Ghostwriting Haunts Christian Publishing

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 14, 2000 | by Larry Witham

Publishers know well the lucrative practice of pairing ghost writers with celebrity authors, and the Christian book industry is no exception to the rule, despite qualms about its ethics.

Religious titles are selling, according to the Christian Booksellers Association, or CBA, which reports that its market has reached $3 billion annually. But few Christian book buyers realize that top-selling Christian celebrities often don't write the books that bear their names.

For years, top ghostwriters in the industry have penned works that fill the evangelical best-seller firmament -- unknown professional writers have penned books by Pat Robertson, the Rev. D. James Kennedy, megachurch pastor Bill Hybels and marriage guru Gary Smalley. Insiders estimate that 85 percent of the Rev. Billy Graham's books have been ghostwritten.

"All responsible Christian publishers wrestle with this," says Lyn Cryderman, a senior editor with Zondervan Publishing House, a major Christian publisher. Ideally, the public should know whose ideas and prose they are reading and praising, and ghostwriters who do the heavy lifting should get paid accordingly. "We view it as an issue of truth and fairness" says Cryderman. At the annual editor's conference of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, which met this April in Grand Rapids, Mich., one leading publisher advocated a total end to undisclosed ghostwriting.

The use of ghostwriters long has been mainstream in American politics and publishing, if not in academia or journalism. President John F. Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize for a book he did not write. Leaders are remembered for lines their ghostwriters coined.

Yet pangs of conscience have struck Christian publishing since the early 1980s, when the evangelical monthly Christianity Today decried the practice. Masking true authorship, the magazine held in an editorial, "is a canny but this-worldly approach to life, a playing of all the angles, a cunning attempt to skirt the edge of moral forthrightness."

The issue was highlighted again in a 1993 World magazine expose by Edward E. Plowman, a veteran news writer for Christian publications. Nearly every form of Christian writing is "grist for ghosts, grinding away for people long on reputation but short on time, self-discipline, or writing ability," he wrote. But Christian publishers will continue to use celebrities as "marketing gadgets" until readers kick the celebrity habit, he predicted correctly. "There are gifted but lesser known writers out there with something important to say" he added. The article raised some dust in publishing circles, Plowman recalls, and did change things slightly. "More publishers are willing to use `and' or `with' on book covers to credit the ghost-writer," he says.

Christian publishers often view ghostwritten projects as "team writing" -- helping the well-known minister package books, his "original thoughts" so readers may benefit. Yet the day may come when a Christian work "is a celebrity preacher's ghostwritten book of ghostwritten sermons bearing a ghostwritten foreword by another celebrity and ghostwritten endorsement blurbs on the dust jacket by still more celebrities, none of whom has read the book" complains Plowman.

A few best-selling Christian authors write their own books, including Philip Yancey, a Colorado-based essayist and stylist. "He writes every word" says Cryderman. "To us, that's the ideal." The Rev. Charles Swindoll, president of Dallas Theological Seminary, has crafted best-selling books from his sermons and has felt the need to defend their authenticity. "I have no writing staff or team of researchers who provide me with historical and illustrative material or serve as my `ghostwriters,'" he asserted in his 1992 book, The Grace Awakening. "Every word comes from my own pen through the age-old process most authors still use: blood, sweat, tears, sleepless nights, lengthy stares at blank sheets of paper, unproductive days when everything gets dumped into the trash, and periodic moments when inspiration and insight flow."

Clashes over who truly shed sweat and tears -- and got paid accordingly -- sometimes erupt after a best-seller climbs the CBA charts. In the early 1990s, Colorado radio minister Bob Larson, whose name is on a novel trilogy that began with Dead Air, sued a woman who broke confidence by claiming she was the real author. The top-selling Christianity in Crisis by radio host and "Bible Answer Man" Hank Hanegraaff ended in a lawsuit by a ministry staffer who claimed to have done much of the work.

On the other hand, Tyndale House has been remarkably candid about its "Left Behind" novel series, which has sold nearly 8 million copies. Although each novel is written by professional scribe Jerry Jenkins, he shares equal credit on the book covers with a celebrity evangelical, the Rev. Tim LaHaye, who advises on the fiction's theology.

Even Tyndale House has been less forthright on a current blockbuster, the Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey book, How Now Shall We Live, a 572-page tome on "the Christian worldview" published last October. One Christian scholar, reviewing the book in the journal First Things, lamented that it was being "marketed on the `superstar' model that dominates evangelical publishing -- itself a scandal to the evangelical mind." Nevertheless, the review credits the book as "a true collaboration" between Colson and Pearcey, although Pearcey's name appears on the book jacket in a small font despite that she's said to have written more than half the book. The book also credits ghostwriter Harold Fickett for nine "story chapters" (out of a total of 45).