It features such newsmaking authors as former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris (now a member of Congress) and shock jock Michael Savage.
Not only is the Christian book industry itself huge, its borders are getting hard to define because so many of its works are published and sold by secular firms. It's difficult to fix the dollar figures with any kind of precision, but sales through CBA member stores and distributors -- a large segment but by no means all of the industry -- came to $4 billion in 2001.
The best-selling novel that year was not a John Grisham or Tom Clancy number but The Remnant, the latest installment of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind series, a feat that landed the authors on the cover of Time. As a result, mainstream publisher Bantam Dell signed LaHaye to a reported $45 million book contract for a separate series. Other Christian titles, such as Bruce Wilkinson's The Prayer of Jabez, occasionally make ripples in the secular publishing world, and most large bookstores have expanded their sections of religious books and novels. Not long ago, if someone wanted a work by Christian horror writer Frank Peretti or lay theologian Philip Yancey, they would have had to visit a religious specialty store. Now they can find it at Barnes & Noble or Borders.
Evangelical Christian pop music -- popularly known as Contemporary Christian Music, or CCM -- now rivals country as the most popular radio format. Several acts, from Michael W. Smith to Jars of Clay, have tried "crossing over" to secular markets, with varying degrees of success. New quasi-religious acts like Creed and Litehouse engage in heavy flirtation with the CCM market without explicitly joining it.
Christian filmmaking is also starting to emerge from the swamp of poor distribution and lousy production values. On display at the CBA were such films as Waterproof (starring Burt Reynolds), To End All Wars (dubbed a film "to end all Christian films" by the religious periodical Books & Culture), and Hometown Legend (think Rudy minus the Hail Marys). The cloth strap that held my convention ID doubled as a promotion for the new Veggie Tales movie, Jonah, which according to Box Office Mojo had taken in over $23 million by Thanksgiving 2002.
Not everybody is happy with the shape and success of the modern Christian culture industry and its growing crossover appeal. In response to the huge LaHaye book deal, critic Bruce Bawer warned on TomPaine.com of the "growing ties between New York publishers and evangelical Christian authors."
Bawer, author of Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity and A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society, expressed nostalgia for an earlier era of publishing when "no reputable New York publisher would have published such books" as the Left Behind series in order to get its mitts on vaguely sinister-sounding "evangelical money." "Some of us," explained Bawer, "still cling to the old fashioned idea that the publishing of books in a democratic society, in addition to being a business, is also a profession that carries with it certain moral, intellectual, and aesthetic obligations....The current move into premillenialist prophecy novels and other works of hard core fundamentalism seems a giant step too far."
In case readers missed the other-shoe-dropping implications of his screed, Bawer took a swipe at the patriotism of Bantam Dell and company for "capitulating" to Bible-thumpers "at a time when the United States is waging a war against fundamentalist intolerance and illiberality -- against minds and hearts possessed by irrational dreams of violence."
Other lines of criticism come from the constituency of the Christian culture industry itself. To many evangelicals, who after all are Protestants, the gaudy excesses of the industry trigger vague cultural memories of ancient controversies over relics and indulgences. The Reformers viewed the marketing of religious artifacts and get-out-of-purgatory-free passes as a sign of decay. It's a pretty good bet that John Calvin or Martin Luther would be none too thrilled by the Jesus, Mary, and Joseph action figures or the Christian self-help books (as one author put it, "It's like a regular motivational book with Bible verses sprinkled in") displayed on the CBA convention floor.
This queasiness is reinforced by an anti-materialist streak that American evangelicalism seems to have absorbed during the 1960s and '70s. In fact, evangelicals' professed contempt for material things can rival the anti-consumerism of the most ardent Naderite. A popular anti-materialistic evangelical song from the '60s featured the refrain "they'll know that we are Christians by our love." When I suggested to evangelical acquaintances that it's just as likely that "they'll know that we are Christians by our stuff," it produced a lot of exasperated sighing.
Another criticism of the culture industry, expressed from within as well as without, is that it has a tendency to reinforce a certain insularity in evangelicals. In the 1980s evangelical singer-songwriter Steve Taylor mockingly expounded on the benefits of the industry: "You'll be keeping all your money/in the kingdom now/And you'll only drink milk from a Christian cow." In the 1990s a secular narrator of one of the vignettes in Douglas Coupland's novella Life After God expressed this distance by reporting on his attempt to understand the "many many" Christian radio stations he happened upon as he drove through a desert. He sensed a real enthusiasm he ultimately failed to penetrate:
"The radio stations all seemed to be talking about Jesus nonstop, and it seemed to be this crazy orgy of projection, with everyone projecting onto Jesus the antidotes to the things that had gone wrong in their own lives. He is Love. He is Forgiveness. He is Compassion. He is a Wise Career Decision. He is a Child Who Loves Me."
Critics are right about the apparent insularity of evangelical culture, but not as right as they think they are. The hand wringing that the Left Behind series has engendered, for instance, is irrational. Though Bruce Bawer's Tompaine.com piece is an extreme example of overreaction, a few nonreligious friends have privately explained to me that the existence and popularity of such books -- "wish fulfillment fantasies about non-fundamentalists suffering apocalyptic torment," as Bawer put it -- worry them. The reviewer for the determinedly anti-religious Free Inquiry likened the series to The Turner Diaries, the anti-Semitic survivalist underground classic that helped inspire Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh.
Yet, other popular nov elists, Stephen King among them, are often just as apocalyptic as LaHaye and Jenkins, without inspiring dire warnings that America is about to embrace a fascist theocracy. True, King and company don't take their apocalypses seriously. On the other hand, the end of the world has been a popular subgenre for many years. Exactly what has drawn readers to so many secular total destruction fantasies is a question that's hard to answer, but that answer is unlikely to be compassion for humanity.
In any event, one might hazard that the incomprehension of secular outsiders has contributed significantly to the birth of the commercial Christian pop culture scene. That is, while the books, music, and videos in CBA stores may not have been of the highest quality or featured the best production values, they at least took seriously the beliefs held by evangelicals, who may constitute anywhere from a quarter to a third of American society. The move by secular presses, movie studios, radio stations, and record labels to cater to this market could be viewed as a victory for commercial self-interest over religious intolerance.
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