Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith

by Daniel Silliman

The story of five best-selling novels beloved by evangelicals, the book industry they built, and the collective imagination they shaped   Who are evangelicals? And what is evangelicalism? Those attempting to answer these questions usually speak in terms of political and theological stances. But those stances emerge from an evangelical world with its own institutions—institutions that shape imagination as much as they shape ideology.  In this unique exploration of evangelical subculture, Daniel Silliman shows readers how Christian fiction, and the empire of Christian publishing and bookselling it helped build, is key to understanding the formation of evangelical identity. With a close look at five best-selling novels— Love Comes Softly ,  This Present Darkness ,  Left Behind ,  The Shunning , and  The Shack —Silliman considers what it was in these books that held such appeal and what effect their widespread popularity had on the evangelical imagination.  Reading Evangelicals  ultimately makes the case that the worlds created in these novels reflected and shaped the world evangelicals saw themselves living in—one in which romantic love intertwines with divine love, humans play an active role in the cosmic contest between angels and demons, and the material world is infused with the literal workings of God and Satan. Silliman tells the story of how the Christian publishing industry marketed these ideas as much as they marketed books, and how, during the era of the Christian bookstore, this—every bit as much as politics or theology—became a locus of evangelical identity.

Genres: Nonfiction, Religion, History, Books About Books, Christian, Christianity, Faith

286 pages, Hardcover

Published October 5, 2021

About the author

Dr. Daniel Silliman is a journalist. Currently, he is a News Editor at Christianity Today.

Silliman received his doctorate in American studies from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He has published two nonfiction books, "One Lost Soul" and "Reading Evangelicals."

Reviews

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Reading Evangelicals, Daniel Silliman pairs notable movements in American evangelical history with popular Christian fiction: Love Comes Softly with the history of the evangelical publishing boom; This Present Darkness with the political engagement of the 1980s; Left Behind with apologetics; The Shunning with (of all things) the megachurch movement; and The Shack with postmodernism. The chapters on The Shunning and The Shack both deal with the emerging church movement. I’ve heard some readers call Reading Evangelicals dated because its final novel was published in 2007, but 2007 is recent to a historian like Silliman, and I can’t think of a more recent Christian novel that made waves quite like the five titles considered in this book.

As I wrote this review, it devolved into a meditation on my own personal experiences with Christian fiction, with little comment on Reading Evangelicals, so here’s my actual review before delving into my reading life. Silliman notes that several people told him this book (originally his doctoral work) had no audience, which I found utterly ridiculous. Books about books are hot right now, with George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain being the latest big thing. Karen Swallow Prior’s bibliomemoir Booked had a small print run, but her book-about-books, On Reading Well, has no end of fans. Reading Evangelicals is church history with a sprinkle of literary criticism, and it does both well. I hope Reading Evangelicals is the success it deserves to be, so that more books in this vein will be published.

Silliman’s conclusion is marvelous and gave me a lot of food for thought. It doesn’t make much sense out of context, so I won’t quote it here, but it ties up the whole book wonderfully, making the whole reading experience “worth it” on a level I couldn’t have predicted while thoroughly enjoying the information he disseminated in the previous chapters. While talking about politics, Silliman also avoids making value judgments, which is extremely refreshing when reading about American evangelicalism in the 1970s-2000s. His expertise as a historian-journalist shines through here, because he is more interested in his subjects than in his own opinion. I use Goodreads to dump my opinions because in my academic writing discussions look a lot different; I can tell Silliman had dumped his opinions about the novels somewhere before writing about them, so he could take them seriously as texts without letting his perceptions guide his interpretations of other readers’ experiences with the books.

I’ve read all of the novels here except The Shack, which I have no plans to read. A member of my family really loves the book and I would rather have no opinion on it than a negative one. Silliman goes through the plots of each book in detail, which I found helpful. I read The Shunning last year, Love Comes Softly in college, and This Present Darkness and Left Behind in high school. The plot refreshers were helpful, and his retelling of The Shack accorded with what I know of the book from my relative and the movie preview.

I need to disclaim why I didn’t like any of those four novels. Love Comes Softly didn’t work for me because I dislike the marriage of convenience trope. I also recall a vague impression of not connecting with the characters; I’m obviously in the minority here. This Present Darkness also didn’t work for me because I have issues with how evil and the supernatural were portrayed in it, and the anti-intellectual, anti-college bias didn’t sit well with my high school self who was applying to universities. Left Behind and I read Revelation very differently, and the adult books were disappointing after the pure adrenaline rush of the YA novels. The Shunning left me cold for several reasons I detailed in my review of it. (Like Beverly Lewis, Silliman also perpetuates the myth that Amish don’t practice fostering/adoption, which is a plot point in The Shunning.)

Christian fiction and I don’t always get along. I recently started a newly published Christian novel and quit a few pages in when the heroine closed her eyes while crying, and started thinking about how beautiful the color of her eyes was. Then and there I knew the author and I Would Not Vibe because I have never once thought about the attractiveness of my eye color while crying, and it seems ridiculous to me that anyone would. (What is it with Christian romance novels and eyes? Is it because ~purity fiction~ doesn’t want to describe bodies, so they stick with hair and eyes and the occasional muscular arm?)

Yet, unfortunately, we must distinguish between “Christian fiction” and religious fiction. Because I love me some chewable religious fiction. My favorite novel, In This House of Brede, concerns a community of nuns and has such exciting plot elements as all-night prayer vigils, the journey of becoming a nun, and Lenten fasts. When I tried reading Christian fiction in middle school and high school, I was repeatedly disappointed that faith was either cursory (a prayer in a time of crisis, church attendance, and nothing more: the Mandie middle-grade mysteries) or unrelatable to me (simplistic answers, slapping a Bible verse on a problem, a “bad” character leaving and miraculously changing off-page and returning a New Person without the messiness of all that character development: Christian romance novels). I want something more from my fiction than that. Silliman also helped me understand the business of publishing a bit more. I can see why the big names publish works by Louise Erdrich, Yaa Gyasi, Barbara Kingsolver, Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Strout, and similar authors: they know evangelical pockets run deep, and evangelical publishing houses have not cornered Christian readers of literary fiction. Plenty, if not most, of the readers of religious literary fiction are not evangelical. These books are often nominated for literary awards, because literary fiction deals with central questions of the human experience, and religion often meets people there, too. The crossover for such hits is into the evangelical sphere. Books like these are also part of a longer tradition in literature, back to British novels like Trollope’s and Eliot’s where religion, institutional or personal, is significant in the novel.

