Cultural analysis

Review: Reading Evangelicals

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Cover image of "Reading Evangelicals" by Daniel Silliman

Reading Evangelicals

Reading Evangelicals, Daniel Silliman. Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (ISBN: 9780802886477) 2025.

Summary: A study of how the Christian fiction evangelicals read in recent decades shaped the evangelical imagination.

My wife was the former librarian at our church. That is, until people stopped taking books out and used the library as a place to dispose of books they’d read. Consequently, we decided to repurpose the space and get rid of most of the books. A large portion of those books were in the Christian fiction genre. Four of the authors discussed in this book were heavily represented–Frank Peretti, Janette Oke, Beverly Lewis, and Tim LaHaye.

This was not the Christian fiction that had formed my life. For that, I had C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, Flannery O’Connor, Marilynne Robinson, Alan Paton, and Frederick Buechner to thank. I realized that I had been formed in a very different outlook (and perhaps literary aesthetic) than the vast majority of my fellow believers. While we had our love for Christ in common, our perception of the world and what was important was just different.

What I could not easily put into words, Daniel Silliman articulates in this cultural analysis of the books evangelicals were reading from the late 1980’s into the late 2000’s. The book begins and ends with the closing of evangelical Christian bookstores like Lifeway and Family Christian by 2015. During the space in which the authors considered here wrote their debut works, these stores functioned as an expression of evangelical identity. Hence, one of the interesting questions he touches on is what will happen to that identity, which he sees as increasingly fragmented.

But the heart of this book is his analysis of five pioneer Christian fiction authors (six if you include co-author Jerry Jenkins) who contributed to the boom of this genre. The authors are Janette Oke, Frank Peretti, Beverly Lewis, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, and William Paul Young. Respectively, they pioneered Christian romance, horror, Amish romance, apocalyptic, and emergent Christian fiction.

What is striking is that each wrote books Christian publishing houses weren’t publishing that someone took a chance with resulting in huge sales. Silliman sketches the background of each author, the genesis of their debut work and how it ended up being published, and the market response. Then he reviews the storyline and prevailing ideas behind each book.

Oke’s books set romance within the context of the love of God and the life of faith. Similarly, Lewis’s books focuses on the choices of individuals, in light of their Amish identity. Peretti portrayed cultural conflict as a reflection of spiritual warfare. Then, Tim LaHaye set this conflict in apocalyptic terms to compel belief against conspiratorial world powers. Finally, William Paul Young’s The Shack is an early example of a deconstructed and reconstructed faith expressed through an encounter with a very unusual Triune God.

Silliman stops short of attributing the rise of support for our current president to this literature. However, he thinks both the individualism and the culture conflict motifs of these books cultivated an imagination that resonated with some of the things he said. He writes,

“The imagination was too small, I think. Too narrow. From my perspective, American evangelicals ended up too focused on their own private domains, too fearful of strangers, too fearful of change, too invested in the arrogance of always knowing the right answer. Imagining the chaos of modern life, the confusion, the hardship, and day-to-day struggle, the best-selling fiction gave the wrong answers. But I want more and more varied imagination, not less, so I will mourn the vanishing book market anyway.” (p. 220).

But with the demise of this vanishing book market, what will capture the Christian imagination? Will it be reduced to some form of political activism? Or will there be Christian writers of the caliber of a C.S. Lewis who will capture that imagination? The hunger is there. For example, consider the phenomenal current success of Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden.

What Silliman does show is the power of good stories to shape the imagination. But the question is, who are the new storytellers and can they tell a better and deeper story?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Family Unfriendly

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Cover image of "Family Unfriendly" by Timothy P. Carney

Family Unfriendly, Timothy P. Carney. Harper Collins (ISBN: 9780063236462) 2024.

Summary: We have a culture that devalues children and makes raising them more difficult, contributing to declining birthrates.

Timothy Carney and his wife are anomalies. They are the parents of six children, and part of a community of people with large families. No, I’m not writing about families from the 1950’s. Carney is aware of how he stands out in a society with a birthrate significantly below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per couple. In Family Unfriendly he argues that the big reason is that we have made raising kids much harder than it once was, and consequently are having fewer of them. Paradoxically, mothers and parents are spending more time than ever on parenting activities, even with fewer children. How can this be?

