My latest: a review of Tara Isabella Burton

I’m in the latest issue of Commonweal with a longish review of Tara Isabella Burton’s latest (nonfiction) book, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. Online, the title is “Have We Become Gods?” In the magazine, it’s “The Brand Called You.” Here are the opening two paragraphs:

I am what I want, and I have the power within myself to make myself what I want to be, if only I find the will to activate this inner potential—or rather, to manifest this authentic identity. Such is the thesis under review in Tara Isabella Burton’s new book, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. The thesis is not a new one. It has a long history, which, in Burton’s telling, begins around the fifteenth century. Though she finds its philosophical culmination in the eighteenth, with the Enlightenment, most of her story covers the past two hundred years: from bon ton and Beau Brummell to “the two most prominent self-creators of the past twenty years,” Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump. Across Western Europe and the Anglophone world, self-creation as both a transcendent possibility and a moral imperative trickles down to ordinary people’s lives and self-understanding, mutating in tandem with religious, economic, and technological changes. Since creation is traditionally the prerogative of deity, Burton’s story is ultimately about “how we became gods.”

Burton is a reliable chronicler. This book continues a theme explored in her 2020 work, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. There she argued that rumors of religion’s death in the West have been greatly exaggerated. The God of Abraham may be on life support, so to speak, but other gods are alive and well. We haven’t refuted religion so much as “remixed” it. Postmodern spirituality is a potent cocktail of magic, money, and memes; a hybrid made possible by the internet, the dynamic power of capitalism, and the loss of authority once vested in religious institutions and their ordained leaders. America, at least, is not a land of atheists or even agnostics. It’s full of witches, cosplayers, crystals, fangirls, Proud Boys, and Goop. Is SoulCycle a religion? What about wellness culture? The borders of religion turn out to be porous. Accordingly, Burton suggests we’re misreading the signs of the times. We don’t live in a secular age. The gods haven’t vanished; they’ve migrated. Our age is as religious as any other. You just have to know where to look.

Read the rest here. And take note, please, that the URL for the review concludes in this way: “burton-trump-kardashian-east.” Go back a decade and find me somewhere in New Haven, nose buried in a book, prepping for comprehensive exams on systematic theology, and tell me that one day I’d write an essay with those names in the URL. My assumption would have been that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong in my career…

Four tiers of Christian/theological publishing

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about types of theological writing: style, accessibility, demographics, audience, and more. I think about it both as a writer and as a professor who regularly assigns or recommends authors and books to students. Who’s in view? Who could make sense of this text? Is the prose clear, stylish, or neither?

After some reflection, it occurred to me that there are four levels or tiers of theological writing—by which I really mean Christian writing, in this case (a) books (b) composed in English, (c) published by Christian authors (d) about Christian matters, and (e) meant for a readership in North America. Before I list the tiers, let me be clear that they have nothing to do with quality. They have everything to do with genre and audience, and the way a book reflects those two factors. I’m going to list plenty of examples within each tier, as well as instances of writers or texts that straddle the fence between tiers.

Tier 1: Universal

Audience: Anyone at all.

Examples: Beth Moore, Max Lucado, T. D. Jakes, Sadie Robertson Huff, Bob Goff, Jonathan Pokluda, Joel Osteen.

Genre: Inspirational; devotional; personal; Bible study; church curriculum.

Available: Lifeway, Mardel, Barnes & Noble, airports—and anywhere online.

