Two of the offspring and I went to our favorite hangout, Barnes and Noble, this afternoon. I found the following books in one particular section where I was browsing:

Confessions of a College Freshman by Zach Arrington
Creating Money by Samantha Stevens (On the back of the book the author was described as “a trance channeller, tarot and aura reader.”)
Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown (author of The DaVinci Code)
Jewish Displaced Persons in Camp Bergen Belsen (I really think this one was misshelved, but it was there.)
The Act of Marriage by Tim LaHaye
Caring for Aged Loved Ones (published by Focus on the Family)
Courting Disaster by Pat Robertson (about the Supreme Court)
Illuminata by Marianne Williamson
Christian Family Guide to Parenting Toddlers
Christian Family Guide to Surviving Divorce

What do all these books have in common? What section of the bookstore was I looking through?
If you guessed “Christian Inspiration,” you would be, amazingly, right. Now I thought about accusing B&N of creating a Christian ghetto for books written from a Christian perspective, no matter what the subject. I was even more convinced of the segregation of books with a Christian worldview when I checked out the “Self-Improvement” section and found these books:

My Grandfather’s Blessings by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. (The grandfather of the title was an orthodox Jewish rabbi and student of the Kabbalah.)
Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard
The Book of Secrets by Deepak Chopra

But there were no self=help books from a Christian perspective that I could find. So we have a “Christian ghetto” for Christian books—or rather for books that are perceived to be Christian. When I look again at the first list of “Christian Inspiration,” I note that several of the books are not Christian at all. No, I don’t think it’s a big conspiracy to protect the pagans from Christianity and infiltrate the Christian world with “aura readers” and Da Vinci codes. I do think that B&N doesn’t “get religion” any better than the mainstream media does. And I do wonder why they can’t shelve the parenting toddlers book from a Christian publisher with the rest of the parenting books, Pat Robertson’s book on the Supreme Court with the other books about American government or current issues, and the aura reader’s book with the rest of the nut cases. Whoops, sorry about that last suggestion. Creating Money belongs in the financial section, of course.
Or alternately, (although it’s not the best solution), B&N could put only Christian books in the “Christian Inspiration” section. I fear that policy would require a level of discernment that’s not easily found in the average bookstore employee.
Next time we visit the bookstore: Semicolon checks out the “Christian Fiction” section of Barnes and Noble to determine whether these fiction books would actually contaminate the “Fiction” section.