The Maker's Guide to a Great Body and a Hot Marriage

...would seem to be the book title that encapsulates the apparent priorities of the CBA crowd these days, especially if the epilogue was a mini-romance novel.

Yes, it's that time of year. The time of year for me to dissect pop evangelical culture as I experienced it at the annual Christian Booksellers' Association exhibit.

(And time for the annual caveat as well. Yes, we know that the evangelical world is bigger than CBA and that the priorities of that subset of the culture are not the priorities of other strong evangelical voices like Christianity Today, Eerdmans Press and the faculties of many evangelical colleges. That's why I use the phrase "pop evangelical culture." Yes, we know that there is much for Catholics to learn from evangelical engagement with culture. Yes, we know that popular Catholic culture has its deeply wacky and wrong-headed elements as well. )

Now, let us continue.

First, what is CBA? It's the trade association for "Christian" bookstores - mostly evangelical, like your Family Christian Bookstores, Logos, Paraclete and countless independent stores. The show is huge, dwarfing the RBTE, the Religious Booksellers' Trade Exhibit which focuses on "liturgical" churches - Roman Catholic, Episcopal and Lutheran, mostly.

So, why were we there? Because for some reason that I don't quite understand, OSV attends. My husband usually finds it a worthwhile experience, as he checks out what the trends are in that market, gets ideas, and meets with potential OSV authors and publishing partners. I have no idea how the marketing presence translates into sales, however. I signed De-Coding on Tuesday, and we got rid of all the books, but not many people stuck around to check out other wares. There was one other Catholic publisher - of Bibles - presence, and of course, Abbey Press was there, as they always are with a huge display. Their deal isn't books, though - it's gift geegaws, and CBA is a big show for them. (It's the arm of St. Meinrad Abbey in southern Indiana, and this year they even had a real live monk there personalizing calligraphied Scripture verse placards - like adding "To the Baptist Bookstore." Nice image - the ladies from the Baptist Bookstore waiting for the Catholic monk to finish up their gift.)

And a few Catholic bookstores do attend, so...

Well, celebrity sightings first, because like any book show that's a great deal of what this show is about. Who did I see? Jenkins and LaHaye, signing their newest, Francine Rivers (a popular fiction writer), Marilyn Hickey (a female evangelist I have been continually confusing with Joyce Meyers for the past two years. I've got them straight now. She's tiny, tiny, tiny - shorter than me, and probably a size 2. She was in classic CBA author garb - Nudie suit (pink and very spangly), glittery slides on her feet.) and Andrea Jaeger. Slim pickings. Didn't even see Larry the Cucumber this year. Michael saw Chuck Norris (who apparently is a Christian and has a book out) and Pat Williams, former Orlando Magic coach, who has many children and a couple of books out.

This is my second (and probably last for a while) CBA, and I noticed a decidedly less energetic feeling about the whole enterprise this year. The big categories are diet books, marriage and sex books, general happiness books and fiction, particularly romantic fiction.

Sound familiar? Sound just like the general market for books? I know.

The pop evangelical engagement with pop culture is always an interesting topic, and you never see it so blatantly displayed as you do at CBA. The motivation, I know, is to discern what people are concerned about from pop culture trends and then show them how to meet those needs via Christianity. That's a good motivation. When I taught high school, it's what I did, in essence - listen to the kids and show them how their deepest questions and fears were not new at all, and were answered by the truth God has revealed to us.

But it's obvious something has gone haywire in the pop evangelical take on this. What it is, I think, is the failure to hold up what secular pop culture reveals about human needs to any kind of judgment. My sense is that this has happened because of the evangelical emphasis on church growth and the CBA concern for profit and sales. If self-help and personal happiness concerns have taken root in American culture, the pop evangelical response is to simply baptize those concerns without really questioning them. If Americans want to diet, we'll just give them Christian diet books.

Let me take a more specific example. Last year, we had a lot of discussion about Thomas Nelson's magazine-style repackaging of the New Testament for teen girls called "Revolve." In the year since, they've come out with one for boys called "Refuel" and now one for women called Becoming.

Here's an advertising bit for it:

Part Bible, part ‘zine – The Bible meets Oprah with a twist of InStyle! Becoming is the complete New Testament using the New Century Version, but it wouldn’t be a culture ‘zine if it didn’t address men, beauty, fitness and food!

I picked one up and spent a lot of time looking through it on the trip back. I found it, on one level, incredibly insulting (as a woman), but that's par for the course for me. I tried to look at it objectively, discerning what it told me about what the Christian life is all about.

Answer: men, beauty, fitness and food!

