Worth Reading

Three pieces recently about Christian publishing:

>> Halo to Christian profits in the Telegraph (24 Sept.): Although sales in the UK of Christian books have almost doubled in 10 years, from £60m [$122 million] 10 years ago to £110m [$224 million] now, chain bookstores, like Waterstone’s, “don’t take the category seriously or stock a wide range of titles.”

Possible reasons:

• “British reserve and fear of upsetting people of other religious persuasions.”
• A feeling that the UK is “a post-Christian nation. The feeling is ‘Been there, done that, move on’”
• Book sections dedicated to any particular faith might attract fundamentalists and pose a security problem.
• The zeitgeist of the UK is just different from that of the US: “while the US book market is dominated by self-help and religious books, the UK chart tends to be dominated by cookery books.”
• Official book sales charts in the UK exclude most Christian books, because they are often self-published or published by small, independent houses.
• The perception among booksellers is that the public isn’t interested in buying Christian titles.

As noted in the article, the situation is “quite the opposite in the US, where sales of Christian books, DVDs and gifts hit $4.6 billion last year [and] Christian book titles are sold in supermarkets such as Wal-Mart.”

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>> A former chain store book buyer, Scott Pack, comments on the article above, in “There’s Money in Je$u$” at Me and My Big Mouth:

“Whatever the spokespeople say, or however keen the chains want to appear to be about Christian books, the truth is that there are two reasons they are unlikely to do anything to embrace this market.

1. They are a bit embarrassed about it.
2. A lot of the books in question aren’t really very good.”

About item 2, he goes on: “But isn’t that the case with most genres? All of us can look at a display in a bookshop and see lots of books we think are crap but they seem to sell. … The thing is, because retailers feel a bit awkward around religious books they are more likely to fall into the trap of picking out the flaws without realising that the same flaws exist in the other genres they buy.”

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>> Related: God knows where all the religious novels went: “Catholicism, and Christianity in general, used to be a respectable subject for grown-up novels. No more.”Nicholas Lezard, in the Guardian Arts blog, is convinced that “religion seems to have disappeared from modern English fiction.” He cites Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, Alice Thomas Ellis, John Irving and John Updike as the only writers who address, if subtly, “serious, grown-up religious despair or difficulty,” and he cites Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series as the “most nakedly religious works of the 20th century” — and both are considered children’s literature.

Lezard asks his readers where novels about religious struggle have gone, and should we mind their disappearance? The reader comments include reading suggestions, and one readers suggests a likely reason for the dearth of such novels:

“The lack of religion in literature might also be to do with a lack of subtlety in religion today, as suggested. Religion has become in public, a simplistic political stance imbued with self-righteousness; and in private, a strange, more intimate form of self-righteousness (rather than personal humility, as intended by most world religions). For very few is it an intellectual matter at all.”

Filed under: readers advisory, underrated and overlooked, publishing, religious fiction on October 3rd, 2007