09chap9.qxd 10/1/02 10:21 AM Page 209 No Longer Left Behind Amazon.com, Reader-Response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America Paul C. Gutjahr Much ink has been spilled on the topic of the uneasy relationship between American Christians and the novel. The vast majority of this scholarship has centered on American Protestantism’s antagonism toward the novel in the early nineteenth century. With few exceptions, the dominant narrative of this relationship goes something like this: American Protestants viewed Wction writing in general, and the novel in particular, as a serious threat to the virtue and well-being of every American up until the 1850s, when their opposition began to gradually erode until it was washed away com- pletely by the astounding popularity of Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, Wrst published in 1880.1 As with so many grand narratives, this one is Xawed. American Protes- tantism has never been a monolithic entity. It has varied according to region- alism, denominationalism, and its connections to other American cultural practices such as science, education, and politics. Perhaps the most im- portant, and most ignored, part of this accepted narrative centers on how The author would like to gratefully acknowledge two fellowship grants that helped bring this article to completion. These grants were awarded by the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University under the directorship of Robert Wuthnow and Marie GrifWth and the Christian Scholars Foundation under the directorship of Bernard Draper. 09chap9.qxd 10/1/02 10:21 AM Page 210 210 Book History inXuential conservative elements within American Protestantism continued to show a distrust toward the novel through much of the twentieth century. This distrust manifested itself most clearly in a vibrant opposition to novels with overtly Christian content, echoing long-standing arguments declaring that fact and Wction cannot be proWtably commingled. As late as 1993, one irate Protestant author captured the longevity of Protestantism’s aversion to the novel when she titled a pleading article that appeared in the major Protestant periodical Christianity Today “Stop Rejecting Fiction!”2 The intention in this essay is to correct the long-held view that Protes- tant opposition to the novel all but ended in the late nineteenth century. Instead, as the title lists of the most important Christian publishing Wrms show, a pronounced opposition by various segments of Christian Protes- tantism to certain forms of Wction lasted well into the 1980s. American Christians may have begun to read more and more novels as the nineteenth century progressed, but even at the close of the twentieth century there existed severe doubts about the propriety and efWcacy of Christian novels— novels explicitly populated with Christian characters who partake in edify- ing narratives bent on espousing orthodox Christian doctrine and encour- aging a Christ-like ethic of behavior. The corrective this essay offers is all the more important because of the size and vibrancy of twentieth-century American Protestant publishing. With a growth rate at times nearly twice that of the twentieth-century American publishing industry in general, Christian book sales in 1996 reached three billion dollars, a 14 percent share of the country’s publishing industry.3 Yet this segment of American publishing is so noticeably understudied that the religious historian Martin Marty has rightly named it “largely an invisible phenomenon.”4 Only in the last two decades have American Evangelicals—an umbrella category for certain more conservative American Protestants and 38 percent of the United States’ general population in 1990—begun to warm to the presence of Christian novels.5 Although this fact is striking in itself, it is made all the more intriguing by the reasons that lie behind this acceptance. By examining the history of twentieth-century Protestant book publishing in the United States in general, and the reasons behind the astounding success of the Left Behind novel series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins in particular, I will argue in this essay that the last signiWcant vestiges of opposition to the Christian novel receded from American Protestantism because the Wctional form of the novel became an important, and largely untapped, resource for explicating the nonWctional content of the Bible. Further, the ability of Wction to explain scripture has not only helped pave the way for American Evangelicals more readily embracing the Christian novel, but has also led to blurring the line between the categories of sacred and Wctional literature. 