Christian authors these days often have a hard time discerning how to base their stories on the foundational morals of Christendom without writing “Christian fiction”.
“What’s wrong with Christian fiction?” you ask? The fact that such a genre label is deemed necessary illustrates the problem. And it’s no help that said label has become synonymous with “unoriginal” and “preachy”.
Let’s face it: The “Christian fiction” label is often slapped on works that prioritize overt messaging over storytelling. Characters in these books and movies tend to feel one-dimensional vehicles for a moral rather than dynamic human beings.
While well-intentioned, this approach tends to preach to the choir. Most people who consume this material already agree with the central ideas, so it never has a chance to challenge or inspire readers who might hold different views.
Worse, the propaganda often takes its toll on the story. Instead of gripping plots, full character arcs, and natural dialogue, the writing is dominated by sermonizing. That’s a great way to alienate readers who are looking for a good story; not a lesson. Which is most of them.
Sad to say, a lot of Christian entertianment has earned its stigmas. Lets take a look at ways to avoid these pitfalls while creating fun stories that reinforce the Gospel message.
The best way to communicate Christian morals isn’t through heavy-handed messaging. If it was, the spate of cringe novel and movie series marketed to Christians would have had some effect. The answer is crafting well-told stories wherein relatable protagonists triumph over adversity by acting in accord with Christian principles. This approach respects the audience’s intelligence, so it can spread beyond the choir to the genpop.
It’s worth repeating: Christian authors who want to convey Gospel truths should first write good stories. Strong plots, complex characters, and realistic conflicts are essential to any tale’s success. Write those, and you’ve draw readers in. Then you show Christian morals emerging organically from the interactions of those elements. The themes will feel authentic, not forced, and you are much more likely to have won your brother.
Obligatory Lord of the Rings example: Tolkien was deeply influenced by his Catholic faith, but he did not set out to write an allegory. Instead, he wrote a story with profound themes of hope, sacrifice, redemption, and the triumph of good over evil. These Christian elements are present, but they arise naturally from the world and characters Tolkien created. The story has struck a chord with generations of readers because it feels universal and isn’t out to advance a particular agenda.
How did Tolkien succeed where almost everybody since has failed? He made his protagonists feel real. Readers connect with characters who face struggles and doubts similar to theirs. It’s no accident his viewpoint characters tend to be middle-class everymen. So consider crafting characters who grapple with the same fears, temptations, and moral dilemmas we all face. Showing how your characters grow and ultimately overcome adversity through perseverance, faith, and adherence to Christian principles can leave a lasting impact on readers.
Don’t believe me? Reflect on the fact that the Enemy overturned the Christian social norms that held sway in the West for more than a millennium by using the same approach, only substituting their own anti-morality.
Play streaming roulette and stop on any random show; odds are the winning behavior will be going along to get along, doing what feels right, or upholding undefined “freedom” totally divorced from any concept of the good. You can easily supervert those inverted morals by rewriting them so the heroes win by demonstrating fortitude, humility, and charity. Those are timeless themes that any audience can take to heart, regardless of cultural or religious background. And that fact gives Christian writers a tremendous advantage that far too few leverage.
If you take only one lesson away from this post, make it this one: Show how acting on Christian principles helps the characters overcome realistic challenges.
That’s it. That’s the secret sauce.
Here’s an example based on forgiveness. Perhaps a protagonist is betrayed by a close friend. Fallen human nature left to its own devices would prompt him to seek revenge. Show the character choosing to forgive instead. Then, to close the arc and seal the deal, show the hero’s mercy leading to reconciliation that’s instrumental to resolving the main conflict at the story’s climax. That way you let audiences see the power of forgiveness through the character’s actions, not a moral lesson delivered through dialogue.
Now be honest: Who thought of Return of the Jedi while reading that paragraph just now?
Sure, many now consider Star Wars to be moral inversion patient zero, but Lucas openly acknowledged the Christian themes in the original trilogy. And RotJ retained enough of them to earn a glowing review from an Orthodox bishop.
Related: Moral Grandeur
That is how you do this, guys. We have the model. Avoid stale tropes associated with “Christian fiction,” and you can reach a much wider audience. You can still write stories that reflect Christian morality, just do it in a way that won’t send the heathens flocking to the exits. It’s a mystery why anyone finds this idea difficult.
