Christian Publishing on Trial

The cover illustration showed a mousetrap stuffed with dollar bills under the headline “Taking the Bait?” The cover copy continued with another question in smaller print: “As Christian publishing turns into big business, is theological integrity giving way to marketing considerations and a watered-down, pop Christianity?” Inside the July 12-19 issue of World magazine, the answer to both questions was a resounding yes. Gene Edward Veith’s article, “What Ever Happened to Christian Publishing?,” timed to hit the street just before the Christian Booksellers Association convention in Atlanta, presented a blistering indictment, concluding with a call for the “spiritual revival” of Christian publishing, “for which Christians should be praying.”

To the extent that the charges in Veith’s article are true, they should be a cause for deep concern among all of us who are involved in some way with Christian publishing (which, in Veith’s terms, means evangelical publishing: he ignores Catholic, Orthodox, and nonevangelical Protestant publishers). If, on the other hand, there are distortions in his account, it is important to address them as well. For both of those reasons, Veith’s article should receive a careful reading.

But there is another reason to focus attention on this article, which is representative of what World variously likes to call “biblical journalism” or “biblical objectivity” or “biblically directed reporting.” (For the latest in a long series of editorial explanations of World’s approach, see Marvin Olasky’s column, “Philosophical Doubleheader,” in the July 26/August 2 issue.)

Under the direction of Joel Belz (publisher) and Marvin Olasky (editor), World has made a significant contribution to Christian journalism over the last several years. Their robust engagement with critical issues, driven by a strong commitment to Christian principles and seasoned with humor and more than a dash of sarcasm, has lifted their magazine into the “must-read” category. But along with those virtues, World has its share of flaws, most notably an end-justifies-the-means philosophy that encourages writers to ignore evidence that contradicts the party line and to ratchet up most every controversy to the level of heresy or unfaithfulness to God. Both the virtues and the flaws–especially the latter–are on display in Veith’s report on the state of Christian publishing.

At the heart of Veith’s critique there is one simple but important truth: too many Christian books are superficial– “spiritual junk food,” as Veith puts it. As an editor who receives review copies of dozens of Christian books every week, I can only say, alas, amen. Veith is absolutely right, and if World had built a story on that theme, just when the Christian publishing industry was expecting some cheerleading, I would have applauded. But that wouldn’t have made for a very dramatic story; it is not exactly news. And so instead, Veith has constructed a tale of venality and theological spinelessness on a grand scale. In Veith’s telling, virtually the entire Christian publishing industry has been corrupted by the intrusion of “big business” and a foolish desire to ape secular trends.

While not alleging a conspiracy in the strict sense, Veith constructs his argument with all the standard devices of the conspiracy theorist, in the grand tradition of the paranoid style in American evangelicalism. His article is a hodgepodge of disconnected observations and facts ripped out of context. He reports the 1992 buyout of Word by Thomas Nelson and the failed attempt, that same year, by a group of Zondervan employees to buy back the company from HarperCollins, the publishing giant owned by the Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch, raising concerns about the conflict between corporate imperatives and Christian ministry.

Veith’s main example of the baneful pressure on Zondervan from its secular master is its decision to scrap a line of academic books that had not enjoyed profitable sales. Much as I love academic books (the good ones, anyway), I fail to see how this decision suggests that Zondervan has capitulated to Mammon. How, in fact, does it differ from World’s decision not to run 5,000-word reviews of university press books? Zondervan publishes books like Alister McGrath’s Studies in Doctrine (with a foreword by J. I. Packer), Philip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew and What’s So Amazing About Grace?, and the outstanding NIV Application Commentary series. They also publish books that are superficial Christian versions of secular counterparts, and books that are bad in other quite distinct ways. The good ones should be celebrated, the bad ones not. But the reality simply doesn’t fit Veith’s conspiratorial narrative.

Perhaps the most egregious distortions in Veith’s article, however, occur in his attack on InterVarsity Press and Eerdmans. If you are familiar with these publishers, you may wonder what on earth they are doing in this article. Obviously you haven’t read widely enough in the vast and fantastic literature of paranoia. Here is how Veith segues to the assault:

Some smaller publishers resist the pressures of commercialism and continue to publish serious theological books–but some of them nevertheless have drifted from biblical orthodoxy.

And then, as cases in point, Veith proceeds to cite IVP and Eerdmans.

So the connection is this: The whole article is a story about how Christian publishing has forsaken Truth and is in need of revival. Many publishers have been seduced by avaricious dreams of crossing over to the “coveted secular market,” but others, such as IVP and Eerdmans, lusting for respectability on the world’s terms, are instead whoring after the strange gods of atheistic intellectuals, heretics, Catholics, and Jews.

It has always been a matter of some amazement to me that many of those who proclaim most loudly their attachment to Truth are so ready to ignore or suppress inconvenient truths. It is, of course, possible to deceive others (and even oneself) while telling part of the truth and leaving out the bigger picture in which that truth has meaning. So, for example, Veith does not mention that next year IVP will publish the first volumes in its most ambitious project ever: the 27-volume Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. It is the goal of this project to reaffirm “the classic Christian exegesis” of the early church. This enterprise provides a magnificent contrast to the trends Veith rightly deplores, but he says nothing about it. It would complicate the picture a bit, wouldn’t it?

Veith’s account of Eerdmans is similarly distorted. While he allows, with condescension, that “Eerdmans still publishes on occasion important evangelical books such as David Wells’ No Place for Truth,” his overall verdict comes down on a publisher that has “drifted away from biblical orthodoxy.” Still publishes important evangelical books “on occasion”? Well, there was that book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, by Mark Noll. And Neal Plantinga’s Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be (honored as Book of the Year by Christianity Today magazine, as Noll’s book was the year before). And Gordon Fee’s magisterial commentary on Philippians. And then there was David Jeffrey’s People of the Book, which was unanimously chosen for the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s 1996 Book Award for scholarship. Gene Edward Veith was one of the three members of the CCL Book Award Committee.

Veith concludes with an admonitory story. “What has gone wrong in the Christian publishing industry,” he writes, “can perhaps best be illustrated in the career moves of Mr. [Frank] Peretti, the million-seller author.” Peretti, you see, was “lured” from Crossway to Word “for a reported $4 million and a plan to turn Mr. Peretti into a crossover hit.” Now the conspiratorial touch:

According to a veteran publishing insider who spoke on condition of anonymity, Word took the first manuscript Mr. Peretti delivered, The Oath, and hired a secular editor from the New York publishing establishment to make it more acceptable for the tastes of the non-Christian market. As might have been predicted, The Oath has failed to win the big sales of Mr. Peretti’s first novels.

In short, early Peretti, the very model of the “in-your-face” Christian writer (before Word got to him with their filthy lucre and their “New York publishing establishment” editor), equals Christian publishing Before the Fall. Others may see this morality play differently, feeling that if This Present Darkness represents our high point, we didn’t have far to drop. For them, the chief lesson to be drawn from Peretti’s spectacular success is that evangelicals are capable of producing their very own trashy bestsellers. (By the way, according to Publishers Weekly of July 14, 1997, The Oath has sold more than 500,000 copies.)

World is right to insist that as Christian journalists we are committed to certain fundamental propositions about the nature of reality. Everything is not up for argument or negotiation. But the world our God has created is a strange and intricate and complex place, and our writing should reflect its nature. When we do violence to that reality, distorting it to fit this or that thesis, we betray our calling.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 26

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