Читать книгу American Quaker Romances. Building the Myth of the White Christian Nation онлайн

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the white conservative Protestants who make up the bulk of the market for evangelical Christian media began to mobilize politically around opposition to policies and cultural shifts that they saw as threatening the “traditional family” and, by extension, American civilization: advances in abortion rights and access to abortion, nofault divorce, gay rights, and (more covertly) desegregation […]. (2021: 194)

As happens in every cultural field, race also plays an important role in the rise of Christian romances. Barrett-Fox and Donnelly (2021) note that major publishing houses of Christian romances include few novels by or about people of color. If one is intent on reading books that deal with the romantic experience of people of color or interracial couples, one must look for such books among the novels published by imprints that focus on racial and ethnic minorities or by presses that concentrate on women of color, or by smaller presses. Harlequin and other major publishing houses are definitely not the answer. Thus, Harlequin’s Love Inspired line has few books which feature people of color as main characters, Barrett-Fox and Donnelly assure; Harlequin’s imprint on characters of color, Kimani, launched New Spirit in the mid-2000s promising to release African American Christian fiction, but it failed to do so, and its final books came out in May 2019 (Barrettt-Fox and Donnelly 2021: 202). Though there are few African American writers publishing African American Christian fiction, Beverly Jenkin being one of those exceptions, the situation is even more lamentable in the case of other minorities: “for readers seeking depictions of Latinx or Asian American characters, the choices are relatively few” (Barrett-Fox and Donnelly 2021: 202).