Your news item in the July 19 issue of The Alabama Baptist related to the action of LifeWay pulling the popular DVD, “The Blind Side,” from its shelves certainly brought home to me a personal disappointment related to the so-called “purification” of our denominational bookstore.
I am a writer. While serving overseas for 15 years with the then Foreign Mission Board (now IMB) I wrote extensively for numerous publications, including The Commission, and almost all of the missions publications from national WMU in Birmingham. At the request of the Board I also authored a missions study book and later had books published by Broadman and New Hope, as well as a book published by Smyth & Helwys. During my years with the Georgia Baptist Convention I continued to write for Royal Service; more recently I have been a regular writer for a local Christian magazine and have been published in Christianity Today as well as in Reach Out, a publication of Columbia International Seminary.
I say all of that to set my denominational and Christian background as a writer. At the suggestion of a friend I contributed stories to the popular Chicken Soup for the Soul series. I was delighted when my stories were selected for not one, but two of their publications: The Cancer Book and, later, Chicken Soup for the Soul: True Love.
When I went to our local LifeWay bookstore to alert them to this fact so my many friends and family could purchase the books, I was told, “We no longer carry the Chicken Soup books.” They could not tell me why, so I came home and called LifeWay’s corporate office. The response they gave: “Not all of the writers in those books are Christians.”
I cannot tell you how many people told me they had gone to LifeWay to buy copies only to learn they did not carry the books. As it turned out, the books were/are available at Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Target and Walmart.
My stories told of God’s grace during the illness and death of my husband: God’s amazing love as he lived — and died — with cancer (The Cancer Book); and of God’s provision, guidance and direction in my second marriage to a widower who had also been a missionary (True Love).
Reading the article in The Alabama Baptist at least lets me know why my more recent publications in the “impure” Chicken Soup books were not worthy to be sold by our stores. I perused the bookshelves and saw numerous books by those who do not hold our theological views, but I suppose they passed the purity test. It seems to me that Southern Baptists are moving into the greatest period of exclusiveness ever — while a lost world just looks on.
Elaine Herrin Onley
Dothan, Ala.
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