One of things I appreciated most from Silliman is that he took readers’ experiences of the novels seriously. He even quotes a few Goodreads reviews for each book, focusing on the positive ones, because the ratings lean toward 3-5 stars for each book. I’m with C. S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism when he argues that the reading experience called forth by the novel is more important than any perceived “quality,” and that one person’s shallow experience doesn’t negate another person’s deep experience, and vice versa. Some Christian fiction has captured my imagination and given me deep reading experiences, though my overarching experience with the genre has been negative. That’s just me, though. I rarely try new sci-fi and fantasy, mostly sticking with old favorites; imagining the world of a post-apoc novel makes me uncomfortable; and horror and I will never be kissing cousins. My poor experiences with these books do not negate the rich experiences of others.

Once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop thinking about why Francine Rivers’ Redeeming Love is missing here. It has a more serpentine history than the five novels in Reading Evangelicals. Redeeming Love was originally published by Bantam, but Multnomah re-released it with fewer sex and more Christian scenes within a decade. In my anecdotal experience, Redeeming Love is frequently named by Christian women as a favorite book, and the Hosea/Gomer allegory is not understated. I’d love to ask Silliman why he didn’t include Redeeming Love. Its sales numbers compare favorably to the books he looks at and its popularity is still widespread. Perhaps he wanted to stick with books originally published by Christian houses (Baker, Crossway, Zondervan, Bethany, and Windblown Media, respectively). Maybe he wanted to stick with five books, a nice prime integer. However, Redeeming Love would have been such an interesting conversation piece with the other five books and I wish it had been included.

I’d be extremely interested in a similar study of adaptations. Love Comes Softly is a whole franchise. (Silliman never mentions Michael Landon or the Little House series [books or TV show], but I think it’s significant that Landon adapted the novels of both Oke and Wilder, and that Oke’s books read like a Canadian, grown-up Little House with similar foci on daily prairie life and struggles.) This Present Darkness has not been adapted, but Peretti has ventured into filmmaking. Left Behind has been adapted and re-adapted (#KirkCameronIsMyBuckWilliams), with even the kids’ version getting a movie. The Shunning and its sequels have been adapted for the small screen, and at least one other Beverly Lewis novel (The Redemption of Sarah Cain) has also been made into a TV movie (Saving Sarah Cain). The Shack has been famously adapted as well. Redeeming Love is coming to the silver screen in 2022. Are these adaptations just money-grabs? Do they constructively interpret the stories?

Content warnings: in the final chapter on The Shack, Silliman relates details about William Paul Young’s personal history of sexual molestation and predation, and gives graphic details about abuse at C&MA schools for missionaries’ children.

[Lirazel · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I met a man who told me everything I ever did.” This is what the Samaritan woman who met Jesus told her friends afterward. Jesus somehow knew the story of her life and she was fascinated by his knowledge and insight.

I felt similarly seen as I read Daniel Silliman’s description of the fiction marketed to Evangelicals. In many ways, Evangelical as a label almost seems to have emerged first as a way to market books. Instead of small, focused denominational presses selling a few books to members of their denominations, magazines and publishers liked the idea of building a broader coalition of Christians who would appreciate the same books. The five wildly popular fiction books featured here were prime examples of how marketing to Evangelicals transformed through the years of my life.

I don’t often read Evangelical history books, but when I do, I often feel like the trends described bypassed the small Wisconsin town where I came of age. But I definitely read 4 out of the 5 books Silliman unpacks, and I definitely experienced many of the theological shifts he describes. Again, I felt seen. Even more so, I felt like I could see a through-line I hadn’t noticed before because of Silliman’s thorough research and engaging explanations. This book was fascinating to me, like a behind-the-scenes tour of my own reading history.

I’ve mostly outgrown Evangelical-marketed fiction (I’ve read one Karen Kingsbury and a few Francine Rivers—whose Redeeming Love would have been an interesting subject!) but I’m always seeking books that portray Christian faith in compelling, honest, sincere, engaging ways. I’m so grateful for this book that told my life to me.

[Josiah DeGraaf · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the concept of this book as soon as I heard about it. The Christian fiction genre is well deserving of a broader look, particularly from a historical perspective, and I was intrigued to see how Silliman took it.

Silliman explores the history of Christian fiction through deep-dives into five different representative novels. This type of historiography (where you analyze a broader movement by focusing and isolating on specific representative instances) is a valid one. But I will admit that it's not my favorite type since it can be more prone to cherry-picking & bias than broader surveys. I tend to like it the most when I already know and trust the historian in question. Since this is my first encounter with Silliman, I found myself unsure at times how representative all his picks were. There isn't anything specifically I'd critique of his work, and for the most part, his selections made sense. But since Christian fiction is such a broad genre, I did find myself wondering at many points what a version of this book that took a survey approach would have looked like.

Onto the text itself. The introduction posed an effective critique of the idea that "evangelicalism" as a movement can be defined either as a particular political movement or as a set of particular convictions (at least from a historical perspective). The alternative Silliman posed was intriguing: that the evangelical movement can be defined as a specific group of people in an ongoing conversation with each other across conferences, camps, bookstores, churches, and conventions. Unfortunately, Silliman doesn't do much to unpack, defend, or specifically define this new definition since the book soon has to analyze the books themselves. And I would have loved to see another chapter or two unpacking and explicating this more. But while I found myself wanting more on this front, I did find at least his way of analyzing evangelicalism (by the conversations evangelicals have with each other) to be helpful, even if I'm unsure about his proposed definition in particular.

The core of the book, then, seeks to do three things (as I can tell) with the books it covers:

- Examine the publication history of each book and what it reveals about the growth of Christian fiction as a genre.
- Summarize and analyze the themes of each book and what they reveal about the author's understanding of "belief" and Christianity as a whole.
- Connect each book to the larger evangelical conversations happening and show how both influence each other.

I found that Silliman did the best with the first and third points, likely owing to his background as a historian and a journalist. As an avid reader, I loved seeing the "behind-the-scenes details" of Christian fiction as a whole. And I thought Silliman generally did a solid job of connecting each book to the larger evangelical conversation happening at the time. I had a few quibbles with some of his arguments, but that's inevitable in a book like this. I found the second point (his literary analysis), however, to be the weakest of the three sections. Silliman did a fine job. But at times I felt like he overlooked key parts of certain books and misunderstood what the author was actually getting at (particularly with This Present Darkness, the one book I have read of the lot). I wouldn't say his analysis was bad per se--and I definitely learned some things at points. I just didn't feel like it was up to the same caliber as the rest of his work. Writing a book that is part historical analysis, part literary analysis is not a task I'd envy!

As a result, most of this book was a solid 4-star review. I was, however, extremely disappointed by the conclusion and some of the ways it undercut the book. Silliman spends half the conclusion analyzing how the history of Christian fiction helps us understand the forces that led to Donald Trump's election. And if that seems like a non sequitur unrelated to everything else about this book, you're not the only one thinking so! It came out of left field, felt awkwardly inserted, and displayed pretty weak ties to the books in question. I don't buy that Christians reading a Peretti novel that contained false abuse allegations motivated them 20 years later to keep supporting a particular politician in the wake of revelations about his own abuse. Fiction is certainly powerful in its ability to shape lives! But you can't draw simple one-to-one correlations like that.

