You’ll sometimes hear critics of the idea that Christian authors should write compelling universal stories rather than Christian Fiction™ argue that Jesus commanded His followers to preach the Gospel, not to tell stories.
But this objection misunderstands the nature of storytelling and the profound role it has played in advancing Christian truth throughout history.
Let’s take a look at how the power of storytelling can serve the faith.
It should go without saying that Jesus did not explicitly command His followers to write novels. But, He frequently used storytelling in His ministry. His parables—such as the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan—are timeless stories that convey profound truths.
It’s no accident that Our Lord used parables in preference to systematic theological treatises. Because engaging tales with characters and situations His listeners could relate got the truth He wanted to teach across far better. They carried the Gospel message implicitly, allowing it to sink into hearts and minds more effectively than a mere declaration of doctrine could.
Related: Why Christian Authors Shouldn’t Write “Christian Fiction”
That’s why Western literature owes much of its depth and vitality to its Christian roots. From Beowulf to The Divine Comedy and beyond, the great works of Western fiction often grapple with Christian themes like redemption, grace, and the struggle between good and evil.
Even Shakespeare’s plays, while not overtly religious, are infused with a Christian moral vision that reflects the culture of the Bard’s time. Gothic novels like Dracula and modern horror fiction, as well as contemporary authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and Gene Wolfe, continued this tradition by exploring deeply spiritual themes without lapsing into preachiness.
Related: The Christian Origins of Western Horror
The reason these works endure is that they are, first and foremost, good stories. Their artistry and universal appeal make them accessible to believers and nonbelievers alike. This broad accessibility should be the goal of every Christian author. And we achieve it by writing stories that captivate readers while embodying Christian principles in a way that feels authentic; not contrived.
What many who object to this approach often miss is that the Bible contains instances of narrative fiction that serve theological purposes. The Book of Tobit, for instance, is a beautifully crafted short novel about faith, Providence, and divine intervention. Its inclusion in the Catholic canon demonstrates the value placed on storytelling as a means of conveying spiritual truths.
The novel form is, therefore, not alien to the Christian tradition. On the contrary, it aligns with literary genres the Bible uses to draw readers closer to God. So writing fiction is not an abandonment of the Gospel mandate but a way to fulfill it by using our divinely endowed creativity.
Contrast the above with Christian Fiction™ as a modern publishing category. Its narrow focus and often didactic tone depart starkly from the Biblical parables and novels. Many books in this genre prioritize delivering a moral lesson or preaching to the choir over telling a compelling story. This approach can turn away readers, including Christians, who want fun and artistry in their fiction.
Christian authors shouldn’t view storytelling as opposed to evangelization but as a means of it. Not by writing “Christian Fiction” that only serves a niche market, but by creating stories that reveal truth and beauty to the widest possible audience. Stories that profoundly affect readers can plant seeds of faith deeper than direct preaching.
Jesus used stories to reveal the Kingdom of God in ways that His listeners could understand and remember. By following His example and drawing on the rich tradition of Christian storytelling, today’s authors can reach hearts and minds with the Gospel in ways that transcend time and culture.
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Simple Christianity or “Reductive” Christianity as I think of it, causes this bare, one dimensional version of the faith that plays out in “Christian” media. This is why some people make the bold and erroneous claim “Christ commanded us to preach, not make stories” – as if street corner soapboxing has a monopoly on what preaching is, but I digress.
As a future storyteller, I’ve been reflecting on how I can avoid the pitfalls of Christian fiction. For now, the best solution I have is to study the stories of the saints and base my works after those people and their circumstances. I’m warming up to the idea of my artistic focus to be on faith, hope, and charity, so why not look to our best players for inspiration?
The attempt to boil down complex transcendent truths to a “mere” Christianity is one of Lewis’ greatest failures imo.
Could just be the Italian and artist in me, but it’s a peeve when people get aggressively defensive about their fear of “more”.
The ‘more’ in terms of faith is to help us better understand the beauty in the infinite which we seek. Related to art, this is why having church in a school gym is an insult* compared to having it in a grand cathedral of catholic Europe. The ‘more’ and grandiose is suppose to stimulate all our senses and direct them towards Christ for a deeper interaction. Anything less is selling yourself short and it’s a crime.
*I say insult because people deserve beautiful places to worship God. Faith and beauty go hand in hand.
“Related to art, this is why having church in a school gym is an insult* compared to having it in a grand cathedral of catholic Europe. ”
I grew up having Mass in my school gym. It’s not the experience I currently prefer. Nor would I encourage it as a norm. Any community with the resources to build beautiful places for worship should do so.
However, I’ve spent too much of my time online talking with all sorts of modern people who are clearly chasing The Experience(TM). A love of beauty that has begun to shape them into Catholics/Orthodox/Anglicans who are very interested in making sure that their Sundays involve the right people who think the correct things while admiring the pageantry of rituals they may or may not understand, including the language. God is almost being lost in all the beauty. I find myself have to bring up Our Lord in the conversation.
