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The Label "Christian" is No Guarantee of Content

by Cowboy Bob Sorensen

Christian bookstores and distributors are not doing their jobs as a charity, it's a business. I get that. They sell things that will make a profit and pay the bills, just like anyone else. For that matter, many Christian publishers are owned by secular outfits that are trying to make money from the "religious" market. Just because something has a label doesn't mean the label is true. There are "Christian" groups that are in no wise Christian, many false teachers, and even cults pretending to be creationists, such as this one.

It's a tough call for what you run in a shop or online company. Companies can be big, and you know how big companies are, they're in a hurry to get more bang for their buck out of their employees. What books, CDs, videos and such are going to sell? Sell things with sound doctrine? Not hardly! Sheeple want to hear something that makes them feel good, or is new and different (2 Tim. 4:3), instead of continuing in the faith and in sound doctrine (Col. 1:23, 1 John 2:19).

I'm not going to teach eschatology here, but I do believe that we're in the last days. One sign of that is that people are becoming more wicked in general, as prophesied (e.g., Luke 17:26-27, 2 Peter 3:3-7). Worse, there is apostasy among Christians. (Note the struggle to proclaim the authority of Scripture, beginning in Genesis 1, as there are many compromisers in that area.) We should not be surprised when people want to forsake strong doctrine for teachings that make them feel good, and that they want to turn a profit even though they are promoting false doctrines.



Writing posts and articles for Piltdown Superman, plus correspondence, interviews, reading, podcasts, videos, all that gets a mite wearisome. So, I occasionally indulge in some Western stories. I was doing a search for Christian Westerns. I'm not a big fan of Christian fiction because it's written to sell (some fiction is so downright bad, I wonder if they really expected people to buy it), and much of it is trite. Still, I looked anyhow. Found lots of romance Westerns, and I'd rather eat rattlesnake than read those. You can substitute chicken in the recipe, but I'm starting to wander on the wrong trail here.

Anyway. I found myself on a site called "Family Christian". They're selling a book in a series called "The Gunsmith" called Silver War. My brain hollered, "Whoa!" I sent an e-mail to them the same day (July 25, 2015), asking why they are selling "adult" material and copied a description from the Gunsmith Wiki. Them books ain't neither family nor Christian! 



Well, I got a reply from customer service that same day. She said that she would have IT remove the book, and said something about "As you could see this doesn’t show details or any information on the item..." First, the cover plainly says, "Adult Western". Second, that's no excuse for such sloppy checking before putting items in their store. As of today, August 1, 2015, it's still there. Was I lied to? Incompetence? Something else? I don't rightly know. EDIT: I see on November 17, 2018, that it was finally removed.

Christians need to be on guard at all times against not only false teachings, but where they spend their money. If it comes from a Christian distributor or publisher, there's no guarantee that you'll be getting valid Christian material.