More importantly, I felt like this focus--especially in the conclusion of a book like this--served to diminish the relevance of evangelical fiction. The history of evangelical fiction is about a lot more than why evangelicals chose to vote for a specific politician. In another context, I would be interested in reading about Silliman's view of Trump (and I suspect I would largely agree with him and his concerns). But framing that analysis as the culmination of this book served to reduce the fascinating world of Christian fiction into another political affair. And as a reader of Christian fiction, that left me with a lot of disappointment.

To sum it up: this book was simultaneously fascinating and frustrating. 70% of it was a fascinating look into the history of a genre through five bestselling novels. 10% of it left me scratching my head and disappointed. And 20% of it was thought-provoking in ways that made me wanting more from Silliman about those topics. At the end of the day, I'd recommend reading it to anyone else who enjoys (or is curious about) Christian fiction, and so I'll give it 4 stars on the basis of the 70-90% that was good and worthwhile. But I do wish the book hadn't undercut many of its great points about culture-over-politics in its own conclusion.

Rating: 3.5-4 Stars (Good).

[Jen Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I grew up evangelical and worked in a Christian bookstore in college, so this was fascinating to me. I had read 4/5 books Silliman focuses on and did not know any of the backstory on them. I found this well-researched and I loved the discussion of how fiction can shape a culture.

[Samantha Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating read for me. I grew up in what seems to me the heyday of the evangelical subculture, and four of the five books discussed here were stocked in every church and private school library around me. (Thank goodness I never wasted time reading The Shack.) I hadn’t thought about the ways that these books reflected the theology and culture of “evangelicals” over time, and while the author acknowledges at the end that there are many other factors, I think his insights make a lot of sense with what I saw and experienced, and still see playing out today.

[Baylor Heath · Rating 4 out of 5]

My parents and I have had an ongoing eschatological debate since I was in high school (with no end in sight). With my dad, there is only so little Scripture we can discuss before he defaults to Left Behind, or whatever new Evangelical apocalyptic fiction is out, dropping "pre-tribs" and "post-tribs" and assuming I have any understanding of this elaborate Rapture timeline that's about as convoluted as the MCU's multiverse. Once I realized that over-reliance, it was a revelation to me how informative fiction has been to Evangelical theology.

So I was delighted to find a book that had that as its very thesis!

I remember reading Frank Peretti's Piercing the Darkness sometime in late middle school or early high school. Having read plenty of Stephen King since then, in retrospect it plays, on the surface, very much like most good King books: a mystical horror is haunting a small American town and a ragtag group of heroes must face it. But having Silliman recount the plot again for me as an adult was kind of alarming: an intellectual, liberal, New Age group conducts a political conspiracy that is taking all the respectable people (white, middle class) out of power and is behind the demonic warfare that rages beneath the unseen realm. Upon summarizing the plot, Silliman provides this commentary:

“All this is about as subtle as The Pilgrim’s Progress. It’s a thinly veiled allegory for the social concerns of the religious right, who feel like they are loosing control of America. It’s the anxieties of conservative, white, Protestant men translated into a fantasy of cosmic struggle. Their fears, from feminists and higher education, to the displacement of the patriarchal father to the possibility of facing consequences related to accusations of sexual misconduct strung together into a narrative.”

Not only did this book spark an obsession with a rowdy form of spiritual warfare and over-focus on demons behind all our problems (I have this book to thank in many ways for my dad blaming most family issues on the devil and for our marches around the house while he yelled at unseen forces), but worse, it made the same Evangelicals overly suspicious about everything in the political realm.

But Piercing the Darkness only ranks second on the damage list: of course, Left Behind takes the cake.
With it Rapture theology went swept the nation and became centerstage for Evangelical theology. Having Silliman provide information on Tim LeHaye made everything click into place. Tim LeHaye had written non-fiction books about the Rapture, but no one seemed to be paying attention, so he approached Jerry B. Jenkins (after Frank Peretti turned him down) about making Rapture fiction, because he knew Evangelicals could be motivated (aka manipulated using fear tactics) by Rapture theology. Unfortunately, he was right. LeHaye called himself "a student of conspiracy theories" and he sure loaded up his book with the best: a shadowy global cabal run by the Anti-Christ seeks to bring everyone into a one world religion! I've heard my dad echo the same fears about this exact plan consistently. Any wonder Q-Anon exists??

So those are obviously the big books of discussion, but Silliman gives a lot of cultural commentary with the other three as well: Love Comes Softly (which brought about the rise of Evangelical fiction), The Shunning (which fanned the flame of concerns about "authenticity" that tore apart any semblance of tradition within the Evangelical church), and the Shack (which rolled in with the tides of an acceptance of "ambiguity in faith" and made it past the gatekeepers of the Evangelical book market, spelling its doom). Through these five books Silliman kind of storytells the rise and fall of the Christian book store, which was a perfect visual for what "Evangelical" means, but with them vanished it becomes harder and harder to pin down exactly what Evangelicalism is.

The conclusion masterfully connects the influence of these books on the Trump movement and summarizes what Evangelicalism seems to be beyond all the supposed distinctives in doctrine.

I'm grateful to Silliman for helping me understand my cultural upbringing in a powerful way.

[Adam Shields · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a Christian fiction skeptic. It is not that I don't think there are good Christian fiction novels, but experience suggests that those Christian novels that are good, are likely not being published, or not being published by Christian publishers. But I know I have a bias. When I first heard of the concept of Reading Evangelicals, I was hopeful for a guide that might help me be less cynical about an area of the Christian world that I had almost entirely stopped reading ten years or so ago.

Daniel Sillman is very ambitious with Reading Evangelicals. He uses these five books, Love Comes Softly, This Present Darkness, Left Behind, The Shunning, and The Shack, to provide not just an exploration of the novels but of Evangelicalism. The meaning of Evangelicalism is hotly debated. There have been dozens of books debating the meaning and value of the term over the past ten years. Broadly, there are three main ways that Evangelical is defined. One way is a theological definition like the National Association of Evangelicals version or Bebbington's Quadrangle. The main objection to these is that this is not how many people use the term. The second way that Evangelical is used is as a political identity that roughly means conservative, White republican who cares about abortion, gay marriage, and who was likely to have voted for Trump twice. The objection to this usage is that there is a significant subgroup that does not fall into this category, either because roughly 1/3 of theological Evangelicals in the US are non-White, or that even those that are White, approximately 20-25% do not identify through political means or regularly vote democrat. In addition, this is a very US-centric definition, and many self-identified Evangelicals (using the political definition) rarely, if ever, attend church. The third primary definition of Evangelical is as a consumer definition. This is primarily the definition that Kristen Du Mez uses in Jesus and John Wayne. Even though it isn't the primary definition here, a significant thread of Reading Evangelicals is about the rise and fall of the Christian books store and publishing industry, contributing to the consumeristic definition of Evangelical.

