Author: Ophelia Benson

I love to read – don’t you? Don’t you just love a good book? I do. There’s just nothing quite like a good book. Except maybe a really good brownie, or a really good walk on the beach, or a really good – I’m sorry.

Yes, I just love to read, especially when I have something good to read. Like – oh – a nice evangelical novel. Yes indeed. You can keep your old Jane Austen and your Emily Bronte (what was her problem, anyway?) and your George Eliot and Tolstoy and Stendhal and all those old-fashioned foreign people. Give me some good evangelical fiction with lots of adventure and violence and scary people and Jesus. That’s what I like.

At first hearing, the above storyline sounds like the basis for some sort of souped-up action movie. You could even imagine the pitch needed to sell it to a studio boss: “It’s got serial killers and Nazis and lost treasure! It’s Silence of the Lambs meets The Odessa File meets Raiders of the Lost Ark!”.

Cool! I can’t wait to read it! I’m going to run to the grocery store right now and see if they got it on those metal shelves by the sunglasses display. I hope it meets a few more movies for good measure – the Lost Ark meets Night of the Jedi meets Blair Witch Project meets the Full Monty (you know, like, Jesus does a strip show at the end) meets Supervolcano (that would be so cool, all the bad people who don’t love Jesus could get chased by lava and all the good Jesusy people could all be in Lubbock that day) meets one of those angel movies – doesn’t matter which one.

Written with a certain punchy, wham-bam brio, Obsessed is designed to be a page-turner. But it is also a profoundly Manichean tract – something that its author openly admits: “To minimise the darkness is to minimise the light,” he said in a recent interview. “I can understand a non-Christian writer using a grey brush to paint evil. But Christian writers, of all people, should never underestimate evil.

You know, that is just so true. ‘To minimise the darkness is to minimise the light’ – that’s beautiful – don’t you think that’s beautiful? And so profound. Because if you don’t think that some people are just evil all the way through in every possible way, just evil evil evil, like they say mean things to the bread before they put it in the toaster and they slap the toilet paper before they use it just to be evil – if you don’t think that, then you don’t think some other people, and Jesus, are the opposite, just good all the way through in every possible way, like they smile at everybody and wear clean clothes and campaign to get rid of the income tax – just really good. You see? You can’t get the one if you don’t get the other one – that’s how it works. And the evil people are supposed to be burned up by lava.

The packaging for Dekker’s Obsessed is from the slick school of upscale airport fiction. And though his publisher, WestBow, is a division of Thomas Nelson Inc (one of America’s oldest religious publishers), there is nothing on the cover that hints at the novel’s pious subtext. Similarly, the jacket blurb eschews all mention of the author’s proselytising intentions, referring instead to a “story of passion, revenge, and an all-consuming obsession”.

Ooh – that sounds kind of dirty, doesn’t it. It makes me feel all kind of – where’d I leave my Bible.

The fact is, however, that in the past few years, Christian-themed fiction has become one of the fastest-growing sectors in the American publishing industry – with its own agents, its own star writers, its own bestseller lists, and, most tellingly, what is known in marketing parlance as “growing crossover trade”: an increasing number of “secular” readers reaching for novels by Christian authors.

Well now isn’t that just lovely? Those poor damned secular readers may get themselves saved after all because they’re reading about adventure and evil and, um, all-consuming obsessions. (Ooh, that makes me feel so – I’ll just think about Jesus.)

Says Kate Duffy, an editor at the New York publishing house, Kensington: “There are two types of books that are really selling in America these days: erotica and inspirational romance,” she says.

Ero – oh dear. I’ll just have a nice glass of iced tea and I’m sure it will go away.

Kensington, a one-time specialist in gay and lesbian titles (not to mention books for all those Wiccans who follow a “neo-pagan, Earth-centered religion” better known as witchcraft), is about to change gear and publish three romantic novellas by the king of apocalyptic Christian fiction, LaHaye.

A one-time specialist in what?? That’s disgusting! And the part about gay and lesbian is disgusting too! I don’t know where all these people get the

Start nosing around the burgeoning world of Christian fiction, and you begin to bump into other manifold curiosities – such as the discovery that “faith-based” writers (as they often like to be called) are now working in such hitherto non-evangelical genres as the detective story, science fiction, graphic novels and even the western.

Yee, ha! Saddle up, pardner – the Clancy boys are on their way to rob the train, and if we hurry we can bushwack ’em and get the payroll and give it to the church. Beam me up, Scotty – it was the butler with the candlestick in the library. Jesus saves.

