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

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.