Poverty, Creativity Spring 1996

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I'm A literary snob. My husband is right. When I walk into a Christian bookstore or past the "inspirational reading" kiosk in the grocery store, I usually glance at the fiction rack and keep moving—fast. The covers alone repel me. Most of the illustrations are poorly drawn, depicting melodramatic people caught in a moment of anguish or rapture that I don't believe for a minute, airbrushed facsimiles of something I'm supposed to believe is a real person having a real life. The romances in particular (good Lord, I didn't know there was such a thing as a "Christian romance novel"!) are laughable and horrifying at the same time. Harlequin romances without cleavage.

Sometimes I slow down enough to read the little plot teaser below the title, or even lift the book off the rack and read the back cover. It's always the same, though. Fingers and face burning, I put the thing back quickly and look to see if anyone saw me. I hurry away, disturbed, embarrassed, frustrated, and once again disappointed.

But if one is going to write about Christian fiction and include any honest discussion of contemporary Christian fiction, one must first read it. (I did read a Harlequin romance—once—just to say I had. It took me two hours, and it was as bad as I'd expected.) So I went to my local Christian bookstore, politely asked my unsuspecting bookseller to show me the most popular titles by living authors, plunked down my Visa card, and went home with a bag of books. What if you like them? my husband asked. What indeed. It would be just like God to let that happen, I thought, to show me up for the literary snob I have ever-so-kindly been accused of being.

You know what happened. The plots, even when predictable, simplistic, clumsy, or borderline melodramatic, ...

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