Margaret’s Musings

Do you ever feel the need to coin a word? I sometimes think of words that need to become a part of the English language. My latest one is evangelit.

For a long time I’ve had a negative stereotype about Christian literature. Usually when someone at church is telling me about some book that’s really good, I smile and nod but am inwardly cringing. As you can probably guess, most of my experiences with Christian books have not been good. They tend to be poorly written, poorly edited, predictable, formulaic, full of shallow characters and bad dialogue, and commit just about every other literary faux pas known to man.

That’s not to say that every book written by a Christian is bad; it’s more a problem when the book is geared toward a churched audience and published by a Christian publishing company.

Enter evangelit. I was thinking we need a word for cheesy Christian literature, something like chick lit. The first thought that came to my mind was Christlit, but that just sounds way too irreverent. I certainly would never blame God or Jesus for all the cheesy Christian literature in the world. Then evangelit came to me. I’m guessing most of these books are written by and for evangelicals anyway.

I started thinking about this because a friend recently gave me a copy of the book Same Kind of Different As Me. As you may have guessed, it’s a Christian book, and when my friend first gave it to me I was skeptical. But as I started to read it, I actually found it to be fascinating and even well-written. Well, written well enough. It’s no Proust.

I would say the first 1/3 of the book is very good. The middle 1/3 is sad but still pretty good. Now that I’m getting toward the end, there are a lot of loose ends that I’m not sure the authors will be able to tie together, but I’m optimistic.

In short, this is one Christian book I would actually recommend to others. Is it evangelit? Well, I’ll wait till I’ve finished the book to make that call. ;)