Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Christian fiction takes off

Sales of Christian books aimed at Evangelical Christians have jumped about 30% over the past for years. Now even secular publishers like Random House and Penguin are getting on board.

Oh course, Christian publishing is not new. Influential evangelical, Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series, which deals with end-time prophesies set in modern day, was something of a phenomenon, selling over 60 million copies and landing on the top of several best-sellers lists, including the New York Times and USA Today.

Michelle Goldberg writes about the series:

The most popular novel in America right now is one in which the world is tyrannized by the former secretary general of the U.N., who operates from Iraq, and his global force of storm troopers, called "peacekeepers." Revered rabbis evangelize for Christ, repenting Israel's "specific national sin" of "[r]ejecting the messiahship of Jesus." Much of the world is deceived by a false prophet, part of the inner circle of the Antichrist, who seems a lot like the pope -- he's a Catholic cardinal, "all robed and hatted and vested in velvet and piping."

Here we see the market revealing to the vast size and influene of the Evangelical movement in America today.

I only wonder how the prevelance of apocolyptic fiction as described above will influene the movement. One hopes people won't start taking fiction for fact, like Presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

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