Description: This level includes authors who write Christian books for anyone and everyone. Teenagers, grandmothers, businessmen, stay-home moms, believers, skeptics, heretics, normie laity: you name it, they’re the audience. These books, when popular, sell in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. They are often deeply personal. You get to know the names of the author’s spouse and children and parents and friends. The content is usually geared toward uplift: the reader is meant to be inspired toward hope, courage, and personal change in his or her daily life. These books often contain practical advice. They’re about how to love God and follow Jesus in the most ordinary life possible—in other words, the life available to 99% of us. Sometimes they assume an affluent readership, but by no means always. You can find these books just about anywhere. Their authors usually (not always) lack formal or elite credentials; if they’ve got credentials, authors avoid flaunting them (that’s not why you’re reading their book) or the credentials have to do with ministry (a Master of Divinity, say, or having founded a successful ministry/church). Authors rarely began their careers as writers but quickly become sought-after speakers. These days they tend to have strong followings on social media, a personal podcast, or YouTube. Egghead Christians like myself are very rarely attuned to this level of Christian writing; often enough we’ve never read these books and don’t even know many of the biggest authors’ names. We suppose “committed Christians” read our books, or our friends’ books, or the books we were assigned in grad school, or the “successful” books put out for “popular audiences” by our academic colleagues. Nope. These are the books Christians reads. If I had to guess, I’d wager they make up more than 90% of Christian publishing sales in the U.S. If neither pastors’ libraries nor seminaries existed, I think that percentage would approach (if not quite reach) 100%.

Tier 2: Popular

Audience: College-educated Christians who enjoy reading to learn more about the faith.

Examples: Tish Harrison Warren, Tim Keller, John Mark Comer, Dane Ortlund, Jemar Tisby, N. T. Wright, Barbara Brown Taylor, Anne Lamott, Wesley Hill, Austin Channing Brown, Andy Crouch, Lauren Winner, Andrew Wilson, James K. A. Smith, Tara Isabella Burton, Esau McCaulley, Ben Myers, Rod Dreher, John Piper, Richard Foster, Eugene Peterson, Cornel West, C. S. Lewis.

Genre: Intro-level introduction to Christian doctrines or ideas; mix of memoir and argument; adaptation of a sermon series into book; Christian treatment of relevant or controversial topic; presentation of Christian faith as a whole; higher-level study of Bible or Christian teaching.

Available: Mostly online, but sometimes in major bookstores like Barnes & Noble.

Description: This level includes authors who write books for Christians with a college degree, usually Christians who would describe themselves as “readers.” These readers, though, are not theological in any formal sense. They did not go to seminary. They are not pastors. They don’t know jargon. Books in this group do not contain words like “eschatological.” If you happen upon that word in a book, you know immediately that you’re already in Tier 3 or 4. The readers in this level may be serious Christians, they may be thoughtful, they may be good readers—but they are not interested in anything with even a whiff of the academic. Tier 2 books, accordingly, are on the shorter side; they don’t shy away from the personal or anecdotal; they lack footnotes (some will have endnotes); they assume faith on the part of the reader; they feel like a gentle conversation between the author (a teacher) and the reader (a learner). Here credentials do matter. The author is almost always a pastor, a professor, or a graduate of a seminary or doctoral program. He or she possesses some kind of expertise, one that invites (without threatening) the reader. The concepts in the book may be complex or abstract, but the language in which the concepts are presented is not. It is as simple as possible. Not only no jargon, but little vocabulary above a high school level. That’s no slam on either reader or writer: as Orwell and Lewis both observed, it’s harder to write this way than it is to rely on fancy words as a crutch. Go read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The prose is flawless, and yet there may not be a single word in six hundred pages that an eighth grader (at least, one from Texas) wouldn’t recognize. That’s a gift and a virtue, not a shortcoming. In any case, Tier 2 books populate the curricula of larger churches with a high proportion of college-educated folks. In churches that don’t fit that bill, it’s almost always books from Tier 1.

Tier 3: Highbrow

Audience: Seminarians, pastors, scholars, literary types, lay intellectuals.

Examples: Beth Felker Jones, Wendell Berry, Alan Jacobs, Fleming Rutledge, David Bentley Hart, Barbara Brown Taylor, Wesley Hill, Tara Isabella Burton, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Cornel West, Miroslav Volf, Stanley Hauerwas, Ross Douthat, Dorothy Sayers, James Cone, Zena Hitz, Francis Spufford, Jonathan Tran, Peter Leithart, Brian Bantum, James K. A. Smith, Esau McCaulley, Lauren Winner, Andy Crouch, Phil Christman, Luke Timothy Johnson, Rod Dreher, John Piper, Paul Griffiths, Tim Keller, Eugene Peterson, Justo L. González.

