BOOKS
Chernus, Roy & True, Michael & Sheerin, John B.
RELIGIOUS PUBLISHING JOHN GABVEY geli#ous publishing has fallen on bad times. I've worked in religious publishins for several years and have seen good and bad things happen, but during the...
...I'm afraid somebody might mistake it for Christianity...
...Fox is predictably trendy--he doesn't like asceticism or dichotomies, he tells us--and in WHEE, I + JOem otl~vev, the author o~ Saints for Confused Times (Themes More Press), is an editor with Templegate...
...The fact that such books sell well encourages speculation that America is becoming a religious nation...
...Sample copy: "We have had to suffer, but I trust that my story will show the vibrancy of life, rather than the evil...
...Commonweal: 283...
...Considering the fact that this age has also given us Farrah Fawcett Majors dolls, leisure suits, and est, it may be the Imitation we deserve...
...If we can get them to believe in the devil, that's the first s t e p . . . " ) But what is happening is not that the nation is becoming religious...
...Now it's a scramble...
...This is probably what comes of having been so constantly exposed to the words of the Bible that they lose their strangeness, which can be glorious and terrifying at once, but never cute, or familiar...
...No, that isn't it...
...Vow, God, by Sister Francis Clare (New Leaf Press) is a Pentecostal number in which, according to the publishers, "the enigma that has been the Catholic nun is unTaveled in one gutsy, anointed, authentic story--warm, personable, challenging...
...I thought Matthew Fox, O.P., had hit 8 new low in this department with On Becoming a Musical Mystical Bear (Harper), but then he outdid himself with WHEEl We, wee, ,411 1he Way Home, which is subtitled ,4 Guide to the New Sensual Spirituality (Consortium Books...
...Remember some of the silly things people said about The Exorcist...
...And Paulist press recently published the sickeningly titled T.S.K.H.: Tickle, Snuggle, Kiss, Hug, by Betty May, a book about relating to your kids...
...One is the cute approach to God...
...This isn't the first time religion has been used to bless the status quo, or the first time churchpeople have been seduced by the spirit of the present age...
...There is even a Christian weight loss plan out there somewhere, but I don't have the heart to look it up...
...I've worked in religious publishins for several years and have seen good and bad things happen, but during the lest couple of years I think we've begun to see the bottom...
...What would scare me would be getting to heaven and finding out that God is an activities director on an endless sea cruise, or that the Holy Spirit acts like Ed McMahon on the Tonight Show...
...that problem is always with us...
...etc., he has written what his publishers modestly describe as "an 'Imitation of Christ' for the Age of Aquarius...
...I am uncomfortable, when I read a magazine like Christian Bookseller or talk to the owner of an evangelical bookstore and hear the business referred to as "a ministry...
...I don't suggest that the cute titles and the born-again books are published by people whose sole concern is the fast buck...
...Subsidized religious publishing has not generally offered hospitality to new and independent religious thinking...
...Religious publishing, and evangelical television shows, are the two areas in which this sort of idolatry is most obvious...
...There is a smarmy feeling on the part of some churchpeople that anything which interests people in religion has to have some merit...
...But it used to be that only a few celebrities (Pat Boone and Anita Bryant, to name a couple) cashed in on this market...
...That is one trend...
...and the way it is sold determines what people feel about it...
...It is possible to reduce Jesus by making him fit our sense of life...
...Well, yes and no...
...I know one response I might get to this, from either the trendy-cute corner or the born-again one...
...If they represent the future of religious publishing, I want to get into something more honest, like child porn...
...The promise of the Bible gets whittled down to a success story: some crooked pol or fame-crazed celebrity gets saved and stops drinkPn$ and horsing around--that's what Jesus is for...
...I'd like you to walk with me down the Lance road of life...
...The trendy end of the spectrum baptizes all the current therapies, politics, and ideologies, while the boru-again end baptizes our culture's right-wing leanings, with in28 April 1978:282 dividualism transferred from economics to salvation...
...it can't be done, and any generalization will founder on a number of honorable exceptions...
...That's the weird little religion both these trends encourage...
...Loges International has just published a book about Larry Flynt's alleged conversion, by evangelist Larry Jones, entitled Hustler/or the Lord...
...The language we are charged with as Christians can't be made to fit any purpose we want, and to be careless or callous about it simply debases it...
...I've heard it before...
...Profit is involved, and must be-at least enough to enable a firm to continue...
...Large secular publishing companies were inclined to wave away the evangelical market until the past few years...
...Someone with wet lips and a goofy stare says, "You're scared"--either of "the new" or of "what the Lord is doing in our age...
...Bert Lance's wife LaBelle---reailyt It's true!--has written This Too Shall Pass (Christian Herald Press...
...On the contrary, religion is becoming one more American product, sold~ like everything else on the market...
...But every now and then I come across items that make me want to gag...
...I don't mean to lump all evangelical writers together...
...Good tb!.-.gs are, to be sure, being published: John Duune, Henri Nouwen, and Rosemary Hau$hton (to name three very different, very good writers) continue to do exciting work, and in almost any decent bookstore you can fred something by C. S. Lewis or Thomas Marten...
...But at the same time, there really must be some fear and trembling involved...
...What is terrible about this...
...I imagine unraveling a nun would be gutsy...
...In fact, it is possible to make a false idol and call it God...
...The other is the boom in born-again publishing...
...The cute titles are the result of domesticated religion: get it down to a cozy level, make God a buddy...
...I'm thinking of a couple of trends...
...The born-again books, despite their frequent nods in the direction of Pentecost, also espouse a form of religion which is hardly likely to transform anything more substantial than a mood...
...What is new about this is that it sells so well now, and it isn't meeting with much resistance...
...Are publishers of religious books finally expected to be different, in making decisions about what directions their lists should take, from any other publisher...
...but even if these things can be put down to a simple lapse in taste, it is a lapse so severe that it presents a moral problem...
...Then they saw some sales figures which gave them a sudden respect for all those brighteyed people with Praise the Lord bumper stickers...
Vol. 105 • April 1978 • No. 9
