Publishers' Row Moved By The Spirit -- Of Evangelical Money
Must Publishing Pluralism Extend To Fundamentalist Intolerance?
Bruce Bawer is the author of Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity.
There are growing ties between mainstream New York publishers and evangelical Christian authors, The New York Times reported on June 8. In one recent high-profile deal, Bantam Dell, a division of Random House, paid $45 million for a new raft of "evangelical thrillers" by Timothy LaHaye, who is listed as co-author of the Left Behind series of so-called prophecy novels (even though he acknowledges that he doesn’t do any of the writing himself). Among much else, the Left Behind novels offer hair-raising accounts of the post-Rapture punishments that, according to the theology subscribed to by premillenialist Christians, will be meted out to those who believe differently than they do.
After reading the Times report, I can't help wondering what Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf -- who published, among others, James Joyce, Eudora Welty, and Ralph Ellison -- would have made of all this. In Cerf’s time, surely, no reputable New York publisher would have touched such books. But times have changed. Irwyn Applebaum, publisher of Bantam Dell, answered concerns over the possible contents of LaHaye’s contracted books by telling the Times, "We certainly are not in the business of precensoring our authors."
But why should Mr. LaHaye be a Bantam Dell author in the first place?
The relationship is not entirely comfortable for either side. Just as evangelical readers, authors, and booksellers tend to be extremely wary of publishers whose lists include books such as The New Joy of Gay Sex (HarperCollins) or the Harry Potter series (which, they argue, promotes paganism and witchcraft), some mainstream publishers admit to considerable discomfort over their industry’s increasing coziness with writers like Mr. LaHaye.
Yet others on Publishers' Row are apparently so eager to get their hands on all that evangelical money that they all but apologize for their own liberal, pluralistic views.
"We are mostly liberals in publishing who have probably been publishing a lot of books which are offensive to Christians," Laurence Kirshbaum, chairman of AOL Time Warner’s book division, told the Times. "Maybe this evens it out." Meaning what? That because fundamentalists are offended by books that reflect the democratic pluralism of mainstream American society, it somehow morally balances things out to publish, say, wish-fulfillment fantasies about non-fundamentalists suffering apocalyptic torment?
Make no mistake: what is new here is not the genre or its popularity; it is the widespread zeal with which mainstream publishers are hunting down such titles for their lists.
The granddaddy of all these books, Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, appeared way back in 1970, and was probably the top-selling American book of the 1970s. (It never made the Times bestseller list, however, for in those days the list did not take into account sales in religious bookstores.) In his book, Mr. Lindsey served up a highly popularized account of the premillenialist vision of the so-called End Times, in which the deity is seen as inflicting exceptional suffering on Jews in order to bring them to "the true Savior, Jesus." (Eventually many Jews will knuckle under and convert, Mr. Lindsey explained, but only 144,000 will be saved.) Mr. Lindsey’s opus was published not by a mainstream house but by Zondervan, then an independent, Michigan-based religious publisher. Yet the prophecy novels that New York publishers are now eagerly signing up are solidly in Mr. Lindsey’s tradition. And Zondervan, significantly, is now part of HarperCollins.
Americans are, of course, entitled to hold whatever religious beliefs they wish, no matter how much they may disturb others. But publishers, who reject books every day, are under no obligation to disseminate and encourage those beliefs. On the contrary, some of us still cling to the old-fashioned idea that the publishing of books in a democratic society, in addition to being a business, is also a profession that carries with it certain moral, intellectual, and aesthetic obligations. Yes, Publishers' Row has always churned out its share of less-than-meritorious books, and in recent years its standards have eroded sharply. But the current move into premillenialist prophecy novels and other works of hard-core fundamentalism seems a giant step too far.
There are ancillary concerns, as well. If mainstream publishers are willing to embrace books of the sort that Mr. LaHaye writes, is it not reasonable to worry that these same publishers, out of fear of damaging their extraordinarily profitable relationships with evangelical authors, readers, and booksellers, may soon begin turning down books that that constituency finds "offensive"?
Nor, finally, do these developments seem felicitously timed. At a time when the United States is waging a war against fundamentalist intolerance and illiberality -- against minds and hearts possessed by dark and irrational dreams of violence -- is it a good idea for Publishers' Row to be capitulating to worryingly similar forces at home?
Published: Jun 13 2002
