Blue Like Jazz Is Not The Worst Book I've Ever Read

Some time ago I eagerly picked up a copy of Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz because it had been recommended as an innovative and insightful work on Christian spirituality. A magazine I trusted suggested I would not only enjoy reading this book, but be led into a new and deeper understanding of my faith. I read it, and waited for the insight. I read the first few chapters unimpressed but open-minded. I passed the midpoint, hoping that this great revelation was just beyond the horizon. I finished the book happy there was nothing more to read, but wondering if I missed something. I offered it to a young friend to see what he thought. Nothing. So now you have the testimony of two believers, both from the twenty to thirty something age range for whom this book is intended: Blue Like Jazz isn’t very good.

But now I see young men on campus reading it. Now I read review after review in Christian circles hailing it as the key to a deeper relationship with Jesus, and my fear is “the world” will get wind of this. My fear is a sincerely curious person will read what is hailed as “the freshest and most honest look at Christian spirituality” and see the disconnect between what Christ is speaking into their heart and what is spoken from those pages. Just to be clear, there is nothing necessarily wrong with Miller’s book. He’s not advocating anything heretical or encouraging some perversion of the Gospel. There’s just not much there. If what is there really is “brilliant” then we’re in trouble because we don’t have much to say; what we do have to say isn’t all that insightful and shouldn’t take the two hundred plus pages Miller uses.

Not all Christians are willing pawns of the Republican Party; not all Christians are right-wing ideologues. We’re not all vapid bourgeois cogs in the machines of conspicuous consumption; not all of us have drunk the wine of her impure passion. Some people calling themselves Christians take seriously the call to love their neighbor in ways beyond trickling their wealth through the economy in pursuit of the most expensive SUV, the flattest TV, and the most wrinkle free skin. Not all Christians are legalistic automatons or repositories of rigid dogma. Not all Christians live their lives from Sunday to Sunday in quiet desperation. Some Christians are socially progressive, some Christians are poets, some Christians are artists. Some people know God is intimately and deeply in love with them. Some people know this is at the heart and starting point of life. I know because I lived in my Volkswagen Bus.
See how easy that was? Nothing too extraordinary, nothing really new, a good reminder of some things we forget, but I said it in less than 150 words.