The Mass I grew up with would have been an insult all the way to the point of sinful for the group I mostly encounter online. The Church has never made statements like that, while encouraging reverence in everyone.
When comes specifically to our worship of God, we should feel blessed to be out both in a muddy field with plasticware AND a beautiful cathedral with the finest of fittings. The gratitude is that Our Lord is there with us and we can appreciate both places for what they are. Calvary after all was not beautiful in the sense of a cathedral and neither was the stable/cave.
A gym with overhead lights that buzzed when you turned them on was the cradle of my own faith. For that I am profoundly grateful.
Can you elaborate on “God is almost being lost in all the beauty.”? As someone who was raised in ugly, bland, unprovoking catholic churches, I lack the insight how someone could “lose” God in all the beauty when my point of view is God has been lost because lack of beauty.
” As someone who was raised in ugly, bland, unprovoking catholic churches, I lack the insight how someone could “lose” God in all the beauty when my point of view is God has been lost because lack of beauty.”
It’s easier to spot than explain, but I’ll try. It appears in my personal discussions that a natural want (and need) for the good, the true, and the beautiful spills over into an entitlement for it. (A hazard, perhaps, of the fall.) Left completely unchecked, that otherwise good desire can develop into a pride and anger directed at the Church and the more average Catholic.
When I have discussions with people who are schismatic over what amounts to personal preferences/aesthetics, we are never talking about relationships with Our Lord or love of neighbor. We are never talking about redemptive suffering, in little or big ways. Instead, we are talking about mind numbing miniate that involves weaponizing Church theology/canon law against her. When the issue goes really south, the slights/judgements against their fellow Catholics never seem to stop.
It appears from the outside those people are in love with an experience. The deeper they fall in love with that experience, even well meaning, the more strain of the relationship with God. Developing a fuller intellectual connection to God that is not dependent on environment can become meaningless. So too is the need to love the liberal Boomer Catholic in the T-shirt and the poor musical taste. At some point, any excuse will do justify an absolute insistence and guarantee for a beloved experience. If that means turning their back on the Church and therefore God, so be it.
Medieval Catholics built beautiful cathedrals out of their faith. Those spaces did not exist as prerequisite for that faith. A devout medieval Catholic might have never seen the cathedral they helped build. Their life long personal experience of worship might have been something quite a bit more humble than the cathedral they left to the future. There’s nothing wrong with wanting something beautiful in sea of ugly. That is a want for God. An issue is when a complete dependence on it develops and it becomes a substitute.
I spent time in Rad Trad spaces as a new “revert”, knowing little about the Faith and naively assuming that the people most openly vocal and zealous about it had to obviously be the Good Guys. While they weren’t bad people per se, I did get the general feeling that they wanted to turn back time to the 19th century rather than anything else. A fictional version of that century as it happens, as it was imagined as a bastion of faithfulness rather than the time of deep spiritual crisis that it really was.
“Medieval Catholics built beautiful cathedrals out of their faith. Those spaces did not exist as prerequisite for that faith. A devout medieval Catholic might have never seen the cathedral they helped build.”
Absolutely spot-on. You could say that churches/cathedrals are themselves an expression of faith. Thinking that those spaces themselves are what brings faith is the same kind of thinking that’s involved when you have someone become highly obsessed with ritual. Doesn’t mean it isn’t important, but all these things are a matter of nuance. Becoming overly concerned with specific minutiae whilst forgetting the larger point of it all is the precise cause of not only the whole ‘Liberal/Rad Trad’ split within the Church, but also the fracturing of Western culture that’s been taking place since the 20th century.
The “sense of entitlement” does put things into perspective. At least in my circles, the attitude of “You don’t need beauty to worship God” has been used as an excuse to deprive. It’s a reductionist Christian attitude. Though we already both agree that if you can have beautiful churches and other forms of artistic expressions of the faith, then have it. From my point of view, so many people in seats of power have found excuses for not outwardly expressing the faith through art and architecture and it hurts. I think it perfectly reflects decades of catholics being ashamed to publicly show they’re catholic.
With the rise of more orthodox catholics, I wouldn’t be surprised if the demand for more creative expression of the faith increases. I know in my case, I’m going to tread those waters of religious art. All in due time. I do crave to make beautiful art in the name of God and to do my faith justice.
One last side note. The beauty of catholic art and architecture does have the potential to convert. When I was taking Italian in college, our professor was showing us pictures of the churches in Rome. One of the non believers in class exclaimed he’d convert if it meant he could go to a church like that. Not to feed into your point of “relying on beauty”, it’s to point out the beauty communicates there’s much more under the surface. It could be that crack in the door that invited people to enter the church – if that makes sense. So for me, I see the visual expression of our faith more of an obligation than a luxury.
