Brad's spirited and at times contentious interview with Daniel Silliman, the news editor for Christianity Today and the author of Reading Evangelicals:: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and Faith. Their discussion of Silliman's book includes rumination on the themes of race, class, politics, and the contours of evangelical culture. Where Silliman sees diversity, Brad sees a narrow focus on suburban White evangelicals whose homogenous,, Trumpian politics are reflected in the fiction Silliman examines.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I am faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
I'm joined today, excuse me, joined today by Dan, friends, if you listen to the show, you know I got a new baby, so things are just like crazy.
So here we go.
I'm joined today by Daniel Silliman, who is a journalist and a historian, is the news editor for Christian Today and teaches humanities at Milligan University.
Dr. Silliman is someone who earned an MA from Tubaigan University and a doctoral degree from Heidelberg University, which we'll talk about in a minute.
And has worked in the past at Notre Dame University and Valparaiso, and is the author of Reading Evangelicals, How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith.
And we are here to talk about that book today.
So, Daniel, first let me just say thanks for being here.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
It's good to be here.
First, I just want to say, I know this is something that kind of plays into the book a little bit, but you did your doctoral work in Germany, and specifically in Heidelberg.
I know you lived most of the time in Tübingen, but I'm pretty jealous.
I got to spend one idyllic summer in Heidelberg, and it was dreamy and fantastic, and I often think of that summer, so I just want you to know that I'm very jealous of that.
It's a great place.
I mean, summer especially.
You were there at a really good time, but it's a great place to live.
It's also a great place to study, I felt.
Yeah, really lucky to get to do that and kind of have that space to think through a lot of things.
Yeah, I was in Germany for eight years total.
And I commuted, so I lived in Tübingen and would go back and forth on the train to Heidelberg.
Well, and anyone who knows their history of modern theology knows that Heidelberg is a sort of epicenter, but too big in is perhaps even more, and so to have experiences in both those places is pretty cool.
We're here today to talk about your book, Reading Evangelicals, How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and Faith, and in a time when we discuss evangelicals and politics quite often, You've written a book on evangelical fiction and what it can teach us, and your goal, it seems, and I'm obviously just open to your correct me on this, is to understand, you know, who and what evangelicals are through the books that they've read—the bestsellers, the culture definers.
And so you have kind of five examples or case studies in the book.
Jeanette Oakes' Love Comes Softly, Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind, Beverly Lewis' The Shunning, and William Paul Young's The Shack.
Can I just start out?
I'm going to tell you mine in a minute, but do you have a favorite among those?
I mean, they're not written for me.
I'm not an audience for any of them.
But probably This Present Darkness is my personal favorite.
The book I recommend to people who don't like Christian fiction but might want to try is another Frank Peretti book called What's it called?
The Visitation, which is about a burnt-out pastor who's giving up on church.
He's done with church culture, and it starts out with him sort of critiquing all the little manipulations that happen at church that he's totally done with.
And it ends in a town square with a parade where three Jesuses, three people claiming to be the real Jesus, get into a brawl and demonstrate the challenges of pluralism in modern America.
And if that doesn't sell you on a novel, I don't know what else I have for you.
So probably Frank Peretti of those is the one that I What about you?
have the deepest connection with personally.
What about you?
If there's a book that culminates in a Jesus brawl, then you got to at least-- It's an underrated climax of a novel, for sure.
You got to take a peek at that, at least.
I don't think I have a favorite of these, but I will say Peretti and Lahaye and Jenkins.
So, This Present Darkness and Left Behind are the ones that just are kind of constitutive of my evangelical upbringing.
Left Behind was everywhere when I was sort of a young adult.
This present darkness was hovering, no pun intended, in the ether and was having sort of a large effect on the people around me.
So those are the ones that really stuck.
I tend to find that people's answer to that question says something about their age and the moment at which they were most connected with evangelical pop culture.
And then a little bit about gender.
Right.
So if you are someone who was overwhelmed by Left Behind when that was everywhere, And you are a woman, you'd be more likely to know about the shunning.
But for lots of men, that book just passed them by.
They didn't see it.
They didn't see it happen.
But then I meet younger evangelicals today who have extensive thoughts and feelings about the shack and have kind of never heard about this present darkness.
So it really does.
Yeah.
It really does.
You know, the books span A little more than 40 years.
My book tries to trace evangelical history through the book markets and through bestsellers in particular from really the 1950s to the early 2000s.
the 1950s to the early 2000s 2008 is when the shack comes out um big and each of the five books you know they're really they're interesting books um but the the real reason I picked them is that each one sells more than a million copies so they're they're a sort of mass phenomenon um Um, which means they get a range of engagements and a range of readers.
And then each one also marks, um, like a moment of transition in the book market.
Sometimes they drive the change.
Sometimes they benefit from the change.
But as I'm telling a story of the book market, uh, these are moments where something shifts.
And I think that that shift tells us something about the broader, um, yeah, history of evangelicalism.
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