Then & Now: Continuities and Disjunctures in Evangelical Fiction

Sheldon's In His Steps

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Wallace's Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ.

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Prentiss' Stepping Heavenward

Eggleston's The End of the World: A Love Story

LaHaye and Jenkins's Argmageddon, the Cosmic Battle of the Ages.

LaHaye and Jenkins's Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days.

Charles Sheldon’s legacy is bound up in the abidingly popular novel-sermon In His Steps (serialized which popularized the phrase “What would Jesus Do?” as a watchword for US evangelicals and did more to propel the Social Gospel movement than perhaps any other printed text.  Before In His Steps was serialized in the pages of The Advance, Sheldon’s literary career included other serialized tales, including “The Angel and the Demon”—a stylized struggle for a single soul. The tale is a clear ur-text for In His Steps.  Yet some of the elements of the serial are not incorporated into In His Steps, such as the voice and actions of the “ugliest Being in all Hell’s dominions…Bad Influence.” The Demon of Sheldon’s tale is of the Bunyan-esque variety: he serves up “books” whose covers “were made of ruined human bodies” with leaves “compounded from “tears, remorse, misery, and guilt.”