“You don’t need beauty to worship God” is how we ended up with 1960s Baby Boomer guitar masses.
In fairness to Lewis, he was essentially doing introductory material and trying to focus on what all major branches of the faith at the time held in common. He claims repeatedly that it’s a first step, not an ending point, but it doesn’t seem to have taken.
Unfortunately, he was further handicapped in his theological work by being an Anglican, and at a time when that community already was moving towards its present Unitarian-level vagueness. It would seem to be only a short time after Lewis’ death that Auberon Waugh (Evelyn’s eldest son) could say “In England, we have a curious institution called the Church of England. Its strength has always been in the fact that on any moral or political issue it can produce such a wide divergence of opinion that nobody — from the Pope to Mao Tse-tung — can say with any confidence that he is not an Anglican.”
“Unfortunately, he was further handicapped in his theological work by being an Anglican,”
In one of his essays/lectures late in life, Lewis actually warns the clerics of Church of England about the path they were headed down. He was aware that it was coming close to falling apart at the seams, even in the 1940’s/50’s. Anglicanism has a branch of that calls itself Anglo-Catholicism, where many of their intellectuals end up. It’s the “highest” of high church Anglicanism. Lewis claimed he was neither high nor low church. However, his ability to treat the Catholic dogmas at least with an even hand in his “mere” works and many other views does not put him in it’s low church traditions.
All that said, Lewis had too many gifts to be hamstrung by the worst of Anglican thought. Indeed at the end of his life he professed a belief in Purgatory, which is forbidden by Anglicanism. I’m at a place in my faith now where I see that at some point, Lewis probably should have converted to Catholicism. Whether a conversion by him would have constituted ordinary or heroic virtue, I don’t know. A conversion to Catholicism in England was costly, even by the early 20th century. That assumes that he was even willing to over come what he felt to be the need to be the ecumenical one in the room.
If you are a Christian and telling a story that means something to you then what you believe will naturally come out of it. This is the case for pretty much anything. You are who you are and if you wish to share it then that will come out of what you express through art and entertainment.
Graham Greene, before he relapsed, used to be one of the best at being able to make Serious Books and Entertainment Books and both were informed by the same worldview. How could they not be? But when he let his vices overcome him, his writing ability took a hit and he never quite reached those heights again. Perhaps if he would have righted his ship things might have been different, but I digress.
The point is that YOU are your art, and perhaps the problem is that we forgot this somewhere along the way and assumed a mid-century materialist secular worldview as the default. But if that isn’t who you are and what you believe (and I believe no one has believed that for a long time, if they ever really did) then why would you adopt that frame when writing something that supposedly means something to you? IE: a professing Christian that believes abortion is a grave evil decides to produce a story where abortion is painted as good. At that point, what are you expressing, and to what end? If that’s not you then who you are you supposed to be?
I don’t know, I just find this entire topic a bit outdated. “Christian” industries did not exist before the late 20th century, so why are we acting like they invented Christianity in storytelling? Why are we following after them? Why are we acting as if it wasn’t a massive failure? It’s as bizarre as writers picking up pens in the modern day because they want a Tor logo on their book. Are you aware of how late it is?
Much of it probably stems from the fact that for most people today, their political ideology has replaced religion. I still see way to many folks who seem to genuinely believe that if only their political opponents could be purged from the system, their ideological utopia would come to pass. It’s one of the main reasons why I’m not impressed by most of the opposition parties you see in the West today.
Speaking as a Dutchman, a short while ago I decided to really go through the program of the PVV (the ‘Freedom Party’, formerly a populist opposition party which is now at the head of a government coalition). I did this mostly because I was interested (after month-long negotiations had neutered down the more ‘radical’ ideas of the party) how much of their program had actually been used to determine the government’s policy.
Every single chapter of that document was nothing but itomizing the failings of the previous government followed by general moral platitudes and political posturing. Some of it was basically a rant. What struck me most was that there was no greater vision in it for the Netherlands at all, just the fixing of the last government’s failings for a return to a materialist status quo.
I’m sorry, but this kind of thinking has no future. Having the desire to ‘restore Dutch sovereignty’ whilst staying active in organizations such as NATO is something I already find quite laughable. Going beyond that though, what kind of society are these plans supposed to create? Because trying to go back up the slippery slope is no strategy at all…
I have noticed that Evangelical Protestant writers seem to have a poor relationship with subtlety. You get the feeling that they’re anxious about you missing the moral if they don’t lay it on thickly enough, and a worry that they might be doing wrong if that happens.
I’m convinced that the entire ghetto-genre was a creation of the Death Cult, or if not that, then an own goal that they encourage. It effectively gets us to remove our voice from the culture without a fight.
Oops. This was meant as a reply to JD Cowan, not myself… :p
Right, it’s a failure. The entire “Christian” Industry project has been a disaster for everyone except enemies of the faith. Even more of a reason it must be abandoned.