More Than Martyrs
Randy Alcorn's Safely Home
Carol Lee Hamrin
April 1, 2002
Safely Home, Randy Alcorn (Tyndale House, 2001), 400 pp.
Popular American novels about China are chancy things. In Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon, characters from the President down refer to the Chinese people as "Klingons"-a word that takes on the symbolic weight of racial epithets that would never be tolerated in the American media. Popular Christian novels are often no better. So I opened the cover of evangelical author Randy Alcorn's Safely Home with some trepidation. Red pen in hand and notebook at my side, I was expecting to catch another influential evangelical in the act of China-bashing. The vivid inside-cover illustration of a heavenly Christ welcoming home a Chinese martyr did not bode well for a balanced treatment.
At the end of chapter one, I jotted down several points, but kept reading. At least there had been some positive remarks about the Chinese people-perhaps Alcorn was not going to add too much to the demonizing of the Chinese government that is fueling an anti-American backlash among younger Chinese.
At the beginning of chapter two, I tensed up again. "Here it comes," I thought, as the book's underground Christian hero, Li Quan, asked himself, "Is this the day I die?" Due to his faith, he had been relegated to a life of manual labor and rural poverty, bicycling along a road of frozen mud to a Spartan one-room house. And yes, here came the scar-faced police with guns drawn, quoting Chairman Mao and demanding recantation of faith and threatening death to two dozen believers for meeting illegally. Oh dear …
But by the time I was a quarter of the way into the story, I began to relax. There were moments of surprising realism, as when Li Quan tries to educate his former Harvard roommate Ben Fielding, an ...
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