Genre: Textbook; magazine essay; popularization of academic scholarship; intellectual history; popular genealogy; political screed; think-tank intervention; “public discourse”/“public intellectual” writing; church-facing theological scholarship; work of interest to pastoral ministry; biblical commentary; public-facing scholarship; etc.

Available: Usually only online, aside from a few very famous authors.

Description: This level includes authors who write for a wide audience of non-specialists who are otherwise interested in serious intellectual and academic Christian thought. Think of books in this group as a way of making the insights of academic scholarship available to folks who either are not academics or, being academics, do not belong to the field in question. Likewise books in this tier imagine a lay reader without formal expertise but who has time, energy, and interest enough to devote themselves to understanding a book written with style about dense matters—like an amateur tinkerer dabbling in quantum mechanics. Such a reader is willing to do the work, but don’t treat her like she’s already a member of the guild. If she were, she wouldn’t need to read your book. Books in this category may have footnotes, longer sentences, a bigger page count, and a presumption of literary and historical background knowledge on the part of the reader. Or perhaps the work in question is a textbook written specifically for upper-level undergraduates or graduate students. There may be explanation going on, but it’s in the context of active teaching; it’s not the sort of book one would pick up and read for pleasure. Living writers that come to mind here often publish in highbrow “popular” venues like Commonweal or First Things or The New Atlantis or The Point or The New Yorker or The New York Times or The New Republic or The Atlantic. Readers are self-conscious, if a mite embarrassed, about their status as intellectuals and readerly readers. They expect nuance, expertise, credentials, even authority. Authors, in turn, supply them in spades.

Tier 4: Scholarly

Audience: Fellow scholars and academics as well as some pastors and few laypeople.

Examples: Kathryn Tanner, Justo L. González, Willie James Jennings, Katherine Sonderegger, Sarah Coakley, David Bentley Hart, James Cone, Jean Porter, Fleming Rutledge, Stanley Hauerwas, Frances Young, Luke Timothy Johnson, Miroslav Volf, Eleonore Stump, Jennifer Herdt, J. Kameron Carter, Francesca Murphy, Bruce Marshall, Linn Marie Tonstad, Kevin Hector, Jonathan Tran, Eric Gregory, Paul Griffiths, John Webster, Cornel West.

Genre: Monograph; dissertation; peer-reviewed journal article; scholarly tome; biblical commentary; etc.

Available: Online, university presses, campus bookstores, or academic conferences.

Description: This level includes academics producing professional scholarship for their peers. They have an audience of one: people like them. They do not define jargon; they revel in it. They do not transliterate, much less translate; they write in Greek or Sanskrit and assume you can read it as well as they can. Their pages are full of footnotes: the more the better. They are scholars writing for scholars, often hyper-specialized scholars inhabiting sub-sub-sub-fields (studying only a single book of the Bible, or a specific century in church history, or a particular doctrine like predestination). If any eavesdroppers want to find some profit in their work, they’re welcome to do so, but the content, style, genre, and assumed audience is unchanged: it’s academic. That’s not to say their books won’t have an impact. Their ideas, if good or interesting or widely received and accepted, will trickle down the tiers over the years and even decades until ordinary folks who have never heard of the source material will learn about or even share the ideas in question. That takes time, though, and has nothing to do with book sales. Academics don’t sell books. That’s not the business they got into. Someone or something else pays the bills, to the extent that they are paid. Which is why scholarly books so often do not appear to have been written with accessibility, style, or even clarity in mind. Other goods and ends are being sought (whether or not such a tradeoff is prudent or defensible).

*

Okay. So those are the tiers. Here are some further notes and thoughts, in no particular order:

• If you’re thinking in terms of publishing and thus in terms of sales, we might put it this way: a Tier 4 book sells in the hundreds, a Tier 3 book in the thousands, a Tier 2 book in the tens of thousands, and a Tier 1 book (if successful by its own standards) in the hundreds of thousands.

