Should Christian fiction evangelize?

It’s a good question, but it depends what we mean by asking it.

If we mean “Should fiction written by Christian authors illustrate and reflect Biblical truth in such a way that the Holy Spirit might use it to touch the heart of a non-Christian reader, and make him or her more sympathetic to the gospel?” Then I would say yes. After all, so-called Christian fiction that does not reflect or uphold Biblical truth has no right to call itself Christian, any more than a so-called disciple of Jesus who persistently refuses to live in obedience to Christ. And we should all be striving to glorify the Lord in everything we do.¹

If, however, what we mean is “Should all or most Christian fiction contain a clear presentation of the gospel message, with the aim of showing the reader how to be saved?” then my answer is, emphatically, NO.

I say this for three reasons.

Firstly, fiction is simply not the right medium for a clear presentation of any doctrine, the gospel included. Stories can shed light on certain aspects of Biblical truth and teaching, but only in a symbolic or illustrative way, not as an end in themselves. They can challenge and inspire readers to think more scripturally, sometimes in a very powerful and even life-changing way, but even so they are merely a signpost to God’s truth, not an exposition of it.

Of course, many Christian authors feel uncomfortable with the idea of merely telling a story which the reader may not be mature or spiritually astute enough to interpret correctly, and they worry that other Christians (including Christian publishers) may say that their book isn’t Christian enough. So they include some prophet, priest or messiah figure (or perhaps even a mysterious voice from heaven) who enlightens the protagonist about the way of salvation.

But as soon as a work of Christian fiction tries to evangelize in the sense of showing the reader how a character becomes “saved” and nudging them to do likewise, then it has ceased to be a story at all. Instead it becomes a sermon badly disguised as fiction, where the characters are merely props or mouthpieces for the message the author wants to convey — something that no one who is being honest can claim is good reading, even if they agree with the sentiment behind it. Such a scene might as well be one of those TV commercials where two women jogging together launch into stilted exposition about hormone treatments or their favorite yogurt. However well packaged the ad might be, we all know that people don’t actually talk that way, and the whole conversation seems fake and even creepy as a result. It’s not good advertising, and it definitely isn’t good fiction.

Secondly, I say NO to the idea that Christian fiction ought to evangelize in this way because I don’t believe it’s even possible to write a story that, by itself, can lead a non-believing reader to salvation. Ideas and allusions that seem obvious to an author steeped in Biblical language and symbolism often go whizzing past a reader who isn’t actively looking for them — consider all the children and even adults who’ve read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe without ever realizing that Aslan is a Christ figure, or indeed that there is anything Christian about the book at all. Even the Gospels themselves are frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted by people reading them for the first time, so do we really think we’re going to do better with fiction?

There’s a kind of arrogance, I think, in the idea that if we write cleverly enough we can preach the gospel in our stories and convince readers to accept it. The truth is that it’s the Holy Spirit who opens people’s eyes and hearts to the truth, and He often works in ways we can never expect or anticipate. Our business is not to try and do His job, or even make His job easier (as though He needs our help!) but simply to write the very best stories we can in good conscience, and let Him choose what He will make of them.²

The third reason I say NO to gospel-preaching fiction is because that kind of fiction has no appeal whatsoever to non-Christian readers, and therefore no audience outside the Christian bookstore market. Which means that when we include the equivalent of four points and an altar call in our stories, we aren’t actually leading anyone to Christ — all we’re doing is giving warm fuzzies to a bunch of readers who already believe.

If there is any real value to “Christian fiction” as a distinct genre, then it ought to consist of honest, searching, well-told stories about the challenge of living the Christian life. It ought to inspire readers to dig deeper and grow stronger in their faith, not merely make them feel nostalgic and perhaps even a little smug about being “on the right team”. The message of salvation is precious and even essential, but it’s the milk we give to newborn believers, not the spiritual meat that growing Christians need. So when we insist on peppering our fiction with conversion scenes, who are we writing them for?

Evangelism, as taught and shown in the New Testament, is an activity that takes place between believers meeting non-believers face to face, and interacting with them in a personal (even if not necessarily individual) way. A book cannot take the place of a person, nor can it interact. By trying to make fiction do the work of sharing the gospel, we are not only sharing the good news in a clumsy, unsatisfying and ultimately ineffective manner, we may be shirking our own responsibility to share our faith in the way Christ Himself intended.