Love Comes Softly was the first novel that could be called a Christian Romance novel. It was published in 1979 at the start of the growth of local Christian books stores. It was one of the first novels written directly for an Evangelical audience and published by Evangelical presses. I read Love Comes Softly early. Probably as a pre-teen or early teen. As one of the quotes from the book said, I read it because my mom owned them all, and the church library stocked them. There were not a lot of Christian novels that I had access to in the mid-1980s. While Stillman does read the novels closely and discuss themes and the books themselves, the context is to the novels is what I find most helpful. Janet Oke was responding to a turn toward not just explicit sex but sexualized violence in the secular romance novel market in the late 1970s. A common trope at the time was that the protagonist would be kidnapped and/or raped, often more than once, and then she would eventually fall in love with her rapist. Before Love Comes Softly, Christian publishers almost entirely published non-fiction, often academic-leaning books targeted toward pastors and bibles. The rise of local Christian books stores needed products to sell, and novels filled a niche. In addition, the rise of the local Christian book store was necessarily ecumenical in orientation. Many Christian publishers were denominationally rooted, and they needed ways to sell outside of their narrow constituencies without alienating them. Love Comes Softly was a successful proof of concept that Christians would buy novels and that fiction could sell.

This Present Darkness is where politics and fear start to enter the picture. Frank Peretti started as an assistant pastor in an Assembly of God church that his father pastored, but by 1983 he quit the pastorate and started working at a factory. Peretti was influenced both by the storytelling of Stephen King and the cultural commentary and theology of Francis Schaeffer. Crossway Books was looking for a novel that would put into practice the theology of Francis Schaeffer, who Crossway had published. Two years after Shaeffer's death, in 1986, Crossway published This Present Darkness. It hardly sold until Amy Grant was sent a copy, and she started talking about it in her concerts. After selling 4200 books the first year, it sold approximately 750,000 copies in the first two years after Amy Grant's promotion. The sequel had 400,000 preorders in 1989. This Present Darkness was built on the early culture war ethos of the Moral Majority and the concerns about ritual child abuse, secular humanism, and the New Age that was throughout the culture at the time.

Part of the value of Reading Evangelicals is that Stillman is not interested in easy complaints about the quality or purpose of the books but interested in understanding the context, the deeper reasons that the books resonated, and the cultural shifts within evangelicalism that marked the rise and fall of the publishing industry. I remember reading This Present Darkness in the middle of high school and the increase in attention to spiritual warfare. Even in my conservative mainline Christian experience, I remember engagement after This Present Darkness with people concerned about attacks by demons and possession. It is easy to be cynical about the ways that white Evangelical culture was presented as under attack in books like This Present Darkness, or about the disbelief of sexual abuse or the casual racist references there, but this history is helpful in reading our recent history in books like Jesus and John Wayne or The Myth of Colorblind Christians.

I am not going to detail the discussion of the last three books in the same way, but each book played a role in the rise and then the downfall of Christian publishing and local Christian book stores. Each book has earned a place in helping to define what it means to be an Evangelical, both by contributing to the theological understanding of the term and by creating a culture that allowed for a communal experience of Christianity that many understand as Evangelical. Daniel Stillman is the news director at Christianity Today. He is intimately familiar with the culture and history, and reality of Evangelicalism. And Reading Evangelicals was both expertly written and deeply informative with a type of care that is difficult to do. I want to read or re-read all of these books again. But I also have a renewed sense of the nuance of the Evangelical story that, even though I experienced it, requires a guide to see into that experience well.

This is not a cheap book on kindle or hardcover. I listened to the audiobook, which for me as a member of Audible was the cheapest method. Trevor Thompson, who narrates many Christian books and who I often think of as Eugene Peterson, CS Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, James KA Smith, Mark Noll, John Fea, and more, did a fine job. There were a couple of mispronounced words as is not uncommon, but the narration was well done.

[Kendra Kammer · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a strange book. I was very excited to read this book. I figured it would discuss some of the most popular Christian fiction books from the evangelical past and talk about the good and bad and in-between ways that they shaped what our culture understands Christianity to be. That's a book I want to read. But that's not what this book was.

The first problem is that I'm not sure who the intended audience of this book was - Christian fiction readers? I don't think so. The author seemed to have very little respect for those moved by Christian fiction. Rather, based on the essays written about each piece of fiction, I think the intended audience must have been wannabe cultural pundits who could nod their heads and agree about the flighty and emotional readers who indulge in these books and pat each other on the back that they remain logical and unmoved.

Perhaps I'm being too hard on Silliman. I'm sure my impressions were colored by my disappointment that the book was such a tedious treatise on the history of evangelicalism using popular fiction as it's trailmarkers, rather than what I'd hoped and expected it to be.

The book should have been subtitled "How a Study of Christian Fiction Shows Us The History of The Evangelical Church." That subtitle is slightly less interesting but would be much more accurate.

TLDR:
This is a very tedious explanation of the historical background of each book and how that book fit in with the evangelicalism of that day.

Interesting quotes:
p. 8 "'What is an evangelical?' ...evangelicals are people who are part of the ongoing conversation that is represented by Christian bookstores."
p. 220 "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. 221 "The story of Jesus Christ is at the heart of the Christian imagination. It's an amazing story: of powerful forces at work, of life-changing love, of a coming kingdom unlike any other, and of subverted expectations about God. Evangelicals are right to believe that if the story is true, it changes every other story we tell about ourselves and the world. They are right to see that the gospel is an invitation to imagine that everything is different, everything is being transformed, everything made right and made new."

(NOTE: Silliman's opinions and statements about the true heart of Christianity were a tiny postscript at the end of the book. I think the book could have been improved if he'd scattered his thoughts throughout instead of writing so impersonally during the first 220 pages.)

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting! I thought the chapters on This Present Darkness and Left Behind really helped explain the current political environment.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been waiting for this book ever since I heard about it... thankfully it arrived at my front door at 8pm on Friday night and I've been reading it ever since. So good!

Daniel Silliman looks at 5 books of Christian fiction that were published over 4 decades and I read all of them (most of them around the time they were published, except for Janette Oke's "Love Comes Softly" as it was published in 1979 and I wasn't reading Christian romance at 6). He weaves in stories about major Christian voices and traditions that were occuring at the same time, like Francis Schaeffer, the Willow Creek phenomena and Brian McLaren's "A New Kind of Christian". It brought back some memories.

Here are the five books: "Love Comes Softly" by Janette Oke; "This Present Darkness" by Frank Perretti; "Left Behind" by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins; "The Shunning" by Beverly Lewis; "The Shack" by Wm. Paul Young. I found it interesting that he talks mostly about the effect of these books on American Christianity but 3 of these 5 authors were born in Alberta, Canada.