Carney explores a variety of habits of modern helicopter parenting that contribute to this. One is the high ambitions we have for our children in sports and other activities, typified by the travel team. Instead of time to just play, everything is structured. And both parents and kids burn out. We also have created a culture of fear around our children never being out of sight. Remember when kids were told to be home when the streetlights came on? Now such a practice could result in Child Protective Services at your door. Of course, part of the trouble is that many of our neighborhoods are no longer walkable. We have to drive our children everywhere. And our neighborhoods are no longer a village, where all the adults looked out for each others’ kids, and kept them in line if need be. Parents have had to take this on themselves.

Around the time of the Recession of 2008, our birthrates tanked and really haven’t recovered. Personal autonomy as a value contributes as well as the perception that having children is anti-environment. The actual reality is that we can’t afford a baby bust. We have too few people of working age. and our Social Security system faces a crisis of sustainability. Meanwhile, we are in the midst of a sex recession driven by online porn and appified dating. These fail to produce the durable relationships of good marriages.

Carney considers ways government can most profitably help but concludes that culture, more than government programs, is critical. Based on demographics, he took a close look at Israel, where the birthrate hovers around 3 children per couple. The ultra-orthodox have as many as 6 per couple and his conclusion from interviews is, whether religious or secular, child-bearing was mitzvah, a righteous or good thing. He found this equally in the Jewish community in Kemp Mill and a Mormon community in Idaho. It seems that part of it comes down to the idea that you have kids when it is a community norm to have kids, and more kids in communities valuing large families.

Carney faces the reality that any parenting is hard and brings challenges that beginning with cleaning up lots of pee and poop and spit up, and progresses from there. Communities that support parenting without imposing the unreal expectations of helicopter parenting and safetyism makes a difference. Then, parents are not alone. Without proselytizing for a particular faith (he invokes examples of Muslim, Jewish, Mormon, and Catholic communities) he quietly points to the value of children and families and the community forming power religious communities at their best are good at.

While the book is a bit of a ramble at times and Carney loops back to topics he raised earlier, he raises important questions. I think he correctly diagnoses the malady that we are family unfriendly and some of the reasons for that. I think he is also spot on that while government can support a family and child friendly culture, it cannot create one. There are dangers of the Handmaids Tale type in that direction. What I think he offers instead is a kind of “mustard seed conspiracy,” something that starts small but spreads because of its vibrant life. And he makes a quiet and compelling case that this is something healthy religious communities are good at.

Review: The Myth of the American Dream

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The Myth of the American Dream

The Myth of the American Dream, D. L. Mayfield. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2020.

Summary: A collection of Christian reflections chronicling the author’s awakening to the ways the American dream neither works for everyone nor reflects the values of the kingdom Jesus inaugurated.

D. L. Mayfield reminds me of Tara Westover, author of Educated. Both were homeschooled in strongly religious backgrounds, albeit far more healthy and functional in the case of Mayfield. What distinguishes them are their very different awakenings, Westover to a love of learning that led her to Harvard and Cambridge, and Mayfield to an awakening to how the structures of the American Dream neither reflected her Christian commitments nor worked well for many in the north Portland neighborhood where she and her husband lived.

Mayfield describes this “American Dream” in terms of four concrete values: affluence, autonomy, safety and power. She recognizes that the proclamation of Jubilee of Jesus in Luke 4 speaks to people whose lives are characterized by just the opposite: the poor, the captive, the blind, and and the oppressed.

Perhaps the most winsome aspect of these essays is that the author takes us through the deconstructing of these American Dream values in her own life. Teaching English to immigrant women, she learns by the annoying ringing of phones what it means to live from paycheck to paycheck in an affluent society. She watches the struggles of her neighbors to meet rising rents in gentrifying Portland. She finds her autonomy challenged by Maryan, whose “magic pot” gets shared around the community and is preferred by her and all to the Insta-pot Mayfield thought would make her life better and more self-sustaining. Instead of the free range educational experience of her youth, she understands the critical important of her neighborhood public school to her community.

Perhaps at no time in history has a concern for safety been greater. It has led us to close our borders and fear of the other. Yet we have a 1 in 6 chance of dying of heart disease, 1 in 7 of cancer, but 1 in 3.6 million of dying in a terrorist attack. Yet the reality of the refugee experience turned Mayfield’s perspective around as she came to understand the dangers these people had endured. She describes how she and her mother experienced the welcome of Muslim families, and found herself hoping for her children that they would so learn in these experiences the love of Christ: “that they are known and valued and love.”

