Wow, this just answered a question I had about why Christian fiction has been pivoting towards Amish romance... the Amish have a degree of unselfconscoius faith but they're still living as outsiders.
Yes, the Amish are interesting in this because they do choose to live separately. The faith must be self-conscious. They cannot be unaware of the wider world they have withdrawn from. But within their own community they can enjoy the reassurance of a shared faith. What you say about Amish romance makes perfect sense.
I suppose this explains why some Christian readers treat writers as enemies if they portray a self-conscious struggle of faith: by depicting as self-conscious what they want to keep unquestioned, you put yourself in that outsider category.
Yes. The readers are really demanding something impossible: the drama of a story without the necessary sources of drama. What then is a writer to do for them?
There's never been an era where Christianity has been so unself-conscious that trying to follow it has not been a driver of heroic action. Witness how *Everyman* had Everyman's impending death shake him up.
That's fair. Christianity is enormously demanding, and unselfconscious Christianity is seldom of the most demanding kind. A mimetic faith consists in the imitation of the crowd rather than the imitation of Christ. It follows that in a moment of crisis, when the demands of the faith call for heroic action, they must inevitably be self-consciously examined, and must shake the person up. The problem arises in fiction when an author doesn't have that moment shake the character up. That's when the narrative seems forced.
Interesting and informative. Your article provides a vocabulary with which to discuss a literary issue. As I was reading, I re-read a paragraph and substituted the word virtue for belief. As I suspected, your differentiation between self-conscious and unself-conscious applied beautifully. Virtue, that is action, approved by the tribe can be more habit than those actions that are chosen among many possibilities. Government forced virtue (for example, government taxes you for actions approved of by the tribe) is rightly resented when this forced virtue conflicts with your beliefs. (State paid abortions is the best example.) But individual actions done by choice (for example, working in the soup kitchen on Christmas Eve instead of writing a check) are transformed into true virtue. As fodder for Christian stories, individual decision making between alternative 'goods' will lessen the "forced" feeling of the written piece.
In the movie, The Nun's Story, Hepburn removes an engagement ring and leaves a note to a fellow who loves her. She makes a virtuous choice to leave human love behind. She struggles with obedience, and asks how it is that bells, the Great Silence, etc. which interrupt helping humans in need can be God's will. (I'm summarizing) Mother Superior tells her she must decide whether she is a nun first and a nurse second, or the other way around. The question is really asking, are you personally dedicated to God, or is your dedication a device to perform social work? You don't have to be a nun to do good in this world. Hepburn faces a choice.
Yet, another good v good choice arises with the coming of WW II. Remain politically neutral and love the enemy, or help fight fascism, and perhaps, aid and abet killing the enemy. She leave the sisterhood. Is she virtuous?
Even within the unself-conscious world of nunnery, there are self-conscious virtues from which to choose; a hierarchy of virtuousness, you might say, that she must construct within herself. The film, at least, did not seem forced. Rather, it presented realistic situations Catholicism faces even today, for example, with the illegal immigration issue. It will take courage, and tolerance to face issues such as these I don't see as I did in 1959.
Yes, this gets us into the area of respectability. Respectability is the virtue of a mimetic faith, copying behaviour as we copy beliefs. One of the great sources of drama in fiction is the moment when a character realizes that the respectability they practice and the faith they have mimetically repeated actually point in very different directions.
Downton Abbey is a great example of this. Almost all of its storylines were based on respectability and the rebellion against it.
Respectability is the single greatest instrument of social control. To fail in respectability can cost you your friends and your livelihood. To step outside the unselfconscious virtue of respectability requires a very deliberate self-conscious choice of a different source of virtue.
Intriguing. I do struggle with this, as I write fiction that is drawn from my own faith, but that I also want to be accessible to the non-believer. Like Lewis 'smuggling in Jesus' via Narnia.
I'd be interested in your thoughts on some of my recent attempts, if you have the time and patience to do so:
Fiction drawn from faith is always problematic. A faith is defined by a set of propositions. Fiction should be drawn from experience, not propositions. Of course, living by a faith does give rise to experiences, both of the ordinary quotidian variety and perhaps of that reality in which one has faith. But those who seek to write fiction based on their faith often start from the propositions of the faith rather than the experiences, which is why they don't want to make doubt or questioning part of their story.
That Lewis seemed to pull it off has, I think, misled a great many writers into thinking that they could do it. But there is, in fact, nothing of Christian creed or theology in Narnia. Aslan had no doctrine, no church, no priesthood, no sacraments, no ritual, and no assembly. He is a thophany, not a god incarnate. Aslan is an instance of the hero with a thousand faces, and Lewis's goal in writing the Narnia books was, as he said, to prepare the imagination for the Christ story, not to teach it directly.
