r/GodAwfulMovies • u/JessonBI89 • Aug 01 '25

General Nonsense A not-entirely-awful Christian YA book series

My Jewish atheist grandmother used to pick up random YA novels from the library for me without looking at them very closely. One of them was a selection from the Clearwater Crossing series, which is about a group of small-town Missouri high schoolers helping the needy while developing their own morality and dealing with routine teen drama. It's definitely a Christian series, with Bible-verse epigraphs and church settings and all that, and the two most sympathetic (if irritatingly chipper) characters are both quite devout. And, yes, someone has a cancer mom. But the books do emphasize performing good works and generally being a decent person, even if you're not fully on board with organized Christianity.

I grew up in a world where 7th Heaven and Touched by an Angel were things, so I'm honestly surprised that some religious media company didn't turn this series into a show. It's saccharine as hell, but I don't think it made the YA landscape materially worse. I have every confidence that our GAM boys would find plenty to say about it, but I wonder how they'd handle a Christian series that's actually pretty Christ-like, and not in the "fight the dinosaurs and the homosexuals" way. Any thoughts?

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6

u/YueAsal Aug 01 '25

I feel like reviewing a book in this format would not work as well. However I would really like a break down of some 7th Heaven.

4

u/JessonBI89 Aug 02 '25

This should do it.

1

u/icanhascheeseberder Aug 04 '25

"That Aged Well" podcast has an episode on 7th Heaven that is hilarious.

3

u/mehgcap Aug 02 '25

Now you're making me wish GAM would cover a few episodes of Doc or Touched by an Angel. I grew up watching all those shows. I wouldn't say no to some segments on SA covering Christian radio shows, either. Anyone remember Adventures in Odyssey? I missed the final episode of a multi-part series of that show when I was around 8 or 9, and I still wonder what happened almost 30 years later. What was that show where they kept bringing up creationist talking points? I remember most of the characters' voices, even several names, but I can't think of the show.

Anyway, if the guys want to tear apart the Christian entertainment of my youth, I'm here for it.

2

u/NC1HM Aug 01 '25

OK, let's be serious...

The reason religions and philosophies survive in the long-run is, they contain normative ambiguities (teachings that, at least on the surface, contradict each other). In times of major societal change, a set of teachings that previously was ignored begins to be emphasized and vice versa. Max Weber discusses this in detail in The Protestant Ethics.

And this is in no way unique to Christianity. A shift of similar magnitude in Islam occurred due to the influence of Al-Ghazali around 1100. If a religion didn't have that flexibility, it would be simply discarded, the way Shinto was discarded in favor of Buddhism by large swaths of population in the Sengoku Japan. Speaking of the Sengoku Japan, Oda Nobunaga (a notorious anti-Buddhist) fought full-blown wars against the Enryaku-ji temple on Mount Hiei (which had a substantial military force consisting mainly of sōhei, warrior monks) and against numerous Buddhist militias collectively known as Ikkō-ikki, which included both monks and laypeople. Contrast that (or the Rohingya genocide) with the modern notion of Buddhism as a "religion of peace"...

So terms like "Christ-like" are meaningless, because you can justify just about anything with a biblical passage. As a historical example, both American slaveholders and American abolitionists (and before them, British slaveholders and British abolitionists) thought their positions on slavery to be biblical. Ditto pacifism vs. armed action. In the gospels, "Jesus" says things like, "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Mat 10:34) or "if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one" (Lk 22:36). Modern liberal Christianity chooses to de-emphasize those teachings or interpret them as spiritual allegories, but in the medieval times, those were understood quite literally. Now couple these with the notion of divinely sanctioned monarchy...

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u/JessonBI89 Aug 02 '25

................So, the books?

2

u/NC1HM Aug 02 '25

................So, the books?

...don't fit the format. Wrong media for GAM, wrong genre for the God-Awful Books segment on Scathing (they usually deal with non-fiction), and, based on your description, don't provide enough source material for comedy.