She speaks trenchantly of the deleterious effects of American power on the evangelical faith of her upbringing:

   Empire focuses on ideological sameness: make the narrative easy, make it clear. Pharaoh will save you. Caesar will put bread in your belly. The president will make our country great again. This leads to small, deformed imaginations–I see it in how White evangelical Christianity has been tangled up in the same pull toward greatness, toward power, toward viewing ourselves as specially anointed by God to rule the world, to hold and be in charge. This leads to a sense of scarcity, a hallmark of pharaohs throughout the centuries: the all consuming fear of losing power. I have seen it in the fights for religious liberty that excludes those who aren’t Christian, in the narrative that says we are losing the culture war and must fight with every tooth and nail to hold our ground…. But most important is the belief that exile is a reality to be ignored and feared at all costs, a strange ideological position for those who claim to follow the God of the Israelites (p. 147).

Mayfield challenges us in another essay in this section to learn from the exiles, including exiles from the American Dream like Ida B. Wells, black anti-lynching crusader who had to flee her business and home in Memphis because of threats on her life. She reminds us that Christians are aliens and exiles in the world enthralled with the vision of our coming King, who look for its coming, not in affluence, autonomy, safety and power, but through the cracks in the sidewalks, the neglected yet joyful schools, poor and yet interdependent neighbors, all anticipating the New City to come.

The phrase that characterizes Mayfield’s writing for me is “raw elegance.” It is raw with the realities of her city and elegant in the depth of reflectiveness that looks beyond failed myths, and the poverty of her community, to glimpse the dream of a greater kingdom. It is a time where the flaws and inadequacies of the American dream have been exposed in its dependence on excessive consumerism built on systemic inequities, and where our impregnable safety and power has been riddled by a microscopic virus.  Voices like Mayfield’s are needed to point us to a better dream–one large enough to encompass the poor, the captive, the blind, and the powerless–all of us really. Will we fight to cling to what we must ultimately lose, or listen to what will save us?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: In Search of the Common Good

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In search of the common good

In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World. Jake Meador. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2019.

Summary: Observing the breakdown in community in both church and society, the author traces the root causes, and the practices of Christian community that can lead to recovery of community and a church that seeks the common good in society.

Many attentive culture watchers have noted the parallel declines of both church and wider American culture. Attendance is dropping in many churches even as churches are rocked with scandals of sexual abuse and financial mismanagement. The seduction of the church to corrupt political alliances, whether of the left or the right, in the author’s view, is only the final step in a church that has given itself to power instead of the doing of “small things with great love.” While all this goes on, America is “bowling alone” to even a greater extend than when Robert Putnam first published his study of the decline of social capital and community in America. Suicide rates are up, life expectancy is dropping, and the professionalized care industry is booming, even as local community and a sense of cohesion and pursuit of common good is vanishing in a land of toxic discourse.

Jake Meador chronicles these parallel declines and traces them to three factors. One is a loss of meaning, a pervasive existentialism that pretends to meaning in choices of radical freedom, yet without hope. A second is a loss of wonder, a dis-enchantment with the world as the buffered self cuts us off from both danger and wonder, resulting pervasive boredom. A third is the hollowing out of work, where efficiency and profitability is the sum total of work’s meaning, where we are alienated both from our work, and by our work from home, family, and religious life, as work becomes all-consuming.

Meador proposes three practices that may play a crucial role in restoring Christian communities to health, enabling them to exercise a societal presence that fosters a wider common good. He begins with the surprising proposal of keeping sabbath, as a tangible way of underscoring that human beings were made, not for work, but for God, that we are human beings, not human doings. One of the things Meador argues for is corporate worship, as one tangible way of keeping sabbath that begins to restore a sense of our being part of some “common good.” He adopts Wendell Berry’s idea of “membership” in which we recognize that we are embedded in both a human and wider biological community.  He advocates for work that is sacramental–that work is good and offers ways to bless others, that produces wealth, and is attentive to the membership.

