Christianity and Speculative Fiction: God and Mammon?

Originally published at Thus Sayeth the Lord…. You can comment here or there.

After Writers of the Future XXI, back in 2005, I signed up to do a couple book signings for the anthology. It was a neat experience– not wholly productive, as far as writing or selling books go; not after the first couple times, anyway. Most of the books I sold went to friends and acquaintances who’d I’d pestered to come. A few went to curious shoppers (this was around Christmastime).

(Note: to me, NEAT does not equal NICE. It equates to INTERESTING.)

The neat thing about the experience, or the thing I wound up taking away with me from almost every single event, was how…entitled complete strangers felt to give me future writing advice. Almost all of these comments were religious in nature; one well-meaning gentleman said, “Next time, you should write something about the Lord.”

It would be nice to report that I shrugged demurely and let the comment pass. I did not. “The Lord’s got a book already.”

What I’ve observed and experienced leads me to believe that there is a general mistrust of speculative fiction (that is, science fiction and fantasy) in the wider Christian community in the United States. I’m not talking about the nutsos who burn Harry Potter books; I’m talking about the soccer moms and dads who teach Sunday School, who study the Bible, who love God and their neighbor, and who are generally decent people.

These aren’t the illiterati; these are all people who I met in Barnes and Nobles, and Borders, and Waldenbooks. People who make trips to the library weekly, who probably fund whole library wings with the late fees their children rack up from not turning in Arthur books. (Not that I’d know anything about that) These are good, sensible people who give the speculative fiction section a wide berth.

I’m a Mormon. An honest-to-goodness, devout, church-attending believer of Jesus Christ. I love my faith. That is to say, I’m not in any way, shape, or form, some type of dissatisfied, disillusioned, cultural Mormon. I know it’s en vogue for writers to wrestle with ecclesiastical authority, and wind up embracing…I dunno, ecuemenical humanitarianism. I don’t wrestle. I can’t get the little spandex uniform to fit. (Too snug)

So of all the people in the world, I should be able to understand why some Christians get a hate-on when it comes to speculative fiction.

I think that a lot of it has to do with the “weirdness” of speculative fiction, especially fantasy. There’s what God ordered for this world– physical, scientific laws; and then there’s the Other. The superstition. The creepy. Some people read about a woman filling a tub with blackberries and making a mind-controlling wine from the juice, and they…bug out. It’s too odd. It’s too abnormal. Weird, weird, weird.

I contend that there’s much more “weird” and “abnormal” things in mainstream fiction than people recognize. The glorification and justification of adultery, for example. Breaking apart a marriage trumps goblins for weirdness every time. Even wizard goblins riding on dragons who breathe purple bubbles don’t compare to Jenny Rae leaving Steve for Mikhail.

Can a speculative fiction writer be so weird, and yet be a believer? Can speculative fiction serve to deepen readers’ spiritual lives? CS Lewis seemed to think so; someone commented to him once that his Narnia fantasies were dangerous because they led children to believe in utter rubbish. Lewis noted that no child believes that lions can talk, and if they do, their belief is easily shunted off. Th
e danger, he argued, was in “school-day” fiction stories; where the protagonist was always the popular boy in school, where every day was great and fresh and etc. That was the lie that hurt children, because it had all the objects of reality (familiar setting, things, people, roles), but so often far removed from the substance of reality.

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