Benevolent Patriarchy on the Prairie

D.L. interviews Daniel Silliman about the Christian romance novel that started it all—Love Comes Softly. 

We talk about Oke’s Canadian background and how that plays into her writing, as well as the impact her books have had on Christian women and the Christian romance genre as a whole.

Daniel is a news editor for Christianity Today and author of Reading Evangelicals. You can follow him on Twitter @danielsilliman

Here is an interview with Janette Oke

This article on Active History explores how Janette Oke romanticizes the Mounties

You can check out this detailed report from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on their role in the Indian residential school system

“I was born on the Canadian prairie. I was actually born at home. This sounds really like old, old west. I was born in a little log house. The doctor came out to our place to deliver me. So it sounds really, really old fashioned. I went to a one room country school. So a lot of what I write, it’s very much a part of my background–as a teenager, and even younger than that, I was very into the west and the pioneer days. So I read everything I could find on the pioneers. I felt they were a very hearty group of people with a lot of bravery to come out and start making a life on a new frontier. Our Canadian west opened up quite a bit different than the stories that I was reading, which were basically westerns from the U.S. side of the border, in that we had the Northwest Mounted Police—they were at that time—and basically precede the settlers.”

“We never had the cowboy and Indian skirmishes and the unsettled west for them to come in. We never had sheriffs in Canada. We have had what is now the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and so our pioneers came out to a rather settled area as far as the laws were concerned and oftentimes there were groups of people that sort of came together from a united background, and if you look at our small town around our area and find the oldest church you can pretty well say, ‘Well, that group of settlers came from Germany’, ‘That group of settlers came from Sweden’, you know. By the oldest church there you can pretty well identify it, so these people came west with deep, personal faith. That changed the whole color of how our west was settled.”

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Cover art by Zech Bard.

TRANSCRIPT

Krispin: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the prophetic imagination station podcast. This is the second interview of the season we're going to do today. But first, I wanted to mention that just last night, we had a Patreon only event where we watched the Jesus music documentary and chatted along. It was really fun. It was really great to see, um, not your faces, but to see those of you that were able to be with us.

It was really fun to watch a terrible documentary.

Danielle: It was a wild ride, but I was glad I was on it with other people. I guess live chatting that experience.

Krispin: I was so glad because I went to see it without you. And you

Danielle: You saw it in theaters.

Krispin: Right. And I really was like, I do want Danielle to watch this with me.

Danielle: I think my favorite thing we discovered was that Steven Curtis Chapman basically admitted he was very attracted to Michael W. Smith. Remember?

Krispin: Yes, I do remember that.

Danielle: And then I had to go because family stuff, but you said there's something at the end [00:01:00] credits?

Krispin: Yes! I did not realize that. After all the credits roll, Carmen, there's a clip of a Carmen music video.

Danielle: Okay. Cause there's some serious Carmen erasure in this documentary, obviously.

Krispin: It's very, very brief.

Danielle: And so then Carmen just shows up at the end with one of his music video clips

Krispin: Yes. Right. Of him shooting the devil as a cowboy from the witch’s invitation, right? That's the one that we did a lip-sync to

Danielle: I know we did.

Krispin: That was even before Tik-Tok.

Danielle: That was before Tik-Tok. I mean, TikTok existed. But we didn't know about it. We'll put a clip of, well, we'll show that clip in the show notes. And you, you were Satan. I was Carmen. Right. Um, so we'll put that in there.

So, we're in the midst of the Christian romance season. I'm very excited to start rolling out some of these interviews, um, do you notice anything different about my voice, Krispin?

Krispin: Yeah. You sound a [00:02:00] little under the weather?

Danielle: I know guys, I'm a professional podcaster because I have Covid and I'm here podcasting. So just trying to wrap my brain around that, um, staying safe, you know, basically we are agoraphobes anyways, so not gonna spread this thing around, but if my voice sounds annoying, blame Covid and I love to blame Covid for many, many things. And our government's response to it.

So, okay. Today we're going to talk about an author named Janette Oke. And I'm not sure how many people know about Janette Oke. So my interview is with Daniel Silliman, who has been on the pod before, and he wrote a book on like these five evangelical novels that changed Christian publishing. And the first one is Love Comes Softly by Janette Oke. Which was published in 1979. And we get into it in the interview about why that time period was important. Why Janette Oke and her Christian pioneer romances, you know, were sort [00:03:00] of like a pendulum swing to some stuff going on in romance reading in general, but Krispin,

Krispin: Yeah. I think it's worth mentioning the other books he tackles in his book to give sort of a context for what

Danielle: what these influential books

Krispin: Yeah.

Like, you know, what does Love Comes Softly sort of compare to in terms of its influence, right? Cause it's Love Comes Softly, This Present Darkness, which is why we talked to him before on our podcast. Beverly Lewis’ The Shunning.

Danielle: Amish, the first big Amish inspirational fiction book.