His final section consists of two parts. The latter grounds the former, and really all that he has written, in the new heaven and new earth, a hope that is even more real than life in the present age. The former talks about what it means for the community of God’s people to be citizens in earthly societies. It is here perhaps that he makes one of his most trenchant observations:

   Put another way, the political priorities of many American Christians in recent years have been precisely backward. We ought to have begun with doctrine because doctrine defines the good life as it relates to political systems and societies. Then we ought to have turned to the formation of citizens. We should have asked what kind of virtues are necessary to live well in community with one another and what particular virtues are necessary for responsible political action. Then we should have asked how to cultivate those virtues within our people. Finally, only after attending to these issues, we should have moved on to debating policy….American Christians, and evangelicals especially, have done the exact opposite. (p. 161).

He argues for a political doctrine shaped by the Kuyperian ideas of solidarity and sphere sovereignty, and the practice of subsidiarity–that government should only do those things it is large enough to do, leaving other matters to other spheres of life.

Reading Jake Meador as a sixty-something took me back to what it was like to read as a college student a young Os Guinness in The Dust of Death, with his sweeping discussion of culture, and what it meant for Christians to live as a third way. There is the same scope of considering cultural forces, the intellectual ideas behind them, and a fresh vision of what Christian faithfulness might look like in the present time. Sadly, a boomer generation fascinated with “fast-everything” circumvented doctrine and virtue and communal practices in pursuit of policy influence, power, or a personal prosperity without a sense of our membership and solidarity with others and all living things.

This leaves me reflecting. Os Guinness is still speaking and writing. Jake Meador has written for a number of publications. But who is reading? And who is heeding? I hope someone is and that the American church wakes up to how far it has declined over forty years, before all we can do is cry “Ichabod. The glory has departed!” (1 Samuel 4:21). Meador’s ideas and commended practices offer light for those tired of groping in the darkness.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Recapturing the Wonder

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Recapturing the Wonder

Recapturing the Wonder, Mike Cosper. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2017.

Summary: Explores the disenchantment many Christians experience living in a modern secular age and the practices that may “re-enchant” our world with the supernatural presence of God.

Thoughtful commentators from Charles Taylor and Hannah Arendt to James K. A. Smith and David Foster Wallace have observed how we live in a disenchanted, disillusioned secular age. In this work Mike Cosper engages these commentators and how the disenchantment of the modern world affects Christians’ experience of the reality of God. He writes about the contrast between an enchanted world and a disenchanted one:

“Perhaps to best understand disenchantment, we can look at its opposite, the ‘enchanted’ world of a few centuries ago. In that world, men and women saw themselves as spiritual creatures, vulnerable to blessings and curses, to angels and demons, and subject to the god or gods who made and oversaw the world. This enchanted world was part of a Cosmos, an orderly creation full of meaning, a place with a purposeful origin and a clear destination, guaranteed by the god or gods who made it and rule over it. At the same time, this Cosmos is full of mystery, a place where our knowledge has its limits and an unseen spiritual realm is constantly at work, shaping our everyday experience.

In disenchantment, we no longer live in a Cosmos; we live in a universe, a cold, hostile place where existence is a big accident, where humanity is temporarily animated ‘stuff’ that’s ultimately meaningless and destined for the trash heap” (p. 11).

For many Christians, the Word of God becomes an abstraction–concepts rather than the living Word of the Living God, working in the world. What Mike Cosper seeks to do in this book is to explore both the corrosive effects of the secular world on our faith, and the practices through which we might recover a vibrant, transcendent faith whereby we recognize the presence of God in all of life.

Cosper begins with three chapters that chronicle the expressions of disenchantment in contemporary Christian life. After describing the disenchantment, he chronicles our modern efforts to self-justify through constructing a social media persona as our modern religious sacrifices that the God of grace mercifully brings to an end. Likewise, he reminds us of the recent focus of many churches on hype and spectacle instead of the slow, steady rhythms of grace by which we encounter God in the ordinary rhythms of life.

In the next three chapters, he commends several practices that break us out of the self-hype spectacles–solitude and secrecy, abundance and scarcity, and feasts of attention. He commends having a life beyond what we post on social media. He uses Lewis Hyde’s The Gift as a parable of living generously and honoring the gifts we receive as well as those we give. He invites us into a life where we feast on giving our attention to God’s world, and sometimes to feasts themselves.

