Christianity Is Alive And Well In Genre Fiction
The New York Times asserts that fiction has lost its faith.
“[I]f any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O’Connor called “Christian convictions,” their would-be successors are thin on the ground.
“So are works of fiction about the quandaries of Christian belief. Writers who do draw on sacred texts and themes see the references go unrecognized. A faith with something like 170 million adherents in the United States, a faith that for centuries seeped into every nook and cranny of our society, now plays the role it plays in Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “This Blessed House”: as some statues left behind in an old building, bewildering the new occupants.”
I beg to differ.
There are thousands of books being written that play out against the scenery of Christian beliefs.
The problem lies not with authors, but with a jaded, cynical, arrogant and narrow-focused “establishment” of smug critics who find faith, ethics and the struggle to do the right thing simply dreary, outmoded and beneath them.
That’s their right.
But as the author of the New York Times piece points out, their narrow view of the world means that, “Christian belief figures into literary fiction in our place and time: as something between a dead language and a hangover. ”
Perhaps one needs to broaden a view beyond “literary fiction” which is controlled by the aforementioned group which accepts divergent ideas with the same equanimity as an Iranian ayatollah.
So, ignore the literary ayatollahs who control “literary” and head for “genre” and you’ll find plenty of Christian and other faith-based struggles.
I’m one of hundreds of genre writers whose characters struggle with right and wrong, good and evil and how to do the “right thing.” But the self-appointed, in-bred literati find evil as obsolete as God since both of them are just (in their view) products of electro-biochemical processes which transcend nothing at all.
My 1999 novel, Daughter of God, was the first thriller to look the divine feminine in Christianity and what that meant for contemporary morality. It was certainly solid enough for The Da Vinci Code to rip off.
And my most recent two novels: Perfect Killer and Die By Wire are both thrillers where the characters and action are driven by religion and Christianity (with an assist from Islam in the latter case).
Information about all my books can be found here.