• I did my best to duplicate names across tiers. I’m not aware of an author, at least a living author, who could reasonably be placed in all four tiers—unless, I suppose, you counted an author, like Lewis, who covered Tiers 2-4 and wrote fiction or children’s stories (and could thus be included in Tier 1). Regardless, although I listed a few dead authors, I tried to giving living examples.

• Who are the platonic ideals for each level? For Tier 1 I’d say Beth Moore or Max Lucado. For Tier 2 I’d say Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary, Ben Myers’ Apostles’ Creed, or John Mark Comer’s Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. For Tier 3 I’d say most everything Lewis and Chesterton wrote; among the living, think Tim Keller or Zena Hitz, Beth Felker Jones or Alan Jacobs. For Tier 4, I’d say just about any academic systematic theologian: Tanner, Sonderegger, Jennings, Tran, Herdt, et al.

• In my experience, when academics refer to “writing for a popular audience” or “writing a popular book,” what they mean is Tier 3, not Tier 2 (and certainly not Tier 1). Jamie Smith is a great example. Some of his scholarship on French continental philosophy is clearly Tier 4. Desiring the Kingdom is Tier 3. You Are What You Love is Tier 2. Early on in my teaching, I assigned DTK to upperclassmen in a gen-ed course. They drowned. Then YAWYL came out. Now I assign that instead, and even still they have a bit of trouble in later chapters—but they don’t drown. It’s at their level. They can tread water and occasionally swim a bit.

• For academics, then, our training seriously warps our ability to tell what kind of writing ordinary people—my term for non-academics—find accessible and engaging. There is a kind of Tier 3 writing, for example, that is full of rhetorical flourishes and feels, to a theologically trained academic, bracing and lovely and passionate and compelling. Hand it to a normie, though, and they can’t make heads or tails of it. It’s impenetrable. The sentences are long; the vocabulary is dense; the presumed audience is not “ordinary person with a day job.” We have to learn how to read with eyes other than our own.

• The fatal symptom of all failed “popular” writing by academics is jargon. The second is complex syntax. The third is the inability to make a simple point with a brief declarative sentence. The fourth is the presumption of all manner of background knowledge on the part of the reader, most of which she has never even heard of. If you’re an academic and you want to write for a wide audience, it’s these four things you must be purged of. (A fifth is name-dropping and ism-mongering. My students always tell me, when they read Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion, that they get “lost in the names and dates.” You know you’re writing a Tier 3 book if you refer to “Eliot” or “Auden” or “Cardinal Newman” or even “Luther” without a first name and introduction. Them’s the facts, whether you like it or not.)

• I want to reiterate the point I made in my description of Tier 1 above: These are the books that American Christians read. They sell nearly all the copies; they speak at nearly all the events; they inform the minds and hearts of countless believers every day. Mourn it or celebrate it, it’s best to accept it. And some folks writing in Tier 1 are fantastic! I’ll not permit the name of Beth Moore besmirched in my presence. Just about every Christian woman in my extended family or home church has been reading, studying, and listening to Beth Moore for three decades. Praise God for that. (And if you haven’t read her memoir, get thee to Mardel pronto. Even better, listen to it on audio.) Nevertheless, it’s crucial to grasp that more people know who Sadie Robertson Huff is than, say, Tim Keller or Tish Warren. Sadie’s got five million followers on Instagram, for goodness’ sake. This is the world we live in.

