When Heaven Weeps by Ted Dekker. WestBow Press, 2001. $14.99 — 384 pp.

For the past 30 years, Christian bookstores and Christian publishers have grown faster than kudzu in June. Each year there are enormous book fairs and conventions around the country in which publishers show their wares — books and crosses, Bibles and jewelry — to thousands of booksellers. Nearly every town in America has some version of Waynesville’s own Christian Bible Bookstore. Sales of Christian books and even jewelry — the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) bracelets and the Left Behind books come first to mind — rival those of major bookstores across the country. Chains like Books-A-Million and Barnes & Noble, realizing the enormity of this market, feature large religious book selections in order to compete with Christian bookshops.

In these same 30 years, both Christian bookstores and publishers have created a genre, and a large readership for that genre, known popularly as “Christian fiction.” Like romance novels, Christian fiction aims to appeal to a large market, composed largely, though not exclusively, of women, with stories that are frequently both formulaic and innocuous. Though some publishers have moved beyond this market — the Left Behind series is the most dramatic example of Christian fiction entering into the world of mega-sellers — the general rule of thumb among publishers like Thomas Nelson is to print books that will offend the least number of readers.

Let me give one example. Many readers wanted to read Celtic or British stories set in the Middle Ages. Publishers and booksellers obliged by making them Christian in theme and tone, but without any but the most cursory mention of the Catholicism that held sway across Europe during this time period. A priest might appear in the stories, but often he seemed like a Baptist minister in a cassock.

As this genre has matured, the scope of plots and characters has broadened. Sex scenes do appear in some Christian fiction. What was once considered bad language is contained in some of the books. More importantly, both sin and sinners are presented in a more complicated way. So what’s my beef with “Christian fiction?”

Quality. The Christian novels sold under that name simply don’t meet even today’s standards for literary excellence.

Let’s look at a specific book to investigate my contention. Recently I selected at random from our public library Ted Dekker’s When Heaven Weeps (ISBN 0-8499-4291-8, $14.99). When Heaven Weeps is the story of Janjic Jovic, a Bosnian soldier who tried to prevent atrocities during World War II and who eventually emigrates to the United States, where his spiritual book, The Dance of the Dead, becomes an international best-seller. Though he has proposed marriage to Karen, a colleague in the publishing world, Jan falls in love with Helen, a prostitute and drug abuser who is torn between her addiction and her love for Jan. Dekker focuses in this book on how that conflict affects Jan’s ministry and reputation, and on the failure of so many Christians, particularly American believers, to embrace the cross and its attendant sufferings.

All well and good. The book, though didactic in places, is no more so than many other secular books, and the arguments presented by Dekker regarding suffering and martyrdom are treated both seriously and passionately. Where the book falls apart, however, is in its literary quality.

Let us look first at the setting of the novel, both geographic and chronological. The story takes place in Atlanta in 1964, yet we could just as well be in any other American city. Dekker uses few street names, few details of Atlanta in terms of buildings or landmarks, and the characters never appear Southern. Though the time is 1964, there is no mention of a presidential race, of Vietnam, of the civil rights movement that inundated all of Atlanta at that time. On the other hand, Dekker does have Helen using heroin, and mention is made of LSD and cocaine. Were addicts doing LSD and cocaine in Atlanta in 1964? Helen tells us that she went to a middle school; were middle schools in the mid-1950s not called “junior high schools?” At one point the story mentions an “old” Volkswagen Bug. How many old Volkswagens of any sort were there in the mid-1960s?

Then there are the characters. Cardboard characters frequently mark genre fiction, and When Heaven Weeps is no exception. The wicked Glenn, who runs a large drug cartel and has the Atlanta police in his pocket, makes so many stupid, violent mistakes that the reader is left to wonder not only how Glenn became the head of a major criminal organization, but how he ever got past third grade. At one point, for example, Glenn shoots two of his own top men, wounding them each in the arm, and then orders the wounded men to produce Helen within three days. Dekker does a fine job showing us the force of Helen’s addiction — she leaves Jan twice to go back to Glenn for drugs — but Karen seems a cartoon figure, leaving us to wonder why she appealed to Jan in the first place.

Other details don’t ring true or are left unexplained. Ivena, Jan’s Bosnian friend, comes from a village in Bosnia whose church is Anglican. Were there Anglican missions to Bosnia before World War II? How did the entire village give up their ancient Catholic faith to become Anglican? Is it simply impossible for a Protestant writer to make his characters Catholic? Jan, Ivena, and Helen flee to Bosnia to escape Glenn, but in 1964 Marshall Tito surely wouldn’t have permitted them into Communist Yugoslavia so easily. And why would they flee to Yugoslavia, where’s Jan’s tormentor from World War II remains at large?

Doubtless “Christian fiction” will continue to mature. Certainly When Heaven Weeps is no more a piece of dross than The DaVinci Code. What is sad, however, is that there already exists an enormous body of great Christian literature that won’t be found in Christian bookstores. I am speaking, of course, of a great many of the classics, from Everyman to Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus,” from “Hamlet” to Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, from “The Divine Comedy” to “Paradise Lost,” from Kristin Lavransdatter and Brideshead Revisted to Mercy Among the Children. Christian books like these — books that demand thought and introspection, books with a Catholic theme, books that involve complex moral approaches to sin, books that may offend the reader’s sensibilities — are seldom found alongside the Bibles and jewelry of Christian stores.

And this is a great pity, this absence, for Christian readers of “Christian fiction” have exchanged their birthright for a mess of pottage.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)