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We recorded a Zoom interview with Daniel Silliman and Kristin Du Mez to discuss Silliman's new book "Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith" (Eerdmans, 2021). This book shares the story of five best-selling novels beloved by evangelicals, the book industry they built, and the collective imagination they shaped.

Buy "Reading Evangelicals": https://www.eerdmans.com/Products/7935/reading-evangelicals.aspx

DANIEL SILLIMAN
Daniel Silliman is a journalist and a historian. He is the news editor for Christianity Today; the author of "Reading Evangelicals," a history of bestselling evangelical fiction; and teaches humanities at Milligan University. Daniel spent several years as a crime reporter outside Atlanta before pursuing higher education in Germany, earning a MA from Tübingen University and a doctoral degree from Heidelberg University. He was a Teaching Fellow at the University of Notre Dame from 2016–2017 and a Lilly Postdoctoral Fellow at Valparaiso University from 2017–19. He has reported and edited news coverage for CT since 2019.

KRISTIN DU MEZ
Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling author and Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets. Her most recent book is "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation."

READING EVANGELICALS
Who are evangelicals? And what is evangelicalism? Those attempting to answer these questions usually speak in terms of political and theological stances. But those stances emerge from an evangelical world with its own institutions—institutions that shape imagination as much as they shape ideology.

In this unique exploration of evangelical subculture, Daniel Silliman shows readers how Christian fiction, and the empire of Christian publishing and bookselling it helped build, is key to understanding the formation of evangelical identity. With a close look at five best-selling novels—Love Comes Softly, This Present Darkness, Left Behind, The Shunning, and The Shack—Silliman considers what it was in these books that held such appeal and what effect their widespread popularity had on the evangelical imagination.

Reading Evangelicals ultimately makes the case that the worlds created in these novels reflected and shaped the world evangelicals saw themselves living in—one in which romantic love intertwines with divine love, humans play an active role in the cosmic contest between angels and demons, and the material world is infused with the literal workings of God and Satan. Silliman tells the story of how the Christian publishing industry marketed these ideas as much as they marketed books, and how, during the era of the Christian bookstore, this—every bit as much as politics or theology—became a locus of evangelical identity.