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Books: The Times gets religion
An interesting thing is happening over at The New York Times best-seller list: A bumper crop of evangelical titles are joining the ranks of traditionally secular fare. Take for example The Forbidden by Beverly Lewis, Quiet Strength by Tony Dungy with Nathan Whitaker, and The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman.
Remarking on the number of Christian titles on the April 20 list, Thomas Nelson publishers president and CEO Michael Hyatt wrote on his blog, “I can’t remember there ever being more.” That week, there were 11 such books. On June 15, there were 14, spread across every major category, including fiction, nonfiction, advice, and business, in both hardcover and paperback.
Publishing industry professionals pinpoint several reasons for the trend, not the least of which is what Blaise Pascal called the “God-shaped vacuum” in the human heart.
“The growth of religious books, Christian and in general, are more indication that people continue to seek answers, whether they lead to Christ or to other places,” said DeWayne Hamby, books section editor for Christian Retailing magazine. “The trend underscores the importance of our emphasis on providing the right answers, on providing better content that will connect with seekers.”
WMB’s very own Lynn Vincent reported on this growing phenomenon in WORLD’s summer books issue.
back to top19 Comments to “Books: The Times gets religion”
Evangelical titles!
Less filling! More taste!
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Evangelical titles??
The only one I’ve read is the Five Love Languages and nearly puked it was so sappy. I can’t speak for the other books. So can someone let us know whether these are actually evangelical books, or just syrupy sweet Christianesque books that leave out Christ?
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Xion,
I don’t know that I would have called The Five Love Languages evangelical, but I certainly found it very helpful. My husband’s primary “language” is kinesthetic and his secondary is gift-giving, while my primary one is service and my second is quality time. Knowing that helps me understand why he and I often are “speaking past each other” in our different love languages. But knowing that they are simply different, and one is not better than another, helps in understanding each other and showing love in ways that are meaningful to the other person.
Maybe you knew all that without reading the book. But it was all new to me when I read it.
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That’s fine Pauline. I am glad it helped you. There are plenty of bad books that help people, but that does not make them good.
The primary problem with Love Languages is that it is not true. This is part of a whole cadre of Christianesque books that replace Christ’s words with programs for a happier life.
John MacArthur calls these fads in the church “Fools Gold”. They look like the real thing, but it is counterfeit Christianity.
The American church is consumed with books, seminars and programs containing steps to a happier _fill in the blank_. It puts us at the center and God as our servant whose job is to make us happier, healthier and holier.
If we aren’t careful, Christianity becomes just another self-help program. And then people wonder why they aren’t happy.
Just as in dieting, we already know what to do. Anyone who has a Bible already knows what God expects of us. But rather than doing those things we buy books and hire gurus to preach at us. It’s easier than actually doing the hard work that yields real fruit.
If you want to be happy, be thankful. I am never happier than when I think about what God has done for me. This magnifies God and minimizes my petty problems. If you want to make your spouse happy, put him or her first. Seek the highest in the object of your affection. Love unconditionally.
All of this is in the Bible. It is sufficient for faith and practice.
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Xion – I haven’t read the love languages book, but I’ve heard some things about it, such as what Pauline wrote.
I’m curious as to what you think isn’t true in it.
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#5 Karen, By ‘false’ I don’t mean false doctrine. I simply mean untrue, i.e. fiction.
I think the book is mostly harmless and does help some people as long as you don’t take it too seriously. But it is no substitute for genuine Christian love.
Why are there only 5 languages and not 12 or 25? Does your biblical role as a spouse really just boil down to making the other person ‘feel especially loved’? Isn’t that a bit manipulative and artificial and even carnal? Junk food makes me feel good, but it isn’t good for me.
Seeking the highest in others does not always make them feel good. The Bible calls us to walk in the Spirit and bear spiritual fruit, not emotional stroking of egos. The Bible calls us to ‘unfeigned love of the brethren’, loving one another with a pure heart fervently (1 Pet 1:22). That is true love, a sacrificial love that is neither sappy nor artificial.