Yes, stories written by Christians should reflect what the gospel of Christ has done in our hearts and lives. But unless that truth grows naturally, even unconsciously out of our efforts to tell a captivating and well-crafted story, we will have no audience, and therefore no ministry.

Should Christian stories evangelize?

This is a crucial issue for anyone who loves stories but loves Jesus more, and wants to glorify Jesus through our enjoyment of stories or our making of stories.

During October our new SpecFaith series explores this issue.

On Thursdays, reviewer Austin Gunderson and writer E. Stephen Burnett host the conversation with interactive articles. On Fridays and Tuesdays, guest writers such as novelists and publishers offer their responses to the question.

We invite you to give your own answers to the #StoryEvangelism conversation.

About a year ago, The Scientific American published an interview with an astronomer who had written a book on how the existence of aliens affects religion. If, you know, aliens really do exist, but they passed over that detail and we will, too. So no one had to wonder where this was going, the interview begins by stating that extraterrestrial life “would be a triumph for science” but would “wreak havoc on certain religions” – i.e. Christianity and Judaism, but mainly Christianity.

These are standard views. But I wonder – where do they come from?

In this individual case, it’s plain to see where the view that aliens would mess up Christianity comes from: They don’t get it. This interview gives the same impression as that Russian taunt, at the beginning of the Space Age, that they had gone into space and didn’t find God there. Theists were forced to the conclusion that the Russians thought someone had expected them to find God in space. It’s always a revelation when your opponent doesn’t understand your viewpoint enough to attack it.

The interview has the same quality of an intellectual miss, and not only because the astronomer called the Eastern Orthodox Church a “branch of Catholicism”, which would be huge news to the Catholics, not to mention the Orthodox themselves. One does not need to grasp the distinction between Catholic and Orthodox to understand Christianity, though one probably should before explaining the clash between Orthodox theology and aliens. The miss is far more easily seen in the assertion that evangelical Christians have a hard time dealing with aliens because we believe that “humans are the sole focus of God’s attention”.

And this is where I think of that Cold War taunt. Don’t they understand that one of the most fundamental ideas of Christianity is that God is not parochial, but bigger than the entire universe? After everything that’s been said and written – that God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, the Creator, Sustainer, and Preserver, infinite, eternal, almighty, what is man that you are mindful of him – after all that, who could believe that humanity was God’s sole focus? It’s like saying Einstein never thought of anything but his cat.¹

So I understand why people who misunderstand Christianity think aliens would wreak havoc with it. That is their impression of the religion. But why do they think the existence of aliens would be a triumph for science? It’s not as if the idea of aliens is a scientific theory carefully developed through a rigorous process of observation and experimentation. There is no natural phenomenon that would be explained if aliens were real. (I know what you’re thinking, but no, not even the disappearance of the other sock.)

The idea of aliens doesn’t come to us from science; it’s just the old idea of the other people, shifted from the observed forest to the observed stars. Nor does science offer any proof that the idea is true. Yes, I know – the vast universe, all the galaxies and suns and planets. But it’s a human reaction, and not a scientific principle, to conclude that somewhere in the vastness, someone must be there.²

To the extent that science has weighed in on the idea, it has not been positive. You’ll notice that we are now talking about alien life in other solar systems. This is because we know too much about our own solar system, and we had to discard the notion of aliens on Mars and push the existence of aliens to regions of the universe we know virtually nothing about. But as science teaches us on what a knife’s edge life precariously balances, it grows more doubtful that there are other planets that, like ours, sustain life.

Science, like religion, is essentially neutral on the question of whether aliens exist. We will have our answer when we either encounter aliens, and know for certain they are real, or when we have explored the whole universe, and know for certain they aren’t. Until then, there are no quandaries, theological or otherwise.

October 31—what’s the first thing that comes to your mind?

In all likelihood, it’s Halloween, with it’s spooky traditions and candy goodness. That is completely understandable because it’s the holiday that gets all the press. Who hasn’t seen scary commercials and trailers for the latest horror movie or store displays luring customers to buy this goody or that accessory?

But in truth, October 31 marks something vastly more important.

