In Defense of Mild Obtuseness

While currently researching for my next planned book, which will argue both Great Awakenings were theological net negatives for the church in America and that we are in the middle of an equally, if not more, disastrous “Awakening,” I have come across several newly released books covering aspects of this latest sea change among evangelicals. Naturally, as I don’t want my sum research of contemporary religious ebbs and flows to come from Twitter, I’ve paid the premium on these new-release hardcovers, often three or four times the cost of a used paperback release of an academy-level examination of an esoteric history subject. For someone who reads roughly forty to fifty nonfiction books a year, the cost adds up rather quickly; I’m well into the highest rewards tier from my supplier.

Some of these books prove exceedingly useful, such as Ryan Burge’s The Vanishing Church, which is a well-formulated gold mine of data, especially around a foundational piece of my thesis, that the religion of Cultural Evangelicalism finds greater consensus on politics than theology. Some, which will remain nameless, are little more than vanity projects for pastors looking to justify why they’ve abandoned fundamentalism for syncretizing cable news talking points into the faith. Thankfully, though these books are nearly useless to me as analytical resources on Cultural Evangelicalism, they serve well as examples of the left-wing end of the problem. All is not lost in my overpriced purchase. That being said, I still find myself greatly frustrated by these purchases, not due to their overall narratives, but because, with the exception of the one written by a professional poet and novelist, I’m spending upwards of $30 dollars for books purporting to disseminate essential information for adults, which are purposefully written, at best, to a middle-school reading level.

The book of cable-news rationalization I just finished, which, again, will remain nameless, was less complicatedly worded than many late-elementary-school text books. It was printed in large, well-spaced type, so it could come in at over two-hundred pages. The minor imprint of a major publisher had it on a promotional “sale” for $24; it took me less than five hours to finish it, and I’m one of those slow-reading weirdos who “hears” the words in his head. I don’t want to wholly blame the book’s well-credentialed author for this, because, chances are, he would have never gotten his work published if he hadn’t shaped his language in this way. Yet, I will assign blame to the whole lot of authors and publishers who downgrade nonfiction, especially my beloved genre of the history of American religion, because the language isn’t the only aspect of these works that winds up getting dumbed down.

Deliberately targeting a reader who would struggle to pass eighth-grade English requires assuming they’d have difficulty with every other eighth-grade subject as well. I cannot fully communicate how frustrating it is to see a complex historical event you’ve read multiple academic treatises on, written by people who dedicated their entire careers to understanding the minutiae of, reduced to two paragraphs of the most lop-sided, propagandistic explanation, meant to tee up a narrative of “conservative evangelicals bad, progressive Christians good.” I cannot fully communicate how frustrating it is to see a multi-faceted, and generally forgotten, figure like Billy Sunday, who will get his own section in my planned book, reduced to a two-paragraph blurb that gives little more information on him than he was a xenophobe. You don’t say? He reached his peak at a time just before one out of ten American men would join the Second Klan, and when one of the best selling books in America was Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. Perhaps there was more to fundamentalism in the 1910s than the few, par for the course, statements Sunday made about immigrants. I cannot fully communicate how frustrating this is for someone who has not only read multiple Ivy-League-level books on American fundamentalism and revivalism, but who, to better understand his subject, spent $40 of his own, hard-earned money on a 1955 biography of Sunday, which only got one printing, written by a professor who would become a well-recognized expert on the phenomenon of “revitalization movements.”

For all the talk about how AI is making us dumber—and it is—the mainstream nonfiction publishing industry has been doing a great job on its own, for some time. It’s a Dunning-Kruger machine, and, no, I’m not going to explain what that is. I want to be slightly obtuse in my writing. I want the average reader to have to Google a few terms, to consider buying a physical dictionary and expanding his lexical topography. I want to be intellectually beneficent, not just ideologically convincing. I want to leave the world, however microscopically, with more good and beautiful words and ideas than I found in it. If you’re a Christian author, you should desire that too, well above the prestige of having a mainstream publisher put out a book of the month with your name on it.