Why Christian Fiction Always Seems Forced

Trying to make it seem natural is what makes it seem forced

Katherine Joyce recently asked this in a note:

Missing the 21st-century element of the request, I suggested Brideshead Revisited, the Sword of Honour trilogy, and The Power and the Glory. But in fact, those books don’t really fit the bill because none of them make Catholic faith as natural as breathing. On the contrary, they emphasize that it is not as natural as breathing, but a source of profound awkwardness in the lives of the characters, which is exactly why those books don’t feel forced.

The Catholic or Christian faith is not, today, as natural as breathing, and any attempt to make it seem so inevitably seems forced. That may not always have been the case, but it is so today, and has been so for a very long time.

There are two modes of belief in anything: the unselfconscious and the self-conscious. Unselfconscious beliefs are those that are held by everyone around you and that no one ever questions. You don’t think about them as believing so much as knowing. Knowledge is what we all agree on. Beliefs are the things we disagree on.

Self-conscious beliefs are those you hold that not everyone around you holds, and which therefore set you apart, to one degree or another, from people around you. With such beliefs, you are conscious of the distinction between knowing and believing. You are conscious that your beliefs set you apart.

We are a tribal species. For thousands of years, we existed as small roving bands of hunter-gatherers. In such bands, people were highly reliant on each other. To be exiled from the band, to lose your right to a place around the fire, would likely mean death, and so we evolved to be strongly motivated to fit in with the rest of our society. We are what psychologists call a mimetic species. That is, we tend to copy each other. This helps us fit in with the group and avoid being exiled. Unselfconscious beliefs are those we adopt mimetically, as part of securing our place in the tribe. These are the kinds of beliefs that are as natural as breathing.

In my Cuthbert’s People series, I have tried to depict people who are unselfconsciously Christian. That is, they are Christian because their tribe (tribe/people/village/society/kingdom/nation) is Christian, not because of any conscious individual decision. During the conversion period in Europe, it was common that missionaries would convert a King, or convert a Queen who converted her husband. Immediately, the whole tribe would become Christian. This is sometimes criticized as forced conversion, but it would have been the most natural thing in the world to most of them. They followed the religion of the tribe, not from personal conviction of its truth, but because it was the religion of the tribe. When the king changed that religion, they naturally changed as well. The same thing happened at the Reformation, where populations largely converted en masse. Some rebelled and were martyred. Most mimetically adopted the faith of their rulers.

Following the religion of the tribe keeps you safe. People who don’t follow the religion of the tribe are disruptive of the unity of the tribe. This makes it hard for the rest of the tribe to trust them. They become a danger to the polity, and thus liable to be martyred, as so many early Christians were martyred by the Roman polity.

Being Catholic or Christian where this is not the faith of the tribe makes you a self-conscious believer. You are conscious that you have departed from the consensus of the tribe and are therefore suspect in its eyes. That means that you have to be far more conscious of and dedicated to your faith than you would be if you held that faith mimetically as part of the tribe. Otherwise you would not risk the displeasure of the tribe by holding onto your heterodox beliefs.

Being a Catholic or a Christian in the West today won’t get you martyred, though it can have a number of other penalties attached to it. The same cannot be said of much of the rest of the world. And before you say it, yes, tribally Christian societies have punished apostates of other faiths with penalties up to and including death. We are a tribal species, and apostates among us make us feel uneasy in some deep part of the brain that cannot be easily argued out of its unease by exhortation or argument.

Of course, the apostate in any society has the same unease in the same deep part of the brain. They are in a constant struggle with the mimetic part of the brain that wants to imitate the people around them. Don’t stand out, it bleats. Don’t be contrary. It’s not safe. It is holding you back from advancement in the tribe. It could even get you killed. Why not just go along to get along?

And this is why many Catholics and many Christians long for a society in which their faith could be held unselfconsciously, where that voice in the back of their heads would grow silent and contented because their faith conformed to the faith of the tribe. And thus it is no wonder that they hunger for a literature that portrays such a society and that portrays Catholic or Christian believers living at ease in such a society. The same is true of anyone who holds any socially heterodox belief. They all imagine and long for a society where their beliefs are mainstream and can be held unselfconsciously and in comfort.

The problem is, there is no story in which unselfconscious belief becomes the source of drama. To become a source of drama, to become a driver of a plot, the belief must be challenged, and in being challenged it necessarily becomes self-conscious. A plot based on a faith as natural as breathing would therefore again seem forced. The forced nature of such stories is not a product of insufficient craft on the part of the author; it is inherent in the nature of the project. This too is true of any other form of socially heterodox belief.

There are two ways that a belief can go from being unselfconscious to self-conscious. The first is a change of circumstances. This sometimes happens to kids going off to university for the first time. They may have been unselfconsciously Christian at home, especially if they went to a Christian school in a predominantly Christian neighbourhood. But at the university, they enter a society that is not predominantly Christian, which forces them either to adopt their faith self-consciously or adopt the unselfconscious orthodoxy of their peers. The same, again, is true of people of other faiths and convictions.

