Benevolent Patriarchy on the Prairie

D.L. interviews Daniel Silliman about the Christian romance novel that started it all—Love Comes Softly. 

We talk about Oke’s Canadian background and how that plays into her writing, as well as the impact her books have had on Christian women and the Christian romance genre as a whole.

Daniel is a news editor for Christianity Today and author of Reading Evangelicals. You can follow him on Twitter @danielsilliman

Here is an interview with Janette Oke

This article on Active History explores how Janette Oke romanticizes the Mounties

You can check out this detailed report from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on their role in the Indian residential school system

“I was born on the Canadian prairie. I was actually born at home. This sounds really like old, old west. I was born in a little log house. The doctor came out to our place to deliver me. So it sounds really, really old fashioned. I went to a one room country school. So a lot of what I write, it’s very much a part of my background–as a teenager, and even younger than that, I was very into the west and the pioneer days. So I read everything I could find on the pioneers. I felt they were a very hearty group of people with a lot of bravery to come out and start making a life on a new frontier. Our Canadian west opened up quite a bit different than the stories that I was reading, which were basically westerns from the U.S. side of the border, in that we had the Northwest Mounted Police—they were at that time—and basically precede the settlers.”

“We never had the cowboy and Indian skirmishes and the unsettled west for them to come in. We never had sheriffs in Canada. We have had what is now the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and so our pioneers came out to a rather settled area as far as the laws were concerned and oftentimes there were groups of people that sort of came together from a united background, and if you look at our small town around our area and find the oldest church you can pretty well say, ‘Well, that group of settlers came from Germany’, ‘That group of settlers came from Sweden’, you know. By the oldest church there you can pretty well identify it, so these people came west with deep, personal faith. That changed the whole color of how our west was settled.”

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Cover art by Zech Bard.