Thread by @drantbradley

I feel bad for Josh Butler. He was failed by his publisher & TGC. In academic publishing, our books are pre-reviewed by scholars to look for problems. Had Butler’s book been sent to theologians at Westminster, RTS, Wheaton, Taylor, etc. they would’ve caught any errors & fixed it.

So, yes, @WaterBrookPress dropped the ball on Josh and left him hanging by not getting enough expert eyes by theologians on the book. This often happens when you work with literary agents who want to pump out overly provocative books “that will sell!” Money over content fails.

TGC also failed Josh because it acts as a magesterium of sorts and became a marketing platform rather than a service platform for churches. TGC can lead some pastors to believe they are omnicompetent to write about whatever they *feel* like talking about, without quality control.

Brett McCracken, a pastor, with a Wheaton communications undergrad B.A. & a UCLA M.A. in Cinema & Media Studies declared the book, “the Protestant magnum opus on sexual ethics we’ve been waiting for." That was marketing. A Protestant theological magnum opus is usually long & dry.

Josh’s literacy agency worked out a 6-figure writing deal for this & another book, both of which may be outside of his expertise. This is not his fault. They offered it to him. Josh was set up because the book deal may have given false confidence that he had earned the expertise.

Evangelical readers are also to blame because publishers are responding to demand. People in the chairs (formerly pews) don’t want to read “boring” books written by some overly nuanced theologian with lots of footnotes. Seminary profs have been sidelined by celebrity pastors.

The moral of the story: demand more boring books written by theologians who’ve spent years studying topics & are held accountable by scholarly peers. Christian publishing has declined since “platform” became the No. 1 determiner of who gets book deals instead of content quality.

Perhaps we should be less frustrated with Josh and more frustrated with evangelical Gospel Industrial Complex that put him in this position in the first place. The profit/marketing/platform tail now wags the theological dog and many churches are worse off because of it.

*literary