So, because the topic of religion can be SO polarizing (which feels like the opposite of what it should be), I’ve been stressed about approaching the topic of God and relgion as they pertain to bestsellers.
I know! I know! I’m a wimp.
But, I am trying to be brave here and I want to be helpful even when it scares me since I’m doing this series on elements of bestselling novels.
God and religion is often an element of the bestselling novels with the highest sale numbers (Gone with the Wind, Peyton Place, To Kill a Mockingbird ,Valley of the Dolls, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, The Dead Zone, The Hunt for Red October, The Firm, The Bridges of Madison County, The Da Vinci Code, Love Story, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, God’s Little Acre).
So, here we go. . . .
When James Hall and his students looked at the top twelve, highest-grossing American novels, God and/or orthodox religion. Each of them have religious content. Some might be considered “heretical.”
Hall says that they “seem to focus on the worldly consequences of religious practice rather than the spiritual aspects. In a word, the morality of bestsellers is rooted in a vision of culture that we know as secular.”
Novels and oral stories have often—for centuries and centuries—had themes that questioned power, including the power of structured religions, and probed the morality of their characters and the society that those characters came from.
The novels that have done exceptionally well often focus on faith and have its characters question faith (Peyton Place). The Exorcist does this as well.
The Godfather, Hall mentions, ends with the wife’s character at church “with a profound and deeply willed desire to believe.”
In Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara’s shallow religious views show her character multiple times.
“Religious-themed novels have traditionally sold so well in the United States that most bestseller lists shunt them off into a separate category so the mainstream nonreligious books will have some slim chance of survival,” Hall writes.
But some still make it on. The Da Vinci Code has a ton of religious elements and tends to go about “charging the Catholic Church with serial murder,” Hall writes. It was a huge success. The Lord of The Rings (okay, it’s from England), The Celestine Prophecy, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull all have religious themes.
In an interview Sophie Roell did with Selina O'Grady, author of And Man Created God: A History of the World at the Time of Jesus, on Five Books, O’Grady says,
“There’s always that tussle in Christianity, between free will versus God determining. I think in most religions that’s a problem — how do you reconcile those two things? Islam has the same problem. In a sense it’s wonderfully acute in Christianity, because the whole thing with Adam and Eve gets going by the assertion of Adam and Eve’s will against God’s. It’s always that tussle between authority and fate versus taking command of your own life. And that’s there from the very start of Judaism and Christianity….”
And maybe that’s part of it?
That internal struggle of a character becomes reflected in the symbols of faith as well as in many religions’ tussle between determination and free will? Or maybe, it’s like O’Grady later alludes to: religion gives meaning to many people’s lives. Do we not also want meaning in books? Is it often not really interesting to see people try to understand/struggle with what they thought was true about their lives, their world vies, their own selves?
Or maybe it’s a bit like Hafiz Fazle Rabbi writes here:
“Literature is the oral and written expression of human minds, human experiences and human thoughts. Thus, religion and faith cannot be separated from ordinary life as it is embedded within our morals, our actions, and our very minds and desires. Intellectuals have agreed on the fact that “the path of literature lies parallel to that of religion” and they remain “interdependent and necessary to each other”. (McAfee, 2006, p.137-138). It is an incontrovertible fact that since the beginning of oral and written traditions of literature, the narrators and authors have used religious subject matters in their writings. For instance, in various novels like “The Portrait as a Young Man”, “Candide”, “Crime and Punishment”, “The Brother Karamazov” and “Native Son”, the authors have used the common religious themes and philosophical questions such as the true meaning of life, life after death, human suffering, injustices and problem of evil, through main characters of their novels with an aim to educate and reform the society.”
Good vs evil. Free will vs determinism. Heaven vs hell. These are pretty big polarities and themes that run deep in many religions and many writers and readers who have been influenced by them.
What do you think?
We’ve started a series of paid and free posts and podcast episodes about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here. To see them all just look up “hit novel” or “bestselling” in the search bar.