All along, Christian authors have had the culture war equivalent of the nuclear football. Yet bafflingly, many have eschewed using it favor of slinging the “Christian fiction” Nerf gun.
Don’t compound their mistake. Instead, focus on telling great stories filled with complex, relatable characters who triumph over real challenges by adhering to timeless Christian principles. When readers see these morals played out naturally in well-told stories, it will bear far more fruit than any feature or novel-length sermon.
The deep lore of Tolkien meets the brutal struggle of Glen Cook in the dark fantasy prelude to the acclaimed Soul Cycle.
Christian entertainers treat the word of God like a magical spell that will spontaneously convert an infidel if you scream it at them enough or shove it down their throats.
This isn’t to say that the word of God isn’t powerful and can’t change people’s lives, but let’s come down to reality here. A person has to be open to the word of God and those graces to repent. Otherwise, you’re talking to a brick wall. If the word of God was enough, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation now would we?
Indeed, as God’s Word assures us, “The world is established and will not be changed.” Reality will never not be real.
Much to the dismay of modern progressives, whose creed was summed up by a statement of the antagonist Lord Ivywood in Chesterton’s The Flying Inn:
“The world was made badly, and I will make it over again.”
In other words, it’s Gnosticism. You can’t have a gnostic heresy without a demiurge…and enlightened people uniquely responsible for fixing the world.
It should be reminded that stories do not teach morality: they reinforce it. Event he fairy tales of old didn’t teach that stealing was wrong because the audience already knew it was wrong–they showed why.
All audiences already come in with a set worldview. You don’t set out to challenge it, you set out to present Truth and the audience accepts it (or not) through the work. The reason it is tougher now is because Western culture has not only been smashed like a hammer through a glass window, but there is no shared cultural values like there was before. This leads to competing worldviews constantly butting heads and the Culture War many don’t want to pretend exists, but it does.
The only way is to present Truth honestly and straightforward. Tell the best story you can with your values and beliefs already ingrained and you will be on the right path.
Any “X” industry is doomed to fail for being deliberately insular and hostile to outsiders. That is not what art exists to do. You can only connect with others by talking to them, not at them.
“Meet the man where he is” gets a bad rap due to those who misunderstand it (wilfully or otherwise) misapplying it. But the advice remains true nonetheless.
The advice of ‘meeting people where they are’ is true, but as you suggest, too many people follow it up with an implicit ‘and leaving them there.’
Preach it, Brother!
This is an exceptionally on-point article
I have long felt that one of the most (if not THE most) Catholic movies ever made was “On The Waterfront”, directed by Elia Kazan (a former Communist) and written by Budd Schulberg (secular Jewish)
I am not suggesting that making a Catholic movie was the goal; in fact the real point is that, while the purpose of the film was to tell a GREAT story, based on actual events involving longshoreman and the mob (as well as giving Elia Kazan an opportunity to throw a middle finger at his critics for cooperating with HUAC), the result was an incredible presentation of Christian truths.
Incredibly effective because the main goals were story and character arc – the message took care of itself
An observation re: Christian fiction: what’s the deal with Christian movies and basketball?
Seriously, every time I watch one there’s a scene where they’re shooting hoops.
Because that’s what youth ministers (and former youth ministers) in their 40’s and 50’s think is cool because they liked Space Jam when they were in junior high in 1994. It’s the same reason Susan from the Parish Council is so certain that “the youth” want guitar masses with hippie campfire hymns.
