Daniel Silliman (PhD, Heidelberg University) is a Lilly
postdoctoral fellow at Valparaiso University. A U.S. historian, he is writing
the history of bestselling evangelical fiction, including Janette Oke’s Love
Comes Softly. As the season finale for When Calls the Heart airs this Sunday on
the Hallmark Channel—based on Oke’s series—I asked Silliman if he could help us
understand the author and the evangelical tradition behind the series and the
books.
When Calls the Heart doesn’t look like a theology of
suffering. The Hallmark Channel show is a sweet and sentimental drama, telling
the story of a cultured young woman who takes a job as school teacher on the
Canadian frontier in 1910. She faces challenges. She learns lessons. She finds
love, inner strength, and a supportive community.
The show is finishing its fifth season this month. And it’s
a big hit. More than 2.5 million viewers are expected to tune in for the finale
on Sunday, April 22. The show has already been renewed for a sixth season, and
the first four seasons are available on Netflix. Online, the show has an active
fan community, including a “Hearties” Facebook group with more than 60,000
members.
“It’s feel-good TV,” The Washington Post reported,
explaining the appeal. “The main characters do the right thing. The problems
get worked out. The guy and girl . . . always end up together.”
Mother
of Evangelical Romance Novels
The story, though, with all its sweetness and light, is
built on a real reckoning with tragedy. It comes out of an evangelical
tradition that addressed itself to the burdened and brokenhearted.
When Calls the Heart is adapted from a novel by the same
name by Janette Oke (b. 1935).
Oke, now 83, is the mother of evangelical romance novels.
She wasn’t the first to write a romance novel with evangelical themes, but her
success established the market for the genre, and made “evangelical romance”
its own market category.
Her first novel, Love Comes Softly, sold an average of
500,000 copies per year for 20 years after its publication in 1979. Oke went on
to write seven more novels in the series, plus three other series, plus another
series with a co-author, more than a dozen standalone novels, some children’s
fiction, and a number of devotionals.
She has had a profound and under-appreciated influence on
many evangelicals, shaping their imagination. She has told story after story of
evangelical faith, story after story about how a woman could trust God.
Oke had a conversion experience at 10 years old. She was
Janette Steeves, then, the child of farmers on the Alberta prairie. In 1945,
she was invited to an evangelistic summer camp for children. Her parents
weren’t churchgoers, but they let her go, and it changed her life.
The camp was run by the Missionary Church, an association
of Mennonites who had embraced revivalism. One thing that set the Missionary
Church apart in Western Canada was its women ministers. On the “needy
prairies,” the church authorized at least two dozen ministering sisters to
organize revivals, preach, and plant churches. The church in Hoadley, Alberta,
for example, was founded by Pearl Reist. In the middle of the Great Depression,
38-year-old Reist took over a pool hall, built a pulpit out of wooden crates
and pews out of nail kegs, and began to preach. Eleven years later, the church
was sponsoring farm children for a summer camp at nearby Gull Lake. The
evangelist, that summer, was another ministering sister named Beatrice Speerman
Hedegaard.
Hedegaard preached to the prairie children about yielding
their lives to Christ. It wasn’t enough to read the Bible stories, she said. It
wasn’t enough to believe God existed. It wasn’t enough to say that Jesus died
for your sins. To really believe, you needed to turn everything over to Jesus
and truly, totally, give your life to God.
Young Janette sat through altar call after altar call, her
heart beating hard, her palms all sweaty. She wanted to go forward. She felt a
longing that almost pulled her out of her seat, she wanted to go forward so
bad. But she was afraid she’d be embarrassed in front of all the other
children.
Finally, one night, Hedegaard didn’t give an altar call.
Instead of asking people to come forward, she told the children if they wanted
to give their lives to Jesus, they should just raise their hands. Janette’s
hand went up. Then Hedegaard said, if your hands was up, you should come
forward.
Remembering this episode years later, Oke mostly remembered
the feeling of relief as she went forward. She felt free. She was free from
embarrassment, free from shame, free from the fear that kept her locked in her
seat for so long. It was, she said, just a “wonderful realization of
forgiveness.”
This became the core of Janette Oke’s theology. She
believed in the power of yielding your life to Jesus and trusting God.