The reason these books are on the best-seller list is because non-Christians are reading them. It is an Oprahesque feel good gospel that people are buying like mad. Diet books that leave out the hard stuff sell wildly too.
Lynn Vincent is going to kill me for this, but 90 Minutes in Heaven isn’t true either. Don Piper is sincere and loves God, but he didn’t spend 90 minutes in heaven. Sorry. It contradicts scripture: (Heb 9:27; 2 Cor 6:5-8)
Am I opposed to sappy feel-good books? No. But what worries me is the claim that these represent authentic Christianity. And so, the millions of who treat this as non-fiction are getting at best Christianity Lite and at worst another gospel.
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Okay, I understand. But why would trying to love someone the way they want/need to be loved (in other words, loving them unselfishly) be wrong?
For instance, wouldn’t a non-huggy husband taking time to hold his hug-craving wife in his arms be a gracious & selfless thing for him to do? Or a non-sporty wife who gives up her time to accompany her husband to a ball game because he enjoys her company?
It seems to me that a Christian marriage takes a combination of giving selflessly to the other, while sometimes (or even often) not expecting them to give back likewise.
(I’m not addressing the issue of how the whole book does or doesn’t portray Christianity, just this one aspect of it.)
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Pauline – What are your thoughts on Xion’s comment at #6?
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#6
Xion,
The idea of the “love languages” is not a substitute for Christian love, it is a help to showing Christian love.
Why five? Because those are the patterns the author say in many years of counseling Christian couples. Could there be a couple he didn’t notice? Probably. So what? It doesn’t negate the usefulness of the ones he did observe and write about.
“Does youf biblical role as a spouse really just boil down to making the other person ‘feel especially loved’?”
Of course not. And the book doesn’t say it does. But it does include that. Can the ideas be used manipulatively? In the short-term, no doubt yes. So can lots of good lessons. I’ve seen people use what they learned in evangelism classes manipulatively, but that’s not the fault of the teaching on evangelism. And I doubt people are likely to keep up doing what the book recommends without either seeing it produce genuine love between each other or give up when it doesn’t produce the desired results.
“Seeking the highest in others does not always make them feel good.” I agree completely. Along with The Five Love Languages, I would recommend Boundaries or Boundaries in Marriage by Drs. Cloud and Townsend. They make it clear that acting in love with someone who is violating boundaries will cause pain – but it is for the good of both people.
Our natural impulse is to show love to others in the ways that we want love shown to us. (The Golden Rule, right?) Since my ways of showing love are to do acts of service for someone, and to try to spend time with that person, I will find it hard to believe that someone loves me who rarely does anything for me and shows little interest in spending time with me – except when showing physical love. If gifts do not mean a great deal to me (not that I don’t like them, but I was brought up in a home where they were a source of conflict more than joy, and my natural frugality makes it hard to enjoy giving or getting as much as I might like to be able to), then I may disappoint someone who expects a more enthusiastic response to a gift, or to receive more gifts from me. And if I don’t initiate physical touch or show eagerness to reciprocate when touched, because it just isn’t a big part of what love means to me, I am likely to hurt the person to whom touch is very important.
Probably some people learn all that growing up, especially if they had wise and loving parents. I didn’t learn any of that growing up. And I didn’t learn any of it going to a church where the Bible was read and taught and preached and memorized all the time. To me it seemed obvious that love was shown by wanting to spend time with the other person, and by doing things for the other person. And I didn’t understand why my husband had so little desire to show me love in those ways.
No doubt he didn’t understand why I didn’t have the same desire to show love in physical ways or to give and receive gifts. We did try to love each other, but I was busy trying to show love my way because I didn’t understand that wasn’t primarily what he wanted, and vice versa. Perhaps some couple figure out on their own that they need to show love in ways that are not what they care about most themselves; in theory I certainly knew that, but as I say it was so “obvious” to me how people give and receive love that it hadn’t dawned on me that it was just as “obvious” to my husband that people give and receive love a different way.