Krispin: And Paul Young's, uh, book

Danielle: The Shack.

Krispin: Shack.

Danielle: The last one. You missed someone in there.

Krispin: And Left Behind.

Danielle: And what's funny is I've already done an entire season on Frank Peretti and his book, This Present Darkness. And I'm going to be talking about The Shining later on in this series, but we're never going to talk about The Shack, right?

Krispin: Uh, I feel like now we should mention that Paul Young came over for Easter. I Remember the shack came out, it was starting to get some ground. Your mom [00:04:00] emailed him and was like, I love this book. And then he came over for Easter that year.

Danielle: Then he became friends with my parents. So my mom bought like cases of his book and handed them out to people. I mean, she's probably the reason it got so popular anyways. And we're never going to touch Left Behind, as I've said multiple times, because it’s triggering for me growing up in a household that was, where end times was like, happening.

Krispin: Right. Yeah. End times religious trauma is a real thing.

Danielle: Yeah, it is a real thing. I'm not going to touch that right now. Maybe when I'm all nice and like a completely healthy person, right.

Krispin: And we have nothing going on in our lives.

Danielle: Yeah. That'd be so great. But right now I’m not going to dive back into end times stuff. Today, we're talking about Janette Oke, which is probably like the least well-known out of all those books is what I'm assuming.

Krispin: I hadn't heard of it.

Danielle: You've never heard of Janette Oke or Love Comes Softly?

Krispin: No, you mentioned Love Comes Softly, but you know, it kinda sounded more sexual than anything.

Danielle: Good job. I told Krispin he needed to make a note. That we have to make some sexy puns. Cause that's [00:05:00] what the listeners demand. And yet it never crossed my mind that this title, but yeah, I guess, I guess you could take that as a sexual pun.

Me and Krispin are very bad at those. So feel free to send us some, if you hear us, I guess we talk a lot about happy endings and romance novels, and people were like, that's also a sexual pun. Um, this is all going to go over my head because I'm autistic. I don't know what your excuses Krispin, but I'm fine with it.

We're just not, it's just not our jam and that's okay. But you guys keep sending them to us. Okay. So. Yeah, me and Daniel didn't really talk about it, but Love Comes Softly was the first book Janette Oke wrote. Let me give you her background. Janette Oke was born like in the prairies of Canada in the great depression.

She was literally like born at home in a log cabin, went to a one room school house, and she's really used this, um, background to say like, I have authority to write about the pioneer [00:06:00] times in Canada in particular, you know, obviously there's just this like overall romanticization of pioneer and settler narratives.

And she sort of is like, yeah, and I get to do this because this is my past. And she can trace her lineage to like the 1700s. Like her ancestors came to Pennsylvania first and then, uh, got land up in Canada. So like, this is her background, the first book she wrote Love Comes Softly. She says it's because, um, she was just sort of like imagining what it would be like, you know, to be a settler.

Like if your spouse dies, like, what do you do as a young woman? And so Love Comes Softly is about a woman named Marty whose husband dies as she's like doing the covered wagon trail, you know? And she ends up being like stranded in this town cause she has a dead husband and she’s like pregnant. And so this guy comes to her and he's like, hey, like I lost my wife last year and I have a two year old and my two year old really needs a mom. Like, it seems like this could be mutually [00:07:00]beneficial.

So it's like the marriage of convenience trope. Right. Which is very popular in romance as a genre. I love it. I kinda love it. You know, the marriage of convenience. Very good for Christians. Right. Where like only romance is stuff needs to happen. Like within marriage. Right. So that's, that's where this is.

Krispin: So they get married first? Okay.

Danielle: Yeah, like right away, in the

Krispin: Okay. Yeah.

Danielle: second chapter of the book and then the rest of the book is just her figuring out like how to be a farm wife. And then she has her baby. The guy Clark is really nice to her and at the very end, like they're in love.

And then I guess the rest of the series goes on. I read this, I read these books a bunch when I was a kid, because they were in the church library. Right. And that's a very common thing you'll hear throughout this entire series. It's like people being like, oh, I got these books from the church library.

Krispin: I thought that was really astute that, yeah, it's sold, however you know a million copies, but you're, you have [00:08:00] to assume that a large portion of those copies are sitting in a church library that are read by several of the women in a church.

Danielle: Yeah. The cultural impact is a lot more than 1 million copies, but it's still astonishing that this book sold a million copies because it's not really well written, the dialogue’s atrocious, all that stuff.

So, I mean, that's the plot of the book, but what I want to talk about really quick before we get to the interview is that Janette Oke is probably more well-known currently because some things she wrote. In 1983, another series she wrote. So the Love Comes Softly series was like her first series, but then she, she's very prolific.