The second way is for an event to force a person to realize a contradiction in their unselfconscious beliefs. It is not only possible but common for people to unselfconsciously hold logically contradictory beliefs. Since their beliefs are held unselfconsciously, they never question them unless something happens where two unselfconsciously held beliefs call for different courses of action. The person then becomes self-consciously aware of both of these beliefs, and whichever they decide to follow, both of those beliefs then become self-consciously held, even if they are held unselfconsciously by the rest of their society.

These two scenarios, the belief that is challenged by entry into a new society and incompatible beliefs revealed by an event, form the essence of the plot of a vast swath of the world’s literature. Both these scenarios involve the person questioning their faith in some way. They may question their adherence to it, they may question their understanding of it, they may question its doctrines, they may question their understanding of its doctrines, they may question its rewards and sanctions, but some part of it they must certainly call into question as a necessary part of judging between it and their other, incompatible belief. A belief cannot go from being mimetic and unselfconscious to being deliberate and self-conscious without being questioned.

But questioning the faith is anathema to “Christian fiction.” That makes both of these plot shapes difficult to implement. To omit the questioning would be to force out of the picture something that is both natural and inevitable. The result must be a story that feels forced.

We should note at this point that the wider world, by and large, has no problem with novels that portray Catholicism or Christianity as a self-conscious faith. In fact, they would not consider works like Brideshead Revisited or The Power and the Glory to be “Christian fiction” or “Catholic fiction” at all, but works of mainstream fiction that happen to be by and about Catholics.

Similarly, I have never had any reader assign my Cuthbert’s People series to the “Catholic Fiction” or “Christian Fiction” ghettos, even though it does portray characters who are unselfconsciously Christian. They are unselfconsciously Christian because the series is set in an age where everyone, or at least everyone of their civilization, is unselfconsciously Christian, where it is simply the religion of the tribe.

The reason that general readers don’t seem to assign these books to a “Catholic fiction” ghetto, I believe, is because in all of them, the characters discover contradictions between their unselfconscious faith and some other unselfconscious belief which then leads to them questioning what they believe, where their loyalties lie, and how they should act. All of which is consonant with human life in every age, and of every habit of belief, and thus something that an audience of any faith can appreciate and understand.

But this isn’t what the “Christian fiction” market wants. It wants stories in which faith is at once self-conscious, so that it can be an heroic virtue, and unselfconscious, so that it can seem as natural as breathing. And that will always seem forced, because it is forcing together two contrary things: self-conscious and unselfconscious faith.

And yet both the audience and the writers want that combination because it provides an affirmation of their faith and a sense of supernatural protection to make up for the unease of the deep mimetic part of the brain that just wants to fit in with the rest of the tribe. The self-consciously heroic faith justifies the reward of supernatural protection from the angry tribe, while the unselfconscious part soothes the mimetic instinct to conform.

You can write a story about the difficulties experienced by a person of self-conscious faith attempting to live in a tribe that is hostile to that faith, as Evelyn Waugh does so brilliantly in the Sword of Honor trilogy, and still be read in the mainstream market.

You can write stories about the difficulties experienced by people trying to reconcile their personal desires with an unselfconscious faith, as I do perhaps a touch less brilliantly in The Wistful and the Good, Saint Agnes and the Selkie, The Needle of Avocation, and The Wanderer and the Way, and still be read in the mainstream market.

What you can’t do, at least not without awkwardness, and without being assigned to a niche Catholic or Christian market, is try to have your cake and eat it too, to have a faith which is both as natural as breathing and also the driver of heroic action. Mimetic beliefs can lead us to do stupid and dangerous things, but these are not heroic actions precisely because they are mimetic. Lemmings are not heroes. An action becomes heroic when it is chosen in defiance of the self-interest of the hero. (This is why the refusal of the call to adventure is an indispensable part of the hero’s journey.)

Christian faith (or any other kind of faith) can certainly inspire heroic action, but in doing so, it must become more than mimetic in character. It must become self-conscious. And any novel that portrays it that way, as an honest expression of human experience, and not a forced piece of ill-considered evangelical propaganda, marches itself out of the “Christian fiction” ghetto and into the mainstream. Within the ghetto, however, the feeling that stories are forced will remain, because the ghetto itself is defined by forcing together two things that cannot naturally coexist.

Not everyone will care, of course. Not everyone will be conscious of the forced nature of the storytelling. The comforts and affirmations they are looking for may more than compensate for any forced element of the story. And it’s a free country. Read what you want. But if you are reading Catholic or Christian fiction and cannot shake the sense that it feels forced, this is likely the reason, or part of it at least.

But not all fiction by or about Catholics or Christians is going to feel this way. If it treats honestly and naturally the struggle to reconcile conviction with desire, a struggle that is common to people of every creed and none, people of every creed and none will recognize the nature of that struggle in the story and will accept it at face value. If it doesn’t, they won’t accept it at all.

Of course, there is a ton of Christian and Catholic fiction that I have not read. There is a ton of every kind of fiction that I have not read. There is more fiction than I could read in a thousand lifetimes. So if you tell me that there is genre Christian or Catholic fiction, the kind that would not sell in the mainstream, that does not suffer from this problem, I am prepared to take you at your word. But I have read enough fiction generally to recognize how this dynamic of unselfconscious and self-conscious belief, and the transition from one to the other, plays out in drama and in life, to know that if you do not deal with this relationship and transition honestly, your work will invariably seem forced.