Nearly 500 years ago, God moved across Europe through courageous men and women to restore to the church the truth of the Gospel, the primacy of the Word of God, the importance of expressing faith in great songs and music as well as a renewal of the personal walk of a believer with his Lord. This is the REFORMATION! (First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton, Newsbreak, 2011)

And the holiday has become known as Reformation Day, most often celebrated as Reformation Sunday on the Sunday prior to October 31.

In part here’s what Wikipedia says:

According to Philipp Melanchthon, writing in 1546, [Martin] Luther “wrote theses on indulgences and posted them on the church of All Saints on 31 October 1517”, an event now seen as sparking the Protestant Reformation.

According to an article at the web site Sunday School Lessons, Luther’s concerns emphasized two key points: justification by faith and the priesthood of all believers.

I have to admit, I take for granted those tenets of the faith. After all, Scripture makes them so clear … except, the common ordinary people of Luther’s day didn’t have Bibles. They depended on their church leaders to tell them what was in God’s word.

A corrupt church and priests interested in lining their own pockets weren’t concerned with trivialities such as what the Bible actually said, so salvation by faith alone was not a concept widely known. The idea of “no distinction [between believers] … but Christ is all and in all” was for all practical purposes unheard of.

Chaplain R. Kevin Johnson explains it this way in his article “Reformation Day”:

[Martin Luther’s] aim was to protest the assertion by the Church that God’s favor could be gained by the purchase of indulgences. Luther taught that salvation and the remission of sin are available by grace through faith in Christ alone and that no monetary offering or good deed would or could achieve the same result. With this bold act of conviction, Luther set in motion a full revolt against the Church known as the Protestant Reformation.

Luther challenged church doctrine by teaching that all Christian believers have both the right and responsibility to carry forth the gospel (a principle we call “the priesthood of the believer”). To prove his point, Luther looked to the scriptures and cited 1 Corinthians 4:1, “Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries;” Revelation 5:10, “you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth;” and 1 Peter 2:9, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” Luther also taught that no extra-biblical means was necessary to obtain divine truth.

in 2011 Justin Taylor wrote a great post chock full of resources for those who wish to learn more about Martin Luther and his part in the Reformation, but most powerful I felt was his closing paragraph:

Luther—like all of us—was a flawed man with feet of clay. He didn’t see or say everything right. But God used him to recover the gospel and to reform the church, and it is fitting to thank God for this remarkable man and God’s grace to him and through him.

Perhaps Reformation Day is the most pivotal holiday ever that few remember or celebrate. Not that churches don’t acknowledge it or perhaps even do something special on Sunday to commemorate it. But it doesn’t quite crowd out Halloween, now, does it?

Not that I’m suggesting Christians should have “our holiday” and non-Christians, “theirs.” But it seems pretty clear, if Christians don’t celebrate the Reformation, no one else will.

Should Christian stories evangelize?

When Stephen sent the email asking for contributions to this series, I had just finished reading Madeline L’Engle’s Walking on Water and was in the process of reading The Creative Call by Janet Elsheimer, which was largely influenced by L’Engle and by the secular work The Artist’s Way, and at the end of reading several of Eugene Peterson’s works (I’ve also read Francis Schaeffer’s Art and the Bible since then).

The whole concept of secular and sacred art, despite my growing up reading mostly Christian fiction, was foreign to me until college, when I entered the debate and began studying it for myself. The more I listened, the more I observed, the more I realized that there is, in fact (or, at least, has been) a strange disconnect between American Christianity and American culture (and therefore art) for some time.

Most of what I could say has already been covered quite eloquently, but a few other thoughts come to mind.

My immediate reaction to “Should Christian stories evangelize?” is a thousand times no.

To illustrate my understanding of evangelistic fiction, the question reminds me of a writing conference I was at in which a lovely older gentleman asked the workshop speaker, “So, a novel isn’t a sermon?” My friend and I stayed quiet while the speaker very graciously told him no and explained why, but I can’t help but thinking about how genuine the question was. It was a true shift in paradigm for him, and I don’t think he’s alone.  So if we’re going to use the word “evangelize” in its exact definition, then no.

If the Holy Spirit wants to use a movie, or a novel, or a piece of music, or a dance, or a painting, to speak to an individual in a way only they would understand, he is perfectly capable and in his right to do so. In fact, that’s typically the way he seems to operate. (One of my favorite Scripture moments is when Jesus calls Nathaniel. That whole dialogue reads like an inside joke between them that no one else understands. Whatever Nathaniel needed to hear, Jesus gave him, but speculations abound as to what it was.¹)

But there are two things at work here.