Yeah, yeah, inner beauty and all that. But the fact is, you could take all of the inserted, extra material in the "zine" parts of this publication, take out the few references to Scripture verses, and come up with something virtually indistinguishable from any woman's magazine. No particular focus on Jesus or salvation, no real contemplation of what the Good News is all about, just a "positive" self-improvement text.

Filled with photos of beautiful women, not one of them over a size 6.

On another note, what this show always brings home to me is the lameness of the evangelical cry that nothing come between me and Jesus, and that Catholics are to be faulted for sacramentality, mediation and so on.

I say, feh.

When I go to CBA, I am surrounded , if not by a sacramental sense, but by a rather desperate search for mediators. Who can help us understand and live out our faith in the world today? A few years ago it was the likes of Pat Robertson and John Hagee and Kenneth Copeland. Now it's Jenkins, LaHaye, T.D. Jakes, Joyce Meyer, Max Lucado and Rick Warren. Next year it will be someone else. No, they're not canonized, but their sales and popularity perform the same function. No, we don't put statues of them up or print holy cards, but we do buy their books, hang onto their words, have huge cut-out figures of them to focus on, hope for their prayers and support and scour their words for something that will help us understand or appropriate the Gospel in a way that makes sense to us.

Let's stand in a big, long line so we can come face-to-face with her. She'll sign our book, so we'll have a relic of our contact. She'll smile at us, shake our hand, and we can tell her how much her witness means to us...and maybe even ask her to pray for us....

Another thing that struck me hard this time was ...what happened to Don't Mess With the Word of God? I mean...don't interpret it...just let God speak. Right? I thought that was the deal. Isn't it?

One of the big products promoted at this show, one that will probably see heavy PR and marketing this fall is a "version" of the Bible called The Word on the Street, which is based on and reflective of the work of a British guy named Rob Lacey, who does the Bible as a sort of performance art. Sold (with great success) in the UK as The Street Bible.

So yes, it's a Bible from one of the largest evangelical houses. You know, Bible only, unadulterated Word of God and all of that.

But it's a paraphrase. A full-scale, abridged paraphrase, which means, I thought that human beings have been about the business of interpreting the Scriptures.

Whenever I'm confronted with such a book, I of course turn to the Last Supper accounts to see how "Bible Only No Interpretation" these folks really are. Here ya go, the passage based on Luke 22:14-20, subtitled "Symbolism on the menu."

He picks up a wine cup, thanks his father for it and says, "pass this round, let's all drink from the same cup. It'll be my last till God's world is more than just talk."

Then he takes a bread loaf, thanks his father again and rips it into pieces; each of the team gets a chunk. He says, "this bread symbolizes me, my body It's be ripped apart for you. I want you to re-enact this as a memory trigger. Don't forget me.

they finish the meal and Jesus picks up the wine cup, deep in thought. He says, "This wine cup is the New Contract sealed with my blood. Blood that'll hit the ground for you."

This kind of stuff is not uncontroversial in the evangelical community. Nor is Becoming, nor is even Christian pop music. But nonetheless, it's what dominates. And it irks me, frankly, because it expresses to me what so many evangelicals do without realizing or admitting it - looking to mediators, embracing human interpretation of God's Word - the very things they preach are so wrong with Catholicism.

Harrumph.

Well, I began this entry with the observation that the CBA this year seemed considerably less energetic than it did last year. Michael agreed, and he has an extra year of attendance to go on, as well. It's hard to put into words, but it's as if there's nothing particularly engaging or interesting being said in this world for publishers to put out there, and what they're left with is a simplistic packaging of secular cultural trends in a Christian wrapper, hoping for sales. The exception, in my mind is Relevant Books, a high energy company founded by one guy just a few years ago that seems to be message-oriented.

So...in this corner, Catholic publishing, almost totally disconnected from people's real concerns and questions, and in this corner, the CBA, successful in addressing those concerns after a fashion...but at what price?

(By the way, Os Guiness wrote a book critiquing evangelical culture and the race for relevance. An interview with him on the subject is here.)

The Contemporary Christian Music and the Christian Booksellers Association are multi-billion dollar industries incredibly contained by their success. Many of them are now driven by the market, not by mission. So instead of the church being salt and light, you've got Christians writing books to other Christians.

I walked through CBA last year with one of the heads of one of the leading publishing houses. He said, "You know, 95 percent of these books are all about me, my, and that sort of stuff." Narcissistic. Very little of it is serious Christian books engaging the culture.

I love C.S. Lewis's idea of resistance thinking. He said if you only adapt the gospel to what fits your times, you'll have a comfortable, convenient gospel. But it'll only be half the gospel. And it'll be irrelevant to the next generation.

Whereas, if you follow resistance thinking—or looking into the gospel for things that are difficult, obscure, or even repulsive as he says—then you're true to the whole gospel. And secondly, you're relevant to any generation.