Yeah, you definitely notice the subtle (or sometimes not-subtle) messaging in contemporary fiction. I don’t watch TV, but my mother does, and I notice that there’s always some subtle spin (witches or heathens being portrayed as good, the villains always being Puritans, Bigots or somesuch, etc) going on. The other side also knows this, albeit most of them probably know it implicitly, and you can tell by their reactions. Warhammer 40,000 may not be particularly well-written, but it contains themes like: outsiders are dangerous, moral corruption inevitably destroys you, and that men and women are not the same. This is why Leftists are constantly trying to monkey wrench it out of shape or calling it fascist. However, the most standout example of Leftists attacking a potential threat that I remember came with the manga *Tokyo Shinobi Squad*. The premise is relatively simple, super-powered crimefighters cleaning up the streets of dystopian cyberpunk Tokyo. However, it committed the unforgivable sin of claiming that Japan’s crime woes were caused by it opening up to mass immigration. The Leftist reviewer whose review I watched spent several minutes heaping anathemas and curses upon the manga for this, before belatedly including some genuine criticisms to maintain the facade of objective review. There was even blatant putting-words-in-the-authors-mouth, such as when the reviewer claimed that the author was attempting to whitewash Japanese history and deny the existence of Japanese organised crime, such as the Yakuza, even though to my knowledge the work never claimed that Japan was crime-free prior to immigration.
I’ve said for a long time that we learn our morality from stories, and mostly not stories that are explicitly preaching.
Did a video about it, in fact.
On story-telling and morality
https://youtu.be/X_HmCMwuwBo
You’ve done this well yourself with the Soul Cycle. The characters are religious, or aware of various religions, but there’s neither an Evil Church of Evil nor an obvious but name-swapped One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic church in evidence. Even so, the Real is still there, as much in the behavior of the characters as in the hints you’ve given so far. You just don’t hit us over the head with it.
Most astute of you. It’s always encouraging to see when readers get it.
The Arkwright Cycle, in which the old pagan cults of the Middle Stratum are just past their zenith, is a rich field for other related thematic explorations.
It’s instructive to think about movies like Ben Hur, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Robe, A Man for All Seasons or even The Charlie Brown Christmas special, which all explicitly have Christian messages. Then compare them to the average modern “Christian” film. There’s a definite difference in the overall “feel” of the films.
I think the problem is that many (not all) of modern “Christian” entertainment approaches the medium from the perspective of the pop cult. For example, if you are going to make a Star Wars movie (and you aren’t a death cultist) then you will pepper the movie with references to films and games so that Star Wars fans know they are watching a Star Wars movie. You won’t think about what the core themes of Star Wars are, since pop cult purpose of movies is to “consume product and get excited for next product,” not for each individual movie to have a meaningful impact.
You can make a “Christian” movie in the same way. Throw in just enough references to the Bible and use of Christian symbols so that people know that this is a movie for Christians, but don’t bother worrying about the core themes. To use another RLM-ism the purpose is ultimately for the audience to say “I clapped! I clapped when I saw someone wearing a cross!”
Now to be fair, I don’t think that many of the directors of the films are intentionally making their movies this way. It’s just that since modern film in general has been dominated by the pop and death cults, if you do not have enough background in classic cinema you will easily believe that there the pop cult approach is the only possible approach for a Christian film (much like how many new fantasy authors are unable to conceive of making a fantasy story that isn’t just a JRPG or MMORPG.)
One frequently overlooked example I’ve reviewed here is Signs. While it does lack subtlety at times, it does an able job of handling the “If God, why bad thing happen?” canard by making the protagonist a lapsed preacher who actually steel mans the atheist argument (“Providence yields outcomes indistinguishable from chance, so miracles are just people getting lucky”) before the film’s events prompt his return to the faith.
Another modern hit that doesn’t get nearly enough credit for showing Christian morals win out is The Dark Knight Rises. Its rather hokey plot distracts a lot of people (which is weird because it’s a comic book movie). But what they miss is Batman laying down his life in the explicit service of truth to save an entire city. It’s a powerful use of the Christ figure archetype that actually salvages the previous film, which was marred by making consequentialism the winning play.
I remember a few years ago when I watched the BBC’s show, “Merlin.” I love Arthurian legend, and not yet being aware that the BBC makes MSNBC look right-leaning, I thought that the Brits would surely give me at least a serviceable adaptation. Plus, it was easy to watch on the cheap Hulu plan!
Every single episode featured Merlin’s mentor figure helping him solve a crisis by telling him to “follow your heart, believe in yourself.” It was so blatant that it made me roll my eyes, and here I am WANTING to ignore the flaws in the show, race-swapped characters, cheesy effects, and to just enjoy myself because Arthurian shows that haven’t been given a grimdark makeover are so rare. But, they couldn’t even let me do that. Sigh.