The latest issue of World Magazine is devoted to a call for the "reformation" of Christian fiction. As Gene Edward Veith relates, most modern Christian fiction is clichéd, formulaic, and intellectually shallow. In addition, for the last 30+ years, Christian fiction has explicitly targeted the Christian audience rather than the broader culture.
Christian publisher Thomas Nelson recalls a time when Christian writers wrote general fiction that had a Christian worldview -- in other words, their fiction acknowledged eternal truths and God's moral laws even when the books' themes weren't explicitly spiritual. Books written in such a way -- such as Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Lewis' Space Trilogy and Sayers' Peter Wimsey novels -- have often had tremendous success in the secular marketplace and have occasionally had an impact on the culture. Nelson has launched a new division, WestBow Press, in an attempt to revive this grand tradition.
Veith sees the Left Behind series for the most part as an example of the "conventional", formulaic style that must be...ummm...left behind. However, he credits the series with the remarkable feat of breaching the wall between the "Christian fiction" ghetto and the secular marketplace. WestBow is poised to take advantage of that breach by turning Christian writers loose to tell their stories without some of the crippling restraints placed on them by other Christian publishers in the past.
I wish them great success.
To help WestBow in their quest to discover and publish fresh Christian talent, World is teaming up with them to hold a short story contest. Check Veith's article for details.
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