Amy Sullivan's basic thesis, in "Jesus Christ, Superstar," is that wretched books like the Left Behind series are popular in the evangelical subculture because of a lack of alternative "Christian-themed entertainment":
… sometime in the 1960s, religiously-themed entertainment simply disappeared. …
This is a problem because when the only Christian-themed entertainment in the marketplace is laced with conservatism, Christianity itself will increasingly take on a conservative cast. The faith of Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr is not the faith of Tim LaHaye and Mel Gibson. Yet the more that single interpretation of Christianity dominates airwaves and bookshelves, the more people of faith are tempted to believe that the only way to be a "good" Christian is to be a conservative.
It's impossible to know whether the Left Behind books would still sell 60 million copies if they had a little competition. … But there's no reason not to try.
I wish that the situation — and the solution — were as simple as Sullivan portrays.
The evangelical subculture is awash with bad art and dismal entertainments. From the Left Behind books to the vast majority of "contemporary Christian music" (which is none of the above) evangelicals are eagerly buying up awful dreck, the consumption of which makes them worse people, worse neighbors, worse citizens and fundamentally worse Christians. This is theologically awful, politically vapid, aesthetically blasphemous stuff.
If the popularity of these dismal artistic and entertainment offerings could really be explained as merely the result of a lack of "Christian-themed" alternatives, then a happy and hopeful solution presents itself: create more alternatives and watch quality win out in the marketplace of ideas.
The first problem with this idea is that the subcultural marketplace of American evangelicalism is not a free market.
Anything not produced by and for the profit of the barons and bishops of the subculture's market-driven ecclesiology will be branded as dangerous, heretical and anathema. The latest album of shallow pop music from a "Christian label" record company is permissible. The latest offerings from U2 or from Buddy and Julie Miller — sales of which do nothing to enrich Word records or Creation concerts — are not. Left Behind, which enriches Thomas Nelson, has the official blessing of the gatekeepers of the kingdom. John Grisham's preachy The Testament, is published by Random House and is therefore not officially sanctioned reading.
But that argument — that evangelicalism's notion of orthodoxy is increasingly a function of sales — is really a separate matter.
I mentioned U2 and John Grisham in part to point out the absurdity of the notion that there exists somehow a dearth of mainstream "Christian-themed entertainment."
Sullivan cites the peak of Hollywood's sandal-epic period as the high-point in the availability of such entertainments in American culture (oddly including Spartacus in the list of biblical epics). These films were all released, keep in mind, back in the days when evangelical Christians wouldn't set foot in a movie house.
But consider the decades since then and the abundance of XTEs that have blossomed — from the entire careers of writers like John Updike, John Irving, Anne Tyler, Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry to the Jesus movement and the birth of "Christian rock," including a couple of Dylan albums for heaven's sake. Peter Jackson also recently adapted some popular novels by a devout Christian writer for the big screen — perhaps you've heard of them?
And in any case, the existing pool of XTE isn't limited only to contemporary works. Last I checked, The Brothers Karamazov and The Complete Father Brown were still in print — even if you will never, ever see either of them on the shelves of your local "Christian" bookstore.
No, sadly the popularity of Bad Christian Art is not the result of a lack of Good Christian Art. It is a result of the rejection of metaphor.
American evangelical Christians do not like metaphor. That's not strong enough. They fear metaphor. It terrifies them, and so they despise it, reject it and forbid it wherever possible.
This is why evangelical scripture reading conspicuously avoids the Gospels.
That seems like an outrageous claim, yet it is assuredly true. Evangelical preaching and devotional literature is far, far more likely to turn to the epistles of St. Paul or to the (apparently) simple maxims of the Book of Proverbs than to the frighteningly ambiguous narrative portions of the Bible.
Evangelicals prefer their truth in simple, unambiguous propositions. The Gospels and Jesus' parables — all that worrisome, polyvalent storytelling — just won't do. Occasionally, but rarely, some brave soul will wade fearfully into the great pools of poetry, epic history or parable in the Bible, but only to reassure others that the biblical writers were all, like Aesop, simple fabulists and that really all such passages can be reduced to a propositional kernel of unthreatening, unambiguous, unremarkable truth. The Psalms are read as proverbs.
(The late Francis Schaeffer — whose influence on the last few decades of evangelical culture would be difficult to overstate — provided the pseudo-intellectual justification for this hatred of metaphor. He was famous for wearing knickers, for declaring that "all truth is propositional and all politics genital" and for condemning Soren Kierkegaard as the Antichrist. The fact that Schaeffer decried metaphor while simultaneously calling for greater Christian engagement in the arts is an example of what the Antichrist would've called irony– another forbidden literary device.)
Fiction in general is to be distrusted. A blatant allegory, like C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is permissible, but any narrative that defies such a simple one-to-one replacement code interpretation is suspect. In any case, evangelicals vastly prefer Mere Christianity. Those few who have read, and understood, the rest of Lewis' Narnia books have been scandalized by what they found there — from the Bacchanalia of Prince Caspian's satire against legalism to The Last Battle's blessedly expansive notion of grace.
It is no accident that the Left Behind novels are remarkably free of metaphor, of multi-leveled themes, or even of the kinds of visual details that might be taken to stand for something at a non-literal level. Artless art — explicit, monovalent, prosaic prose — is the only permissible form of storytelling.
This is true not only in the realm of fiction, but in music as well. Singer-songwriter Rich Mullins found great fortune and favor in the evangelical world when he penned the thuddingly blunt praise chorus "Our God is an awesome God." His more thoughtful and musically interesting writing about the "Ragamuffin Gospel" wasn't nearly as welcome. (I would say more about the world of "contemporary Christian music" but, alas, it's too depressing.)
Isn't it possible, though, that some evangelicals could be persuaded, through exposure to better quality art, to embrace metaphor?
Yes. Not only is this possible, it happens all the time. But because the fear and loathing of metaphor is an intrinsic part of the self-definition of the evangelical subculture, this also means that these people cease to be "evangelicals." Sure, some of us hold on to the label, but the truth is we no longer fit in, and we're no longer really accepted.
I still consider myself an "evangelical" Christian — I'm still born-again, after all. But once one recognizes that even this phrase — "born again" — is, like all language about the transcendent, a metaphor, one no longer is completely comfortable or completely welcome within the evangelical subculture. There metaphor is still distrusted and feared. They are like Nicodemus on the rooftop, still clinging to their pharisaical propositions, unable to grasp why this compelling teacher insists on speaking in riddles.
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