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In early January, a box thudded onto my front porch like a late Christmas gift from a distant relative in the Midwest. The 34 books contained within were the entries in the "contemporary novel" category for the Christy Awards, a competition inaugurated in 1999 to encourage quality writing in the fast-growing market for Christian fiction. My assignment as one of seven judges: rate the novels on a 1-to-10 scale in elements ranging from characterization to plot to overall enjoyment. ("If you hadn't had to read this book for review purposes," our instructions on that last point helpfully clarified, "would you have finished it?")
Here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's safe to say that Christian fiction has an image problem. Hearing of my assignment, friends expressed emotions ranging from sympathy to shock. Many assumed I was wading through several installments of the Left Behind series (not so—those books reside in the "futuristic" category) or the Christian equivalent of bodice rippers (which have their own category as well). No one seemed to think that reading 34 contemporary Christian novels was a plum job. In short, you won't score any points among the scandal-of-the-evangelical-mind crowd by being a Christy Award judge.
But only a few books into my three-month-long sojourn in the land of Christian fiction, I realized that I had been given an opportunity that every curious mind welcomes—a new cultural landscape to explore. In the December 2001 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, David Brooks took readers on a tour of "Red America," acting as a kind of docent guiding his latte-and-biscotti peers through the Bush-leaning regions on the map of the 2000 presidential election. Red America is where Christian fiction thrives, and like Brooks, I found more there than meets the eye.
What meets the eye first, however, is the covers. The palette of Christian fiction is heavy on pink, rose, fuschia, and pale colors of all hues. And also on cursive writing. The cover designers have done an admirably thorough job of targeting their market: not so much Red America as Pastel America. Twenty-seven of the 34 novels are written by women, who obey the writing-class injunction, "Write what you know," by featuring almost exclusively female narrators. In a few cases, I suspect that I was going boldly where no man had gone before, at least to judge by one narrator, who explained at a particularly tense moment that she felt just the way you do "when another woman comes into your kitchen." If you, dear reader, are a Christian man whose intellectual or artistic bent has sometimes made you feel just slightly less than manly in that muscular Promise Keepers way, I highly recommend a dose of Christian fiction. Within a few pages you will feel the testosterone coursing through your veins and start hankering for a good pickup game of football.
On the other hand, you may find yourself making a Costco run for jumbo-size boxes of Kleenex. The writers of Christian fiction, it seems, pride themselves on the art of catharsis. In the course of 34 novels, my fictional friends lost (or nearly lost) a dozen children to accidents or disease, endured 11 heartbreaking romantic separations, bade farewell to four aging parents, and discovered or disclosed ten terrible secrets about their past. I was unprepared for the sheer emotional amplitude of these novels, which only began to wear off after 25 or so. Since I did much of the requisite reading on airplanes, on several occasions I found myself on a transcontinental flight blubbering into my napkin.
The emotional fireworks do have the virtue of leading straight into the thorniest question of Christian theology: theodicy. The cultured despisers would have you believe that evangelical Protestants play fast and loose with the problem of suffering. But even the most conventional of these novels—which is to say, those most committed to getting each hero and heroine safely home before dark, hand in hand with their true love—take no detours around pain. Instead they throw their characters into it, and we overhear them agonizing, wrestling, and arguing with God.
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