Stupid things religious people say

[Fake Messiah]

Oh no, another set of scary books is out there to get Christian women by filling their heads with contra-biblical nonsense about female empowerment and also making them horny instead of being frigid, submissive zombies as God demands. So it's also a good opportunity to peddle church products in order for people to "stay safe".

Although judging by the poor spelling abilities of the author of this article, she might benefit from reading the books she is forbidding and staying away from Christian literature; perhaps then she would learn how to spell.

Here Be Dragons: What Christians Need to Know About Romantasy

Around midnight on January 21, 2025, bookstores across the United States experienced crowds they’d not seen since the days of Harry Potter. Customers lined up outside storefronts by the hundreds to snatch up a hotly anticipated fantasy title the moment it hit bookshelves. The fervor was so intense that some shops charged admission. As in the days of Harry Potter, many fans arrived in costume to celebrate their favorite characters.

The title that sparked so much excitement was Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm, the third book in the Empyrean series of novels within the “romantasy” subgenre. Romantasy blends the tropes of romance with the imaginative world-building of fantasy, creating novels described as “The Bachelor meets The Hunger Games.”

Influencers often praise the female empowerment they encounter in these books. Romantasy “allows women to have it all,” Instagrammer Christina Clark-Brown told The Guardian.

The erotic content in romantasy poses the greatest concern for Christians. While euphemistically labeled “spice,” these scenes are often explicit. For example, in his review of Yarros’s Fourth Wing, Plugged In contributor Kennedy Unthank noted that the main characters “engage in two different graphic sex scenes, both of which are multiple pages long and describe the sex in such detail that readers will get a full anatomy course by the end.”

As 82 percent of romance readers are women, the soaring popularity of spicy romantasy has implications for the sisters, daughters, and mothers who sit beside us in church. Jacobs, who has written extensively on the topic of women’s lust and fiction, says romantasy “can absolutely be a gateway drug to a pornography and/or erotica addiction.” While most research on pornography emphasizes its dangers for men, Jacobs has encountered increasing numbers of women who struggle with lust in silence and shame—even in the church. In 2018, she conducted a small, anonymous survey of Christian women and found that 94 percent struggled with lust; this same percentage reported that literature and television exacerbated their temptation.

While alarming, these findings shouldn’t surprise us when we consider that the content we consume, whether written or visual, shapes our minds and hearts (Rom. 12:2). Diving into explicit fiction reflects a chasing after wind (Eccl. 1:14) as we search for meaning, connection, and love down avenues that will never satisfy.

In a world riddled with anxieties, the lure of stories that offer diversion and fantasy can be powerful.

Jacobs urges believers to consider the plethora of vibrant and God-honoring literature from modern Christian authors. “There are literally hundreds of Christian authors of speculative fiction [writing that includes genres other than realism] that are desperately trying to get their books into the hands of Christian kids, teens, and adults, and are struggling to do so,” she said.

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/artic...romantasy/