A major publishing house such as Time Warner Books now has its very own religious imprint – Warner Faith – and its own “Faith Building Fiction” list, with Christian chick lit authors such as Lisa Samson, whose new novel, Songbird, is trumpeted on their website as a hot title this season (“One woman’s search for forgiveness and peace leads her down the path of pain and despair, only to find hope via God’s grace”).

Well that’s just real nice, but does she find any good – I’m sorry.

At the time, there were only a handful of pioneers in the field of evangelical fiction – for instance, Frank Peretti, who is often referred to as “the Christian Stephen King” (and who has sold more than 12 million books to date). His 1986 novel, This Present Darkness, follows a born-again Christian preacher and newspaper reporter as they uncover a New Age plot to take over the world.

Really? He is? See, where I come from, Stephen King is often referred to as ‘the heathen Frank Peretti.’ But the New Age plot to take over the world sounds real exciting. They’d do it, too; they’d take over the world as soon as look atcha.

None of those cited above is a “literary” author, but to merely write them off -with a sardonic metropolitan titter – as pulp fiction for the born-again brigade is to underestimate their growing influence.

A sardonic metropolitan titter? Hey, Bub, I don’t titter. That was no fucking titter, that was a Bronx cheer as loud and ungenteel as I could make it.

This morning I read Mark Bauerlein’s article in Theory’s Empire, ‘Social Constructionism: Philosophy for the Academic Workplace’, originally published in Partisan Review. It’s great stuff.

When someone holds a belief philosophically, he or she exposes it to arguments and evidence against it, and tries to mount arguments and evidence for it in return. But in academic contexts, constructionist ideas are not open for debate. They stand as community wisdom, articles of faith. When a critic submitted an essay to PMLA that criticized constructionists for not making arguments in their favor, the reader’s report by Richard Ohmann rejoined that since constructionism is universally accepted by academic inquirers, there is no need to argue for it anymore.

That’s either hilarious or infuriating, or probably both. Constructionism is universally accepted by academic inquirers!! Is it really!

No, it certainly is not, and the fact that someone doing a reader’s report on such a book thinks or claims to think it is, is…shocking, absurd, risible, maddening. Talk about groupthink.

Commentaries on ideological origins and ethical results far exceed conceptual analyses and logical expositions. Evaluating concepts and arguments by their political backgrounds and implications has become a disciplinary wont, a pattern of inquiry. It is the natural method of constructionist epistemology, the outlook that will not distinguish between a truth and its origination, which is to say the outlook that is not really an epistemology at all. It speaks an epistemological language, but it has no epistemological principles.

Just so. Evaluating concepts by their political implications: the very definition of unepistemology.

If constructionists mean by “truth” merely “what passes for truth,” then the contradiction disappears, but now we are no longer talking about truth in epistemological terms, but in historical terms, that which is accepted as truth in this or that time and place. The acceptance of something as true is one thing, the truth of that belief is another. Establishing the latter is a routine epistemological task. Documenting the former is a traditional historical endeavor, carried out by Gibbon as well as by Sedgwick.

‘If constructionists mean by “truth” merely “what passes for truth,”‘ – as they so often do, and as journalists and others writing about them also so often do – witness Morris Dickstein in that article a few weeks ago. I pointed out at the time that he was confusing the two – which people really ought to stop doing.

This polarizing, personalizing rhetoric indicates that social constructionism has an institutional basis, not a philosophical, moral, or political one. It tramples on philosophical distinctions and practices an immoral mode of debate…Instead, what has emerged from social constructionism is not a philosophical school or a political position, but an institutional product, specifically, an outpouring of research publications, conference talks, and classroom presentations by subscribers…In a word, it is the school of thought most congenial to current professional workplace conditions of scholars in the humanities.

And why? Because (in the US at least) academics have to publish a book within 3 1/2 years of being hired, or they won’t be tenured. Social constructivist books are easier to write than those that rely on evidence and time spent in archives. All a bit of a misunderstanding, it seems.

I listened to part of an Open Book on libaries earlier today. Michael Holroyd talked about how important the library was to him when he was a child – ‘It was a place of light.’ Yes – so it was to me when I was a child. I had two libraries: the public one, in an old brick colonial house painted yellow on Nassau Street, which had a wonderful library smell that I can conjure up whenever I think of it, and which fills me with an intense nostalgia; and the one at school, which was a series of three rooms (painted dark green I think) with arched doorways: it was usually empty (it was a tiny school), and it was a refuge.

