Is There Just One Christian Imagination?

There is no question that religious belief can be freeing and exciting. There is also no question that the opposite can be true also. Certainly, most people outside of the church can’t grasp the freedom of faith and instead tend to see the dour side of religion, with all of its rules, regulations, and restrictions (hereafter referred to as RRR). Or they see the televangelists who seem to love money and show what happens when bad taste, shallow reading of scriptures, and wealth come together (sort of similar to what we get in our current first family).

But faith can also be generative and empowering. Faith can inform a new way of seeing that grows out of the commandment of grace to “love your neighbor.” As Flannery O’Connor once wrote, it was by her faith that she could see to be creative. Or, as the Psalmist has it, “By Your light we see light.”

While plenty of Christian writing in the current market place seems not to see clearly and seems bent on offering self-help steps, many have been the charged and freed imaginations in church history–perhaps starting with Paul and St. Augustine, but also present in the likes of Dante, St. Theresa of Avila, John Bunyan, John Milton, the later works of Leo Tolstoy, most of Dostoyevski, and more recently Dorothy Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis. I know my list skips so many others, but I don’t mean to be exhaustive here so much as suggestive. What I really mean to suggest is that there is not just one Christian imagination. There can be many expressions of this.

There is not one genre that is Christian (usually this means fantasy or romance). Rather, every genre that is not pornographic or excessively sentimental should be open to exploring.

The church doesn’t always recognize this. But if we take the Psalmist seriously, we should consider that as Christians, we are free to see by His light into all corners, and that includes genres. Most Christians will write in the genres they prefer, but that doesn’t mean that the Christian who loves fantasy should shun or put down the Christian who writes a modernist or post-modernist novel. Many of these choices are not morally or biblically oriented so much as settled by taste and education.

I currently have two books on Amazon. One is a contemporary novel with a little satire about what Americans believe about the end of the world. The other is a chapbook of poems. In neither book am I overt or preachy about my faith, but it does come out, sometimes in character concerns, sometimes in metaphor. I am not trying to hide. Rather, I am trying to have integrity and charity. I am following an idea that I have found as a reader–some of the best Christian writing, it turns out, is the least overt.

A quality that should never be missing from writing by Christians is a love of truth. This quality is as important as love, and the most truthful writing I’ve come across may have been written by Sophocles, who wrote over four hundred years before the Incarnation, and who was himself a pagan poet and playwright. There is something deeply truthful about the human condition in his tragedies that we still have. The question of our free will and our sense of fate, the question of our pride brought low, these questions become frameworks on which we see the greatness and the limitations of our humanity.

This is much more powerful than writing guided by RRR.

By His light we see light. We are led into all things. The most recent aspect of my journey has involved grief and the loss of a child. I wish this on no one, but I also don’t wish for others to make this journey alone. It turns out that I found that God was in the midst of my suffering. But to listen to the current crop of Christian writers and fiction writers, this wouldn’t have seemed possible.

By Your light we see light.