First, art is not evangelizing anybody if it is made in such a way that only another Christian would interact with it. That is not evangelism. That is edifying the body. But, as one of the other contributors put so well, it is not edification, either, if we’re creating alternate realities (especially in contemporary fiction) in which the work is creating some emotional outbursts but not actually feeding anyone or going only halfway with a subject, or a dozen other things that simply widen the chasm between real-world people and situations and this otherly, surreal place that implies a guru meditating above the cosmos and apart from earth and mere mortals.

Second, we’re confusing “theme” with “gospel presentation.” Scripture is abundant with theme: justice, revenge, love, kingship, sovereignty, redemption, human nature, the ethical treatment of the earth and animals, and so on. And it doesn’t always answer the questions. Job never knows why he suffered; the book of Jonah actually ends with a question; Paul’s answer to why not everyone is saved boils down to “trust God.” Many things happen in Judges that are put there, but neither celebrated nor directly condemned, and so on. This being said, of course a story can have a strong redemption theme; it can even have a very blatant retelling of Christ’s work on the cross and be splendid, but, to blatantly quote L’Engle, even the theme must “serve the work.”

For the glory of the Lord

I can’t say precisely what needs to change; I think that varies by the person.

Some are too ready to throw out all tradition, caution, and counsel in favor of “gritty” and “real” while others are too ready to shun anything that smells of licentiousness or bad theology. My experience is that this is a false dichotomy for the most part; most people live along a pendulum (or something more like a ball of knots) of things they consider acceptable or unacceptable–I call them glorious or grotesque–in fiction.

In answer to what should change, I can only say this, not because it isn’t being done, but because it needs reinforcing: We need to expand our definition of “evangelism opportunities” from creating ninety-thousand word tracts that might fall on fertile spiritual soil of an unknown number of unknown people. Our definition or “evangelism opportunities” must also include creating something of excellence, richness, and potency that will create the opportunity to speak the good news and live evangelistic lifestyles among the handful of real, flesh-and-blood people we come in contact with, and leave the rest to the Spirit himself, because not one of us has the power to resurrect dead human souls.

And, in conclusion, I would say as Paul did: “In whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” and for his glory (Colossians 3:17; I Corinthians 10:31).

Should Christian stories evangelize?

This is a crucial issue for anyone who loves stories but loves Jesus more, and wants to glorify Jesus through our enjoyment of stories or our making of stories.

During October our new SpecFaith series explores this issue.

On Thursdays, reviewer Austin Gunderson and writer E. Stephen Burnett host the conversation with interactive articles. On Fridays and Tuesdays, guest writers such as novelists and publishers offer their responses to the question.

We invite you to give your own answers to the #StoryEvangelism conversation.

From part 3 of the series:

We still have Sabbath rest, times when we retreat, recharge, and fulfill human needs. Yet that rest is part of our goal of evangelizing people, preparing us for an eternal Sabbath. ¹

Stephen, I think the idea you touch on here is crucial to our understanding of what it means to be fully Christian—and in a larger and even more fundamental sense, fully human.

The kind of life that we have been designed to live, as bearers of God’s image, can’t be reduced to a single activity, because God Himself isn’t a monomaniac. From the beginning of the universe He has worked and rested, created and delegated, commanded and consoled. When He incarnated as one of us, He lived and worked and rested and studied and played as an ordinary human being for 30 years before beginning His itinerant ministry. Was Jesus failing to glorify His Father during that pre-preaching period? By no means! Indeed, He was and is our Living Example of what it means to be fully human. We have no other standard.

Even Paul, called by God to be a celibate apostle, didn’t dare insinuate that his level of devotion to evangelism should serve as a template for others. He writes while discussing marriage:

I wish that all were as I myself am, but each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another … let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him.²

Paul is articulating the doctrine of vocation, the idea that we’re all called to serve and glorify God, not by becoming something that we’re not, nor by abandoning our strengths to become standard-issue evangelism-automatons, but by treating our occupations as vocations through the application of the gospel’s redemptive power to every sphere of life.

But there is a caveat. Paul goes on:

This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.³

We are to live in this world—to work, rest, love, play, and evangelize—while being mindful that everything is about to change forever. To hold reality with an open hand. To see beyond the petty perils that can only threaten a soon-to-be-resurrected body,⁴ and to live with eternity in mind.