She wrote tons of books, and then she did the Canadian West series. The first one in that series is When Calls the Heart. And so that's probably more well-known to people because that has been a movie, a few movies, I believe I've never watched them, but then it became a show on the Hallmark channel, which makes a lot of sense. These books are very Hallmarky and The Canadian west series, When Calls the Heart, it's like all about the Royal [00:09:00] Mounties in that the main character Elizabeth like ends up falling in love with a Mountie. Do you know what a Mountie is?

Krispin: No, not really.

Danielle: I do, because I read these books as a tween.

Krispin: Is it like the Canadian version of like the wild west Sheriff?

Danielle: Yeah, but it's like Dudley do, right. They wear a red jacket and they're always on horses and it's so funny. Like. In the cultural imagination, like Mounties are seen as positive, good like forces of calm, like. All this stuff,

Krispin: So the Canadian version of it, wild west sheriff, in the sense of like, I feel like that's very Canadian to be like the law enforcement is like a presence of calm rather than like a presence of like vengeance or, or wrath.

Danielle: Yeah, okay. So here's the deal I got When Calls the Heart on Kindle. And I was reading, here's the preface to the book. Okay. This is the preface. This is what Janette says.

She says, “I would like to supply my readers with a few facts considering the Northwest mounted police. The force [00:10:00] was founded in 1873 as an answer to the problem of illicit liquor trade and lawlessness in the west. It has been said that the mountain was dressed in a red coat to readily set him apart from the U.S. cavalry.”

So setting up this dichotomy that like the U.S. sort of police force, maybe not great. Right. Okay. The Mountie was okay. The Mounties job was to make peace with the Indians, not to defeat them. And many of the Indian tribes, which she had to deal with, had already had run-ins with the troops from south of the border. Okay. So this is saying like,

Krispin: Janette Oke, throwing some shade at the U.S., some well-earned shade.

Danielle: But here's the thing. They were not great. Like they did. Like terrorists, indigenous people, like

Krispin: I am not surprised.

Danielle: So here's what she says later on. She she keeps talking about the mountains and then she says, “Although I try not to be too sentimental when I think of the Mounties and their part in the development of the Canadian west, to me, they are living symbol of my Canadian [00:11:00]homeland.”

Okay. So I'm like, what, like. Now I'm freaking out, Krispin. Now I'm just freaking out because these books that she wrote in 1983, that are now like extremely popular Hallmark channel television shows, like this show is on Netflix. That's how I watched it, but I just looked it up. And this year in 2022, right, happening right now, the ninth season of When Calls the Heart, which again is focused on a town of settlers and the mounted police force, right. Um, was the most watched scripted, like TV show on cable.

Krispin: What?

Danielle: That shows how popular it is. And like the people who love it are called the hearties. Like, When Calls the Heart, they call themselves hearties. Like, they're so into it. And it's like this absolute romanticization of police. Isn’t that fascinating?

Krispin: Well, I was going to say, I, for one, I was going to say like, it is not shocking at all that a white woman who [00:12:00] wrote romance in the seventies is pro police, but it is shocking that that is the most watched show on cable

Danielle: Right. And the romanticization of that. Right. And so, so this is another thing that Janette said in an interview too at um, the Dove awards. Okay. She said she was talking about her, like being Canada, right. So she says,

“Our Canadian west opened up quite a bit different than the stories I was reading, which were basically westerns from the U.S. side of the border. Okay. Um, and that we had the Northwest mounted police and they basically proceeded the settler. So we never had the cowboy Indian skirmishes and the unsettled west for them to come to. We never had sheriffs in Canada. We had the Royal Canadian mounted police. And so our pioneers came out to a rather settled area as far as the laws were concerned.”

Okay. So. Basically like, again, this idea that like Canada was different than the U.S. and not racist. There was no Cowboys and Indian skirmishes, the Royal mounted police just made it safe for everybody to [00:13:00] compensate for what, like.

Krispin: It basically sounds like they like pre colonized it.

Danielle: Yes. And so, uh, there's definitely been a few things floating about right now because the show is so popular, right. There are some articles about like, uh, maybe we should stop romanticizing the Mounties. Right. And so that's good to see a little bit of that, but there's not enough. It's not enough. For like, how important it is. So if you look up like the truth and reconciliation, like committees of Canada, which have been in the news, because there's been some horrible findings, right. At Indian boarding schools and all this stuff of, of bodies, of kids who had died and been buried in these Indian residential schools and Canada had Indian residential schools, just like the U.S. did. And guess who enforced mandatory attendance for children at the Indian boarding school?

Krispin: Of course.

Danielle: The Mounties. And so you can look up all these reports, right? Like their role in the [00:14:00] residential school system and like enforcing mandatory attendance. So it's just like, I am now just freaking out about this stuff.

Okay. And Janette Oke, I was like, she's a kindly old lady just running out of her space and I'm like, of course. Romanticizing, the pioneer narratives is beyond toxic. It's just beyond toxic. So I just found all this stuff. So I'm not like that intense in the interview with Daniel, but I just had to throw it out there.