So what we learned from the book wasn’t a substitute for sacrificial love for each other, it was learning how to do it. It’s not easy, it’s not sappy (I hate sappy), and I don’t consider it at all artificial.
Can non-Christians read and benefit from the book? Sure. There’s a passage in C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters where it talks about how things like genuine laughter and love and deep thought and appreciating nature’s beauty are gifts from God and can draw people close to God even if that wasn’t their goal, because in those things they are turning from self to something real that comes from God. So I think also, in learning to love one’s spouse in a way that is meaningful to the other person even though less emotionally fulfilling to oneself, a person is turning from self and can become more open to God.
Sappy feel-good book? No, this book didn’t make me feel good. It told me that I couldn’t wait for my husband to start spending time with me and doing the dishes and laundry for me. It told me that he might start doing those things (especially as he read the book too), but that whether he did or not, I had to work more at loving him in the ways that spoke to his heart, in physical touch and gifts (which can be quite inexpensive, though unfortunately my husband has expensive tastes, and a tendency to eat too much so gifts of food isn’t always a good idea either).
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A few excerpts from a devastating NYTimes essay on self-help books in todays Books Magazine.
At No. 7, One Month to Live: Thirty Days to a No-Regret Life, by Kerry and Chris Shook (WaterBrook, $19.99), is hard-core. For all the claims that self-help has been entirely Oprahfied — a group hug between hardcovers — our noblest self-help paradigms are still austere. The Shooks, the husband-and-wife team behind the wildly successful multi-site church Fellowship of the Woodlands, start brutally: “Your time on earth is limited.” Oof. I can hear the hoofbeats now.
No amount of subsequent encouragement about living passionately or like Jesus eased that solar-plexus blow, at least for me. Through instructions to love, keep a journal, write letters and make lists (the no-regrets life requires grueling paperwork), the Shooks’ macabre bottom line stuck in my nut. It seemed rude, really, and at odds with the function of advice books, which is not to get real but rather to shore up the bereft.
The truly bad news comes soon enough: “Satan knows the dream starts in your heart, so he’s committed to wounding your heart, taking it out of action and freezing your God-given dream with soul-numbing cold.”
______
Become a Better You (Free Press, $25), at No. 4, sells mainly on the strength of its author’s name. Joel Osteen is a hit televangelist, veteran best seller and pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, reportedly the biggest church in the country. If he says shape up, you shape up, because he’s got the gleamingest pulpit.
Osteen opens by crediting Frank Lloyd Wright — whose favorite design, he said, was always “my next one” — with having become a better him. In Osteen’s metric, you don’t have to be brutally aware of your mortality or rich in omega-3s or pastel hues to succeed; you just have to be happy. What a relief!
His seven keys to a better life restate that point (“stay passionate,” “be positive”), and by the end of the book I found myself smiling like a fool. Now that’s self-help. If your husband is a slob, don’t be a freak about it, but don’t spend hours doing yoga, either. Pick up his shoes and be cool. Bounty and love surround you both! He’s probably being cool about your issues, too.
________
The time is ripe for a Deepak Chopra takedown — or definitive apotheosis — if only because with the book at No. 3, The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore (Harmony, $24), he has now published …
Still, I don’t really get “The Third Jesus.” Even its title is a head-scratcher. With the first Jesus still pretty hazy to most people, the idea of a third one — an arbitrary concept of goodness that might be wrested from Christianity — is not even an interesting mystery. “One Jesus is historical, and we know next to nothing about him,” Chopra writes. “Another Jesus is the one appropriated by Christianity. He was created by the Church to fulfill its agenda. The third Jesus, the one this book is about, is as yet so unknown that even the most devout Christians don’t suspect that he exists.” Let me guess: Chopra knows.
Trying to follow Chopra’s schema through decontextualized passages of Scripture, I resentfully wonder why this was classified as an advice book. There’s no “YOU,” only droning “we” stuff. (I guess this is what the listmakers mean by “miscellaneous.”) Chopra says we need to heed some newfangled, nothingburger Jesus straight out of Acme Spirituality Inc. What do you mean we, Mr. Deepak Chopra Man?
