Story Follow-Up

It seems that I opened up a can of worms with a story I shared yesterday regarding how I felt inundated by stories and posts featuring LDS authors on Christian Bookstagram. Since it's difficult to share on stories (IG has been quite glitchy for me recently), I'll share more here for context. Please don't read this if the topic isn't of interest to you or if you don't care too much about the theological background of the authors you're reading; that's absolutely fine with me if you don't read on 😀

Let me start off by saying that it's hard to convey things in a one-page story. I prayed that I would choose the words that would matter to summarize my thoughts, while acknowledging that they are imperfect and incomplete. If you met me in real life, you'd know that I'm fairly unassuming, very soft-spoken, and reticent to stir up controversy. I can see why people feel a little bit more bold online. That being said, I wrote this with a heart of concern toward the other Christian Bookstagrammers that I have been connecting with over time. I do not follow, engage with, or seek out any LDS authors or reviewers, so that is not the audience I have in mind when I share content. I do not write to cause them concern because I'm not writing for or to them at all.

Since my audience is primarily Christian, I write about this topic because I care more about the deception/clarity piece than the consumption aspect. At the end of the day, it really doesn't concern me what people choose to read. I'm not in a place to judge and it's easy enough for me to skip over content I don't want to see. Where I want to point a light is when LDS books are being promoted and there is nothing to denote that these are simply clean books as opposed to Christian books.

I can understand why a lot of these titles are being consumed because they're clean or, as used by the LDS community, "wholesome." If that's the case, I don't mind if people on Bookstagram share that it's just a clean book. What can get confusing is when these books are mistaken as Christian books. Yes, Christian books may or may not overtly reference God or Scripture; however, the worldview that the author is writing from is or should be biblical. For LDS books, it doesn't matter how clean it is to me when I know that it's a different worldview than the one I have. Even if faith isn't mentioned in a specific book, I don't want to mislead anyone by inadvertently promoting it and then finding out that other titles might reference faith or so forth.

I believe that many readers are more unaware of the author's background than they are willingly trying to promote an alternate belief system and thinking that it's Christian. It's the unawareness part that I want to address. If readers care about what they're consuming, they will take the time to do some extra work in researching and understanding what's at stake. I also recognize that I will not change anyone's mind by just a mere post here and there, especially if I've never connected with that individual. If sharing what's important to me resonates with someone else, that's great. If it doesn't, I would still hope that I can maintain a peaceful relationship and a charitable demeanour toward those who disagree.

I didn't use to care as much about what went into my mind, but I can see how over time, it dulled parts of my relationship with God. Reading Christian books is now a matter of priority to me because I want to be sharpened by the Bible and learn God's truths from other believers. At the end of the day, I want what I do to have eternal significance. I want to be an instrument of God's grace knowing how much of a sinner I am. I also want the Christian reading community to be strengthened by God's Word, the Bible and only the Bible as our Scripture, so that we can all exercise spiritual discernment together. That is my heart in sharing what I share. It's not to condemn or tell people what they should or shouldn't do. It's to work past my natural shyness and to lovingly share my convictions because it matters that we hold fast to God's teaching and avoid things that may cause us to veer from His inerrant, infallible, and inspired Word.

"But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves." - 2 Peter 2:1