This is what we're talking about. This is very complicated stuff. And it has far reaching consequences. Yeah.

Krispin: And it really gets in the way of actually reckoning with our past and where we're at.

Danielle: Exactly. So it's a real, it's like a forced marriage romance story. The, When Calls the Heart one is more just like, you know, lady goes off to a new place, ends up falling in love with a Mountie kind of thing.

But you know, these are also the stories of what white women love to tell about, what white women love telling themselves about their histories. Right? And so Janette is doing it from the context of I'm Canadian. We're not that [00:15:00] racist, we're not bad. Um, and that's kind of like kept her from criticism in my book is because she's not from the U.S. and she's not talking about the U.S. stuff where we have a much more robust, like level of criticism. I don't know. What do you think? Don't you think sometimes Canadians are like, we're not that bad? I'm sorry. I know we have a lot of Canadian listeners. Maybe I'm like ruining Janette Oke for you, but I want to hear you guys weigh in and we'll put in all the show notes, like, um, some of these, uh, like studies and stuff that the, what is it called? The truth and reconciliation committee.

Krispin: Right. I would guess that a lot of people that are familiar with Canada would be like, yeah, it's not that great. I feel like having a truth and reconciliation committee is one step beyond the U.S.

Danielle: Oh yeah. So I, yeah, so

Krispin: But it does not take a lot to be one step above the U.S.

Danielle: So Janette Oke sold millions of books. And now there's television shows that, you know, this spring just have millions of [00:16:00] viewers watching every premiere, you know, it's just wild. So that's why we're studying this. Nobody talks about it. Nobody said, but Janette Oke, if you're listening, we're coming for you, sweetie. We're coming for ya.

I sincerely hope you write something about the Mounties and their role in oppressing and terrorizing indigenous people. Anyways, onto the interview.

INTERVIEW

You know, I already got you on here to talk about This present darkness today, we're going to talk about Janette Oke, and I'm so excited because who else can I get to talk to me about this book?

Daniel, Daniel, this book was published in 1979. I read it in the early nineties from a church library. And, um, I bet that's how a lot of other people read it. Um, church libraries used to be a thing. I didn't, I couldn't find it if you wrote about that in your book, actually. But um, to me that seems a way where this, these kinds of books get passed from person to person to person.

That's [00:17:00] another hallmark. So they've been read by way more than a million people, right? Because they get passed around the church. They get passed in community. Here's the deal. I'm going to just put my cards. I re-read Love Comes Softly by Janette Oke in a day. And I loved it, Daniel. I loved it. I'm so shocked.

It may be, this is just because it is so much better than Redeeming Love. And I had my bar set so low, but I was like, Janette Oke, like her female character has agency. And basically, the book is about a person who had terrible things happen to them who eventually is won over by the love of a very kind man.

And like, that's it, he's very kind, of course, it's so much benevolent, patriarchy. We won't get into all that. But from, just from my perspective, I was just like this is about a very kind man. And I love that, it was a very sweet, very [00:18:00] simple story, all that. So I just want to put my cards on the table.

Daniel: Yeah. It's novel that really acknowledges how life can be a struggle and then suggests that you can get through it with faith. That's the core of the story, but I think a lot of readers, the readers who've liked it, find it reassuring. And it's not escapist in the sense of like denying real struggles, um, or denying that life is just hard, but it is reassuring in the sense that, um, the woman has agency and she finds faith and that's what empowers her to get through the difficult things in her life, and that can help, can work for you too.

Danielle: And to contrast it with Redeeming Love again, it's just that the main character Marty is never seen as like a horrible person, right. She's just struggling. And she has some pretty normal reactions to the grief she's experienced. And she is. Yeah. She's like kind of grumpy, but it's like, yeah, her husband [00:19:00] died.

Like, of course she's grumpy, but she is at so Redeeming Love is all about like this soiled dove, this, this woman who just is always choosing sin, and that's not Marty at all. And I just, I just liked it that you can identify with this female character, you know, who's probably more like you and how you feel about yourself, which is like, yeah, some bad things have happened. It'd be nice if somebody, you know, was kind to me.

So I make, I'm reading this during a pandemic still, right? I'm sure these are the kind of books people would go to because you do get to live out that romance fantasy through somebody else, which is, something good will happen to her at the end, you know, and you'll feel so happy for her because she's gone through so much bad stuff, but again, the bad stuff is different than the Redeeming Love bad stuff. And I think that's probably why it impacted me, not as negatively now.

Daniel: One significant difference between these two books is that Francine Rivers was a professional romance novelists before [00:20:00] she had a religious experience. So she's bringing in the genre and the skills of being a genre writer in a way that, um, Janette Oke is, is not, I mean, I think literarily, there are some things with Janette Oke that kind of don't make sense.