The Narnia books are about the encounter with the divine, which is an experience, not a doctrine. They are accessible to non-believers because they are recounting an experience, and people find value in stories of encounters with mythic beasts that they don't believe in, such as dragons, elves, of the god Pan in Kenneth Graham's wonderful The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. These moments of awe are a human universal, no matter how you account for them, and therefore, experiencing them in a story strikes a universal chord. Lewis's success consists not in how close he came to telling the Christ story but in how far away from any specific dogmatic or doctrinal part of it he managed to stay.
Fascinating. We seem to be coming from very different perspectives and using different definitions of faith.
Without seeking to get into an argument, I would gently suggest Jesus' abundant use of parables (often short stories with beginnings and ends, memorable characters and scenes) as a counterpoint to what you are saying. Just as Christ's parables elucidate principles of faith in way which is deeper and more effective than simply stating a creed or doctrine. In this way, I would say Lewis' fictions work as a kind of extended parable.
Or take Tolkien's mythic world-building as another example. The stories of the residents of Middle Earth facing pure Satanic evil, whilst dealing with the temptation of power, does teach us faith principles in a vibrant way.
But that's exactly my point. Lewis kept the principle of telling stories. Not only parables, but the story of the death and resurrection itself. He left out everything else that defines a faith today: "no doctrine, no church, no priesthood, no sacraments, no ritual, and no assembly."
I don't think "extended parable" quite fits. He set out to create an entire history of the relationship between a world and its creator that consisted entirely of stories. The absence of any form of church or doctrine in Narnia should be a clear indication that Lewis went straight to the depiction of the encounter with the divine, eschewing any doctrine, church, or religion.
But while those stories have gospel parallels, they also have parallels to a number of myths. Most notably, perhaps, Aslan is not incarnated; he simply "lands". His relationship with his creatures owes at least as much to Apollo as it does the Christ. And what all that does for Lewis is allow him to just tell stories, which is precisely why he can be enjoyed by so many people, including those who are entirely unaware of the parallels to Christ.
But while the deposit of faith does indeed include all these stories, it is *defined* by a set of propositions: the creed and the catechism. Even Christ himself explained the meaning of some of the parables in propositional terms. And the problem that writers typically run into is when they try to use doctrinal propositions as the source of their fiction. (A problem that applies equally to other faiths and ideologies.)
Interesting article, even for a non-Christian like me! I think it speaks to something that applies even more widely. People seem to want heroicism without the heroic struggle (which never actually “feels” heroic in the moment) that brings it. Becoming self conscious and living with the internal struggle of feeling at odds with your tribe is the thing that in one way or another most of great literature is about!
Absolutely. The same thing will apply to any system of thought that is held in the same way, with any dogma, essentially. And thus it will apply to any fiction based on that dogma, independently of whether it is true or not.
This is an interesting perspective. I've not considered faith as a 'self-conscious' thing... surely anything anybody believes in conscious, in that the person has come to that belief. I think the difficulty is in putting this on the page in a natural way. I still haven't got to the bottom of what I think is the reason so much contemporary Christian fiction is so cheesy... maybe it is this over thinking of it, as you suggest. Maybe it's a market thing.
What I'm more interested in is why you've equated Catholicism and Christianity as if they're almost the same thing, when in fact Catholicism and biblical Christianity have some very different and incompatible beliefs. Perhaps it's to do with the similar outworking of morality? I wonder if in publishing, the market for fiction is similar.
Actually, I was deliberately separating them. The problem is one of terminology. As a Catholic, I would naturally use the term Protestant for Protestants. But that is not what the Protestant fiction market calls itself. It calls itself Christian. So there are two markets, one called Catholic and one called Christian. The Christian market is much larger and better organized, as most Catholics tend to read mainstream fiction. But there is a distinct Catholic publishing market. If I had used the term Christian exclusively, that would have seemed to omit the Catholic market, even though it, too, is a Christian market with the same issues.
". . . when in fact Catholicism and biblical Christianity have some very different and incompatible beliefs."
Ooh, fascinating!
As a long-time Christian but very new Catholic, I am veeery tempted to try to start an argument about this here. (One of the great ironies of the kind of "Bible alone" Evangelicalism I left behind is that it's _less_ biblical than Catholicism, overall.) That classic "convert's zeal", maybe.
But I realize that is beyond the scope and inapt to this context. So, instead a courteous tip of the hat...
