“If this book is so bad, then why bother reviewing it?”
I used to grapple with this question, in some form, during my time at Christianity Today, where I played a leading role in arranging the magazine’s coverage of books for nearly 15 years. On occasion, CT would publish an unfavorable review. Every so often, this would raise a handful of skeptical eyebrows among fellow editors and curious readers alike. Why, they wondered, would we devote attention to titles so lacking in merit?
To my mind, such puzzlement betrays two flawed, or at least debatable, assumptions. The first is that running reviews of bad books—even bluntly critical reviews—hardly ever serves a compelling purpose.
This is not, I would wager, a majority view within evangelical Christianity, inside or outside of journalistic circles. Most evangelicals can readily appreciate the importance of countering bad thinking with better thinking—especially when the bad thinking slanders Christ and his followers or advances beliefs they find untrue, unwise, or immoral. Some, however, prefer to see evangelical outlets operate more as recommendation services, with review choices conferring something like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. They favor a deliberate sorting of worthy from unworthy, with an eye toward promoting more of the former and less of the latter.
But this debate skirts around a second, arguably more widespread assumption lurking behind quizzical reactions to negative book reviews. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that expending ink on bad books really is a waste of time. The question remains: Can we reliably identify which books are “good” and which books are “bad”? Can we separate literary wheat from literary chaff in a neat and tidy fashion?
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According to many pessimistic culture-watchers, modern societies are slouching toward a “post-literate” age marked by a retreat from written language into a nonstop carnival of viral video clips and other digital distractions. Yet even against these headwinds, some people retain an irrepressible urge to write books. And even more people retain an irrepressible urge to subject those books to public praise or opprobrium.
The judging impulse thrives at the top, among elite cultural tastemakers. Each year, an array of prestigious literary organizations hands out an array of glittering literary prizes. Major newspapers like The New York Times and the Washington Post name their choices for the year’s finest novels, memoirs, or works of history, while a host of esteemed critics and brand-name pundits chime in with their own personalized picks. A few rungs down the cultural ladder, you’ll find outfits like CT, The Gospel Coalition, and WORLD Magazine publishing annual book awards features tailored to evangelical readers.
In many cases, however, a book’s reputational journey owes less to literary lions and media gatekeepers than to regular Joes, with their internet connections and social media platforms. As with restaurants, movies, neighborhood handymen, and nearly every consumer item under the sun, so with books. These days, everyone’s a critic. Websites like Goodreads (like its plucky little upstart owner, Amazon) enable users to post ratings and comments, which can influence sales figures and public perceptions in unpredictable ways.
How do people go about forming their impressions of books in this democratized landscape? Some readers, bless their hearts, model old-fashioned habits of careful, cover-to-cover attention, rigorous reflection, and charitable interpretation. They pay due regard, but not slavish deference, to any critical consensus or amorphous “buzz” surrounding a particular release.
It hardly requires excess cynicism, however, to recognize that other, more dubious forces feed into our judgments. This isn’t (always) a knock on readers for reading sloppily or prejudicially, but simply a concession that ordinary life limits our capacity to see the full field of literary endeavor with pure, unclouded eyes. Leaving aside kids, chores, jobs, illnesses, and a thousand other time-claimers, there aren’t enough hours in the day or days in the year to read everything worth reading—not, at least, with anything approaching scrupulousness. Even the big media titans, with their enviable resources, can’t pretend their best-of pronouncements flow from Olympian insight into an entire year’s crop of books.
All this virtually guarantees a degree of intellectual outsourcing. Without intending or even realizing it, we can fall under the sway of clever publicity campaigns, splashy celebrity endorsements, or bookish “influencers” growing their empires on Instagram and TikTok. All that exterior noise generates its own momentum, crystallizing into narratives about what “everyone” purportedly knows or thinks. Blocking it out, or at least keeping it in perspective, demands mental, intellectual, and (dare we say?) spiritual discipline.
