Reading Evangelicals

I kind of can't believe that this book exists. Despite its brilliant premise, I am truly shocked that anyone agreed to publish it. Shocked but really glad!

So. That brilliant premise: what can we learn about evangelicalism of the past four decades by looking at the biggest bestselling books of evangelical fiction? So great. All the conversations about evangelicalism that have exploded in the past few years seem to focus on either the theological/institutional side or the political side of the community. Deciding to look at it through the lens of the arts--through the narratives of fiction--is such a fresh take.

And that take is deeply tied to Silliman's dissatisfaction with that theological or political approach. As he writes:

"Evangelicalism is better conceived as an imagined community, a rolling conversation organized by real structures and institutions in the world that make that conversation possible."

I like this. I think it's a really useful way of thinking about evangelicalism and not one I've seen articulated before. The older I get, the more I think that precise definitions of just about anything are impossible. They may be useful in giving you a loose idea of the center of whatever phenomenon you're talking about, but you always, always get in trouble when you try to draw stark lines around the edges of things. Anything worth thinking about is messy and bleeds into other things. Life is interdisciplinary. Imagining a community as a conversation is just so much more realistic and useful than trying to compile a list of qualities to be checked off a list.

As for the discussion of the books themselves, I thought that Silliman did a great job picking a handful of extremely popular and influential books that are representative of different theological/social trends in evangelicalism. I haven't read all of the books (and the ones I have read, I am not a fan of), but I can testify that they were all wildly, wildly popular in the evangelical movement at large and in Christian bookstores in particular. (My mom worked in a Christian bookstore my entire childhood. I spent a lot of time there. All of the books Silliman explores here were indeed perennial bestsellers.)

It's a difficult challenge to give an overview of the plot and themes of books your readers may or may not have read and give a decent critique of them as they reflect evangelical culture, but Silliman does a pretty good job in the space he's provided. I kind of wish the book was twice as long so he could dig down deeper, but it's no surprise that it isn't.

On the negative side: the editing for the book is pretty sloppy, which is distracting. I don't just mean awkward sentences and grammatical mistakes that should have been caught by the copy editor, though there are a number of those. I mean repetition in some areas and things that should have been explained more fully in others. I know that that seems to be the new normal in book publishing, but I will never stop complaining about it.

I'm also torn about the tendency to frame every single discussion of evangelicalism as a way to understand evangelical Trump voters. On the one hand, I do think that 81% figure was a wake-up call for a lot of people and I'm thankful that it launched a conversation about so many things in evangelicalism that had been swept under the rug for so long. I understand why it's this watershed moment and why Trump's whole deal does indeed seem to embody all of the worst aspects of evangelicalism, from racism to misogyny to the victimhood complex. But also I just resent the idea that we need to talk about everything through the lens of Trump.

I do think that Silliman does a fairly good job of connecting Trump to the hyper-individualization of evangelicalism as represented in these books, the rejection of any concern for a common good. And I like how I got to learn (briefly) about both the rise and fall of the evangelical publishing/bookselling market and how it connects with things like suburbia and financial disruption in the form of economic crises and the rise of Amazon, etc. Only now I want to read more about those topics, plunge into them more deeply, and I'm not sure where to even look for that information.

So really, I see this book as a launching pad both for explorations of evangelical fiction/publishing and for conversations that use the "rolling conversation" lens to talk about evangelicalism more broadly. I would love to read more from Silliman on these topics, but I also hope that many others will build on his work.

P.S. I really want to know what my dude Mark Noll thinks about this book. The scandal of the evangelical mind indeed.

P.S.S. Seeing even-more-my dude Fred Clark cited in a book is always a thrill. I can quite confidently say I wouldn't be the person I am today without Slacktivist. Fred, you would be an awesome person to continue this conversation if you ever do decide to write a book. I mean, beside the hundreds of thousands of words you've already written about how terrible Left Behind is.