The seventh chapter was of great interest. He looks at Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I was intrigued, having recently read the later (reviewed here). He suggests both were seeking transcendence, Merton through a rule of life, and Kerouac, through attentiveness in the moment. Recognizing the downsides of each lifestyle (most of us don’t live in the monastery, and Kerouac’s road was tremendously self-destructive), he suggests we need both.

Each of the chapters concludes with spiritual practices connected to the chapter. Cumulatively they help us focus on God in our hours, days, weeks, and years, and special seasons and feasts of the church. We learn examen, Ignatian prayer and praying the Psalms, practices of solitude and silence, fasting and feasting, and how to weave all of these into a rule of life. The author shares his own rule, one that struck me as marvelously do-able.

There are a number of books that have been written about our secular age. Likewise, a number have been written about spiritual practices. The particular gift of this book is the bringing of the two together, pointing to the importance of, and telos of these practices. Cosper helps us see that through them, we recover a sense of the greatness of God in the ordinary of our hours, days, weeks, and years–which make up a life. More than this, he captures something of the deep joy of secrecy, or a long leisurely feast with friends, or seeing an abstract Word come alive to us. One senses that you are walking alongside one who is recapturing the wonder of a transcendent God who is also immanent in our world–and that we may as well.

 

Review: The Image of God in an Image Driven Age

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the image of god in an image driven age

The Image of God in an Image Driven Age, Beth Felker Jones and Jeffrey W. Barbeau, eds. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2016.

Summary: A collection of papers from the 2015 Wheaton Theology Conference focusing on how our understanding of “the image of God” shapes our understanding of what it means to be human, and how we ought perceive the images that pervade our lives.

The subtitle of this collection of papers from the 2015 Wheaton Theology Conference is “explorations in theological anthropology.” In other words, the thread that unites the essays in this collection is the exploration of what it means to be human, particularly in relationship to God. In particular, this is a wide-ranging, and yet, taken together, coherent collection of papers exploring what it means to say that human beings are made in the image of God. Although called a theology conference, the contributors are drawn from theology, English literature, history, and art.

The papers, grouped in threes are organized around four topics: canon, culture, vision, and witness.

  • Canon particularly explores how biblical themes inform our understanding of imago dei. Catherine McDowell focusing on creation and how we are God’s “kin” or children. William Dyrness on the Fall and the tension that exists between trajectories of life and death. Craig Blomberg considers the New Testament witness and particularly the understanding of the image of God as Christlikeness, reflectors of Christ’s glory.
  • Culture explores the connections between the idea of image, theology, and the arts. Timothy Gaines and Shawna Songer Gaines consider human sexuality, our sexualized culture, and how many works of Renaissance religious art, in portraying the naked human form portrayed human sexuality as a good gift of God. Matthew J. Milliner explores consumerist issues and how artists have often engaged in iconoclasm, in breaking false images, and the unique role Christians in the arts may play. Christina Bieber Lake, in exploring the persistence of the image of God amid the suffer in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road–an exploration that left me wanting to read this work.
  • Vision explores the incarnation of Jesus as an icon of God, enabling us to see something of God. Ian McFarland explores the Eastern Orthodox theology of icons. Daniela Augustine discusses the work of the Spirit in transforming those who are in the image of God to grow into the likeness of God. Janet Soskice considers Jesus as the one through whom God spoke the world into existence and that our own capacities for speech image the speaking God.
  • Witness explores how Christians proclaim (or fail to proclaim) the Triune God. Soong-Chan Rah, in a particularly trenchant essay, explores the sad racial history of black and white in the U.S. and how the image of God has been construed in terms of “whiteness.” Beth Felker Jones attests to the power of Christian witness to the image of God to resist the commodification, sexual and otherwise, of human beings. Philip Jenkins reminds us of the global character of Christianity and prepares us for the new cultural expressions of peoples in the image of God.

Some conference proceedings collections seem lacking in cohesion. This collection, while reflecting diverse perspectives, offered, I thought, a coherent, yet multi-faceted exploration of the wonder of what it means to be humans in the image of God. The engagement with the arts, literature, and mass culture fulfills the promise of addressing our image driven age. The recognition of the image of God and the racial blinders that limit our vision of that image is a vital contribution to a broader theological anthropology.