Why Christian Fiction?

Full disclosure: Christian fiction fascinates me. Not because I’ve read very much of it, but because of the place that it occupies in the conservative Christian subculture. I find most of it uninteresting, and occasionally find it disgusting. Some books masquerade as “Christian,” getting wide exposure and acclaim in the Christian community while doing little more than promoting sentimentality and titilating the senses.

My prejudices aside, this is how the thought was sparked: while at Barnes and Noble today, I was struck by the size of the Christian fiction section compared to the non-fiction section. Noting this phenomenon, I curiously perused through the other religious sections (as I often do), particularly looking for traces of fiction. No Bhuddist fiction, no Muslim fiction, no Hindu fiction. Just Christian fiction. “Perhaps merely an American phenomenon,” I thought. A quick perusal of British fiction bestsellers over the last few years added evidence; no “Christian” fiction on British bestseller lists.

The more I thought about it, the more it fascinated me, especially as I looked at religious fiction around the world. I spent about 45 minutes looking at big news sites and various versions of Amazon.com. Not a lot of religious fiction around the world.

Granted that a large swath of the population in the U.S. is at least ostensibly “Christian”, and granted that fiction is more popular than non-fiction. Beyond those reasons, why is there so much Christian fiction, especially in the United States?