Are You There God? Lightweight Narrative Annotation of Christian Fiction with LMs

TL;DR

This paper explores Christian Fiction, especially divine acts, using computational tools and lightweight language models to analyze and compare different subgenres, revealing meaningful differences in depiction.

Contribution

It introduces a novel lightweight language model approach for annotating divine acts in Christian Fiction, enabling scalable analysis of religious literature.

Findings

Lightweight LM can match human annotations in identifying divine acts.

Significant differences exist between Left Behind series and broader Christian Fiction.

The study provides a broad topical overview of Christian Fiction genre.

Abstract

In addition to its more widely studied cultural movements, American Evangelicalism has a well-developed but less externally visible literary side. Christian Fiction, however, has been little studied, and what scholarly attention there is has focused on the explosively popular Left Behind series. In this work, we use computational tools to provide both a broad topical overview of Christian Fiction as a genre and a more directed exploration of how its authors depict divine acts. Working with human annotators, we first developed a codebook for identifying "acts of God." We then adapted the codebook for use by a recent, lightweight LM with the assistance of a much larger model. The laptop-scale LM is largely capable of matching human annotations, even when the task is subtle and challenging. Using these annotations, we show that significant and meaningful differences exist between divine acts depicted by the Left Behind books and Christian Fiction more broadly.