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Conservative Christian "dragon fiction" was a phrase coined by critic Vince Passaro in Harpers Magazine (September 1996), which was used to describe evangelical or fundamentalist Christian fantasy or apocalyptic fiction, as well as political thrillers.
Passaro identified several subgenres in this review article. He titled the article "dragon fiction" in an apparent reference to Frank Peretti's work , an evangelical fantasy novel in which small-town protagonists must pit themselves against a literal dragon, as an embodiment of
satanic power and strength.
More often, however, the evangelical or fundamentalist protagonists in the featured books find themselves pitted against more mundane political institutions within the United States, which are usually engaged in public policy formulation that is viewed as against the political and ethical frameworks of conservative Christian deontology, such as legislative initiatives that would liberalise stem cell research or embryo experimentation. This segues into apocalyptic fiction, a well-established popular fundamentalist Christian literary genre.
Winterflight (1981)
According to Passaro, the "dragon fiction" genre began in 1981, when the late evangelical author Joseph Bayly published Winterflight, an anti-abortion/ anti-euthanasia evangelical science fiction which extrapolated what would happen if his fellow evangelical Christians did not mobilise against abortion and euthanasia. Disability cleansing is the result, as is involuntary euthanasia of senior citizens.
Charles Colson's Gideon's Torch (1995) is another such novel, dealing with LGBT community machinations to support stem cell research to find a cure for AIDS, and involves urban riots, a liberal Republican Party US President, and anti-abortion terrorists. However, in this novel, conservative Christian political agency and social activism have resulted in some political leverage. However, this rendered it an exception amongst most of the other work that Passaro reviewed in his article.
Apocalyptic fiction: Meier, Robertson and Burkett
While Larry Burkett's pre-apocalyptic fiction might seem to be an exception to the above, his THOR Conspiracy (1995) depicted a near-future United States in the grip of a second Great Depression, which served as a framework to condemn governmental economic regulatory policies that reduced travel, 'stifled' private enterprise, provided a more comprehensive social security system than at present, and presided over lower educational standards in the name of centre-left political correctness. However, Burkett's real condemnation is reserved for the environmental movement. It attacks current theories of climate change as a conspiracy theory to subdue social conservatives and evangelical Christians. In this book, Beijing and Washington DC are subjected to nuclear attack from a newly reunified Korea, in defence of its own interests. Unusually for "dragon fiction'", there is no apocalyptic denouement, as the novel ends with a reconstructed United States governed from Philadelphia, its original capital. Here, once again, conservative Christian political agency prevails over a hostile central government and its regulatory agencies.
Paul Meier and Pat Robertson are viewed as seeing no such escape for conservative Christians, and their respective books (The Third Millennium and End of the Age: 1993) are viewed as more conventional evangelical apocalyptic fiction, in which the Rapture evacuates all existing conservative Christians from Earth, leading to seven years of a Great Tribulation that ends in the biblical battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ. Often, social liberals are viewed as incipient advocates of totalitarianism under the rule of a kindred Antichrist.
Passaro compares this work to that of celebrated Catholic novelist Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away (1960), finding more moral ambiguity and contradiction in her work, which is ambivalent about the value of its particular denominational religious beliefs. However, he does not unreservedly condemn the "dragon fiction" that he reviews.