Making matters more combustible, online chatter about books—much like online chatter about seemingly everything else—invariably gets sucked into the cross-currents of contemporary politics. Culture-war dynamics condition us to view books as ideological litmus tests. If they celebrate people and causes we love, or disparage people and causes we hate, we’re tempted to shower them with applause, even if they traffic in unsound arguments, shoddy research, or slanted characterizations. Superficial takeaways—pro-this, anti-that—come to overshadow deeper appraisals of quality, beauty, and integrity.
For a glimpse at the ugliness this can encourage, witness the battle lines arrayed across segments of Goodreads and its ilk. Most users, to be sure, aim to keep things civil. They share recommendations, voice level-headed perspectives, and look for leads on other promising titles.
But woe betide any author who transgresses some shibboleth held sacred by this or that cultural faction, if only in the excitable imaginations of its most implacable members. Retribution often takes the form of “review-bombings”—coordinated blasts of one-star ratings meant to stamp transgressors as pariahs. Mob fury even reaches into genres not known, heretofore, as ideological combat zones, like young-adult fiction. Several YA novelists have found themselves hounded with a ferocity that bears comparison with the Chinese cultural revolution.
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I can imagine many ordinary readers finding the preceding paragraphs a tad hyperbolic, or at least somewhat remote to their own reading experience. After all, how many local bookstore or library patrons are joining bands of Goodreads fanatics as they browbeat some poor author trying to make a living or chase a dream? How many are browsing shelves as dedicated culture warriors, hunting for titles to fan the flames of their partisan rage?
The answer, I’d guess, is: not very many. The great mass of bibliophilic “normies” gravitate toward books that pique their interest, tickle their fancy, or help them learn a thing or two. They would probably roll their eyes at the antics of Goodreads bullies, arguing—quite sensibly!—that people should write whatever they want, read whatever they want, and stop behaving like jerks.
In all likelihood, the variable most responsible for shaping our judgments of books isn’t political loyalties, internet algorithms, or regnant cultural narratives, but simple personal taste. People like what they like, and up to a point, that shouldn’t cause any consternation. Maybe you prefer the characters and storylines of Dickens to those of Dostoevsky. Maybe you find histories of World War II captivating and histories of the War of 1812 a relative snooze. By and large, such idiosyncrasies don’t lend themselves to moral and intellectual scrutiny.
Yet moral and intellectual strictures are unavoidable in any properly Christian account of our relationship to books and reading. Which compels us to reject, on one hand, extremes of pure subjectivism.
Christians can make generous allowances, of course, for quirks of personal taste. Gospel freedom gladly permits an affinity for your favorite pastor’s relatable anecdotes, your favorite theologian’s illuminating illustrations, or your favorite writer’s winning way with words. What it doesn’t permit is the easygoing ethos suggested in stereotypes of the modern book club, where people nod along to every utterance with unfailing politeness, never daring to introduce any buzzkill notions of right and wrong.
As with the pulpit, so with the printed page: Venturing claims about God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, is a serious business, never to be undertaken without a superabundance of fear and trembling. Misrepresenting his Word, works, and ways is no trifling offense! The Bible underscores this point with several sobering cautions. In the Gospels, Jesus presents drowning as a fitting fate for anyone guilty of deceiving his followers (Matt. 18:6; Mark 9:42; Luke 17:2). And the Book of James warns of the stricter judgment in store for anyone wearing the mantle of teacher (3:1).
We can see the danger, then, of adopting a relaxed, read-and-let-read posture when basic biblical fidelity hangs in the balance. But Scripture also abounds with useful guidance for evaluating books lying outside the explicit domains of theology and doctrine.
Consider Paul’s exhortation, in Philippians, to dwell upon “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is admirable” or “excellent” or “praiseworthy” (4:8). Or his contrast, in Ephesians, between “unwholesome talk” and speech that “build[s] others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen” (4:29). And don’t forget Proverbs, that redoubtable repository of tutelage on wisdom and folly, which teaches extensively on taming the tongue and weighing our words.