Like that's not how you structure a novel, there's some amateurish elements to it that you would never find in Francine Rivers, right. Francine Rivers is a woman who knows her craft. But Janette Oke was also reacting to a lot of horrible stuff that was happening in the broader romance genre. And sometimes you'll hear people dismiss it as it's like these women just wanted to be safe from sex and hearing about sex, but romance novels in the 1970s, weren't just like acknowledging the existence of sex.

They were telling stories about rape and how, if you love your rapists, you can have a relationship with him and it live happily ever after, because your love over your love overcomes all including, you [00:21:00] know, violent men. So I actually think that in context, the reaction of Christian novelists, like Janette Oke makes more sense than people generally get it, give it credit for.

And I don't know that that Francine rivers. At least with Redeeming Love, was as different from the rest of the genre. As many of these other writers were in the seventies and eighties, she's in rural Canada. There wasn't a bookstore in the town that she lived in. She's buying romance novels from the grocery store in Calgary, which was a very normal thing in the seventies, that I don't know any adult who buys their novels from a grocery store these days. But this is a very normal thing at the time, but yeah, she's in very rural Didsbury, Alberta.

Danielle: Yeah. And I'm like, I remember being a kid and seeing like romance novels for sale at the grocery store. And that was like a really helpful way for me to reframe like yeah, in the seventies, you know, in the late sixties, like, there weren't bookstores, there weren't Christian bookstores. You read what was available to you and what was available to women, you [00:22:00] know, where these books at the grocery store, which did often contain these elements right of, I would say sexual violence, you know, being seen as titillating. And so I think it's, I think you're totally right to say people want different things besides that. But Janette Oke also had some theological stuff going into her novel and you get into her history a little bit, which really broke my heart, you know, to hear she had a miscarriage and then she gave birth to a child who died, you know, a couple hours after being born and just how her faith was sort of crystallized.

And that reminded me of, when we talked about Frank Peretti's book, you had brought up Amy Grant and Amy Grant loving Frank Peretti’s book because it gave her some agency in her own spiritual life and her own horrible things happening in her life.

You didn't say in your book, if there was specific like Christian fiction that Janette Oke went to in these times of grief for her, it almost seems like she wrote the first book, right, [00:23:00] to help women deal with this stuff.

Daniel: So it's not quite the first book. There are novels that, um, evangelical publishers had tried to produce, but they kind of just weren't successful. I think Oke wrote the book that she needed. I think she wrote the one that she, that she would have wanted as she was going through those really trying struggles.

And it was also the first, Love Comes Softly became the first book in that it convinced all the publishers all at once that that Christian romance was, uh, going to be really popular and mostly good idea. Love Comes Softly off, like comes out in 79 by like 86, everybody has one or two or a dozen Christian romance novels.

Um, they're all set in the west. They're all kind of Prairie. They're not, they're not knockoffs of Janette Oke, but it's like, she invented a genre at this time.

Danielle: She invented a genre. And [00:24:00] I think that's really fascinating, especially thinking about the time period and what the setting was. So, you know, everybody loves to think about why certain books, you know, get popular, like Amish romance, all that. So I want to ask you, why do you think Janette Oke’s book Love Comes Softly about a woman who's experienced a ton of hardship on the prairie, you know, falls in love. And it's a pretty common romance trope, a marriage of convenience. Why did it explode the way it did?

Daniel: The normal way to approach these things for historians has been to talk about a psychological need, a sort of mass psychological need. I've benefited from going the other direction and thinking about the material conditions and the networks that existed. If you take that approach, Janette Oke got fairly lucky at producing a book at exactly the moment when Christian bookstores were ready for this book.

So, Christian bookstores, organized for the very first time in the 1950s, uh, in 1950. [00:25:00] And they primarily are selling to pastors and church supplies and theology books and maybe some Sunday school curriculum and in the mid seventies, um, partly through the white flight and the growth of the suburbs and then, uh, an expansion of credit, there are all these new Christian bookstores going up in strip malls all around the country. And they realize that for every pastor, there is a 100, 200 maybe more book buyers who are not being served. So there's this dramatic shift from publisher serving ministers to publishers serving lay audiences. And at the same time, and I talk about this in the book, there's a shift from denominational publishing to evangelical. So a broader trans denominational. So there's a lot of incentives not to talk about anything that will divide your audience and what all of these people [00:26:00] in the suburbs in evangelicalism have in common is families. So the idea believe in Jesus, read the Bible, follow the Bible and you'll have the best life and you'll have a good family and you'll flourish in your community, um, becomes like the central theme, the central message of the Christian bookstore. That's also Janette Oke’s message, right? With her own theology of suffering and her own understanding of flourishing and her, her story of, of love and her story of letting go and letting God, fits exactly that idea that becomes possible and becomes distributed because of the Christian bookstore.

