Christian novel

So what did you find as you were kind of

exploring like the Christian fiction world? Consistent themes emerged.

And so I really used Janet Oakes' Love Comes Softly as a case study.

And it's not a random case study.

It's a book published in 1979 that really reinvigorates the Christian fiction industry.

and sets a template.

And what I saw is that the values embedded in that book, through the narrative, through the characters, aligned very closely with what was going on in nonfiction in Christian women's publishing at the same time.

I wanted to really bring readers from outside the this cultural space kind of into the narrative of at least one book.

And that's where I went with Oak's Love Comes Softly because it really did break open the market for Christian fiction in 1979.

And it was later adapted into a Hallmark film.

And it, you know, is kind of a good representative work.

But I loved reading that one, not just for kind of the theology and the positivity and the submission and all of that and the masculine protection, but But also I read it as an economic document, right? What were the free market economics, the kind of libertarian ideals that were also embedded in Christian fiction? And that's something I saw over and over again in some of the books I didn't end up including.

But that was fun to write about and to hold it up together with Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House.

which scholars have already really shown how the ideals of libertarianism, free market capitalism were embedded throughout that series.

Yes.

I think she did a pretty good job there with, um, identifying some of the major players, uh, names we'll all recognize.

Um, but I have to say when she started talking about, um, Christian fiction, I almost was like, oh no, I'm about to be implicated.

So she does put it in its context.

It started in the 60s with Catherine Marshall, the author of Christie.

more

Amish.

This is when I was an actual reviewer for Publishers Weekly for Christian fiction.

And I was like, I can't do it anymore.

Here too we often find a special purpose besides the general moral drift which marks such works.

Now that we have made our survey of pagan and Christian fiction, it will be well to concentrate our attention on one or two examples of each class.

The pagans will be represented by Achilles Tatius because he is like most of the pagan novelists and Longus because he is unlike them.

The Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena is a clear imitation of these by a Christian hand.

But in Amish fiction, there's been more scholarship around that.

And what we have learned is that so many women talk about how reading works of Christian fiction are devotional acts.

And they actually pray through the characters.

And they do read these books as a kind of act of not just entertainment, but also religious formation.