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Are you for real?

by Judd Spencer

August 3, 2012

Disclaimer #1: I received this book for free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for this review. Disclaimer #2: I chose this book because I disagreed with the title and I wanted to see if I could be converted; I wasn’t.

It’s an uncomfortable thing to a read a book (or anything for that matter) by an unknown author. I therefore found it disconcerting to read (or merely attempt to read, I only made it 70 pages) Altared by Claire and Eli…whoever they are. Even more disconcerting for me was the world Claire and Eli described, so different from my own, which caused me to repeatedly ask during my 70 page endeavor, “Are you real?” Have you ever read one of the countless Christian fiction books concerning the end times in which every sermon preached by every preacher just so happens to be on Revelation? Or perhaps you noticed in Courageous how everyone from cops to criminals coincidentally decided to discuss the importance of fatherhood in their day to day lives. Very convenient for the story teller, but not accurate to real life! In this vein, Claire and Eli paint a picture for their readers of a world in which every sermon by every pastor is preached from Genesis 2 about marriage. Convenient, but it left me asking, “Are you for real?”
As a Christian undergrad nestled securely within the bubble of a Christian institution, I was certainly aware of a tendency (or even craziness) toward the marriage happy condition described in Altared; but in the real, sex-crazed world we live in, I have seen nothig of the sort. While Claire and Eli rightly identify the fact that the Christian church does not know what to do with single people, and treats singleness as a problem, the authors fail to put their finger on the pulse of our culture, downplaying the lonliness which leads so many to settle for casual sex. This is a problem far greater than marriage happiness in the world I live in, but apparently not in the world Claire and Eli live in, which causes me to ask, “Are you real?”

This book addresses a potentially real issue in small pockets of conservative Christians who find themselves isolated from mass media and culture, but it does so in a cursory fasion that fails to identify or confront the sinful nature which opposes us every day in our pursuit of God-glorifying relationships, whatever form they may take.