Danielle: Interesting. Cause I think I not really considered that because I grew up in this world and that's what I grew up reading. It didn't cross my mind that maybe other romance, novels, other works of fiction, you know, were not really centered on the pinnacle of experiencing and the flourishing life is to be married and have children.

[00:27:00] So children are uh, part of Christian romance, you know, which is fascinating. And I bet that's not a part of all of secular romance. Now I have a theory and you can tell me what you think about this. And I was like a sheltered homeschool kid, so I didn't get to read a ton. Um, but my family was really into Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and then Janette Oke was like the bridge, right to other reading for me.

It's like, I probably read it when I was like 11, 12, maybe younger. And a lot of Laura Ingles, like so much discussion about chores and so much, um, all of this stuff, but a tiny bit more self-aware, and then also of course, uh, just slightly less authentic because we haven't discussed it yet, but the dialogue in Love Comes Softly is so bad. It’s, it’s

Daniel: She invents her own dialects that, I don't know. I have not found any explanation, but yeah, [00:28:00] she does. It's kind of, um, fake southern. Some of it feels like imaginary southerners on TV or something there, but it's not, it's not Southern. It's this, I don't know.

Danielle: Okay. I have.

Daniel: It’s lots of ers and, and Bs and all the to be verbs are all wrong. And it's a very strange set of choices that she made.

Danielle: So I am going to be talking to other people about the Amish romance books, because they also have their own, you know, language to them. But I wanted to read just a snippet of some of the covers. Like some of the things that Marty in particular says or thinks of the books. I'm going to read it just so our listeners could get, um, you know, wrap their head around this.

I might do a terrible job because I don't know how to do this, but here, here we go. There's lots of talk about her needing to make her husband coffee and do all the chores perfectly right. Blah, blah, blah. So she says he be looking cold all right. Yeah. Be the one that be, [00:29:00] need it yabby, chilling yourself for sure working out in that wretched wind. Lucky ya be, if’n you don't be putting yourself down over it. Come yes, better be drinking this while it be hot. And I'm just like, what is happening? That's just what it is over.

Daniel: Yeah. Sometimes it sounds like a fake Minnesota mixed with like

Danielle: Your B, but what's the vet that you be? That one, I just can't.

Daniel: There all bes, no one is anything. Yeah. I don't know what's happening with that. I do think that I do think, uh, just dialects, yeah writing in dialect used to be seen as interesting. It was much more widespread. Yeah. It's weird.

Danielle: It's fascinating.

Daniel: It’s hard to read. I do think, I do think you're right that the, the prairie-ness helped with the popularity.

I mean, she's pulling [00:30:00] she's pulling from this fantasy space that most Americans have. Like most Americans have, um, the shared fantasy of the west and she's, you know, establishes that pretty quickly. And then she’s able to play in that space in a way that's both like really familiar to us culturally, and that, pulls us um, us in.

Danielle: Yeah. And I think that is kind of a hard thing to parse out. Again, because I was so steeped in it, but, um, I, yeah, there is a preface to my version of, of Love Comes Softly and it's written by Janette Oke and she says, this is the first sentence, right in this book says,

“The life of the pioneer holds much appeal for present day Americans.

And well, it should for, it is to the strong courageous people that we owe so much of our heritage.”

That's a hard sentence to read in 2022 when white Christian [00:31:00] nationalists are, um, you know, are literally banning history books, right. Or books that deal with history that doesn't line up with Janette Oke's vision of, of history. To me, that's very coded language for, I wrote an imaginative novel about manifest destiny, right? And so she said,

“Because of my interest in the past and my respect for our forefathers, I chose as a setting for my novel, the period of the pioneers.”

And, uh, you know, that’s obviously been such a popular setting for the white imagination. I was expecting it to be a little bit more overtly racist. Like the Laura Ingles books, frankly are, but, um, she bypasses most of that. So that's, what's also fascinating is like Janette Oke is less racist than Laura Ingles. I'm not sure. That's like,

Daniel: Well, at least she, she is definitely imagining a Prairie that's that's empty of indigenous people where Laura Ingalls Wilder has these [00:32:00] vestiges of conflict between white settlers and indigenous people.

Danielle: However, I'm not sure that Laura Ingles was so explicit in stating that. Um, if you're a pioneer, right? And your farm is going good, which Marty, his husband Clark, his farm is doing really well. And he straight up tells her it's because God gave me this land and has blessed this land, you know? And so that's pretty insidious and, and terrible. And honestly what most white evangelicals truly believe. And so, um, in some ways it is worse, right? Because this novel just takes that as of course, everybody knows, like God gave us this land. There's nothing else out here. It's ours. He's blessing it, which is also kind of hard because this book is a prosperity gospel and it's not. Right because pretty terrible things happened. Clark's wife died, even though he prayed for her, you know, all this stuff, but then I think more structurally or just culturally [00:33:00] and the land itself is a prosperity gospel approach.