Holroyd got his education in libraries, he said – he never went to university. Score one for libraries (score several, actually). Then Open Book interviewed some people in Waterstone’s or someplace to ask them if they use the library as well as bookshops. Some said yes, others said no. ‘Why not?’ Libraries not very good, small, not many books, rundown – and some closed altogether, the one in Deptford for example. Ah, thought I, already thinking of doing N&C on the subject (libraries are a subject that get me going), and Jeremy told me last year the one in Sutton was closed – I can say that. So, Open Book said, libraries often small, rundown, without many books – but now we will go to a library that is none of those things – the brand new central library in (wait for it) Sutton. So I snickered a bit. Well at least that explains why it was closed.

But then things got very bad. Very bad indeed; really terrible. There was a lot of stuff about how the new Sutton library has a machine for checking books in and out that makes a fart noise when the books are checked in, and a ‘Sound Shower’ you can stand in to listen to new music without having to wear headphones (and the sound leaks out a bit, Open Book noted). Then Open Book asked the librarian, ‘Does anyone ever ask people to ‘be quiet’ here?’ And she answered happily, ‘No, never. We encourage people to make noise.’

That’s when I put my fist through the wall.

See, we have the same thing here – everybody has it everywhere – it’s universal. It has been decided and decreed (where? by whom? when? why? why wasn’t I consulted?) that libraries must now be ‘welcoming’ which means – well I thought it meant allowing people to make noise, I didn’t quite realize it had got to the point of actually begging them to do so.

Because they have to be ‘attractive,’ you see. The librarian told us that (and we already knew it, having looked into this subject a bit over the years). And ‘attractive’ for libraries means (why? why? why?) ‘as noisy as possible’ rather than quiet so that you can read and think and browse the shelves without being distracted by people shouting and cell phones chiming – let alone study and do research and write and really think hard. What, in a library?! Are you mad?! That’s not what libraries are for!

Well what are they for then? No, seriously – what are they for? Borrowing videos and CDs, mostly, it seems, and you don’t need quiet to do that.

But all the same, I have some basic questions about all this. One – why is noise considered ‘attractive’? Why is it thought to make libraries more ‘attractive’ if people are not only allowed but encouraged to make noise there? Why isn’t that thought to make them unattractive as opposed to attractive? I ask because I’ll let you in on a little secret: that’s certainly the effect this policy has on me. The louder a library is, the less attractive I find it, and that’s a fact. I don’t go into a library that sounds more like a rock concert and think ‘Wow, this is the most attractive library I’ve ever set foot in, I’m going to come here all the time.’ No. I think the opposite.

Two, why, even if it is true that some people find a loud library more ‘attractive’ than a quiet one, do the people in charge of libraries give them what they want instead of giving people who find a quiet library more ‘attractive’ what they want? Because there are more people in the first group? Because the second group is considered (I bet you can guess what word I’m going to use here) ‘elitist’? Because they think there is something old-fashioned and priggish and tiresome in liking quiet libraries? Because they think that quiet and reading and thought and study are horrible nasty regressive posh activities that ought to be stamped out in favour of nice healthy gregarious loud running around and shouting?

But even if they do think that – why can’t they let the nice healthy gregarious loud running around and shouting go on in the many many places that are intended and designed for nice healthy gregarious loud running around and shouting? Like playfields, parks, community recreation centers? Why do they have to take over the libraries too? Why can’t the libraries go on being what they were before: places where you go to find books, and read them, and use the reference books, and study and write? Especially for people who have no such place anywhere else? Why is it necessary to abolish libraries as places for quiet reading and thinking? Is reading and thinking such a sinister way of life that it has to be stamped out not just most places but everywhere?

Just the other day, someone I know told me she heard the young daughter of her gardener say she wanted to go to the library. ‘You want to go to the library!’ this acquaintance imitated herself exclaiming in amazement. ‘Shouldn’t you be asking to go swimming or something?!’ I don’t think she meant to sound scornful, but she certainly did. ‘Brilliant,’ I thought, ‘make the kid feel stupid and wrong and clueless; nice going. Just because you don’t like libraries doesn’t mean no one does.’

Same to those people who think cacophonous libraries are more ‘attractive’ than quiet ones, and that it’s worth attracting people to libraries that are really playgrounds. Just because not everyone likes to read and think doesn’t mean that no one should ever be able to.

Of course, it’s not just London. It’s never just London – or anywhere else.

It’s a suicide bombing in Iraq which killed more than twenty people, along with more bombings in Mosul and Kirkuk. It’s six Afghan policemen beheaded by suspected Taliban guerillas. It’s at least twenty people injured by a bomb in a litter bin in a tourist resort in Turkey. And this month is the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre when eight thousand Bosnian Muslims were killed and dumped in mass graves.

All part of the routine.