Terry Yount, March 28, 2022
Author and commentator Terry Mattingly is right. In the Christian subculture, there are writers who appeal only to readers of Christian books. Why? Because, according to Mattingly, it’s the simple thing to do. What is hard—and more trouble to get noticed—are books like C S Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, always a staple at non-Christian bookstores worldwide.
What passes for good writing these days in most bookstores in malls across the United States is mediocre. It is inspirational or fetching in its appeal to the modern progressive mind. I find New York Times bestselling authors who know how to engender enthusiasm for their work because it uses a formula that works. Many authors write what will best tantalize a browsing customer at Barnes and Noble. Of course, not all authors are motivated primarily commercially, but in my judgment most writers who want to build an audience are. Terry Mattingly
Formula writing (writing aimed at a narrow reading audience because it sells) continues to dominate the marketplace. That is not so much a criticism as an observation. What should be our motivation for the work we do? Should it rotate around public awareness only, or might it best rise from the impulse to improve those around us?
Christian writers using the formula method know how to engage an evangelical audience. How do they do it? First, use a topic that resonates. Attach a title popular with current readers (like Christian athletes), and you have an audience. Why would we ask a writer who is accustomed to producing pablum for the Christian right to create something that has wider appeal? It is difficult and risky. Most Christian books, it seems, cater to a less educated audience who prefer easy topics.
Mattingly writes in a blog article for Evangelical Press Association:
[It’s] hard to produce stories, and books, and songs, and movies, and magazines, and newspaper columns that appeal to ordinary readers in America and around the world. It’s easier to produce Christian products that sell to Christian consumers who occasionally visit Christian stores.
Now before you tune him out, I must confess I am a fan of Christian literature, fiction, and nonfiction. Such literature fulfills a market for homeschool parents and others looking for decent reading material for their developing children, and for living life in the modern culture. Lewis left novels like “The Silver Chair” or “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” as beloved child-friendly Christian allegories. Every generation has its heroes and favorites. Lewis, genius at creating a thread of believability in imaginative fiction, was unique.
T. S. Eliot
When I think of all the excellent reading material available to us as parents in the postmodern West, it is encouraging. We need to recognize and celebrate the fact that God inspires influential writers like Tolkien, Eliot, or Lewis to work outside the Christian ‘ghetto’.
Mere Beauty* began with the idea that creators make the ordinary extraordinary. In fact, great works of art do not function in a vacuum. As creators or consumers, we can effect change in the marketplace of ideas. Targeting your audience is one way to specifically do that. Pursuing a level of integrity while aiming for a certain group is the challenge. There are simple, transcendent works like Eliot’s The Wasteland that address the intellect while singing to our heart. You do not have to read much modern poetry before realizing it either moves the soul or falls flat. When possible, people of faith should cultivate the less accessible works that merit our attention. Doing so constitutes a ‘soft’ rebellion against the sham culture of mediocrity.
*Terry Yount is Executive Creator of Mere Beauty, a forum for people who love the creative arts.