Christian Horror Novels

For Thanksgiving this last weekend, my family went to Oklahoma City to visit some friends. They live in a horribly normal suburban home, and I was truly impressed with how nice it was. They had all kinds of yuppie décor and other things to fill a big house with such as a pool/ping-pong table and a TV the size of a whole wall. But what really surprised me was their bookshelf. I walked up to it and saw nothing but ‘Christian’ fiction. It was all Peretti, Dekker, and LeHay and Jenkins. I would consider all of these to be one big genre: dark, horror, eschatological, futuristic fiction. Seeing all these books made me wonder, “What is the appeal of ‘Christian’ dark fiction? Do Christians really like being scared? If so why, is it because we don’t fear God himself enough? That seemed like a logical conclusion according the reading that I was doing at the time: Shane Claiborne. According to him, and other well respected Christians from past centuries and decades, these people didn’t fear God, and their lifestyle showed it. Maybe our friends were filling their fear void with dark Christian fiction…who knows?

But I still wondered what the appeal of these books was. Jenkins and LeHay have invaded Christianity with their fictional interpretation of eschatological Bible passages. Having talked with many friends over the years about these books, I have begun to pick up on some of their appeal. After people read them, they begin to compare their world to world of the books. “Who is Nikolai in our world?” people would ask themselves. This kind of paranoia crept upon us at the right time: Y2K. I would make the argument that these writers contributed to the ‘fear and consume’ culture surrounding the terror of the new millennium, (thank you Michael Moore) but that is an argument for another time. This attitude of searching for the antichrist has stuck with Christians in the US, as clearly illustrated during this last election (or even the last decade i.e. Osama and Saddam). Perhaps the Left Behind series gathers its appeal from the fact that it writes about something we all fear: the future. Christians especially fear the future because there really is no clear interpretation of the eschatological passages of Revelation, Daniel, or even Ezekiel. Since we fear these things so ardently, when someone offers an interpretation set in our world and culture we latch onto it. All of the books except for the last one have dark covers, but the last one is white. These books offer us more than fear, they also offer us hope for a beautiful tomorrow. Perhaps that is where their appeal is.

This still does not account for Peretti or Dekker. Why do Christian writers try to make other Christians scared? Peretti has pumped out many books, including a series for kids, and they all inspire awe or fear in us. Dekker writes ‘Christian’ horror novels, which my little brother reads by the dozen. What is up with people wanting to be scared? Is there a vacuum of fear in our hearts? Perhaps as believers we are simply bored. Claiborne makes this argument in his book The Irresistible Revolution. He argues that teenagers and the younger generation of believers are disenchanted with the church because the church doesn’t challenge them. His contention lies within a basic disagreement with modern-day evangelicals: what it means to live the gospel. Claiborne’s idea of living the gospel consists of total lifestyle reorganization and redirection toward Christ, whereas most modern evangelicals simply change a few patterns of behavior while still living their boring 9 to 5, bureaucratically controlled lives. This idea of total lifestyle reorganization has been quite the experience for Claiborne: he has traveled the world, Iraq, India, he has been arrested on many occasions, he has moved to the ghetto to live, he has lived on the edge (with no real income) for over ten years. This ‘style’ of Christianity is exciting and dangerous, like the books of Dekker and Peretti. Since most evangelicals don’t want to get out of their suburban environment and live on the edge like Claiborne, they insulate themselves by reading dark Christian novels. They get their religious excitement through sweeping worship services, short-term mission trips, and horror novels. All these things make modern evangelicals feel like they are doing something with their lives, when in reality they are not.