These verses weren’t written primarily to help us navigate contemporary bestseller lists. Nor do they furnish some infallible rubric for literary discernment. People, Christians included, will disagree on what counts as praiseworthy, admirable, or wholesome. But making these ideals a compass lifts our reading habits above the realm of individual preference.
So far, I suppose, so uncontroversial. Faithful believers, accustomed to invoking universal truth and biblical authority, seem largely immune to the fiction that all books are created equal. Give us an artistic product, literary or otherwise, and we’ll give you a value judgment.
Yet here we confront an opposite extreme that many Christians have a tougher time ruling out: an overconfidence in the possibility of grading every book on objective measures of moral, theological, and spiritual correctness. I believe such measures exist. I simply question whether fallen human beings can apprehend and apply them with wholly uncorrupted hearts and minds.
Sure, there are plenty of open-and-shut cases. I have no qualms, for instance, in commending the works of Tim Keller as better sources of spiritual nourishment than anything rolling off the self-help or New Age presses. But my experience as books editor at Christianity Today attests to an element of unpredictability at odds with the oracular pretensions on display among certain raters and rankers.
Case in point: The CT Book Awards offers an evangelical riff on the old saw about a room with 10 economists generating 11 opinions. In my role overseeing the awards process, I would recruit panels of judges to evaluate set lists of finalists in theology, apologetics, missions, everyday discipleship, and other major subjects. Almost without fail, their evaluations landed all over the map, even controlling for the presence of figures representing different wings of the evangelical big tent. On a shockingly routine basis, pastors and professors with nearly identical credentials and outlooks arrived at radically different conclusions after reading the very same books.
All this casts doubt on formulas for drawing neat dividing lines between books that are spiritually healthy and spiritually harmful, as though the task merely requires enlisting the right theological criteria or pulling the right levers of worldview analysis. These are indispensable tools, in reading as in all of life. But they won’t unlock firsthand access to the mind of Christ, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3). Books are less imponderable than the mysteries of redemption, but we behold both only through darkened, clouded lenses.
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Ultimately, the case against a “quality-control” approach to books and reading rests on something deeper than the difficulty of determining which books deserve evangelicalism’s seal of approval. It touches on fundamental questions of why we read, and what we hope to gain thereby.
Pardon one further anecdote from my time at CT. Over the years, I became something of a squeaky wheel about ending the magazine’s convention of attaching a star rating to each book under review. Not only because many reviewers got antsy about appearing overly mean or harsh, ensuring a dynamic not unlike college grade inflation. More importantly, because I wanted readers to grapple with the review in its entirety, rather than fixating on whether the reviewer “liked” the book. I wanted to train attention on the subtleties and complexities of appreciation and critique, rather than see the whole package compressed into a reductive yea or nay.
When we read, we do more than offer ourselves as willing receptacles of correct information and wholesome lessons. We exercise God-given gifts of reason and reflection, wrestling with matters of logic and coherence, beauty and profundity, truth and error. In this sense, immersing oneself in a book—following its narrative shape, assessing strengths and weaknesses, pausing to savor flashes of insight or arresting turns of phrase—is inherently enriching. The process is its own reward, irrespective of any judgments reached along the way.
One favorite book of mine, published around the time I began at CT, is Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. In it, he advocates reading books that bring delight, likening an obsessive focus on intellectual self-improvement to schoolmarmish tut-tutting about eating one’s vegetables.
Likewise, I’ve grown convinced that a preoccupation with ratings and seals of approval drains the joy from reading. It flattens our love affair with books into a pedantic quest for a perfected syllabus, with every potential stumbling block mercifully weeded out.
Far better, I think, to picture the world’s shelves and stacks as a lush garden or an immense banquet, full of delectable fare. Yes, we need guidance on avoiding thorns and thistles (to say nothing of crafty serpents). Yes, we need reminders to eat some salad before raiding the dessert tray. All of God’s gifts come with guardrails. But discerning where they lie shouldn’t cast a gloomy shadow over our invitation to taste, see, and read that the Lord is good.