I found the value of Silliman's work was reflecting on what I thought about these books when I first read them and realizing that asking some questions about the authors' worldview might have saved me a lot of heartache. It's tempting to take fictional characters and events and adopt them into your faith - and be disappointed when the world doesn't work the way a fictional setting does.

I'm keeping this book. I might even reread the five books - and try to ask some questions as I read about what aspects of Christianity the authors are trying to promote over others.

[Bethany Yardy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is important. As someone who grew up Evangelical and is still wrestling with the questions and distrust I received as a result, this book fills in a lot of missing pieces. Too much of that culture is written off or disregarded, but Silliman argues powerfully that the fiction and other commodities produced within Evangelicalism tell the story of who they are and how they make sense of the world. I highly recommend!

[Josh Olds · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a lot of Christian fiction, so when I heard about Daniel Silliman’s Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith, I was immediately intrigued. Silliman selects five books as cultural pivot points in evangelicalism, either as something that contributed to a change or as reflective of such change. It’s difficult to distill evangelicalism’s influence into five fictional books, but Silliman proves pretty successful. Before I read the book, I posted the cover on my social media accounts and asked friends to guess what the five books were. It took about 15 minutes and eight guesses before friends knocked out all of them. Consensus: these are well-known and (usually) well-regarding in the evangelical subculture.

Silliman writes as a historian, meaning that he’s more interested in the history of these novels, their route to publication, and the cultural milieu that allowed them to flourish rather than the theological underpinnings of the novels. That expertise shows because Silliman is at his finest when walking readers through the timeline of Christian publishing. It probably should be dry and boring read, but Silliman makes it come to life. Where the book struggles, however, is on the theological side. Silliman doesn’t do much in the way of critically reflecting on the book’s theology (with perhaps the exception of Love Comes Softly) and—in my opinion—misunderstands the theological background of some of the entries. More on that later.

The five books Silliman covers are:

1. Love Comes Softly by Janette Oke
2. This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti
3. Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins
4. The Shunning by Beverly Lewis
5. The Shack by William Paul Young

If you know much about the evangelical subculture, you’re probably nodding your head, agreeing with every entry, and compiling a half-dozen other titles that would fit into this list. (Seriously, Silliman, not one mention of Redeeming Love?) Each entry is important both in terms of publishing and in terms of theological underpinnings. Love Comes Softly is considered to be one of the earliest “Christian fiction” novels, offering a Christian alternative to bawdy bodice-rippers. This Present Darkness expanded Christian fiction considerably, opening up the genres of horror, suspense, and the apocalyptic. Left Behind was one of the first Christian novels to crossover into the mainstream. The Shunning launched a million Amish-themed novels. And The Shack was a subversive allegory for the new millennium that worked outside traditional publishing houses.

With each entry, Silliman gives readers an introduction to the author and their background before and at the time of writing. For each author, this is their debut novel, so there’s a lot about how their writing—not just one of their books—changed the industry. Silliman then offers a reflective summary of the book, breaking out its plot, characterization, and major themes. If you’re already familiar with the book, it’s a rehash of a lot you already know, but if you’re not familiar with the book, this provides the foundation for the discussion that follows.

The meat of Reading Evangelicalism is that discussion. In the chapter on Love Comes Softly, Silliman notes how a major theme is God’s work amid suffering and his redemption of tough circumstances, how God uses bad things for his glory. What’s missing here, and perhaps it is because Silliman does not identify as a theologian, is a robust discussion of whether or not that belief is theologically grounded. Or perhaps Silliman is content to explore evangelicalism without commenting or criticizing it. Nonetheless, because Silliman doesn’t go as deep in exploring where these beliefs come from, he is limited on the depth to which he can discuss the thematic elements of the book.

In the Left Behind chapter, Silliman misses the role that 9/11 played in developing the book’s crossover appeal, as apocalyptic literature suddenly seemed much closer to non-fiction than fiction. He touches on the rapture, but focuses mainly on apologetics a la individuals like Norm Geisler and Josh McDowell, viewing Left Behind as apologetical more than eschatological. While that point has merit, it does seem to overshadow the larger End Times theme.

Similarly, Silliman’s discussion of The Shack spends more time talking about Mark Driscoll than the emergent church or the evangelical left that more accurately reflect the teachings of The Shack. Silliman is right, however, in exploring The Shack as a fracture point for American evangelicalism as it was the first Christian novel to really feel “emergent.��� It would have more weight if there was any indication that other novels followed—making William Paul Young the first in a trend rather than an anomaly—but we’re not told of any. (Some of Ted Dekker’s later novels may fit this category.)

Overall, to the average layperson, Reading Evangelicals is probably going to be an influx of information that helps explain the history of the evangelical subculture through the lens of literature. To someone who has been looking through that lens a while, I was hoping for something a little more robust. Despite that, I can full acknowledge that Reading Evangelicals is a seminal contribution to the field of evangelical history. This broke the ground, now it’s time to dig deep and critically evaluate how Christian fiction has influenced and been influenced by the culture surrounding it.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Reading Evangelicals, Daniel Silliman tells the story of American evangelicalism: the freedom of the individual readers, their imagination, and their part in a larger conversation–both real and imagined–and “how that ongoing conversation is shaped and given structure by institutions and networks, which limit the discussion but also make it possible.”

Silliman uses five novels published over four decades: Love Comes Softly (1979) which I read in my fifth grade classroom library, This Present Darkness (1986) which my sixth grade teacher turned off the lights and read aloud to our class after lunch, Left Behind (1995) which informed my Sunday school and youth group discussions in high school, The Shunning (1998) which influenced the Amish fantasy genre to which I was introduced as a middle grade reader, and The Shack (2008) which informed my women’s Bible study discussions and later theater going experience with Christian colleagues from school.

“The bookstores catered to…middle-class white women in the suburbs…most of the readers were churchgoing women: white, married, mother of a few children, middle class,” and I was poster child for the demographic. I had grown up in a middle/upper class, white, churchgoing, two parent family of five, obsessively spending all my savings on books at the family owned Christian bookstore in the mall and continuing my addiction at the Family Christian Bookstore where my students worked when I became a teacher.

Needless to say, when I discovered Daniel Silliman’s book, it felt like a letter addressed specifically to my life experience as a Reading Evangelical. As Silliman tells the story of these books– “how they were written, how they were published, how they were sold, and how they were read”–he not only tells the story of the turn of the twentieth evangelicalism, he tells the story of its readers. I was enraptured (no pun intended)!

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Silliman is one of the authors attempting to define what evangelicalism actually *is,* in a cultural sense.

He posits that we can view it as a community in conversation, sharing a common print culture and imaginative framework.

In this way, the book reminded me of analyses of the Enlightenment, which is also notoriously hard to pin down and define, contained a lot of diversity, but was characterized by a pipeline of similar ideas and ways of expressing one's thoughts.

