It’s a question I asked myself while reading a novel by a popular writer of Christian fiction. I don’t think it’s true-- I know many Christian women who are quite literary and enjoy well-written works of fiction. So why instead of C.S. Lewis are we getting this kind of insulting effort on the parts of so-called Christian fiction writers? Do they just not care or do they feel like Christian women are so dumb we won’t know the difference between Shakespeare and Diane Steele?
I started reading this book on a mission-- to see what is out there. I haven’t decided exactly what genre I’m writing or who I’m specifically writing to so I wanted to see what Christian fiction looks like these days. As a young adult I read a lot of Jeanette Oke books but that was about it for adult Christian fiction. Not great but not horrible either. She’s a fair writer and not too preachy-- not someone I aspire to be like but not someone who’s work I would be ashamed to see on the shelf next to mine, were such a lovely thing as publication to occur.
Does Christian fiction need to contain in every other sentence some reference to God and prayer and what is happening in the characters’ spiritual lives? This writer certainly seemed to think so, but I wouldn’t want to be like her for all the published novels in the world. I won’t name names but I certainly felt at the end that if Christians were anything like those portrayed in her book, I would not want to be associated with them at all. That writer must live in a very sad Christian community, a world peopled with hypocrites and sanctimonious preachers and gossips. Either that or she only knows how to write those kind of characters, and assumes that most of us only want to read about Christians like that.
I read a story about the Salem witch trials once-- historical non-fiction, but moving all the same. In the midst of all the accusations a woman was fingered as being a witch. Her husband publicly denounced the accusation as absurd. The fingers then pointed at him as an accomplice, and later even as a witch himself. He denied it. He was told if he spoke out against his wife he would be acquitted and released. He refused. So the righteous people of the town hung his wife and sister-in-law in front of his eyes and again asked him to recant and denounce his wife as a witch and he would be saved. He refused.
They laid boards on top of him and piled more and more rocks on the boards, slowly and painfully crushing him to death. They asked him before each rock was added if he would recant and place blame on his wife. I think if it were me I would have been thinking that she was already dead so what was the harm? But he was a better person than me, and he refused. The only thing he would say was “More weight!” He stood by her to the end, through death, and pronounced her innocence.
That a live human person could have such faith in God and in their spouse as to die that way, and as to live that way, spoke volumes to me. Yet in this book all the Christians immediately turn on an accused woman, including her own husband, when an obvious police agenda points an evidentiary finger at her. The one man, a preacher, who does believe her, does so in the most sanctimonious way and only with the blessed intention to save her, a lost woman. It made me sick, the narrative pat on the back he was given in the book.
I kept reading, thinking the author was simply setting her readers up and at the end would address the fact that this community of Christians were just awful people and they would see the light, change their ways, have an epiphany-- something that would redeem them. But no-- in the end the heroine magnanimously forgives them even though they were so horrible to her, and they excuse their way out of it easily and with an aw-shucks manner and no actual apology to her whatsoever. Yes, her extreme faith buoyed her up and kept her from holding grudges against her family and friends, who apparently learned nothing from the situation.
There are many hypocritical, sanctimonious, judgmental, gossipy people in the world who claim to be Christians. I don’t know their hearts so I couldn’t say whether they are or are not. I certainly don’t want their behavior to be exalted though, or identified as how Christians behave.
I know a lot of wonderful Christians. They are certainly flawed individuals. Their faith is real and goes through the same peaks and valleys as mine does. Some are more generous, loving and forgiving than others. Some are fake. Some are lost. But they are all real people. They would all make interesting characters and none of them speaks only about their good deeds, their faith in God, and how He’s working in their lives, in every sentence.
They don’t even speak that way at church all the time. They manage to talk about the weather and their struggles to lose weight. They talk about their kids-- not usually about how perfect they are but about their struggles in raising them. They talk about their spouses and their finances and car troubles and how fun it is to find a forgotten twenty dollar bill in a pocket while doing laundry.
I think I’m going to write a story about these people. Not a story centered on their Christianity but a story about their lives and how as Christians they deal with real issues. They will be flawed. They will most usually do the wrong thing and realize too late their mistake. They will not always remember to turn to God when times are tough and their Christian friends will let them down. They won’t always come out on the other side whole and well and with a new perspective on life and renewed faith in God. But sometimes they will. And that is real.
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