Church Voices

You can disagree with me, but I think its fair to say that the production of quality Christian art especially in the area of fiction has been pretty much non-existent for awhile now. Sure, you’ve got occasional bright spots like CS Lewis or Tolkien, but for the most part Christian fiction has been boringly derivative, see Peretti, Frank and LaHaye, Tim as prime examples.

The problem with these kinds of works, isn’t just one of quality (though that argument has been made). It has to do with imagination. These are largely just theological aphorisms crudely dressed up as story. Not all that different than the Veggie Tales movie about Jonah. Nothing particularly wrong with that so long as your goal is to do nothing more than entertain the average Family Christian Bookstore shopper. Naturally, the biggest problem with that sort of entertainment is that its preaching to the choir. Its red meat for red meat eaters, and the chances of a vegetarian even being aware of their existence is… well, you know the old saying about hell and snowballs.

Recently, I was listening to the podcast in which two ideas were being toyed with. The first was the idea of elitism. The opinion offered was that elitism largely means “you don’t like the things I like” with the example being a studier of western literature being unaware of what sports team is in town. The only downside the podcasters could find was the example of a professor who hired a plumber and realized he couldn’t even begin to make conversation because literature professors are from Jupiter and plumbers are from Mercury.

But here’s something the podcasters missed amidst their talk of manual labor and Don Quixote, the reason why great works of western civilization are great works of western civilization is because they communicate great truths of the human existence in ways that plumbers and preachers, or at least plumbers anyway can understand intuitively. In other words, subjects that interest elitists only became subjects that interest elitists by first conquering the hearts and minds of the blue collar everyman. There is, after all, a reason that Albert Camus and Friedrich Nietzsche wrote largely in fiction, while the most highly praised philosophers of today generally don’t.

Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, the relatively recent strains of western Christianity has managed to largely stamp out these types of potent communication. Although, like the first wisps of weeds appearing at Chernobyl there are some signs of life starting to appear. It began with reflective personal narratives written by people like Donald Miller. Obviously, these aren’t the purely fictional accounts we’ve been discussing, but they do contain seeds of that larger truth reflected through the account of the author. And these types of books have proliferated over the last decade or so.

And then, relatively recently, there has been a sighting of a species long since believed to be extinct. An honest-to-God work of fiction that reveals some of the more mind bending properties of God in an engaging, emotional, and well written way. Its like a woolly mammoth lumbered into Manhattan on a busy Monday afternoon. The only question that remains is whether or not we’ll see more of these types of work. Obviously, everything written can’t be Homer’s Iliad, but just like a natural eco-system, you’ve got to have zebras out there for a sabre toothed tiger to survive.