The Shack is just that book, and its success proves not how much this country loves religion but how far from mainstream faith the nation’s aspirations have shifted. When every publisher turned down the book in its current form, Young and some friends founded their own firm, Windblown Media, to fill what they considered “a big hole” in publishing: Although there were “religious” books and “secular” books, they thought, there were no titles in the middle ground, no “spiritual” novels that cast God as a path to happiness without serving up dogma. Two years later, at 50, he started The Shack. He went bankrupt in 2003 and lost his house. (He says he was the first white child to speak Dani, the language of the highlands tribe.) He got through college and a seminary and then worked a string of clerical and service jobs. Young was “born a Canadian,” as his back-flap copy puts it, and grew up the child of missionaries in New Guinea. And although it is a Christian book, its author does not seem to follow any church. The novel’s subject is faith in God, but it is written as if to a reader who has little interest in religion. The Shack’s success is puzzling in part because it is a book of puzzling intent.
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