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1987
It's hard to believe now, but for most of the twentieth century, evangelical Christians didn't have much taste for fiction. We dealt in matters of truth and doctrine. Our books told true stories of personal testimony or coached us in Christian living. Fiction was trivial, if not downright deceitful.
Then came Frank Peretti. He was a writer, not a preacher or prophet, just a hack who delivered a plot-crackling page-turner about spirilual warfare. This Present Darkness took place in a small town in the Pacific Northwest, peopled by ordinary folks named Hank and Kate and fought over by a robust collection of angelic and demonic beings.
It caught something in the Christian consciousness. Were not just muddling through this suburban existence—we're waging spiritual war. Politically, culturally, educationally, artistically, evangelicals were primed for battle. The world had been slipping out of our grasp—it was high time to grab it back in God's name. The Reagan Revolution had excited many evangelicals, but many others were realizing the limits of political power. They were ready for Peretti's basic premise: Culture wars are spiritual. Victory will be won through prayer, spiritual discipline, and unmasking the ways of the enemy. You can hear it in the songs written for the church in the century's last decade: We have a host of new battle hymns.
In the publishing world This Present Darkness was a boulder dropped into a pond. Its publisher, Crossway, was a well-respected but lower-tier company that was edging into fiction. There was little budget for promotion. In fact Peretti's novel was out for about a year before it caught fire, fanned by word of mouth, much of that emanating from pop singer Amy Grant. Then it became a megaseller, spawning Peretti's own sequels as well as a flurry of copycat novels. Suddenly every publisher was
scrambling to find Christian fiction. Those that had specialized in theology and Christian living were now looking for plot lines and character development.
You might forgive authors like Janette Oke for wondering what all the excitement was about. She had been quietly selling millions of historical romances in the Christian market throughout the 1980s. There was already a niche carved for her and a handful of successful novelists, with a loyal band of female readers who appreciated the Christian characters and sexual restraint of Oke and her ilk. There was also a substantial market for "biblical fiction"—musings about what the Bible doesn't tell us about some of its people.
But Peretti exploded the market for Christian fiction by writing in the present day in an adventure genre. Suddenly it was okay for Christians of any age or gender to read plain old fiction. And publishers raced to supply that need. Before Peretti, your average Christian bookstore might have devoted half a shelf to fiction. Now it׳s half the store.
Yet the influence of This Present Darkness goes far beyond the publishing world. Like many of the important works covered in this book, it capsulized the spirit of its age and propelled it forward. Peretti didn't invent the idea of spiritual warfare but he described it happening in the little town of Ashton. That gave Christians a way of seeing their own towns.
Once a fretful servant accosted the prophet Elisha, pointing to the enemy troops surrounding them. After Lhe prophet prayed, God opened the eyes of the servant so he could see the larger reality, the army of God's angels surrounding the enemy. That was the kind of eye-opening that Peretti gave us. Many of us weren't seeing the enemy; many more weren't seeing the angels. Peretti gave us a way to see the spiritual conflicts of our lives.