This blog is a little out of the ordinary for me, but a good friend sent me an article by Philip Jenkins with a provocative question.
“Imagine you wanted to teach a course on Evangelical Christianity, past or present, what novels or similar texts might you use? One problem, of course, is for many years evangelicals had real doubts about the whole world of novels which they associated with frivolity or even immorality and that’s why there is no evangelical Jane Austen. On the other hand, Puritans like John Bunyan have a good claim to have invented the English novel as a genre – Pilgrim’s Progress or The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. They were after all fundamentally interested in exploring the inner landscapes of the mind and soul. But for later years the pickings are scarcer. I love, for instance, using Lewis’s ”Screwtape Letters” as a teaching tool but what else leaps to mind? I’m not necessarily referring to books that happen to be authored by evangelicals, unless they centrally address those distinctive religious themes.
I was an English major (among other things) in college, and while I would say Flannery O’Connor has clearly written fiction out of a Catholic perspective and Wendell Berry’s fiction is not inconsistent with evangelical culture (especially younger evangelicals), there is a scarcity of fiction that is actually positive about evangelical culture.
I’m pretty sure the “Left Behind” series is not what Philip Jenkins is trying to find. Why is there not more? I would say this:

1.  Great novels are mostly about the complications of this world and typically evangelicals have concentrated on the next world and discounted the “inner landscapes” of this world. We cannot claim St. Augustine’s torturous reflections for this one. The Catholics own him.

2.  Novels when done well are not didactic or proclamational. They do not have foregone conclusions. Much of evangelicalism is just that. We all remember the story of the little boy in Sunday School who asked” “What is brown with a tail lives in a tree and eats acorns?” The little boy responded, “Well, it sounds like a squirrel but I know the answer is supposed to be Jesus.”

3.   Novels may have a limited number of plots but they are not systematic theology. Evangelicals like closure. We cannot have unresolved issues. We are more comfortable with “five ways” kinds of books or biographies with happy endings.

4.  Fiction trusts the reader as much as the author. It is truth working on many levels and not just one or two.

5.  The evangelical culture – unlike Southern religion or Jewish – is not old enough to be really interesting and historically rich. It is still new and many of the main figures are sometimes caricatures more than characters.

6.  We are people of the Book. We preach and teach but we don’t do stories or fiction…yet.

You take a stab at answering Philip Jenkins. I know he would like some suggestions.