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2-
“So can someone let us know whether these are actually evangelical books, or just syrupy sweet Christianesque books that leave out Christ?”
Do the books leave out Christ in name or in behavior/example or both?
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At least it’s not Henri Nouwen.
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#11 Reg – By ‘leaving out Christ’ I mean making him irrelevant. Self-help books are just that. They are man-centered, self-sufficient for building self-esteem. His name is used in vain to boost the bottom line.
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Nicely stated Pauline and Karen. Since you are the producer of these pearls, perhaps that makes me the sand in the oyster.
You both have the advantage of a Christian foundation. From there, pretty much everything you read or experience or do can glorify God. Nothing wrong with learning a few techniques along the way. The sappiest book ever written changed my life. It was called What’s So Amazing About Grace.
So a person with the right heart, can bear good fruit. But just like the gospel without Christ becomes empty social mores, marriage techniques without Christ are unfulfilling. Superficial actions without a changed heart look good on the outside, but inside are empty.
Is it good for a non-huggy husband to hug his hug-craving wife? Sure. But there is more going on here than a hug deficit. There is sin. Pride in one person holds back what the other person selfishly craves. One should learn to give love while the other should learn contentment, but simply giving a hug doesn’t address the larger issues. This book oversimplifies the problem and the solution.
Life is about Christ and how we reflect his glory. The problem with so many self-help books is that they are all about self. The focus is on fulfilling selfish needs when those selfish needs are actually the root of the problem. How about learning contentment and thankfulness? Before changing others, how about changing yourself?
As Christians we should edify, i.e. build up one another, teach one another, challenge one another to walk in the Spirit and thereby bring forth the fruit of the Spirit. That is the polar opposite of simply fulfilling needs, like getting the other person to do the laundry.
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Xion – Thank you for your comments. I agree with most of what you wrote.
As I wrote in my comment above, “…a Christian marriage takes a combination of giving selflessly to the other, while sometimes (or even often) not expecting them to give back likewise.” That includes, as you mentioned, learning to be content.
I do question, however, the thought that one who needs (”craves” is maybe too strong a word) hugs or whatnot is selfish. (Yes, I do agree that we can be selfish about wanting our needs met or wanting them to be fulfilled more often than we should.)
On one hand, I believe that we should humbly share our needs with our spouse, while trying our best to meet their needs. On the other hand, I know that we need to recognize that no human, not even our “other half” of one flesh, can fully meet all our needs, only God can do that.
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Karen “I agree with most of what you wrote.”
Well, I agree with all of what you wrote.
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Xion,
It’s been a couple years since I last read The Five Love Languages (and I can’t get it out right now because we’re getting work done in the basement to take care of leaks, so we had to box up a lot of our books). If it gives the impression that its ideas are all that is needed for a good marriage, then it is deficient in that regard.
The Bible, and books that help one understand the Bible’s teaching on salvation, the work of the Holy Spirit in sanctification, and the nature of love as exemplified by God and which we also are to show as the Spirit works in us, are needed in order to have a good Christian marriage. But they do not provide all the knowledge some people need, especially those who have grown up in homes where their parents were poor role models. I’m pretty sure this book is not meant to stand on its own but on a Christian foundation.
I thought What’s So Amazing about Grace? was wonderful also!
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Xion – I think you go too far here.
It is true that the self-help book market is overly full of garbage. But some of the books are both helpful and solid in content from a Scriptural standpoint. A lot of people are benefitted by a good commentary, of topic exposition. It is legitimate to look at many of the good Scripturally derived ’self-help’ books as topical expositions on how to practically implement Biblical directions.
I haven’t read the 5 Love Language so as to express any opinion on where it falls on the spectrum of ‘garbage to good’.
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#18 KRM Xion – I think you go too far here.
It wouldn’t be the first time. I agree with you.
I have no problem with people reading self-help books on their own time. Go for it! My problem is with ego stroking self-esteem books infiltrating the church and being called authentic Christianity. Our help cometh from the Lord who made heaven and earth.
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