lyrics also make sense, and often include history and theology lessons. The biggest trouble are the occasional translation horrors, where some mininmally skilled translator keeps to the literal sense of the Greek or Slavonic words, and ruins thep oetry altogether.
There's a lot of thoughtful discussion of the series and more from an evangelical perspective here:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/special/leftbehind.html
It is a stupid song (sadly, not the stupidest) and does sort of contradict a monotheist theology...but Christianity (at least as expressed in the Gospels) has never been about serving the best and the brightest, those who are already perfect. Whether you believe it or not, Jesus's story is that he died for everyone - salvation doesn't come with a dress code, IQ test, admission fee, or good taste requirements.
Stupid people need songs too.
Fred Clark of Slacktivist has gone through the first Left Behind book, or as he calls them the world's worst books on a page by page basis. He publishes it on his blog most Fridays, http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/left_behind/index.html.
Fred is a liberal evangelical and he brings a lot of insight into why the books are bad theology, and he is also a newspaper reporter who brings a lot of insight into why the books are bad writing.
I look forward to each Friday's entry. He has almost reached the end of the first book.
The Hellboy comics and films are quite good, and explicitly Christian.
Hellboy, a demon brought to earth by Nazi occultists at the end of WWII, messes up everyone's plans for the apocalypse by being rescued by American soldiers and raised Catholic.