The new popular source of girl power isn't a hyper-sexed Miley Cyrus video or Candace Bushnell's recently published Sex and the City prequel about Carrie Bradshaw's teen years. If you look past the Bible-study scenes, young-adult novels from evangelical authors and publishers are offering their young Christian readers a surprisingly empowering guide to adolescence.But, you know, you have to “look past” the artificial intrusion of the Christian social mores in these novels to find the affirmation of all the values we’d want teen girls to hold. Again:
Created as a "safe" alternative to mainstream fiction, books for Christian girls include wholesome heroines, lots of praying, and absolutely no cursing….Amid all of this piety, however, are explicitly positive—even feminist—messages like positive body image, hard work, and the importance of not settling for just any guy….Why Graham considered that “however” was the perfect word choice in that sentence is what I want to know.
Mind, I know next to nothing about Christian YA fiction and I’d be willing to assume we’re not talking prose to match a Flannery O’Conner or Marianne Robinson. And I might be safe to assume these books are a seedbed for the Number-One religion of most teens and young adults--Moral Therapeutic Deism.
But Graham’s unwilling to see that what she dislikes about these novels isn’t peripheral to what she likes.
It reminds me of my time in the Cayman Islands. Secular people would decide to move to the island thoroughly charmed by the culture—and then proceed to rail against some of the very things that made the culture charming. They had been attracted to a culture that had been created by old-school Christian values and had no clue that by undermining what they disliked they’d eventually lose what they liked.
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