keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side, keep on the sunny side of life

[intertribal]

I've been devouring Vince Passaro's 1996 Harper's article, "Dragon Fiction: The (Very Lucrative) Advent of the Christian Thriller," and boy, it's amazing.  (Not available online, unfortunately, unless you're a Harper's subscriber)  The following is about (a real book!) Gideon's Torch, by Charles Colson (who was convicted of involvement in Watergate):

They are protesting a nationwide network of soon-to-be-opened "regeneration centers" that will use fetal tissue to do state-of-the-art AIDS research. This is a nifty plot ploy, because lingering behind the veil of an evil government is the entire homosexual community, with its "enormous influence" as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently put it, howling for the brain matter of babies.

The anti-abortionists then blow up the first regeneration center near completion, at George Washington University's Medical Center. The two bombers are caught and killed by a SWAT team. One of them has a brother, a minister, a gentle soul who disapproves of the bombing scheme and had nothing to do with it. He is arrested (opening the book up for its big Trial Sequence), convicted, then sent to a really nasty maximum-security federal prison, where he is stabbed to death by a large, homosexual Negro drug dealer when he tries to help a retarded boy about to become the man's sexual pet... the fundamental decency he revealed at his trial and in his martyrdom brings about the religious conversion of the attorney-general.

Her slow conversion is brought about through the agency of a crippled Christian whom she has been forced to hire as her associate attorney general. His name is Paul, as in Saint, and he doesn't take long to start showing Emily the error of her secular ways... what is a mere Harvard law professor compared with a good Christian thinker who understands God's law?

On the trend in general:

They are dramatically unconvincing; indeed, they are dramatically appalling. What's more telling is that their sense of Christianity isn't much better.

What we learn from this new blossoming of "Christian fiction" is that American Christianity has entered a paranoid and deeply disgruntled stage, one not helped by the transparently dishonest pieties of politicians who cater to the nation's most superficial moral convictions while ignoring at every turn the deeper requirements those convictions carry. As always, though, we get the leadership that we wish for and deserve: one that doesn't ask much of us. We live in a country that wants its narratives sentimental and its religion easy.

And on Christian books that are actually good:

The smartest assessment of [Flannery O'Connor] came from Thomas Merton, who once said, "When I read Flannery O'Connor, I don't think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles... for the all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor." As with Graham Greene and many other openly Christian writers, O'Connor's Catholicism grants her an intuitive sympathy to the tragic narrative. In our own time, the tragic narrative has almost disappeared from view; the sentimental narrative has supplanted it. Not surprisingly, we also live in a culture that cannot tolerate the suggestion that life will possibly be painful, not always rewarding, and gratuitously unfair.