• For people like me—meaning academics who’d like to write for as wide a popular audience as possible—Tier 2 is the sweet spot. My revised dissertation (published in 2022 with Eerdmans) is Tier 4. My doctrine of Scripture (published in 2021 with Cascade) is Tier 3: accessible to pastors, seminarians, and normies who want to stretch themselves. My next two books (more about those here) are Tier 2. They were both the most fun I’ve had writing and the most challenging to write. Why? Because I had to let go of all my crutches and shortcuts. I had to say in ten words what I’m used to saying in fifty. To say in four sentences what I want twelve for. To make a claim without a footnote defending me from attacks on all sides. To say something about God, Scripture, or the gospel that a Christian of any age who’s never read another theological book in her life could understand without a problem. It’s hard, y’all! And for that reason it’s really nice to work with editors who get it. Todd Hains at Lexham was a taskmaster, breaking down my four-line sentences into two; simplifying my syntax and diction; strangling my jargon; murdering my adverbs and adjectives; in general, killing my darlings. Thank God for Todd. Someone might actually read my book next year because of him. Get yourself an editor, or at least honest friends, who will tell you exactly how unreadable your “popular” writing is. Then get revising.

• Here’s a delicate topic that, I hope, I’ll be able to discuss with appropriate nuance and clarity. Because I have a lot to say about it, I’m going to leave the bullet points to make the point…

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In theology and Christian writing generally, it’s been a man’s game until the last half century or so. It hasn’t been a white man’s game, it’s important to note, since Christian writing from the beginning has come from places as diverse as north Africa, the middle East, Russia, eastern Europe, South America, and elsewhere. Even calling writing from Europe “white” is unhelpful, since it’s overly generic or anachronistic (or both). Saint Paul wrote in Greece and Saint Augustine in Hippo and Saint Leo in Rome and Saint Anselm in Britain and Saint Basil in Caesarea and Saint Athanasius in Egypt and Saint Cyril in Jerusalem and Saint Ephrem in Nisibis and Saint John in Damascus and Saint Teresa in Spain and Saint Thérèse in France—and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. It makes no sense to call such writers “white,” even if much that they wrote is part of the so-called “Western” inheritance or patrimony. Such a term fails to describe their literal skin color, and most of them lived before (and thus innocent of) the invention of race.

Having said that, just as there is a legitimate concern to create space, in scholarship as well as classroom syllabi, for women Christian writers, so there is a legitimate concern to create space for living Christian writers of color, particularly those who come from cultures or groups rendered marginal by the centuries-long dominance of white Christian voices in North American contexts. Stipulate with me that this concern is sincere, that it is legitimate, and that it is worthy of attention and support on Christianly specific grounds. Now think about my tiers of theological publishing above.

For the moment think only of women writers. It seems to me that women are most represented in Tier 1. It wouldn’t surprise me, in fact, if aggregate sales of Christian books favor women authors (though I have no idea if that’s true). I would guess that Tier 4 is where women are next most represented, in terms of authors of books published as a percentage of the whole group. After just a few generations, women swell the ranks of the theological disciplines, and the “big names” that define the field as just as likely to be women as men. (Again, this is anecdotal, but stick with me.)

My sense is that where women continue to be under-represented is in Tiers 2 and 3, and I would submit that Tier 2 is where there are fewest women authors. Allow that I may be right about this. Why might that be?

One reason is that women who enter the theological academy operate from a felt pressure, and often explicit advice, to prove their bona fides to their (predominantly male) colleagues. They do so by producing top-level scholarship without a trace of the popular in it.

Another reason is ordinary institutional pressures: T&P requirements.

A third reason, even following tenure, is a general sense (which applies to men too) that “real” scholarship never descends beneath Tier 3. Maybe you write a textbook. Maybe you “dumb down” your hyper-specialized research for non-experts within the academy. But you don’t try to appeal to the masses. You don’t write “for everyone.” You’re a scholar! That’s beneath us.

A fourth reason is a side effect of the success of women writers in Tier 1: a certain perception of what it means to be “a female Christian writer” who “writes for a [read: female] popular audience.” This isn’t just a genre. It’s a whole sensibility. There are unwritten rules here. You need a social media presence. You need to interact with your fans. You need pictures, and not just of you but of your family (ideally your beautiful children). You need to “let people in.” If you don’t, is anyone really going to buy your books or pay you to speak?

