Christian Bookstore Weirdness

I had to get a pair of shoes for working in the Culinary Arts kitchen at MATC.  It turns out that the shoe store my dad and I went to on the East Side of Madison is right next to a so-called Christian bookstore.  So when we finished my errand (it took about fifteen minutes to do so), we went to the bookstore for a little while.  Unfortunately, merely sticking a Christian label on something doesn't automatically make it Christian.  If I may quote Abraham Lincoln on the subject, "If you call the tail a leg, how many legs does a cat have?  Four; just because you call the tail a leg does not make it one."  Likewise, calling something Christian that looks like it doesn't necessarily make it such.  
 While I like this particular bookstore's plain Bibles and greeting cards (the cards with the sheep theme are my favorite), their book and music selection leaves a lot to be desired.  I'm going to explain why I say this, although I'll leave out the children's stuff because I didn't look in that spot. 

Some of their Bibles looked a little odd.  I found one that was apparently aimed at girls under the age of seventeen.  It hand sequins and beads on the cover.  While I like those sorts of sparkly things, I don't like them being used to decorate a Bible.  First off, it makes Christianity look cute and fuzzy (which it is not), and number two, if you're going to decorate a Bible, why not use the old Medieval illuminated style?  It may look pretty, but a lot of illuminated scripts tackle such painful issues such as Punishment and Hell. 

The music selection is ridiculous.  It is all contemporary; no Bach cantatas, no Mendelssohn's Elijah, no sacred works by Handel or Beethoven, no Verdi's Requiem, no Vivaldi's Gloria, not even anything by John Rutter.  Don't get me wrong; a lot of contemporary Christian music is great (I myself happen to be a fan of the Newsboys and some of Casting Crowns songs), but a lot of Classical Music is sacred works.  In fact, for many years and particularly during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, most of the music written was for church/mass.  Why not sell recordings of some of the older stuff?  There was also no Michael Card music.  Michael Card, the Christian singer that I grew up listening to, who wrote mostly his own original tunes, and who never glossed over anything about the Bible: Listen to his song The Basin and the Towel.  This was the second tune of his that I heard (The first one was "Poem of Your Life".  I first heard both when I was a little girl).

Their video selection was—to put it mildly—dumb.  While I haven't seen most of the movies they had on sale, there was a DVD set of movies about the Apocalypse.  If there was ever a subject that people couldn't be more annoyingly presumptuous about, it's this.  I first saw a film about it when I was in eighth grade.  It was so ridden with glitches I have refused to watch another video on the subject.  The Bible clearly says that we don't know the day or the hour, or even so much as to how it will precisely occur.

Their book selections are the worst.  Most of the books were feel-good, happy-perky, stego-brained glop.  Books with titles like Get Out of the Pit, Good-Bye Insecurity, etc..  No Pilgrims Progress, no Beyond the Gates of Splendor, no Let the Little Children Come, nothing about how Christians suffered for the LORD.  Whenever it wasn't feel-good dumbness, it was God-Wants-You-To-Always-Be-Happy heresy.  And I mean heresy.  My dad spoke of this one "preacher"man whose books were being sold at this bookstore.  There was a passing reference to salvation in it, but nothing about sacrifice or the cross.  This man, who preaches only feel-good stuff, is a heretic.  There was a book called Prayers that Activate Blessings.  Just by reading the title I can tell that this is something that would make even my Pentecostal best friend Stiffelio roll his eyes.  The whole idea that following Christ would result in only happiness for a person and never suffering completely ignores the fact that Jesus said that we must deny ourselves and take up our crosses every day.  It's not pleasant, and crucifixion was hellish way to die, but Jesus said that we must be willing to suffer for the faith.  I struggle with the concept myself, but I can't argue with it.

So to the owner of the Christian bookstore on the East Side of Madison I say this: Cut out the con job.  Start selling the real serious stuff and no more of the How-To-Live-A-Happy-Life stupidity.  That is, quit telling people that the Christian life is a soft fluffy pillow and start teaching about how to really live for God.  And while you're at it, can you also start selling Dante's The Divine Comedy?  People should really start learning about what sin looks like to God.