Navigating Christian Romance Novels: What’s Acceptable?

By Elizabeth Prata

Back in 1992 Bruce Springsteen published a song called 57 channels (and nothing on). It was during the time when streaming movie channels had gone to a 24 hour format, (yes, HBO hadn’t always been 24 hours), cable tv was expanding, and satellite television was coming in. In my day in the 1960s and early 1970s, we had 3 broadcast channels, and later Public TV added a 4th.

Many of us marveled at the expansion of available choices for personal entertainment, but shortly we were disappointed at the vapidity of them all and frustrated by the lack of quality. It was true, 57 channels and nothing on.

Thirty-three years later we have even more opportunities for our personal entertainment in not only streaming movies and TV, but music, internet content, podcasts and print media in books. Despite the widening of choices, Christian segments of each of those industries still remains small. What do we watch/listen to/read without our eyes/ears/heart becoming dispirited (or righteously offended) by the content? For readers, aren’t there ANY safe, well-written romance books? 57 Publishers and nothing to read…

“Sweet Savage Love”… that’s the title of a secular romance novel published in 1974 by Rosemary Rogers. It had one of those lurid covers with the shirtless man looming over the low bodiced woman.

It has been called a landmark in the historical romance genre. “Often dubbed the “Princess of Passion,” author Rosemary Rogers is considered to be one of the founders of the modern historical romance novel. She has written more than 20 novels and sold more than 60 million copies of her books, including “Dark Fires,” “Sweet Savage Love” and “Bride for a Night,” says the Daily Republic.

Blurb:  “a sexy adventure that pushed the envelope with two fascinating characters fueled by raging passion.” 

We were teenagers. We knew raging passion.

We also knew this: where our mothers kept it, (and all our mothers voraciously read these books), and we unearthed it like a precious fossil from the drawers and cupboards in which they were hidden by moms who, perhaps, lacked the books’ presentation of the passionate couple that for them, had settled into humdrum. We immediately turned to the pages that were dog eared. We knew to say “go to page 22!” read the passage in giggling awe, and then quickly replaced the book in the mom’s hiding place.

Truism: sex sells.

In the 1970s “Romance books” were a hotly growing segment of the secular publishing industry. Girls who became Christians later but who had developed a taste in their younger years for passion and/or romantic endings needed a replacement. Harlequin filled the bill. Time Magazine noted in 1974 that when Harlequin introduced their romances, since 1970 their profits had tripled every year.

“What turns a normal woman into a Harlequin junkie? The formula requires three ingredients: an exotic setting (Rome, the Caribbean, Africa), a demure heroine whose modest station in life is similar to the reader’s, and a usually rich, arrogant hero who initially patronizes the heroine, then sweeps her off her feet “like a leaf in the wind” into a blissful, totally unLiberated marriage. Curses never go beyond an impetuous hero’s “God’s teeth!” (“What a shocking remark!” exclaims the heroine.) Sex never gets further than a kiss, but manages to crop up in perfervid abundance anyway.” (Source Time Mag).

Definition perfervid: intense and impassioned.

Here is the question of the day: is it OK to read romances (like Harlequin & its ilk) if the sex isn’t explicit? Are Christian romances a good substitute for secular romance genre reading?

That question was posed to me from a long-time reader of this blog. She’d asked,

“I’m wondering if you’d be interested in doing a series about “Christian” romance novels. I used to be quite into the various authors, but recently I’ve been thinking that these books are a subtle way for the enemy to lure Christian women into sensuality … I am seeing how easily language can be used to conjure up images in the mind.“

There seem to be two segments of Christian fiction, “edgy” and non-edgy. Some say that Francine Rivers fulfills the former, and that Charles Martin fulfills the latter. “Edgy” can be a synonym for obscene, or it can be a synonym for spicy, racy, or a word that alerts readers to the fact that the book pushes the sin boundaries.

What topics would an ‘edgy’ novel address? Perhaps rape, incest, adultery, addiction, lust, etc.

But don’t all Christian romances have some level of lust? AKA “passion”? Even Christian novelists themselves discuss the dilemma. How far is too far?
What does edgy mean and do we even need edgy?
Why does it have to be called Christian fiction anyway– Tolkien’s wasn’t…
In Christian fiction, how do we balance keeping the message strong and not watering it down while still wanting to reach readers beyond Christian bookstores or churches?

I posed the above links of questions to illustrate that the novelists themselves are engaged in this discussion.

The problem is, each person is on a different place on their sanctification walk. Each person carries no-go boundaries from various issues that have previously impacted them. One book, or one publisher, or one genre cannot satisfy all.

Steve Laube wrote about edgy Christian fiction,

“Some areas of dispute when it comes to edgy Christian fiction include:
Sex: Some readers may not want any sexual tension or sensuality, while others may be comfortable with content that would receive a PG-13 or R movie rating.
Language: Some readers may not want any coarse language, while others may think that a lack of coarse language is unrealistic.
Violence: Some readers may have different opinions about what constitutes violence.”

Language, sex, or too-graphic are obvious issues for the Christian but there are other pitfalls in reading Christian romance books. Here is a commenter from Reddit: “I had the subscription to harlequin in the 1980s, I learned a lot from them and the soaps we watched back then, I was surprised when I had my first serious boyfriend that things were different in real life,”

Mindaboo on the Puritan Board said, “I have stopped reading these books altogether. I have found as I mature in the Lord I see these things as a stumbling block to me personally. A friend told me years ago I suffered from “Cinderella Syndrome”. She was right and for me I needed to put the books away.“

A friend said she had read a few in her younger years and wished she hadn’t. She mentioned Francine Rivers and Karen Kingsbury, if I remember correctly. She said Rivers was pretty graphic, and she is sorry now that she learned things she shouldn’t. Of Kingsbury she said there wasn’t a lot physically graphic but the emotional emphases almost made it seem like emotions of romance were an idol.

The greatest threat to a person’s devotion to God is idolatry. ~Matt Ryman, at Ligonier

“The human heart is a perpetual idol factory.” ~John Calvin

The bottom line is, what Christian readers want, especially the sub-genre of Christian romance, is a well-written story that presents characters wrestling with life and coming to solutions based on biblical principles- without going into the arena of ‘too graphic’.

There is no way to possibly vet or address particular books, or even segments of the Christian romance publishing industry. And I abstain from reading romances for the normal reasons, so I can’t really do any first-hand research. But the question is important. I will answer by offering some biblical principles to guide the women who seek some direction in this thorny area of personal entertainment.

Part 2 tomorrow.