And yet even as I write these words, I feel a reflexive twinge of guilt. So conditioned am I to interpret these sorts of statements as calls for evangelism that I must concentrate in order to perceive their gloriously holistic meaning. We ought not hear the words “live with eternity in mind” and cringe; we ought to leap for joy, for by them we aren’t compelled to perform some awkward ritual in order to accrue divine favor, but are rather liberated to inhabit our lives without fear. We’re free to do all that we do “as unto the Lord.”

As you pointed out, Stephen, we are always sinning when we act in contradiction to faith, for it’s at that point that we shift our allegiance from God, Who redeemed us with His own blood, to some idol we perceive as having more power or credence.

Such idolatry takes endless forms. Writes Tim Keller in his excellent treatise Every Good Endeavor:

You will not have a meaningful life without work, but you cannot say that your work is the meaning of your life. If you make any work the purpose of your life — even if that work is church ministry — you create an idol that rivals God. Your relationship with God is the most important foundation of your life, and indeed it keeps all the other factors — work, friendships and family, leisure and pleasure — from becoming so important to you that they become addicting and distorted.⁵

It’s not evangelism—a particular kind of work to which we’re all called to one degree or another—that redeems our occupations, but the gospel itself: the good news that, because of Christ’s work on our behalf, our identity and eternal security are now rooted in Him.

Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25: 14-30 illustrates the consequences of faith and fear in the workplace. A master entrusts three servants with varying quantities of money according to their abilities. The first two step out with faith into the marketplace, unafraid to risk what they’ve been given because they trust the one who saw fit to entrust it to them. The third servant, fearing failure, does nothing. But whom does he actually mistrust—himself, or his master? That his sin is faithlessness becomes clear when he is later punished for failing to accomplish the master’s purpose. So we, too, are called to trust the Master Who designed each of us to perform a particular kind of work to the praise of His glory.

To quote Keller again:

You may think you have been given little because you are always striving for more, but you have been given much, and God has called you to put it into play. It is natural to root your identity in your position in the palace [like Queen Esther, afraid to provoke the king]; to rest your security in the fact that you have a certain measure of control over the variables in your life; to find your significance in having clout in certain circles. But if you are unwilling to risk your place in the palace for your neighbors, the palace owns you.⁶

And we do not wish to be owned by anyone but God, Whose ownership means liberation and fulfillment and the eternal joy of finally occupying our rightful place in the universe. We wish to trust Him through the veil of tears that’s fallen over creation like an iron curtain, to see beyond the encroaching idols of Earth and the long night of sorrows to that Dawn when our Maker at last looks upon us and says:

Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.⁷

The rapturous gravity of this moment is approached by C.S. Lewis in his sublime essay The Weight of Glory:

There will be no room for vanity then. [The redeemed soul] will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex for ever will also drown her pride deeper than Prospero’s book. Perfect humility dispenses with modesty. If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself; “it is not for her to bandy compliments with her Sovereign.”⁸

And now I approach an answer to your question about the form taken by Jesus’ summoning work in my own life. A full answer is, of course, impossible, as I myself am barely aware of but a fraction of the Holy Spirit’s work to divert me from selfish ambition and vain conceit in order to will and to work for God’s good pleasure.⁹

As I recounted previously, it was fear that drove me as a child to the cross. Since then, God has been progressively turning my eyes from the stick to the carrot, as it were. The longer I live, the more I am staggered by the implications of the gospel.

What is this gospel we so often speak of with the perfunctory boredom of familiarity? Why, it’s nothing less than the ultimate embodiment of everything for which we humans secretly yearn in the innermost depths of our souls. It is the Ur Myth, the Story of Stories, the Template from which all we know of romance and heroism has been cast. If we Christians really believe that God purposed to die for the sins of His creation from before the foundation of the world, then what we are faced with in the gospel is a story of love and loss and triumph over evil that enfolds the very cosmos in its throes.

Moreover, it speaks to the very nature of our Creator that He has chosen to not only become a personal participant in the narrative of human history, thereby embodying and defining heroism, but to reveal Himself progressively through the ages—from the mists of Eden when His salvation was but a Word, to the fires of Israel consuming imperfect sacrifices and throwing copied shadows on the wall, to the Word Himself made flesh and put to death and risen from the grave, to the King returning in splendor from His epochal journey heavenward.