Like Mr. Kostas, who commented above, I too thought of C. S. Lewis while reading the original post, but I thought first of his so-called "Space Trilogy", Lewis's three science-fiction novels for grown-ups: in which (some of) the characters are Christian, and are (it seems to me) realistically depicted having the kind of internal struggles and monologues (dialogues?) that we as Christian readers recognize and find familiar--as an example, I'm thinking of right after Professor Dimble has the meeting with Mark, when Mark is far gone down a dark path, and Professor Dimble is beating himself up for not having been more charitable to a difficult person in a difficult period.
The Space Trilogy always seemed to me remarkable in this, precisely because (in the fiction I've read, at least) such over depictions of characters' Christian faith seemed extremely unusual. Perhaps because it would seem forced, coming from most writers. But I don't know that anyone could claim that Lewis's characters hold their beliefs unselfconsciously from beginning to end; so I think my example of the Space Trilogy is consistent with Mr. Baker's original thesis above.
But I guess what Mr. Baker's thesis really recalls, for me, is an observation I'm sure I've seen movie reviewer Deacon Steven Greydanus at Decent Films.com and/or others make (I'm having trouble finding it at the moment), that there's a certain kind of movie coming out of a certain kind of Christian subculture, a mode of thinking that (pointing a finger only at myself, that this was exactly how I thought, when I was a newer Christian, and more of an Evangelical) I now sometimes think of as "Baptist black-and-white thinking":
As I recall, the movie reviewer pointed out that in some movies (_Fireproof_ or similar, perhaps?), character are depicted as consistently having good fortune or an easy path while they remain faithful, hardships whenever they do things they shouldn't--in other words, "instant karma's going to get you", as John Lennon might put it.
This feels forced, and contrasts sharply with fiction in which life is hard, and sometimes (frequently) bad things happen to good people, because the latter is what we all intuitively recognize as our lived experience, whether we're Christian or not.
The portrayal of Jamie Frase in the Outlander series is as natural and unforced story of a true believer and practitioner of faith as I have read anywhere.
This would explain why standout Christian movies will often be dramatizations of a real person's journey to faith (resolved and in the past, of course). Knowing the story ends in faith allows every affordance needed for a real story to be told. A structural comfort.
But yes, the same story invented as fiction would be unacceptable.
Wow, this just answered a question I had about why Christian fiction has been pivoting towards Amish romance... the Amish have a degree of unselfconscoius faith but they're still living as outsiders.
Yes, the Amish are interesting in this because they do choose to live separately. The faith must be self-conscious. They cannot be unaware of the wider world they have withdrawn from. But within their own community they can enjoy the reassurance of a shared faith. What you say about Amish romance makes perfect sense.
I suppose this explains why some Christian readers treat writers as enemies if they portray a self-conscious struggle of faith: by depicting as self-conscious what they want to keep unquestioned, you put yourself in that outsider category.
Yes. The readers are really demanding something impossible: the drama of a story without the necessary sources of drama. What then is a writer to do for them?
There's never been an era where Christianity has been so unself-conscious that trying to follow it has not been a driver of heroic action. Witness how *Everyman* had Everyman's impending death shake him up.
That's fair. Christianity is enormously demanding, and unselfconscious Christianity is seldom of the most demanding kind. A mimetic faith consists in the imitation of the crowd rather than the imitation of Christ. It follows that in a moment of crisis, when the demands of the faith call for heroic action, they must inevitably be self-consciously examined, and must shake the person up. The problem arises in fiction when an author doesn't have that moment shake the character up. That's when the narrative seems forced.
Interesting and informative. Your article provides a vocabulary with which to discuss a literary issue. As I was reading, I re-read a paragraph and substituted the word virtue for belief. As I suspected, your differentiation between self-conscious and unself-conscious applied beautifully. Virtue, that is action, approved by the tribe can be more habit than those actions that are chosen among many possibilities. Government forced virtue (for example, government taxes you for actions approved of by the tribe) is rightly resented when this forced virtue conflicts with your beliefs. (State paid abortions is the best example.) But individual actions done by choice (for example, working in the soup kitchen on Christmas Eve instead of writing a check) are transformed into true virtue. As fodder for Christian stories, individual decision making between alternative 'goods' will lessen the "forced" feeling of the written piece.
In the movie, The Nun's Story, Hepburn removes an engagement ring and leaves a note to a fellow who loves her. She makes a virtuous choice to leave human love behind. She struggles with obedience, and asks how it is that bells, the Great Silence, etc. which interrupt helping humans in need can be God's will. (I'm summarizing) Mother Superior tells her she must decide whether she is a nun first and a nurse second, or the other way around. The question is really asking, are you personally dedicated to God, or is your dedication a device to perform social work? You don't have to be a nun to do good in this world. Hepburn faces a choice.
