Books are still a happy medium
Books lead down many paths. Faithful guides are needed.
The power that books exert among human beings is mind-boggling. They are important companions, and very often they are guides. Colorful and varied they brighten our living spaces. We devote the nooks, crannies and walls (some of us dedicate whole rooms of our homes) to keep and display them. Like good friends, books stand ready to hand: some new, some old, some intimate and others mere acquaintances.
Even with the advent of information available through computer technologies, books hold a special place in the hearts and lives of people in the late 20th century. We like them for their aesthetics, their portability and the vast worlds they open to us. We like them because we can produce books with content to our liking, and also because we are able to discover entirely different patterns of seeing and believing in the works of others.
Although the diet they offer is not always healthy, books are our primary source of brain food. We don’t understand even half of their allure, but something there is that makes us stop, browse, borrow and buy books. Reading takes us places we wouldn’t be able to get to on our own. In books we seek knowledge, and the human thirst for greater knowledge dates all the way back to the Garden of Eden. Perhaps that helps to explain why reading stimulates the human imagination at its deepest, most personal levels.
Tough call
Beyond that, we just plain get attached to books. A college professor once told his students how as a younger man he’d struggled with the call of God on his life. In one of those classic heart-to-heart confrontations with God, the professor had pledged his all to his Creator, declaring himself ready to go to remotest Africa and eager to perform any self-effacing deed to serve his Lord. How surprised he was to suddenly become aware of a still, small voice gently asking if he would be willing to part with his books. Ah, that was harder.
The fact is, God maintains more than a passing interest in anything that exerts power in the lives of his created beings. Books qualify. The words that people read impact what they think and what they do. Books carry words; words communicate ideas; ideas generate action. Virtually everyone with an agenda to promote finds ways to publish and distribute books. To whatever purpose an author is committed, books are capable communicators, carrying inspiration and information through which lives can be transformed.
Christians have long recognized this power and co-opted it for missionary purposes. Indeed, we are known as "People of the Book." The Bible itself is the bestselling volume of all time, and Scripture translation projects have been harbingers of literacy in many a society.
And it doesn’t stop with the Bible. Books are the bedrock of a booming Christian industry. Publishers are churning out a tremendous variety of religious or religiously inspired titles in just about every genre imaginable. Poetry, polemics, periodicals, fiction, biography, travel, history, textbooks, reference works–all these and more exist in distinctively Christian form. Throughout North America, at any rate, an entire subculture is served by Christian product retailed through countless Christian bookstores.
The downside of this self-sufficiency, of course, is that too easily it ends up serving ourselves. The sober truth is that countless millions of literate North Americans never set foot in the Christians’ stores.
But books are still a happy medium, and in recent years a new breed of mega-bookstores has been rapidly expanding across the continent. These stores are destination points, lovely places to be and to browse in the ambience of intelligence and leisure that books exude. The big bookstores purport to support no particular ideology or purpose. Rather, they are marketplaces, places to display the ideas of the age. On their shelves lie great chunks of both the wisdom and the foolishness of the world.
Browsing through Chapters recently reminded me of an essay I wrote years ago for an undergraduate writing class. In it I described a section of one of my own bookshelves, where "novels and essays, poems and histories, Bibles and handbooks, literature and pulp" stood strangely together side by side. It was a place where "disparate authors nonchalantly rubbed bindings–Lawrence Sanders and Jane Austen, B.F. Skinner and C.S. Lewis–all casually arrayed together as if physical proximity can reconcile the differences they argue in their pages."
The big stores are a much grander version of the confusion of my shelves, and it’s very encouraging to see many good Christian titles accorded their rightful place in these secular marketplaces. For too many years most evangelical literature was only available through specialty outlets. But the big store managers are mostly interested in moving product. They care little what message lies between the covers of the volumes they sell–potatoes or tomatoes, beans or peas. It’s all a matter of preference.
Melange of beliefs
So just as one can pick and choose among, say, cook books, the spirituality section hosts a melange of beliefs, with religious and quasi-religious books proffering their spines for casual browsers and serious searchers alike. The downside of the big marketplace is the general lack of consumer discernment. Caveat emptor–buyer beware. Bright covers, catchy titles, slick marketing or mere happenstance prompt people to buy material that can either lead them on or lead them astray.
This is where Christian leaders–clergy or lay–can serve a helpful role. Read widely and share your wisdom. Know some section of the mainstream bookstores in addition to the wares of your Christian bookseller. Be familiar with a variety of titles that will help the people you know–believer and non-believer alike–move nearer to God. Encourage the people you influence to read, and lead them to green pastures. Help them fill their minds with good things. There’s plenty of fine brain food out there.
Doug Koop
Editor