Christian media
Based on Wikipedia: Christian media
The Gatekeepers Without a Pope
Here's something strange about evangelical Christianity: it has no pope, no central council, no official body deciding what counts as authentic teaching. So who decides? Bookstore buyers. Publishers. The people who choose which books get printed and which ones sit on the shelves at your local Christian bookstore.
This makes Christian media one of the most peculiar cultural ecosystems in America. It's a multi-billion dollar industry that functions simultaneously as entertainment, theology, and tribal identity marker. The books you'll find in the "Christian Living" section aren't just products—they're de facto doctrine for millions of believers who will never crack open a systematic theology text.
And it all started, in a sense, with sermons.
From Pulpit to Page to Pixel
The conventions of Christian media grew out of three roots: the sermon, written literature, and gospel music. If you've ever noticed that Christian self-help books feel like extended devotionals, or that Christian films often build toward a climactic moment of decision that mirrors an altar call, you're picking up on this DNA. The genre carries the cadences of preaching in its bones.
Over the past century, this template has been adapted to every new medium that came along. Radio in the 1920s and 30s. Television in the 1950s. Contemporary music in the 1970s and 80s. Video games in the 1990s. Streaming services today. Each time, Christian creators faced the same question: How do we translate the experience of encountering God through this new technology?
The answers have ranged from the sublime to the embarrassing, sometimes in the same decade.
The Written Word: More Than Just Bibles
When people think of Christian publishing, they often picture Bibles. But the Bible itself—despite being the bestselling book in human history, year after year—isn't usually what the industry means by "Christian literature." It's more like the sun around which everything else orbits.
The actual publishing landscape breaks into several distinct territories.
Devotional literature represents the bread and butter of the industry. These are books designed to be read in small daily portions, helping readers build habits of prayer, reflection, and spiritual growth. Think of them as guided meditations for people who might be uncomfortable with the word "meditation."
Theological works range from accessible introductions for curious newcomers to dense academic treatises that would make a seminary professor reach for coffee. This category has roots stretching back nearly two thousand years—early church fathers like Augustine and Jerome were essentially doing Christian publishing when they circulated their letters and commentaries.
Allegory has been a Christian literary superpower since at least the Middle Ages. The technique uses symbolic stories to convey spiritual truths, and it's produced some of Western literature's most enduring works. Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, written in the early 1300s, remains a literary monument—an epic journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise that doubles as a meditation on sin, redemption, and the nature of God. John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, published in 1678, became arguably the most influential English-language book besides the Bible itself for two centuries. Its story of a man named Christian journeying from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City gave English speakers a vocabulary for talking about spiritual struggle that persists today.
The Rise of Christian Fiction
Something interesting happened in the late twentieth century. Christian fiction, which had always existed but remained somewhat amorphous, crystallized into a distinct commercial category—particularly within conservative evangelical culture.
This wasn't just marketing. It represented a deliberate withdrawal from mainstream culture and the creation of a parallel entertainment ecosystem. The logic went something like this: secular entertainment is filled with content that conflicts with Christian values. Rather than simply avoiding entertainment, let's create our own.
The results were often dismissed by literary critics but devoured by readers. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' Left Behind series, dramatizing a particular interpretation of biblical end-times prophecy, sold over 80 million copies. Frank Peretti's spiritual warfare novels depicted invisible battles between angels and demons playing out behind the scenes of ordinary life. Francine Rivers' historical and contemporary romances brought Christian themes to the romance genre.
What made these books distinctively "Christian fiction" wasn't always explicit religious content—it was the worldview underlying the story, the assumed moral framework, and often the expectation that characters would have some kind of faith journey or spiritual awakening.
The genre has since fragmented into niche markets. Catholic fiction. Mormon fiction. Mennonite literature. Amish romance—a surprisingly robust subgenre that outsells many mainstream categories. Each serves readers looking for entertainment that reflects their specific faith tradition.
The Enduring Classics
Not all Christian literature exists in the evangelical bubble. Some works have transcended their religious origins to become part of the broader Western canon.
John Milton's Paradise Lost, published in 1667, reimagined the biblical story of humanity's fall through the lens of English epic poetry. Milton's Satan became one of literature's most compelling villains—so compelling that critics have debated for centuries whether Milton accidentally made the devil too sympathetic. The poem's influence on how English speakers imagine heaven, hell, and the cosmic conflict between good and evil is almost impossible to overstate.
C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, published in the 1950s, wrapped Christian theology in fantasy adventure. The lion Aslan's death and resurrection in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe parallels Christ's sacrifice, but millions of children have loved the stories without ever catching the allegory. Lewis, an Oxford academic and former atheist, became perhaps the twentieth century's most influential Christian apologist partly because he could write fiction that worked on multiple levels.
Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ, published in 1955, took an entirely different approach—imagining Jesus experiencing doubt and human desire on the cross. The book was condemned by many Christian authorities and placed on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books, yet it's also been praised as a profound meditation on the dual nature of Christ. It was later adapted into a Martin Scorsese film that sparked protests across America.
These works remind us that "Christian literature" isn't a single thing. It spans everything from comfortable affirmation to unsettling provocation.
Moving Pictures: Christian Film Comes of Age
For decades, Christian film had a reputation problem. Low budgets. Wooden acting. Plots that existed mainly to deliver a salvation message. The jokes practically wrote themselves.
This has changed dramatically.
The streaming era has transformed what's possible. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and other major platforms now carry faith-based productions that compete for mainstream attention. Some services, like Great American Pure Flix, focus exclusively on Christian content, creating a kind of faith-based streaming ecosystem.
The Chosen, a crowdfunded series about the life of Jesus created by filmmaker Dallas Jenkins, represents a new model entirely. Rather than seeking traditional studio financing or distribution, the production raised money directly from viewers—eventually becoming one of the most successful crowdfunded entertainment projects in history. The series has been praised even by some secular critics for its production quality and its humanizing approach to biblical characters.
What changed? Partly technology—high-quality production has become more accessible. Partly audience—younger evangelical viewers who grew up with prestige television expect higher standards. Partly economics—producers realized that underserved audiences represent opportunity.
The Strange World of Christian Animation
VeggieTales might be the most unlikely media franchise in American entertainment history.
The premise: Computer-animated vegetables retelling Bible stories and teaching moral lessons. Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber became household names for millions of Christian families in the 1990s and 2000s. The series spawned a theatrical film (Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie), Netflix series (VeggieTales in the House and VeggieTales in the City), books, games, and merchandise.
But VeggieTales emerged from a longer tradition of Christian children's animation.
Davey and Goliath, a stop-motion series produced by the Lutheran Church, ran from 1961 to 1973 and became a staple of Sunday morning television. A boy and his talking dog navigated moral dilemmas with gentle, earnest gravity. The show's pacing feels glacial by modern standards, but it shaped how an entire generation thought about religious children's programming.
Superbook, a 1981 anime series created by the Japanese studio Tatsunoko Production for the Christian Broadcasting Network, took a different approach: two children and their robot are transported into biblical stories through a magical Bible. The show was rebooted in 2011 with contemporary animation and voice talent.
The influence of these series extended beyond explicitly religious programming. Len Uhley, a writer who worked in Christian animation, later brought faith elements into mainstream comics—including explorations of faith in the Marvel X-Men characters Nightcrawler (a devout Catholic) and Wolverine.
Even the beloved Peanuts comic strip carried Christian themes that a religious scholar named Robert L. Short explored in The Gospel According to Peanuts, published in 1965. The book argued that Charles Schulz's comic was filled with theological depth. Its influence became most visible in A Charlie Brown Christmas, where Linus Van Pelt recites the Gospel of Luke's account of the angels appearing to shepherds—a moment of explicit Christianity that network executives initially wanted to cut but which became the special's most iconic scene.
The Airwaves: Radio's Long Christian History
Radio was the first broadcast medium, and Christians were early adopters.
Today, Christian radio encompasses a surprisingly diverse range of formats. Contemporary Christian music stations play what is essentially pop and rock with religious lyrics. Urban contemporary gospel serves Black Christian audiences with sounds rooted in traditional gospel and modern R&B. Southern Gospel maintains the harmonies and themes of older American Protestant music.
Beyond music, Christian radio includes talk formats that mirror secular talk radio but focus on religious and cultural commentary. Teaching programs feature extended sermons or Bible studies. Children's programming—most notably Adventures in Odyssey, a long-running audio drama series—has cultivated devoted multigenerational audiences.
Adventures in Odyssey deserves special mention. Produced by Focus on the Family since 1987, the series follows residents of a small town and is centered on an ice cream shop called Whit's End. Episodes tackle everything from typical children's adventure fare to surprisingly complex moral questions. Many adults who grew up listening to the show describe it with genuine affection—it represented a form of children's entertainment that took young listeners seriously while maintaining a clear Christian worldview.
The Television Landscape
Christian television operates on two levels.
First, there are dedicated Christian networks. Trinity Broadcasting Network and the Christian Broadcasting Network rank among the largest religious television networks in the world, broadcasting around the clock to audiences across multiple continents. Their programming ranges from worship services and teaching programs to talk shows and televangelism.
Televangelism itself—the practice of preaching through television—has been both enormously influential and perpetually controversial. At its best, it brought religious teaching to shut-ins and seekers who would never set foot in a church. At its worst, it produced scandals involving fraud, manipulation, and abuse that damaged the credibility of religious broadcasting for decades.
