ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys scholarship on the relationships between religion and popular romance. After noting the many skeptical and reductive accounts of both religion and romance as addictive escapes from real-world troubles, it documents what romance scholars have said about how religion, especially Christianity, can be read as a romance, and about how ideas about love from Christianity and other religions have shaped the history of the romance genre. Romances which express several types of Christianity (Protestant, Catholic, Mormon) are discussed, as well as some Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and Wiccan romance novels and the available scholarship on them. Finally, the chapter considers how the vision of love promulgated by the romance genre, even in ostensibly secular texts, can often be read as a religious or divine phenomenon: something unconditional, omnipotent, and eternal.