A fifth and final reason connects back to something I said in my description of Tier 2 books above: unlike in Tier 1, Tier 2 books trade on the credentials or authority of the author. But among Christians, men are far more likely to possess credentials, authority, or both. They’re more likely to be ordained; they’re more likely to be a pastor; they’re more likely to have graduated from seminary. That’s what makes a Tish Warren such a remarkable success story. When she published her first book, she was a proverbial “nobody” without a social media following, without a speaker circuit, without a tenure-track professorship. But she was an ordained priest. That, plus her ability to pack theological substance into clear and beautiful prose, made her something of a unicorn. Otherwise Tier 2 is almost all men.

Consider Tara Isabella Burton. Like Warren she’s another exception that proves the rule. To be honest, she’s more of a 2.5 than a 2.0 on my scale. Her books lie somewhere between “popular” and “highbrow.” My students have to work when they read them, though they do eventually make it out the other side, and they’re not upset with me (or her) when they do. Now notice: Burton has a doctorate in theology from Oxford—but she didn’t go the academic route. She became a religion journalist and a novelist. She mostly writes highbrow nonfiction in a public-intellectual vein, even as her two books about Christianity in America are just accessible enough to qualify as “assignable” to my twentysomething college students.

So here’s the thought I want to float. It’s two sided.

On one hand, suppose again that you’re a professor, like me, who assigns books to students. You’d like these books to be authored by a representative swath of humanity, not just white dudes. The books, however, have to be both readable and Christian; ideally belonging to Tier 2. Not just that, but at least in my context, they can’t be morally or theologically liberal; they need to be nonpartisan, mainstream, or traditional. I’m not assigning my students a book that denies the resurrection of Jesus, or one that assumes anyone with a brain is a socialist, or one that argues abortion is a moral good. I’m not even assigning a book that’s outright partisan in the sense that it presumes “no serious American Christian could vote for/against X.” Remember, I’m teaching 21-year-olds who’ve never heard the word “theology” or “ethics” before. They’re babies. And I live in west Texas. So no ideologically progressive books (which is not to say I don’t assign essays, excerpts, and chapters written by thinkers from across the political spectrum: I do).

Here’s my question for you. Remember that I’m a theologian in need of theological texts to assign in general-education undergraduate theology courses for majors in business, nursing, and education. These texts need to be squarely in Tier 2 (with one or two exceptions for quality Tier 3 books). What do you propose I assign? Which authors do you recommend? Who fits the bill?

The truth is, if you’re avoiding Tier 1 and Tier 4, and certainly if you’re avoiding Tier 3, your choices are profoundly, even shockingly limited. That realization is what generated this entire idea about the different tiers of Christian/theological publishing. I assign Warren and Burton in my classes. I assign Beth Felker Jones and Jemar Tisby and James Cone, too. In addition, my students can handle Barbara Brown Taylor, Lauren Winner, and (if they’re Bible/ministry majors) Fleming Rutledge. I’ll give them, as well, small doses of Kathryn Tanner or Frances Young or Ellen Charry. But the sweet spot, as I’ve learned, if I want students to dive deep, to gain from the reading, and not to resent me or the text, is Tier 2. And if you share the goal of assigning women as well as men, black authors as well as white (not to mention others), then there just aren’t that many to choose from—assuming living authors, assuming my other constraints, assuming my context, assuming my subject matter.

That’s a sour note to end on, so let me turn to the other side of the coin. If I were giving advice to a friend already in the academy or to a student just about to begin the long trek through graduate study toward a doctorate, here’s what I’d say. If you’re a woman or person of color and you have any interest at all in writing for an audience beyond the university, then begin preparing today for publishing a Tier 2 book. That’s where the market inefficiency is. That’s where the audience is. That’s where you can make a difference. Aim for any tier you please, but if your desire is to write for a popular readership and you also have the talent and institutional support to do so—it’s there for the taking. Have at it.

And while you’re at it, call me up on pub day. I’ll add your book to the syllabus on the spot.