The Ottery
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“The Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals”: Christianity Today’s List

October 9th, 2006

I love “Top 50” or “100 Most [Insert Adjective Here]” lists. It’s fun to look at them and say, “Ulysses? The best novel of the 20^th century? Really?” or “I can’t believe they left Benny and Joon off the list of 100 Top Films Featuring Dancing Hot Dog Buns!” In other words, they’re inherently going to cause disagreement.

So it’s no surprise that Christianity Today’s “Top 50 Books” list (which only includes books published since World War II) seems to be an odd conglomeration featuring books from all over the evangelical spectrum. Of course, my first question when I look at the list is: Which evangelicals are we looking at to determine these books’ influence? Are we measuring influence by sheer quantity of people who have read these books or by the relative power within evangelicalism of the individuals who have read these books? Looking at the list, the answer seems to be a little bit of both.

For example, I doubt that, as crucially important as it is, many typical evangelical congregants—or leaders, for that matter—have read Philip Jenkins’s The Next Christendom. Granted, it’s a pretty recent book, but I don’t get the impression that many American evangelicals are aware that the Global South is currently the hotbed of fervent, evangelistic Christianity—or if they are aware, it’s from their personal experience and not from reading Jenkins’s book.

Similarly, though I wish it were the case, I doubt that Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger has that much clout among the majority of evangelicals. It’s popular enough that it got republished in a special 25^th anniversary edition a few years back. But if more American evangelicals had read Sider’s prescient vision of the current global political situation, I doubt we’d be in the mess we’re in today. However, when I look at the names of people who made suggestions for the “Top 50” list and see the “evangelical social justice” triumvirate of Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis, and Sider himself among them, Rich Christians’ inclusion isn’t that surprising.

Similarly, I’m puzzled by the inclusion of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, since evangelicals have been even more suspicious of it than they have of most Christian-authored fantasy. It seems like Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe would be a more representative choice (though, even there, I had a couple of childhood friends whose mothers wouldn’t let them read The Chronicles of Narnia because they were “Satanic” books—they had witches and magic in them, after all).

Sigh. My cynicism about evangelical subculture really shows through when some of my favorite books on the list are the ones that I doubt the popularity of. Just to be fair, I’ll say that I also really like Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy, Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, and C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and I don’t question that they’ve been truly influential among evangelicals.

My biggest complaint about the list? It’s really white. What about the books that have been influential among African American evangelicals—the books of T.D. Jakes, for example?

In general, though, since I haven’t been alive for all of the past 60 years, I’m probably not the best judge of what should and shouldn’t be on the list.

Entry Filed under: Books