What the gospel tells us is this: God is a storyteller. He revels in Mystery. He delights in drawing out the tension, takes pleasure in the process, and finds value in, as Sam Gamgee puts it, those inside His story who face despair and “just [go] on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end.”

And yet it is an uncommon occurrence indeed to look up from tedium and see through the facade of meaninglessness that discolors the workaday life. That we daily inhale a zeitgeist of militant secularism doesn’t help matters. In our minds we may know that we’re living in a story, but in our hearts we feel naught but frustration and doubt. How then shall we rouse ourselves from, as Lewis put it, “the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years”? How shall we regain perspective?

Should Christian stories evangelize?

This is a crucial issue for anyone who loves stories but loves Jesus more, and wants to glorify Jesus through our enjoyment of stories or our making of stories.

During October our new SpecFaith series explores this issue.

On Thursdays, reviewer Austin Gunderson and writer E. Stephen Burnett host the conversation with interactive articles. On Fridays and Tuesdays, guest writers such as novelists and publishers offer their responses to the question.

We invite you to give your own answers to the #StoryEvangelism conversation.

Some guys at my church recommended that I read One Second After by William Forstchen. They don’t seem to be the reading type so I was curious to see what kind of book would have hooks strong enough to draw them in. If you haven’t read it or heard about it, the book takes place in a small town in North Carolina and details what would happen after an EMP strike on the US (I get so irritated with movies that take the time to explain what an EMP is, even though everyone who has ever watched a movie should know by now, so I’m not going to bother). I’m still reading the book but so far, it’s what you would expect: a flawed but well-meaning ex-military man with skills and charisma tries to keep his family alive and his beloved town from falling apart, with mixed results. What has attracted so much attention to this book is the supposedly realistic portrayal of how American society would break down without electricity. There is no zombie outbreak, no spikes-and-leather warriors of the apocalypse, no cannibal motorcycle gangs. Just normal people thrown into an extraordinary situation.

This isn’t a book review, but I will have to say that the writing is pretty bad. Exposition abounds, and the author, editor, and proofreader apparently don’t know the difference between “have” and “of” (as in “must of” instead of “must have.” This is a pretty frequent infraction, and I can’t help but wonder if this is a devious attempt to further corrupt the English language, like what happened with “alright” becoming mainstream). But I digress. The story is gripping and the reader immediately feels empathy with the characters. I get a similar feeling with Dean Koontz books – completely ridiculous but I can’t stop turning the pages.

As I’ve been reading, one thought remains on my mind: this is the kind of apocalypse book that conservative Americans, and I believe American Christians, would devour. It’s definitely a dyed-in-the-wool, traditional American values book, which I agree with by and large. But here it’s on full display – the independent American spirit, family sticks together no matter what, take care of your own, don’t trust the government, don’t take any chances when it comes to your family’s safety, etc. Newt Gingrich, who has collaborated with Forstchen in the past, wrote the ominous foreword, and the book’s claim to fame is that it was recommended before Congress as prophetic reading. This is a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-to-work apocalypse, not a fanciful sci-fi bloodfest. It’s the kind of book that makes you proud to be an American.

There’s nothing wrong with this, but as a Christian, I began to wonder how I would react. Honestly, my first reaction to an event like this would be to grab my guns and hunker down with the family. The Bible does not prohibit this, but it doesn’t advocate blowing away trespassers either. In fact, I get the impression that we as Christians should err on the side of love and compassion. We are told numerous times to love our neighbor, love our enemies, bless those who curse us, etc., and in an apocalyptic situation, this would seem to mean share food stores and shelter, help people defend their families, and sacrificially help those in need. God is still God even if society goes down the toilet, and He doesn’t stop loving us or providing for us. It’s not a matter of, “Well, the fat lady has sung for civilization. Guess it’s just us with our wits and our guns.” We would need to trust Him no matter how dire the circumstances and to show love and compassion no matter what.

I’m not saying we should let our homes be overrun by bandit hordes or give away everything we had for sustenance. But I do think that we, as American Christians, shouldn’t be so quick to rely on ourselves in a time of crisis, even if we are well-prepared and suited for it. Our first reaction would be to circle the wagons and keep others out, but I don’t think that’s what Jesus would do at all.

Except the zombies. Shoot every one of those suckers in the head.