Pulpit Fiction Christian Writers Put A New Twist On Thrillers: A Healthy Dose Of Religion

Wildlife biologist Steve Benson is alone and unarmed on a moonlit mountainside. He is being hunted. A lizardlike beast the size of a whale lurks nearby. It eats people.

Something new from Michael Crichton?

Not quite. Here is what Dr. Benson does next: He prays. “Now, Lord, You’ve helped me so far,” the frightened scientist begins.

The scene is from “The Oath,” a novel by Frank E. Peretti, a former Pentecostal minister who now lives near Kingston, Idaho. It is part of a new, lucrative genre loosely called Christian thrillers, in which potboiling adventure is combined with a distinctly conservative theology.

This literary trend is the latest example of the skill entrepreneurial believers have shown in taking secular ideas and giving them a spiritual twist for a religious marketplace. T-shirts with evangelical slogans, children’s videos with cartoon Bible stories and many other products have found consumers who want their entertainment leavened with inspiration.

While the Christian thrillers may mention soul and spirit more often than, say, those by Dean Koontz, they tap deep into the current stream of American anxieties, telling stories of righteous individuals confronted by corrupt institutions like the government, the news media or law enforcement. Often, the books offer a conservative critique of abortion rights or Main Street clergy members who would shy away from denouncing personal sin; all feature major characters who publicly embrace a born-again faith in Jesus Christ.

Since August, two evangelical Protestant luminaries better known for their other works have published action novels: Charles Colson, the Watergate figure who now runs a prison ministry, and Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network.

Colson’s book, “Gideon’s Torch,” written with Ellen Vaughn, tells the story of a harsh federal crackdown on anti-abortion groups, the response of a ruthless and opportunistic president to anti-abortion violence. A peaceful pastor is caught up in the government’s sweep; a secularly inclined attorney general has a crisis of faith.

Robertson, in “The End of the Age,” writes of nothing less than events leading to the Second Coming of Christ. After a meteor strikes Los Angeles, a wealthy couple flees to the desert, joins a Bible study group and converts; the Antichrist slips into the White House.

Colson’s book has had a first printing of 175,000 copies and Robertson’s 275,000 copies by Word Publishing, a subsidiary of Nashville-based Thomas Nelson Inc., which has priced each book at $22. But those numbers pale beside the 530,000 copies Word has printed since September of “The Oath.”

“When you’re writing Christian thrillers, you have to be very mindful of your readership,” said Peretti, considered the dean of the genre. “I never put any swearing in my books.”

Explicit sex is definitely out, too, and gory violence is kept to a minimum. But a character’s spiritual transformation is essential. “Conversion is always in there,” Peretti said, “if only by implication.”

At $24 each, “The Oath,” in which a rational-thinking scientist is forced to do battle with sin in the form of a fire-breathing dragon, topped Publishers Weekly’s best-seller list of religious books in September, ahead of Pope John Paul II’s book of reflections, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” (Knopf).

Once the associate pastor of an Assemblies of God church in Vashon Island, Wash., Peretti gave birth to the genre with “This Present Darkness” (Crossway, 1986), still a big seller in religious bookstores. It tells the tale of a small-town newspaper editor, aided by a fundamentalist minister and an invisible troop of angels, who thwarts an occult conspiracy led by a female psychology professor and a legion of demons. The editor, who starts as a member of a vaguely liberal church, embraces a conservative faith by the novel’s end.

The book’s success “was a very significant turning point for Christian fiction,” said Bill Anderson, president of the Christian Booksellers Association.

Until then, most fiction in religious bookstores tended toward frontier romances. But these days, Anderson said, booksellers see “a growing interest in quality reading that has the elements of entertainment but has the advantage of life- and character-building.”

Peretti and his wife, Barbara, lived in a trailer near Seattle just a few years ago, but they now own a large, rustically elegant log house deep in the woods of North Idaho.

A small bookcase near Peretti’s desk holds translations of “This Present Darkness” into languages like Icelandic and Korean. That book and its sequel, “Piercing the Darkness,” feature muscular, sword-bearing angels who materialize in blazes of light. Their demonic counterparts are slimy and afflicted with sulfurous breath. Some represent vices like sloth and lust.

“See, a lot of that is derived from what we know about demons,” Peretti said. “They have different strengths; they have a hierarchical order; they have different tasks.”

This is a common Pentecostal belief, one holding that evil spirits, under Satan’s direction, can wreak havoc on humans. But they may be exorcised by Christian believers, just as Jesus did in Gospel accounts. Vivid exorcisms, with demons shrieking at the righteous, take place in some Peretti novels.

Readers may take that as entertainment, but Peretti said he wanted them to be spiritually moved. “In Christian bookselling, what gets talked about?” he said. “The effectiveness of the book as an avenue of ministry.”