Second, there are individual Christian programs that air on general-interest networks or streaming platforms. These range from historical dramas to reality shows. Duck Dynasty, which ran from 2012 to 2017 on A&E, centered on the Robertson family and their Duck Commander business. The show became a cultural phenomenon—and a culture war flashpoint—while also spawning books, podcasts, and merchandise.
The Business of Belief
Christian media is big business, and its distribution channels reveal interesting things about American consumer culture.
Christian products reach audiences through dedicated retailers like family-owned Christian bookstores (a declining but still significant category), through general retailers like Walmart and Amazon, and increasingly through digital platforms. Some explicitly Christian companies have become cultural touchstones themselves—Chick-fil-A and In-N-Out Burger both have Christian ownership and incorporate biblical references into their products and practices.
Major publishers like Zondervan (owned by HarperCollins, itself owned by News Corp) and LifeWay Christian Resources (affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention) dominate the book market. Denominational publishers serve their specific traditions—America magazine for Catholics, Amazing Facts for Adventists.
The economics create interesting incentive structures. Because evangelical Christianity lacks central theological authority, what gets published and promoted effectively shapes what millions of believers understand their faith to mean. A publisher's decision to champion a particular author or theology can shift the entire landscape of popular religious understanding.
This is the gatekeeping function mentioned at the start—and it means that commercial decisions carry theological weight whether anyone intends that or not.
Newspapers and Magazines: The Print Survivors
Christian print media faces the same challenges as secular print: declining readership, rising production costs, audience migration to digital platforms. But it persists, often in forms tied to specific communities.
Denominational newspapers serve members of particular church traditions. The Methodist Recorder covers the Methodist Church of Great Britain. State conventions of the Southern Baptist Convention often publish weekly or biweekly papers for their members. These publications function less as journalism in the traditional sense and more as community newsletters, keeping geographically dispersed members connected to institutional news and denominational priorities.
Individual megachurches sometimes publish their own papers. Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, distributes a weekly newspaper throughout its metropolitan area.
Catholic publishing operates in a distinct institutional framework. The Second Vatican Council's 1963 Decree on the Media of Social Communications called for establishing "a truly Catholic press" that would help form public opinion in accordance with Catholic teaching. The decree imagined this press being guided either by church authorities or by lay Catholics committed to the church's mission. This top-down encouragement created a robust ecosystem of Catholic publications that continues today.
Christian magazines serve niche interests within the broader Christian market. Christianity Today, founded in 1956 by Billy Graham among others, aims to be a thoughtful evangelical voice on religion, culture, and politics. Charisma serves charismatic and Pentecostal Christians interested in spiritual gifts and supernatural experience. Relevant targets younger Christians interested in the intersection of faith and contemporary culture.
Guideposts, published since 1945, occupies a unique position. Founded by minister Norman Vincent Peale (author of The Power of Positive Thinking), the magazine focuses on inspirational stories rather than explicitly theological content. Its approach—optimistic, practical, focused on personal testimony—has influenced how much of Christian media communicates.
Video Games: The Final Frontier
Christian video games remain something of an oddity in the gaming world.
Most are produced by small independent developers rather than major studios. The category includes Bible trivia games, adventure games based on biblical narratives, and attempts to create Christian alternatives to popular mainstream genres.
The challenge is fundamental: video games thrive on conflict, violence, and moral ambiguity. Christian values often emphasize peace, forgiveness, and moral clarity. Reconciling these impulses produces games that sometimes feel like they're fighting their own medium.
Occasionally, a major company will attempt a faith-based game. The results have been mixed at best. The market remains small but persistent, serving families looking for entertainment options that align with their values.
What Christian Media Reveals
To step back and look at Christian media as a whole is to see something fascinating about how religious communities navigate modernity.
On one hand, there's the impulse toward separation—creating parallel entertainment ecosystems where believers can consume content that reinforces rather than challenges their worldview. This produces much of what outsiders mock about Christian media: its earnestness, its predictability, its sometimes painful lack of artistic sophistication.
On the other hand, there's the impulse toward engagement—using contemporary forms to communicate ancient messages to new audiences. This produces works that occasionally transcend their origins to reach broader culture: a Chronicles of Narnia, a Chosen, a piece of music that crosses over from Christian radio to mainstream charts.
The tension between these impulses drives the ongoing evolution of Christian media. And because the industry lacks central authority, that evolution happens through millions of individual decisions—by publishers deciding what to print, by retailers deciding what to stock, by consumers deciding what to buy, by creators deciding what to make.
In this way, Christian media functions as a kind of democratic theology. What people actually read and watch and listen to shapes what they believe, perhaps more than official pronouncements from denominational headquarters ever could. The bookstore buyer, choosing which titles to display at eye level, exercises a form of theological authority that medieval bishops might have envied.
The gatekeepers may not wear vestments. But they're gatekeepers all the same.