Her favorite hymn was written by a Linda Shrivers Leech, a
Methodist organist. The hymn goes:
God’s
way is the best way
God’s
way is the right way
I’ll
trust in him always
He
knoweth the best
It’s sweet. And some might think the theology sentimental.
But Oke found this practice of trusting God was sturdy enough to bear up under
the greatest sorrow. This was the hymn she sang to herself at 22, when she had
a miscarriage.
Reckoning
with Reality
Janette married a young man from the Missionary Church,
Edward Oke. In 1957, the young couple moved from Alberta to Indiana, where
Edward took classes at Bethel College. He was going to be a minister. She was
pregnant.
They had only just arrived and unpacked their belongings
when Oke had a miscarriage. She was alone in their $65-a-month apartment, far,
far from her mother and sisters. There was no doctor, no trusted friends, and
no pastoral counseling.
It was just Janette, her pain, and God.
Oke laid down on a fold-out bed and cried. And as she cried
she decided again to give everything to Jesus. She decided to trust him and she
gave him her baby and her sorrow. She sang the hymn again:
God’s
way is the best way.
God’s
way is the right way.
I’ll
trust in him always.
He
knoweth the best.
The next year Edward graduated and started seminary at
Goshen College. He took a position as an assistant minister at a nearby
Missionary Church, and Janette started working in the mailroom at a
manufacturing company. Sometimes she taught Sunday school. Life seemed to be
good to the Okes.
Then Janette got pregnant again.
Her joy was mixed with fear. Oke prayed, though, and felt
comforted. She gave God her baby and her fear. It comforted her.
Oke gave birth to a son in October 1959. But the infant had
a heart murmur and an enlarged liver and the doctors didn’t know why. They
whisked him away and tried to save him while Oke lay in her hospital bed,
unable to do anything. Then they came back. Her son was dead.
In her apartment, alone, she thought the same thing over
and over again: I didn’t even get to hold him. I didn’t even get to hold him.
She spent days looking at the empty crib, just crying.
She said to God, “I know I said you could take him—but I
didn’t promise not to cry.”
Let Go
and Let God?
Sometimes this revivalist theology is summarized as “let go
and let God.” And sometimes, it’s understood as a kind of prosperity gospel. If
you give up and surrender, it’s said, God will give everything. Abundant life!
Fullness. Your days will be sweetness and light.
But for Oke, that’s not what it meant to let go and let
God. To really yield and really give everything to God meant also giving up any
idea of what abundant life was supposed to be like. You couldn’t trust God and
get a Mercedes. You could trust God and get God. You couldn’t yield your
pregnancy to God and get back the baby you always wanted. But you could know
Jesus was holding your baby, your mourning, your deepest pain, and know he
loved you—loved you so much—and your sorrow was his sorrow, your loss was his
loss, your ache was his broken heart.
If you give your life to Jesus, Oke believed, you can know
how much he loves you, and his love can comfort when life is hard.
This is the theology Oke put in her romance novels. Her
first novel, published by Bethany House in 1979, starts with a woman suddenly
widowed, alone and afraid on the frontier. By the end of Love Comes Softly, the
protagonist tells God, “Ya be comfortin’ me, and I be grateful for it.” She
says, “I thank ye, Lord, that ye be teachin’ me how to rest in you.”
It was Augustinianism in a bonnet, in a made-up prairie
patois. It was evangelicalism for the everyday lives of women who knew how life
could be. It was story for all those who are weary and burdened, who just
wanted to give the weight of their lives over to Jesus. It resonated with a lot
of people.
Hallmark
Version
Janette Oke’s faith in yielding to God doesn’t always
translate to the TV series. When Calls the Heart is not plotted around
conversion, and the religious elements are mostly relegated to the background,
the moral norms setting the scene like the Canadian landscape. There are no
revivals and no born-again experiences, as there are in the books. Brian Bird,
who co-created the show with Michael Landon Jr., explains the show is trying to
be more subtle. He says, “I believe all human beings have these violin strings
running through our souls. These strings, when you pluck them, they reverberate
with certain themes like forgiveness and redemption and sacrifice and courage
and banding together to help one another.”
An estimated 2.5
million viewers will tune in to those reverberations on Sunday. More will watch
it when it goes to Netflix, probably later this year. And some of those will
glimpse in the show the deeper theology behind the original books—an
evangelicalism contextualized and addressed to burdened and brokenhearted women.
