A Reply to Madam Johnson

In regards to Protestant Literature:
Why are most of the great Christian writers Catholic? That is the question for the age. Protestantism is catching up (like Frederick Buechner and Walter Wangerin), but what catching up they have to do! Here are a few points that my class with Master Jenkins pointed as possible reasons:

(1) Sanitation; evil is cleaned up so the book is more "Christian" (as though Christianity has no real understanding of or say in the reality of evil).

(2) Unrealism; good and evil is GROSSLY exaggerated. Even unsaved good guys seem "Christian" (no one curses, drinks, or smokes). Bad guys are just ridiculous (how many times will they try to fry the world by some over done plot about viral plagues, nuclear holocausts, or conspiracies by "them").

(3) Propaganda; "preaching to the choir," reinforcing the pet beliefs of the people.

(4) Big Business; if people will buy it and it mentions Jesus, Zondervan will sell it ("reaching into the pockets of the choir," as someone once said).

(5) Lightweight issues; this is tied into propaganda. There is no dealing with the depths of the human soul. Books are usually centered around typical Southern Baptist Convention issues like abortion, evolution, relativism, new age etc., and even then they only scratch the surface of those issues.

(6) Lack of defamiliarization; everything is contrived and cliche. There is no more mystery. There is no repackaging (not changing, but repackaging) of the truth so as to present it from a fresh perspective (Ex: The realism of Christ "being made sin" for us hit home for me when I read the climax of Endo's Silence because I had never seen it presented in such a way before).

(7) Driven by plot, not the characters; this is a basic literary critique. Pop fiction (which Protestant literature is primarily comprised of) is always driven by the plot (the domino effect, i.e., how one event leads to another). Good literature is never driven primarily by the plot, but by the characters and how they relate to and change within the plot.

Of course the real question is WHY has mainstream Protestant writing gone in this horrid direction. If I had to guess, I would say that the primary reason is the same reason why mainstream Christianity lost the fight for America during the 20th century: complacency gets rocked by a sudden paradigm shift that frightens the majority of Christians that leads them to a strict application of "in the world but not of it." An example of this is the modern Protestant Christian's aversion to academia (those cotton-pickin' eggheads will steer you away from GAWD!). Anything that is classified as "of the world" has to be steered clear of; and if it must be mentioned, it must be mentioned in the worst possible (yet somehow highly sanitized) light. If a character is a new age psychic, they are depraved beyond redemption. Any unsaved persons not affiliated with any of "them" (new agers, hippies, evolutionist, philosophers, even Catholics), is sanitized to unrealism because vices are associated with "them".
This is, of course, a reaction, which is why Christianity lost America (and the whole of the West): Modernism slowly chipped away at Christendom's security as top dog and the whole thing came tumbling down with the backlash of postmodernism. When modernity threatened and postmodernism kicked the door in, Christianity was most unChrist-like, i.e., it reacted instead of responded. We went on the defensive instead of the offensive. We confused sanitation with purity and shut out the world, leaving their conceptions of evil and grace to be shaped by whomever or whatever whilst we got our beliefs propped up over and over again by relevant pastors and pop culture Christendom. Shame on us all.
Somehow, Catholics (for the most part) apparently kept their heads throughout this period (maybe they responded instead of reacted; I don't recall a Catholic version of Jimmy Swagger). Too bad Protestantism was frightened by the winds and waves and choose to run back to the safety of the fishing boat.