Book Reviews: Reading Evangelicals; Reading Black Books

If we are what we read, then it’s worth taking the time to explore which books have shaped us most, and how they’ve done it. The two books I’m reviewing today do this in very different ways, but both of them make thoughtful and effective contributions to the discussion.

(Make sure to read all the way through this newsletter today—there’s a surprise for you at the very end!)

Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith by Daniel Silliman (Eerdmans, 2021)

“Historians have been fighting over the definition of the ‘evangelical’ pretty much since the emergence of a distinct field of history that focused on evangelicals,” Daniel Silliman writes in the introduction to Reading Evangelicals. Himself a historian and an editor at an evangelical magazine, Silliman adds, “The problem of this persistent question feels very real to me. And I think the answer may be in the bookstore.”

The idea makes so much sense that it’s surprising no one thought of it before, but I’m glad Silliman did. Works of fiction that are targeted to a specific audience such as evangelicals, he argued, help form the imagination of that audience, and imagination in turn helps to form beliefs, ideas, and character (not to mention creating a market for many more works along the same lines).

Silliman chose five seminal novels as the focus of his study: Love Comes Softly, This Present Darkness, Left Behind, The Shunning, and The Shack. For each, he offers some backstory on the author, the time period, and the cultural context before examining the book itself. All this helps to explain why each book took off the way it did, when it did. Ever wonder about the enduring popularity of Amish fiction, or how The Shack grabbed an audience that once went for much more theologically conservative books? Silliman’s incisive analysis fills in a lot of those blanks, showing how the books influenced the audience who in turn influenced the next wave of books.

If the book has a weak spot, it’s in the chapter on Janette Oke’s Love Comes Softly. Silliman does a good job of explaining how and why a Canadian college president’s wife came up with the idea for a prairie romance that found an eager Christian readership, but he doesn’t situate the novel in a broader theological context, at least at first. He shows how the book’s main theme is learning to trust in God’s provision, but he doesn’t remark until much, much later on whether the novel handles that theme in a good way or in a flawed way, which left this reader, at least, groping for a point of reference. When I read, “[Clark] wants what is best for [Marty] because God wants what is best for her. She should have what she wants, because that is God’s greatest desire, that people flourish,” I honestly was half-waiting for “Whereas we know that life is cold and brutal and God can be hard to fathom, so Clark should have tossed her out into the snow.” Or something. Just any kind of commentary that would show us where Silliman’s thinking was on the topic.

This was just the one chapter, though; once Silliman got to This Present Darkness, he was able and willing to share his points of reference (and even uses the phrase “point of reference,” borrowing from Francis Schaeffer). From there on, he provides perceptive theological and cultural commentary that shows us where evangelical authors and their audiences followed orthodox Christian paths, and where they diverged from those paths. He traces an ideological line through these books that helps us understand how the evangelical community got to where it is, spiritually, ideologically, and politically. And he provides food for thought about the needs that these books were trying to fill, and where the conversation about evangelicalism might take us from here.

Reading Black Books: How African American Literature Can Make Our Faith More Whole and Just by Claude Atcho (Brazos Press, 2022)

Pastor and professor Claude Atcho approaches the question of faith and literature from what you might call the opposite direction. Instead of looking at books written for Christians and seeing how they helped form Christian thinking, Atcho looks at a group of classic novels and poems and gives them a robust theological reading. In doing so, he demonstrates how to bring Christian ideas to bear on books that are not necessarily Christian in themselves, but that deal with many of the same issues Christianity addresses.

The books and poems in question are all by African American writers. They include some of the best-known works of American literature, including Invisible Man, Native Son, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and Beloved. The authors covered here tended to come from deeply Christian backgrounds, and their books are steeped in religious imagery and language, but while some of them found themselves identifying more and more deeply with Christ, others struggled against the faith of their childhood.

To come to these novels with a Christian perspective, Atcho tells us, is to wrestle with some of life’s deepest issues, to try to discern faint rays of hope even in the midst of profound despair. As he puts it:

A theological reading … considers that [Richard] Wright, the author of Native Son, has something interrogative and constructive to say to our faith as we reflect on what that challenging message might be. To read Black literature through a theological lens is to affirm the dignity of these stories, the wisdom of these authors, and the power of God’s revelation to speak a word to us amid our collective lived experience.

Throughout the book, Atcho resoundingly demonstrates that to read in this way is to to treat authors and their works with the respect they deserve, even if we engage them from a point of view they may have shared only partially or not shared at all. At 172 pages, Reading Black Books is not a lengthy tome, but it is a dense one, deserving to be read slowly and savored—dense with historical, literary, and religious insight, and with eloquent language. And in a way it provides answers to some of the questions posed by Silliman: questions about how faith should teach us to engage with day-to-day life, and about how reading can grow instead of shrink our world.

(Cover images copyright Eerdmans and Brazos Press, respectively.)

Book Links:

Reading Evangelicals on Amazon
Reading Evangelicals on Bookshop

Reading Black Books on Amazon
Reading Black Books on Bookshop

Note:

We have something to celebrate this week: This newsletter has hit the 100-subscriber mark! I want to thank all you faithful readers for coming on this book-reviewing journey with me. And to mark the occasion, we’re having a giveaway! Three of you can win autographed sets of my books One by One, Dorothy and Jack, and The Gospel in Dickens.

To enter for a chance to win, please answer one of the following questions in the comment section below (or all of them, if you feel like it!):

1. Why did you subscribe to Dear, Strange Things?

2. What has been your favorite book review in this newsletter?

3. Has any review here persuaded you to read a particular book? If so, which book(s)?

Good luck, and I look forward to reading your answers! I’ll hold the drawing and announce the winners in two weeks.