Daniel: Yeah, her specific is called higher life theology or Catholic theology. It doesn't say that if you have faith, you will have wealth. So it's not prosperity gospel in that literal sense, but it does say that you should trust God. And if you trust God, you'll see the benefit and you'll discover the best version of your life through that, which might include hardship.

It might even include poverty, but, um, the goal is still your flourishing. So Charles Taylor talks about this and the and the eminent frame of secularity to the highest possible goal for religion is your wellbeing. And it might be your community's wellbeing, or it might be your individual wellbeing, but there's certainly no end of faith or no end of God's purposes that's beyond you doing well. We see that pretty clearly in this.

Danielle: One of the tensions in the [00:34:00] book is that Marty is not a Christian. She doesn't really have very much knowledge. And so the benevolent patriarchy stuff really comes up a lot because Clark reads the Bible, reads out loud. Like Marty's learning the Bible from him. Um, he takes her to church. She hears that Jesus died for her sins.

And Marty is always like, is Clark's God real? Can I believe in Clark's God? And you point out like that's actually really accurate in the book. Clark basically owns God. Like. Does for Clark what Clark needs. And he has a simple faith in him. And I was like, man, if that isn't the benevolent patriarchy, to be happy, a woman needs to believe in her man's God. Right. And I think that really depressed me. So that took out some of the good feelings I had while reading this book, Daniel.

Daniel: That stood out to me, especially when you contrast it with Oke's own life, which also goes to the question of heritage. There's a sort of complicated piece with the heritage and that the missionary church, which were, these were, [00:35:00] um, Mennonites who embraced revivalism and kinda split from the other Anabaptists. Out on the Prairie in Canada, they decided that, um, women should be ministers and there were a whole bunch of women who felt called to the ministry. And so they went west. To the space in which it was allowed and took over these saloons and turn them into churches and, um,

Danielle: Yeah, I love that stuff, man. I loved it.

Daniel: And these are the, and these are, they ran the summer camp where Janette Oke became a Christian. Like she didn't come from a Christian family and she, you know, went down the aisle and this like very classic evangelical way, but it's all run by women, specifically because they're on the Prairie.

So that makes it, that's a weird story. That's not your, your typical understanding of the cowboy on the Prairie. It's like, missionary woman on the Prairie in her own life. So her, her whole family converts with her when [00:36:00] she's a child, except for her father, the only male Christian in her own biography ends up being her husband.

And he becomes a minister and she's never describes like sitting in a church service with mending and charge. It's, doesn't seem at all like a male dominated religion as she actually experienced it, at least from, from the biographical accounts that I can find. But then when she's imagining a character like her coming to faith, it's through a strong kind man who demonstrates God and very much models God for her. Right. He wants the best for her. He loves her. He doesn't want to manipulate her. That's what makes him, so, so kind. Yeah, it gets really complicated for me when you start trying to parse out, um, how, how it works in the novel and how she's imagining it working versus how it actually worked in her life, which wasn't quite as [00:37:00] patriarchical as I would've expected.

Danielle: Yeah. And it's interesting because just growing up female in these environments, like I have seen the aftermath of this kind of like romanticization of like the male doing devotions, being a man of God, leading his wife, you know, to understand the scriptures. I read the book and I was like, does Marty even know how to read? Because she could very well be illiterate because she, but I think it says she did pick up the Bible at one point to try and read it.

Daniel: But mostly it's him. Yeah. And it's presenting a picture of male piety, which is benevolent, benevolently, patriarchical without being violent or authoritarian or aggressive.

Danielle: Which is unfortunately such a relief, like, you know, like

Daniel: I also spent a lot of time trying to wrestle with like, how much did this faith is individual versus social. I mean, there's some ways in which, in which the characters. Her Christianity leads to [00:38:00] flourishing and it's kind of just her flourishing, right? It's kind of, it's not bound up with loving her neighbors or, or it is, but only in this like very distinct after effect kind of way.

But on the other hands, it is very social, but all tied up in the family. You know, and there's not a picture of like, because we're Christians, we have a new kind of family or a new conception of what it means to have a family and a sort of new Testament, Pauline church kind of way. Instead, it's just that we have the best version of a family. You know, and, and, and, um, The prairie that she's imagining is very suburban and it's very organized around, around atomic families in a way that historically actually wasn't quite like that.

Danielle: Oh, are you telling me this book is not historically accurate?

Daniel: I know that

Danielle: I’m shocked.

Daniel: That’s what we were going in for it, but it is interesting that like the fantasy of the [00:39:00]prairie at moments, it was really a fantasy of suburbia, and the

Danielle: Wow.

Daniel: And the individualist faith, which I think gets criticized a lot, and rightly so, it's interesting when the individualist faith turns out to be a kind of family faith, and it turns out to be, it is social. It is communal, but only in this very distinct, uh, family values kind of a way.

