Problems with Christian Fictions

Do you read Christian Fiction? I don't. The few titles I have sampled were low in quality and did not catch or keep my interest.

Dan Edelen at "Cerulean Sanctum" blog has listed some of The Problems with Christian Fiction I tend to avoid the genre for some of the reasons he lists. For one thing, I'm a guy!

"But what I find to be the most disheartening news comes from the A-list Christian authors of today. I can’t remember the last time I picked up a novel by a Christian author that I found worthwhile.

Now I have to qualify this comment by saying that the Christian book market is a woman’s market. One of the most damning statistics is that the vast majority of Christian men never pick up a book after they graduate from school—save for the Bible (and I can attest that a lot of them don’t pick up that book, either, if our ampant biblical ignorance is any indication). Christian women drive nearly all the sales of Christian books, including Christian fiction.

So there’s a lot of Christian chick lit out there.

Newsflash: I don’t read novels that cater exclusively to women. Christian novels aimed at women could be Pulitzer Prize-worthy and I would not know it. (So if you’re an author of Christian novels that cater primarily to women, you can take what I’m saying with a grain of salt.)"

He goes on to mention authors struggling with what it means to be a Christian, the need for a high suspension of disbelief to enjoy the story, mimicking secular trends and unreliable reader reviews. And then there is this:

"....I’m bothered by the excessive padding I read in novels. All modern novels suffer from this, but the Christian novels I’ve read of late are plagued by it. What makes this even more remarkable is that I’ve already noted that many Christian novels lack sufficient worldbuilding. If those elements are missing, what’s being padded?

Too many authors repeat elements of the story or revisit a pattern of character behavior with slight modifications. I read one novel by a Christian A-lister where the middle chapters consisted of the same two groups of people wandering around in the woods, going through the same motions, asking most of the same questions, ad infinitum. Tedious is the word that springs to mind."

Okay, all you fiction readers out there - What do you think? Is Dan right?