Friday, December 24, 2021

A Case for Withdrawing the Genre of “Christian Fiction”

 From LitHub:

The premise of the book I’m holding is a familiar one: girl and boy meet, girl and boy don’t get along, girl and boy can’t deny the romance that sparks between them. It’s a plot I’ve read dozens of times before and will gladly read a dozen times more. Yet beneath my anticipation there’s a lurking insecurity, one that tells me I shouldn’t be reading this book, and it causes me to sneak it into the house as though reading it were an illicit activity. For this novel is categorized as Christian fiction, and I’m not Christian.

Not even a little bit Christian. Religion wasn’t part of my upbringing, and I chose not to align with anything spiritual in my adult life. But I am an avid reader, one of those reads-four-books-per-week types. I’m not too picky and take pride in traveling through so many new worlds in the books I encounter. This includes Christian fiction, for which I’ve formed a habit that can be rather uncomfortable for a non-Christian identifier. Much of time, the Christian fiction I read has nothing to do with Christianity; in truth, the book I’m about to dive into is simply a work of formulaic contemporary fiction that just so happens to be published by a Christian publishing house.

So-called “Christian fiction” is the category assigned to novels published by Christian faith-based publishers. Rising to popularity in the US in the late 1970s, the big names today are Baker House, which houses six imprints, each with their own flavor and specialty, Zondervan, which considers itself the gold standard for Christian publications, and Tyndale, my personal favorite. As with all fiction, there are subgenres to note: Amish, biblical, contemporary, historical, fantasy, and western. In my experience, the latter four subgenres tend to feature very little Christian-specific content. (Read more.)

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