Yet, another good v good choice arises with the coming of WW II. Remain politically neutral and love the enemy, or help fight fascism, and perhaps, aid and abet killing the enemy. She leave the sisterhood. Is she virtuous?
Even within the unself-conscious world of nunnery, there are self-conscious virtues from which to choose; a hierarchy of virtuousness, you might say, that she must construct within herself. The film, at least, did not seem forced. Rather, it presented realistic situations Catholicism faces even today, for example, with the illegal immigration issue. It will take courage, and tolerance to face issues such as these I don't see as I did in 1959.
Yes, this gets us into the area of respectability. Respectability is the virtue of a mimetic faith, copying behaviour as we copy beliefs. One of the great sources of drama in fiction is the moment when a character realizes that the respectability they practice and the faith they have mimetically repeated actually point in very different directions.
Downton Abbey is a great example of this. Almost all of its storylines were based on respectability and the rebellion against it.
Respectability is the single greatest instrument of social control. To fail in respectability can cost you your friends and your livelihood. To step outside the unselfconscious virtue of respectability requires a very deliberate self-conscious choice of a different source of virtue.
Intriguing. I do struggle with this, as I write fiction that is drawn from my own faith, but that I also want to be accessible to the non-believer. Like Lewis 'smuggling in Jesus' via Narnia.
I'd be interested in your thoughts on some of my recent attempts, if you have the time and patience to do so:
https://waymarkers.substack.com/p/the-mouth
https://waymarkers.substack.com/p/the-raising-up-of-niccolo-part-1
Fiction drawn from faith is always problematic. A faith is defined by a set of propositions. Fiction should be drawn from experience, not propositions. Of course, living by a faith does give rise to experiences, both of the ordinary quotidian variety and perhaps of that reality in which one has faith. But those who seek to write fiction based on their faith often start from the propositions of the faith rather than the experiences, which is why they don't want to make doubt or questioning part of their story.
That Lewis seemed to pull it off has, I think, misled a great many writers into thinking that they could do it. But there is, in fact, nothing of Christian creed or theology in Narnia. Aslan had no doctrine, no church, no priesthood, no sacraments, no ritual, and no assembly. He is a thophany, not a god incarnate. Aslan is an instance of the hero with a thousand faces, and Lewis's goal in writing the Narnia books was, as he said, to prepare the imagination for the Christ story, not to teach it directly.
The Narnia books are about the encounter with the divine, which is an experience, not a doctrine. They are accessible to non-believers because they are recounting an experience, and people find value in stories of encounters with mythic beasts that they don't believe in, such as dragons, elves, of the god Pan in Kenneth Graham's wonderful The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. These moments of awe are a human universal, no matter how you account for them, and therefore, experiencing them in a story strikes a universal chord. Lewis's success consists not in how close he came to telling the Christ story but in how far away from any specific dogmatic or doctrinal part of it he managed to stay.
Fascinating. We seem to be coming from very different perspectives and using different definitions of faith.
Without seeking to get into an argument, I would gently suggest Jesus' abundant use of parables (often short stories with beginnings and ends, memorable characters and scenes) as a counterpoint to what you are saying. Just as Christ's parables elucidate principles of faith in way which is deeper and more effective than simply stating a creed or doctrine. In this way, I would say Lewis' fictions work as a kind of extended parable.
Or take Tolkien's mythic world-building as another example. The stories of the residents of Middle Earth facing pure Satanic evil, whilst dealing with the temptation of power, does teach us faith principles in a vibrant way.
But that's exactly my point. Lewis kept the principle of telling stories. Not only parables, but the story of the death and resurrection itself. He left out everything else that defines a faith today: "no doctrine, no church, no priesthood, no sacraments, no ritual, and no assembly."
I don't think "extended parable" quite fits. He set out to create an entire history of the relationship between a world and its creator that consisted entirely of stories. The absence of any form of church or doctrine in Narnia should be a clear indication that Lewis went straight to the depiction of the encounter with the divine, eschewing any doctrine, church, or religion.
But while those stories have gospel parallels, they also have parallels to a number of myths. Most notably, perhaps, Aslan is not incarnated; he simply "lands". His relationship with his creatures owes at least as much to Apollo as it does the Christ. And what all that does for Lewis is allow him to just tell stories, which is precisely why he can be enjoyed by so many people, including those who are entirely unaware of the parallels to Christ.
But while the deposit of faith does indeed include all these stories, it is *defined* by a set of propositions: the creed and the catechism. Even Christ himself explained the meaning of some of the parables in propositional terms. And the problem that writers typically run into is when they try to use doctrinal propositions as the source of their fiction. (A problem that applies equally to other faiths and ideologies.)