Silliman concludes that this common print culture is actually over - tbh, I have a hard time thinking of novels, today, that are as well known and influential as the five he writes about. I'd love to see a list of books he thought of including but didn't.

It's hard to capture something as nebulous as a subculture. Silliman seems to do a good job of illuminating one piece of it,and taking it seriously on its own terms.

It was a fun and quick read, because he's basically describing my adolescence. I read all these books (except the Shack) and remember hearing my friends' moms talking about them. Silliman's description of conservative white evangelical subculture seems intuitively correct - it's more a feeling of shared sensibilities than a clear, defined system.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admit that I'm squarely in the audience for this book, and it won't be for everyone. It doesn't have the bombshell appeal of Jesus & John Wayne, nor does it really try to. But as a history text that charts evangelical Christian publishing, this is fascinating. It walks through five fiction bestsellers, starting with Janette Oke's Love Comes Softly and concluding with Wm. Paul Young's The Shack, looking at the broader moments and how these particular books directed the imagination to the larger conversation happening. I was less engaged with the review of reader responses at the end of every chapter (combing through Goodreads reviews) and the summaries/analyses of the texts themselves (although I recognize this was necessary to some degree), but the rest of the conversation carried me along. The conclusion also raises some topics that will be fruitful for thinking and discussion in the future.

This book will not be for everyone, but it was for me.

[Zak Schmoll · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book. Rather than trying to define evangelicals by theological particulars or political affiliations, the author tries to analyze evangelicals through the lens of the fictional books that have been popular in evangelicalism. I had read three of the books on the list (The Shack, Left Behind, and This Present Darkness), and I had not read the other two (The Shunning and Love Comes Softly). I think the author does a pretty good job of literary analysis. He draws themes out of the books well. I do think there are some rather tenuous connections to culture that he draws from that literary analysis, but this is a thoughtful book that tries to add some nuance to the discussion of how we understand the term evangelical.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and helpful.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can’t remember where I heard about this book, but the title intruiged me, especially since I was once an eleven year old child sneaking around with my dad’s copy of Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness. I felt the author definitly had a specific political perspective behind his writing, and one which I wouldn’t necessarily align with 100%, but I nevertheless really enjoyed his analysis of these books that were at the height of their popularity during my childhood and early teens.

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intriguing food for thought.

[G. Salter · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great exploration of how evangelical publishing evolved over the 20th century, how particular novels played into and informed evangelical concerns.

[Cara Meredith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nailed it.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I very much enjoyed reading this book. The author pairs 5 notable works of Christian fiction with five broad movements within (one partly without) Evangelicalism in the last half-century in order to discuss various aspects of the Evangelical landscape. The five chapters at the core of this book are certainly worth reading. I found every one very interesting, for varied reasons. I have only read books by two of the five authors discussed, and only one of the five books. The others I only knew by reputation. Silliman did a good job introducing the creation story, the world, and the movement of each book; so a lack of familiarity with each title or author is no obstacle to the reader of this volume.

Silliman's take on each book is interesting and insightful, but perhaps not as rigorous as I would have liked. At times, he seemed to fit the account of the novel to his greater purpose in the chapter; the connections could seem a little forced or tenuous. Nevertheless, given the subject matter, I enjoyed it as a popular-level study. I thought the same of his take on the movements within Evangelicalism at a few places as well. For instance, his discussion of "choices" related to Left Behind ("It was about the characters making choices." pg. 100) surprisingly made no mention of conversionism, decisionism, Revivalism, Charles Finney, the Wesleys, or any of the many possible connections of this idea from the early history of the Evangelical movement. However thoroughly he may dissent from the attempted theological definitions of evangelicalism, the oversight here surprised me. But so he didn't go where I thought he would? What of it? It wasn't his purpose, and I believe in letting people tell the story they want to tell and not the one I would have told. So I'll mention this, but not hold it against him. I have no doubt he is fully aware of the historical references of which I speak.

Now, I read this book as an Evangelical, but also as something much more definite. Certain of the beliefs he allows under the Evangelical umbrella are particularly odious to me, particularly in the last chapter before the conclusion. The particular author discussed there provoked charges of heresy, and while I can see it in other ways (it's just fiction), I cannot regard either the author or the book as meaningfully orthodox either. I would be on the side of those warning of heresy, whether I thought the word to be useful there or not. Nevertheless, Silliman takes a remarkably well maintained neutrality throughout. He describes, rather than renders judgment. I can appreciate this about him, and won't guess at the reasons in this review.

The Introduction and Conclusion dealt with the long-contested issue of defining Evangelicalism and Evangelicals. The understanding of what an Evangelical is is fractured, and belief-based definitions struggle to account for the breadth of the movement to which it is applied. I am of the old school that favors a theological definition more in keeping with legacy of Evangelicalism tracing back to the Wesleys and Whitefield. But I am also of an age that I have a fair number of friends with very similar backgrounds whose understanding of Evangelicalism fits a more political identification shaped more in the 70s and 80s. I can't discern why I fall one way and friends so much like me fall another. I don't quite get their view, though I grew up around all the same things they give as reasons. I can tell they don't quite get mine, either. And that's okay. Silliman rejects all such belief-based definitions, and provides his alternative in the Conclusion. I found it unsatisfying. I suspect some of my friends would like it more than I did.

But regarding his contention that belief-based definitions are untrue to the movement, or that the label "Evangelical" does remarkably little to actually help to identify someone, I would say that I have to agree, though maybe approaching it from a different direction. I describe myself as an Evangelical, and the term is meaningful to me. But that meaning, currently, only tenuously adheres to the term. No other term quite captures that meaning, so I don't abandon it. But the term has another life also, and it cannot be used helpfully without definition. Being merely "Evangelical" is maybe like what C. S. Lewis says about being "Merely Christian." You're trying to live in the hallway, but it's in the rooms attached to the hall where people enjoy meals, etc. Saying you are "Evangelical" says remarkably little right now, or it clarifies remarkably little. It should have remained an adjective, and not become a noun. On this, I highly recommend the very short work by Carl Trueman, The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Seriously, it's maybe 33 pages of actual text. While I appreciate Silliman's observations, I think Trueman's book is much more insightful on this particular question.

Another issue with the conclusion is Silliman's attempt to account for the Trump Moment in terms of what we learned in the five chapters. This felt forced, subject to a strong selection bias. It wasn't convincing, and he seemed to have lost his carefully maintained objectivity for the moment.

I don't think Silliman's Introduction and Conclusion spoil the body of his book. Certainly not for me. They are interesting, and perhaps they account for his own motives for writing, but to me they were ultimately underwhelming. Nevertheless, the five chapters in between are unsullied, and were definitely worth reading.