09chap9.qxd 10/1/02 10:21 AM Page 211 No Longer Left Behind 211 American Protestant Publishing and the Novel Timothy Dwight—poet, theologian, and president of Yale—captured the early American Protestant resistance to the novel in stating, “Between the Bible and novels there is a gulph Wxed which few readers are willing to pass.”6 He was not alone in his condemnation of novel reading; a host of religious and nonreligious commentators condemned the form as hope- lessly corrupting. Such censures would Wnd a wide circulation in the United States as the American Tract Society issued tracts on the subject; gift books and advice manuals included articles on the dangers of novel reading; and a host of other printed material would warn readers away from the insid- ious novel form.7 Religious and nonreligious antinovel writers most often grounded their arguments in two lines of deeply intertwined reasoning. Preeminent among these was a Scottish Common Sense philosophical notion of the importance of basing one’s life on the truth. As one critic preached in 1807, novels removed one from the truth through their tendency to “give false notions of things, to pervert the consequences of human actions, and to misrepre- sent the ways of divine providence.”8 Virtuous action, and thus the ability to lead a worthwhile life, depended on embracing what was true and avoid- ing even the slightest hint of dissimulation or falseness. A second line of reasoning argued that novels with their romantic and adventurous tales inXamed the imagination, and thus the passions. Awakening uncontrollable animal instincts once again worked at cross purposes with ideals of vir- tue, which were heavily dependent on notions of hard work, discipline, and perseverance.9 Finally, Protestants added a third line of reasoning to these antinovel polemics. They protested that novels were dangerous because they took time away from more worthy activities, principal among these being Bible reading and other devotional practices. Further, they feared that novels, even more dangerously, might so inXuence American reading tastes that the Bible would come to seem nothing more than “a wearisome book.”10 In the end, it was this concern with the Bible that fueled much of the Protestant hesitancy to accept the novel form. A concern with truth (as most explicitly revealed in the Bible) was the cornerstone of American Protes- tantism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is not sur- prising, then, to note that various theological camps that held more tightly to the importance of Bible reading and a biblical hermeneutic propounding of the absolute historicity of the Bible played a key role in the develop- ment of the acceptance of Wction among American Protestants. Examining these camps as they manifested themselves under the auspices of different 09chap9.qxd 10/1/02 10:21 AM Page 212 212 Book History denominations is one of the best ways to trace the changing attitudes among American Protestants toward the novel in general, and the Chris- tian novel in particular. Seven Protestant denominations have functioned for so long in the United States that they have come to earn the title “mainline denominations.” These include Congregationalists, Presbyterians, American Baptists, Meth- odists, Disciples of Christ, Lutherans, and Episcopalians. Episcopalians, with their early interest in German higher criticism, and thus a more Xexible view of biblical language and interpretation, were among the Wrst denom- inations to embrace Wction more widely in the 1830s. The other mainline denominations would begin showing openness to the novel beginning in the 1840s as they too became more open to higher criticism, but various degrees of opposition to the novel would linger for decades.11 As the nineteenth century began to draw to a close, a new kind of denominationalism began to arise, growing out of an ever more militant commitment to biblical literalism and various theological stances focused on the centrality of the Bible in everyday life. These newer denominations came to be classed under the rubric “Fundamentalist” after the turn of the century because of their commitment to the fundamentals of biblical orthodoxy.12 More theologically conservative elements among the Meth- odist, Presbyterian, and Congregational denominations joined with Ply- mouth Brethren, various independent churches, and certain strains of the nineteenth-century Restorationist movement to be associated with Ameri- can “Fundamentalism.”13 Near the end of the nineteenth century, as what would become known as American Christian Fundamentalism began to gather strength, a differ- ent kind of Protestant publishing was emerging. Denominations had long had their own publishing enterprises to facilitate their efforts in religious education, governance, and missions, but the new breed of Protestant pub- lishers was not linked to particular denominations. These publishers sought to work with broader constituencies, which shared core theological beliefs rather than denominational labels. Such common commitment could be traced back to the interdenominational publishing efforts of the American Bible Society, American Tract Society and American Sunday School Union, but by the end of the nineteenth century cross-denominational publishing would begin to move away from the nonproWt realm of these earlier publishers.14 The advent of this new type of Protestant publishing came with the founding of Revell Publishing by Fleming H.