Interesting article, even for a non-Christian like me! I think it speaks to something that applies even more widely. People seem to want heroicism without the heroic struggle (which never actually “feels” heroic in the moment) that brings it. Becoming self conscious and living with the internal struggle of feeling at odds with your tribe is the thing that in one way or another most of great literature is about!
Absolutely. The same thing will apply to any system of thought that is held in the same way, with any dogma, essentially. And thus it will apply to any fiction based on that dogma, independently of whether it is true or not.
Excellent breakdown on why Christian fiction feels forced/faked
This is an interesting perspective. I've not considered faith as a 'self-conscious' thing... surely anything anybody believes in conscious, in that the person has come to that belief. I think the difficulty is in putting this on the page in a natural way. I still haven't got to the bottom of what I think is the reason so much contemporary Christian fiction is so cheesy... maybe it is this over thinking of it, as you suggest. Maybe it's a market thing.
What I'm more interested in is why you've equated Catholicism and Christianity as if they're almost the same thing, when in fact Catholicism and biblical Christianity have some very different and incompatible beliefs. Perhaps it's to do with the similar outworking of morality? I wonder if in publishing, the market for fiction is similar.
Actually, I was deliberately separating them. The problem is one of terminology. As a Catholic, I would naturally use the term Protestant for Protestants. But that is not what the Protestant fiction market calls itself. It calls itself Christian. So there are two markets, one called Catholic and one called Christian. The Christian market is much larger and better organized, as most Catholics tend to read mainstream fiction. But there is a distinct Catholic publishing market. If I had used the term Christian exclusively, that would have seemed to omit the Catholic market, even though it, too, is a Christian market with the same issues.
". . . when in fact Catholicism and biblical Christianity have some very different and incompatible beliefs."
Ooh, fascinating!
As a long-time Christian but very new Catholic, I am veeery tempted to try to start an argument about this here. (One of the great ironies of the kind of "Bible alone" Evangelicalism I left behind is that it's _less_ biblical than Catholicism, overall.) That classic "convert's zeal", maybe.
But I realize that is beyond the scope and inapt to this context. So, instead a courteous tip of the hat...
Re OP: Fascinating point.
Like Mr. Kostas, who commented above, I too thought of C. S. Lewis while reading the original post, but I thought first of his so-called "Space Trilogy", Lewis's three science-fiction novels for grown-ups: in which (some of) the characters are Christian, and are (it seems to me) realistically depicted having the kind of internal struggles and monologues (dialogues?) that we as Christian readers recognize and find familiar--as an example, I'm thinking of right after Professor Dimble has the meeting with Mark, when Mark is far gone down a dark path, and Professor Dimble is beating himself up for not having been more charitable to a difficult person in a difficult period.
The Space Trilogy always seemed to me remarkable in this, precisely because (in the fiction I've read, at least) such over depictions of characters' Christian faith seemed extremely unusual. Perhaps because it would seem forced, coming from most writers. But I don't know that anyone could claim that Lewis's characters hold their beliefs unselfconsciously from beginning to end; so I think my example of the Space Trilogy is consistent with Mr. Baker's original thesis above.
But I guess what Mr. Baker's thesis really recalls, for me, is an observation I'm sure I've seen movie reviewer Deacon Steven Greydanus at Decent Films.com and/or others make (I'm having trouble finding it at the moment), that there's a certain kind of movie coming out of a certain kind of Christian subculture, a mode of thinking that (pointing a finger only at myself, that this was exactly how I thought, when I was a newer Christian, and more of an Evangelical) I now sometimes think of as "Baptist black-and-white thinking":
As I recall, the movie reviewer pointed out that in some movies (_Fireproof_ or similar, perhaps?), character are depicted as consistently having good fortune or an easy path while they remain faithful, hardships whenever they do things they shouldn't--in other words, "instant karma's going to get you", as John Lennon might put it.
This feels forced, and contrasts sharply with fiction in which life is hard, and sometimes (frequently) bad things happen to good people, because the latter is what we all intuitively recognize as our lived experience, whether we're Christian or not.
(meant "overt depictions", not "over-depictions"!)
The portrayal of Jamie Frase in the Outlander series is as natural and unforced story of a true believer and practitioner of faith as I have read anywhere.
Have you read any of the novels by Michael O’Brien? He is a master storyteller. How about Robert Hugh Benson in his Lord Of the World?
This would explain why standout Christian movies will often be dramatizations of a real person's journey to faith (resolved and in the past, of course). Knowing the story ends in faith allows every affordance needed for a real story to be told. A structural comfort.
But yes, the same story invented as fiction would be unacceptable.