Finally, even if some connections were a little bit of a stretch, each of those five chapters seemed worth talking about. And I did, with my wife. I won't take them on now, but Silliman was not only a worthy conversation partner. He also inspired me to carry that conversation on with others. Perhaps in the spirit of his own conclusion, that is a conversation partner worth having.

[Jake Raabe · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book for the publisher in exchange for an honest review)

In the broadest sense Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith is an attempt to define "evangelicalism" by examining a particular literary market and, in particular, the imagination displayed by the fiction that literary community consumes. In doing so, author Daniel Silliman attempts to understand evangelicalism outside of the usual doctrinal and political bounds typical to these conversations. The approach is fresh and therefore yields new insights in a field of study that, frankly, tends to be somewhat stale. That Silliman manages to bring new insight to the question "Who are evangelicals" in the year 2021 is a real accomplishment, and I think anyone who find these discussions interesting or helpful would really benefit from this book.

Reading Evangelicals is a broad history of the Evangelical publishing industry with particular focus given to five books: Janette Oke's Love Comes Softly, Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkin's Left Behind, Beverly Lewis' The Shunning, and William Paul Young's The Shack. After an introduction explaining the book's scope and methodology, each chapter briefly examines the life of the author, situates the author's writing in the context of evangelicalism at the time, summarizes the plot of the novel, and discusses its reception and impact.

The situation of each book in a specific context is especially insightful, as each book is shown to be shaped by and subsequently itself shape a specific trend in evangelicalism that helps readers better understand who Silliman is suggesting evangelicals are. Love Comes Softly demonstrates a conviction that God desires individual flourishing. This Present Darkness is the result of a particular concern with worldview and its apologetic implications. And so on, with each chapter. These suggestions are not immediately intuitive in the sense that they aren't always something a reader familiar with the books could "guess" what Silliman would discuss beforehand--for example, "an interest in eschatology" is not the key idea Left Behind, according to the book--but they are always compelling. I've read three of the five books Silliman discusses (This Present Darkness, Left Behind, and The Shack), and I found these chapters to be insightful and accurate, furthering my understandings of these books and the contexts they both came from and shaped.

Silliman is not particularly interested in critiquing or correcting the theologies of the books discussed, but seeks to understand them on their own terms. This adds significantly to the theses of each chapter and the book as a whole, as at no point did I doubt that I was being presented a books argument in the strongest, most sympathetic light possible; each work is steel-manned, and that makes the conclusion of the book all the more powerful and, perhaps, somewhat sad, as Silliman traces these currents through 2016, with the simultaneous rise of Donald Trump in the United States and death of the Christian bookstore. It is a well-reasoned case supported by a fair and honest assessment of each of these books. In a conversation as cacophonous as "why did Evangelicals support Donald Trump," it is remarkable that this book speaks freshly and compellingly, mostly due to its central interest in question "what can we learn about Evangelicals from the books they read?"

Definitely check this one out if you're interested in recent evangelical history, especially its literary culture.

[Nathan Meyers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really, really liked this book. But I should start with the disclaimer that I am its target audience I grew up evangelical (and still love Jesus). I worked at a Christian bookstore for over two years in high school. And I love reading books about books. In sum, I had read or was extremely familiar with all the bestselling works of Christian fiction that Daniel writes about and had first-hand experience with how their messaging (was impacted by and) impacted evangelicals. In particular, I've always struggled with why the church I attended in middle & high school was so obsessed with rapture theology and apologetics. It seemed like there were things of much more Biblical and developmental importance to us youth. The chapter in this book on Left Behind gave as good of an explanation as any as to why that's the case: Left Behind underscored the evangelical compulsion to set up dichotomies and compel the recipient to make a choice. In this case, a personal relationship with Jesus over all other false/empty world views. Given that all other choices lead to hell, making a commitment to Jesus and knowing how to persuasively compel others to do so is therefore the most important thing us youth could be doing.

Now that I've gotten my personal biases out of the way, I think this book is extremely well-organized, written, and deftly argues its theses. In the introduction, Silliman argues that he's unsatisfied with the common definitions of what is an evangelical which are based on political or theological beliefs. These definitions fail to account for change over time, such that in the past few decades belief-based criteria have constantly been revised to define who is and who isn't an evangelical. Given this fluidity, Silliman proposes that a better way to define evangelicals is by the mediums that keep them in conversation. For the last half of the 20th century and early 21st century, bookstores and Christian publishing were one of the biggest hubs of evangelical discourse. Taking the argument a step further, the best-selling Christian fiction books of the last 5 decades have captured essential components of evangelicalism and spread them exponentially. Silliman dives into a chapter-by-chapter exploration of 5 of the bestselling Christian fiction novels from the late 1970s to late 2000s. He sets the cultural context that the novels took advantage of, provides a thesis for the central message of each novel, and then demonstrates how the novel bore out that message and how & why that message resonated with the evangelical culture at large.

Novels matched with messages are as follows: Jeanette Oke's Love Comes Softly presented faith as individualized relationships with God that bring personal flourishing. Frank Peretti's This Present Darness argued that the Christian worldview was in conflict with all others. Tim Lahaye & Jerry Jenkin's Left Behind used fear and suspension of belief to compel readers to make a choice for Christianity over dichotomous alternatives. Beverly Lewis's The Shunning argued that the Christian life is one of authenticity above all else. And finally, William Paul Young's The Shack echoed the themes of the Emergent Church and dissatisfaction with the state of Evangelicalism to argue that faith in God accepts ambiguities.

I could go on and on, but I leave you with a strong recommendation to read this book. Of the many books attempting to explain or understand evangelicalism, this is one of the best. Even if you wouldn't expect as much from its method of choice, aka writing about Christian fiction.

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book that I'm tempted to give five stars, but it comes up a little short.

Silliman himself is an evangelical (who returned to the US in 2016 after eight years in Germany) who thinks too much attention on evangelical culture focuses on political issues or narrow theology. Silliman argues that the fiction evangelicals have read in their bookstores have helped cement a unified identity and a culture. To understand this, he looks at five huge selling (one million copies plus for each) books and what tha says of evangelicals. You get a book that apparently created Christian romance novels, one that created Christian gothic horror, one about imagining the End of Times going on right now, a romance about the Amish and living an authentic life, and one where a man meets the Holy Trinity in a cabin (and was accused of heresay for publishing the book).

Silliman is very strong on understanding the novels and what they say. He also notes how they related to the broader evangelical culture at the times. In the conclusion he notes how some themes of the books - individualism over the common good, an us vs. them mindset, a belief that others were Wrong and needed to be fought against - helped pave the way for evangelical support for Trump. Silliman ultimately concludes that evangelical fiction has done the community a disservice, providing too pat of answers, and too easy a we're-right-and-they're-wrong worldview.