Danielle: Oh, I like that. You do draw that out though in your book, if millions of people are reading these books about a Jesus that is only very personal and only about their flourishing. Yeah. There's going to be some, you know, implications. I wanted to bring up one thing too, because when Janette Oke wrote this novel, she tried to get it published, send it off to some people. They were like, no, we're not going to publish it. And there was a female editor, right, at Bethany house, Carol Johnson. And you mentioned this in the book. So I'm assuming that most editors at this time were male.

Daniel: Just in general. Yeah. In Christian publishing [00:40:00] as well. But yeah, just in general.

Danielle: So now we have a woman editor. Who's like, I like this book. She convinced his Bethany house to publish it.

Daniel: Did you notice the place that Carol Johnson shows up in my book. She's also the publisher who accepts Beverly Louis's the shining and invents Amish romances as another genre.

Danielle: Can you say her name again?

Daniel: Carol Johnson.

Danielle: Carol Johnson. You started a revolution.

Daniel: Her significance in history is basically unknown. Like there's very little out there about her, but yeah, she, she played a pivotal role in two of the most significant Christian novels that really shaped a lot of, specifically like ideas of feminine piety for sure.

Danielle: That's the fascinating thing. When, when researching Christian romance, you know, I guess I had in my mind what I'm going to talk about, and this is not what I ever imagined. And I love that it's like, there is actually a woman who allowed these books to be published, who has impacted millions and millions of people.

And [00:41:00] that's fascinating. That's an untold story. So thank you for bringing that up. Do I also think it's fascinating that the Mennonites are strangely a part of these stories, right. Of publishing, of these narratives. And it's just fascinating because of the ways these novels diverge greatly from the reality of what it's like to be Mennonite on the Prairie.

Daniel: Yeah. I mean, I can definitely talk more about Oke, but I think it might be helpful to zoom out and remind listeners this. One of the really interesting things about novels and thinking about novels is how they don't control readers. They don't force readers. They invite readers. In some ways, all of these novels are about belief and what it's like to believe, but because they're fiction, they're also just inviting you to suspend disbelief.

So it's this very gentle invitation to be imaginative and to engage some ideas. [00:42:00] But readers did a lot of different things with them. You know, you can easily have read all of these books as a kid and come away with just the idea that like, God loves me and the Prairie seems cool. I think it can be tempting when parsing romance novels to come up with like really strong ideas about what they did to people. Um, and people are more free and creative than a lot of times we give them credit for. I especially think critics, and we can all watch for this in ourselves, critics have a tendency to dismiss female readers too, as they don't have any rational faculties. And they're all carried away by their emotions of the romance and sweep them into some theological positions that couldn't have avoided because they were overcome by the novels. That's just not a great way to think about it. They're, they're weirder and more interesting, and people are freer and more complex.

Danielle: Yeah, and I think you're so right. And it's such a tight rope I feel like [00:43:00] walking sometimes because I don't want to denigrate women and their reading habits and what they love and what they're drawn to, at the same time. I think it is very okay to critique it, to look at it with curiosity. And, uh, there's still some questions. There's still some questions I have in my mind, especially this confluence of reading romance as devotional material that I still can't wrap my head around, but well, maybe we'll get there, Daniel, maybe we won't, but you know, it's a part of my history. It's a part of a lot of people's history that just hasn't been talked about enough.

So thank you so much for writing this book. I hope, I mean, if you're listening to this podcast, if you sat through our entire season on Frank Peretti’s, book This Present Darkness. If you are currently listening to this season on Christian romance, there's a very good chance you will love Daniel's book. It's called Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith. And Daniel, I don't think [00:44:00] I can do it. I don't think we're going to be talking about The Shack ever on this podcast. And I don't think we're ever going to talk about the Left Behind series, but that's only because that is too real for me. That is too triggering.

And I'll just be honest about that, but, uh, you know, I, I'm going to talk about, uh, The Shining with somebody else, we're talking about Janette Oak, and we already talked to you about This Present Darkness, so I'm doing pretty good. Um, but you're just a lovely guest and a lovely repeat guest to have. So thank you so much for coming on.

Daniel: It’s always lovely talk to you. It's nice. It's nice to, it's nice to talk to someone who just intuitively takes this stuff as seriously as I do, and you're willing to critique it, but you're also willing to treat everyone as like fully rounded people who are reading this stuff. And that's great. It's fun to come on.

Danielle: And that's what you did again, I felt so glad just to read and just like the way you approach it. It's very complex, very complicated. I was a huge fan of your work. [00:45:00] Do you want to tell people where they can find you on social media? Is there anything?

Daniel: Sure. Um, yeah, I'm on Twitter a lot. I'm very findable on Twitter. I'm @danielsilliman. I'm also the news that are Christian Today. So a lot of the day-to-day writing that I'm doing is news reporting. And you can find that on Christian Today.

Danielle: Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Daniel. [00:46:00] [00:47:00] [00:48:00] [00:49:00][00:50:00]