Frank Edward Peretti (born January 13, 1951) is a New York Times best-selling author of Christian fiction, whose novels primarily focus on the supernatural and spiritual warfare.
Later, he studied English, screen writing and film at UCLA, and assisted his father in pastoring a small Assembly of God church on Vashon Island from 1978 to 1983, also taking construction jobs to make ends meet.
[9][6] The book remained on the Christian Booksellers Association's top ten best-sellers list for over 150 consecutive weeks, and has as of 2013 sold over 2.7 million copies worldwide.
The Oath, generally regarded as one of Peretti's greater works, has sold more than one million copies, and received the ECPA Gold Medallion Book Award for Best Fiction in 1996.
He wrote a 2000 memoir, The Wounded Spirit, which covered his struggles as a child with a facial tumor, which caused him to be mocked by other children and retreat to solitude until it was eventually treated with multiple surgeries.
Peretti's first full-length novel after 2000 was the 2005 thriller Monster, which played with the Bigfoot legend and explored issues surrounding the "survival of the fittest" and creationist-based objections to evolution.
[21] In addition to his appearance in Hangman's Curse, Peretti has had a voice role in Flo, the Lying Fly, the second animated entry in the Hermie and Friends series for children.
[22] He has also made a number of videos (and associated audio tapes and books) in which he takes on the persona of Mr. Henry, a slightly eccentric inventor and Bible teacher.
[15][28] As his novels have been widely sold and read throughout Evangelical, Charismatic and Pentecostal churches, Peretti's fiction has excited the imaginations of clergy and laity alike on the subject of spiritual warfare.
"[29] Some critical reservations have been expressed by a number of Evangelical and Pentecostal writers that many readers are using Peretti's novels as manuals on prayer, exorcism, spiritual warfare and as guidebooks about dangers of the New Age movement.
For example, Kim Riddlebarger expresses alarm that many readers have "redefined their entire worldview based upon a novel" and insists that the Bible does not call upon Christians to "engage in spiritual warfare as a combat between angels and demons".
Hexham observes that Peretti's novels reflect the anxieties that many fundamentalist and evangelical Christians have about secular society, the mass media, the social sciences and tertiary education.
[33] Andrew Connolly notes that "these enemies, united under a New Age banner, are motivated not simply by an alternative religious ideology, but by demons" in Peretti's work.
Phyllis Tickle, religion editor of Publishers Weekly, called Peretti "the daddy, the king of, the sine qua non of the contemporary evangelical Christian fiction, if you cut out inspirational from that category.
"[32][2] The editor-in-chief of the publisher Crossway Books has described Peretti's thrillers as being written for the Moral Majority, stating, "there are 35 or 40 million people in this country who are really upset with the way things are.
"[9] Historian Crawford Gribben argues Peretti's work "certainly set the terms for the re-energizing and even the remilitarization, of evangelicalism";[36] others have noted his writings encourage readers to take political action.
Daniel Silliman, professor of American religion and culture at Heidelberg University, asserts that Trump played off the types of fears among evangelical Christians found in Peretti's books and later works inspired by him such as the Left Behind series.
[37] Theological studies professor André Gagné, who has written on the Christian dominionist movement the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), states that its founder C. Peter Wagner "regarded Frank Peretti's novels as the best illustration of actual spiritual warfare."
Religious studies scholar Damon T. Berry argues that despite the books' fictional settings, the spiritual warfare and demonology presented – also seen in the NAR's prophecies regarding Trump – are intended to be true-to-life.