Silliman does a good job on the novels, but it felt like he overstated his points when he noted their importance to overall evangelical culture. To be clear, he has a very convincing argument that they contributed to the culture, but at times it sounds like they were the top influence and I don't know about that. There's the old line: Ask the actor playing the gravedigger in Hamlet about the play and he'll say, "It's about this grave digger who meets a prince." The books are more important to evangelical culture than the gravedigger was to Hamlet, sure, but the importance still felt distorted.

One other thing: I did find an interesting gender dynamic going on; one that Silliman leaves unaddressed. The books written by women are heavily focused on one's personal life and loves, while two books by men are deeply invested in culture wars stuff.

This book did make me curious to look into "The Shack." That one sounds interesting.

[Tammie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't even know where to begin to describe how much I appreciated Daniel Silliman's book--perhaps because my adult life has spanned the publication of these highlighted books. Pairing this with Kate Bowler's "The Preacher's Wife" brought memories in waves--both good and bad. Daniel's analysis explains so much about evangelicalism, how I was raised and where I currently reside within that spectrum.

I was a young bride when Janette Oke's "Love Comes Softly" was published. At the time I greatly enjoyed it but would probably not do so now as my tastes have changed (another story for another day). I hated "Left Behind," but not as much as I hated "The Shack"--could not get past page 10. (Though now knowing Young's back story, I at least better appreciate his creation of the book. But as an aside, I heard him speak at a conference a few years ago and was so put off by his condescension and attitude of "I have arrived and you haven't," that I had no desire to try to read it again. But I digress.)

Silliman well captures my personal tension. His weaving of evangelical events through many years and tying them to publication of these books was spot on. My experiences in my own non-denominational church and the pentecostal church of my grandparents are recreated in his narrative. Today, I look to the far right and think "I can't go there"; I look to the far left and think "I can't go there either." Neither look like the Jesus of the cross.

But what I appreciated most was the way Silliman brought everything together at the end--his own story, his testimony if you will, his challenges to us, his honest reflections, and mostly his love for Jesus and his desire to continue to honor him. No, he thankfully does not do that in a syrupy way at all. His love for the Lord simply undergirds the way he wraps all of these events together.

I will probably go back and think I could have written this better, but I am still processing all he wrote. I was so moved by how his words resonated. I listened to this as an audio book, and told my husband I needed to listen to the last chapter again. And that if he did not have time to read or listen he should at least listen to the last chapter.

Thank you, Daniel. I felt this was a real labor of love for Christ and his church.

[Kimberly Van · Rating 3 out of 5]

what’s in a name? The name “evangelical”, for instance…

I have mixed feelings about this book.
The good: it made me consider how the Christian Fiction I read impacts my theology, especially my theology about my everyday life. It tracks 5 books — Love Comes Softly, This Present Darkness, Left Behind, The Shunning, and The Shack — to explain what the authors thought about God and their world, how the book got published, and a general reception to the book.
The not-so-good: it’s a slog. I described it to my friends as book as dry as a desert. I also am not sure where the author sits in his own Christian faith. He uses the book and tracking through these major Christian fiction books to try to pin down what an Evangelical is. He throws the net and keeps most of the fish that get stuck in the net. I, for one, would not include The Shunning or The Shack in the Christian Fiction category, so I already have some problems with using them to help craft a description of “evangelical”.
I recommend this book as a good general historical overview of Christian fiction as a category and to start a conversation (even if it’s just with yourself) about how the fiction you read informs your thinking. Does what I read draw me closer to God or away from God? Does the book present a true view of God? What does the author want to teach me about God?
Jeanette Oke wants me to believe that God cares about me and my life and he is close (immanent). Frank Peretti wants me to believe that my everyday life is a battle between good and evil, God and his angels vs the devil and his demons. Left Behind wants to force belief and show me that there is a choice, but a it’s choice between believing God and disbelieving him. The Shunning wants me to believe that God wants me to be true to myself. The Shack wants me to believe that faith is nebulous, ethereal even. It says that if you’re not questioning everything, then you aren’t exercising faith.
I say to all these fiction books: but who does God say He is? What does God say reality is? What does He say that faith is? What does He say about me? What does He say that He wants me to do?
I couldn’t have articulated any of this before reading Reading Evangelicals, so I’m grateful I read it.

[Joe Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

News editor of Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of American evangelicals, Daniel Silliman has given us a candid if ambiguous assessment of evangelicalism, based on five blockbuster books or book series. These crossover books are the public face of evangelical Christianity for most secular readers. Silliman argues they have also set the agenda for current evangelical thought and they have often redefined how conservative Christians see the world and their role in it. For example, few evangelicals believed God would snatch them away before the earth fell into an evil-dominated endtime, but then the "Left Behind" novel series popularized this doctrine. Silliman feels an urgent need to understand evangelicalism, due to its growing role in American politics, but he despairs of finding a coherent expression of evangelical Christianity in popular fiction. He also mourns the loss of Christian bookstores as "discourse communities" where such theological ideas can be discussed and compared. They are fast disappearing along with other brick-and-mortar bookstores. Silliman describes how Christian publishers viewed these blockbuster books with suspicion, then delight and amazement as they racked up sales in the tens of millions of copies. But as bookstores disappear, the cost of marketing books skyrocket and profit margins plummet, so publishers are slashing their plans and merging to survive. The whole landscape of Christian publishing is changing dramatically.

I most appreciated Silliman's biographical vignettes of the authors, which reveal their motives for writing. It's also helpful to have his summary of each author's theological position, but this is not a cogent theological study. It's a peephole into the thinking of readers, authors, and publishers who made the evangelical publishing phenomenon of the past three decades--informative, but just a peep.

[Joel Wentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is actually more like 4.5 stars. It's so, so close to 5, as I loved (almost) the whole experience of reading it.

This book is really composed of three distinct "subjects" - a recent history of the Christian-evangelical publishing industry, literary criticism, and cultural criticism. In my view, it's a major success in the first two areas, and a bit mixed in the third.

The publishing history is so fascinating, and even the biographical snapshots of various authors and influencers is incredibly interesting. Silliman did great research on this, and especially as it's something I knew little to nothing about before reading the book, I found it of great value. I also really enjoyed his take on the various themes that show up in these five novels (the literary criticism), and found some genuine insights here, particularly in the chapters on Peretti, Left Behind, and the Shack.

The cultural criticism, however, is more of a mixed bag. I think the best way to receive this book is as an interesting proposal regarding how certain cultural trends within conservative evangelicalism showed up in popular fiction at the time (as mediated by a booming publishing industry), but I do not think this book contains the definitive definition of that incredibly slippery term "evangelical," as much as Silliman might think it does. The closing chapter tries to draw some conclusions regarding the popularity of Donald Trump among evangelicals, and I simply don't think this particular study can address that thorny issue.

In sum, I suppose I wish the cultural criticism aspects were a bit more constrained, as they inject an element of overreach in an otherwise genuinely insightful and informative study that is unlike any other history of American evangelicals I have read. I really did love the reading experience, and will be recommending this to others.