Faith and Fiction: Part 3

Faith and Fiction: Reconciling the Tension between the Two Great Loves of My Life

In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about the earliest fiction I fell in love with as a child–and how I first noticed the tension between faith and fiction.

In Part 2 of this series, I wrote about how the religious fervor of my teenage years led me to give up some stories and hobbies that I’d otherwise enjoy.

Part 3: College and My Twenties

In high school, my newfound spiritual zeal had led me to give up my longtime hobby of comic books. After enjoying them (a little obsessively) as an older child and preteen, I stopped reading or buying them at all for about three or four years. But old habits die hard, and I found it hard to give up completely on these stories and characters I’d come to love.

College was a new era—one with newfound freedoms and decisions. I attended the Christian school where my dad taught and, even though I could have stayed at home, chose to live in the dorms for the first year to get the “college experience.” I was still sincere about my faith and, by many people’s standards even in a conservative Christian environment, I came from a very sheltered and prudish background. The school didn’t permit R-rated movies, and I, having never watched one in my life, questioned why my Christian peers would ever want to watch such a film at all.

But I would often walk from campus to a nearby Barnes & Noble and there began to rediscover my love for comics and graphic novels. I picked some up from their shelf, sat in the café, and began catching up on the characters and storylines I’d missed over the last few years. In my mind there was somehow a difference between buying/collecting comics, which I’d given up, and reading the collected editions that I could easily find at the bookstore without buying them.

A fellow university student, Taylor (pseudonym), saw me reading at Barnes & Noble from time to time. He shared my interest in comics and introduced me to a couple other guys who did too. In my sophomore year, we attended a small, local comic con together. I slightly struggled with knowing how to proceed, since I officially still wasn’t collecting comics—though there was plenty of other merch to buy (I think I came away with an animated Justice League DVD, at least). Then, the next semester, under Taylor’s leadership, we started an official campus Comic Book Club where we’d talk about—among other topics—the intersection of pop culture and faith. I began to question my previous choice to give up my once-beloved hobby. “If my Christian friends at my Christian college like comics too, then they can’t be all bad—right?” (To be fair, while Taylor remains a committed Christian, I can name several friends from Comic Book Club who have now rejected the faith—so make of that what you will.) I kept reading comics, and I soon began buying them again too—perhaps even more voraciously than I once had, since I now had levels of freedom and income that I’d lacked as a teen.

Comic Book Club wasn’t my only attempt to reconcile my faith with my favorite hobby. There was also The Watchman, an overtly Christian superhero I made up and started writing a story about. I envisioned it like a comic book with monthly installments, but I’m more of a writer than an artist, so I drew a cover for each chapter/issue but still just wrote them in prose format. Still, I released six monthly chapters in 2009–and had outlined ideas for many more–before I diverted my attention to other projects. I also connected with an online group called the Christian Comic Arts Society and got recruited to write a few things for them (including an interview with the guy who drew The Action Bible, and a movie review for which I got paid in the form of covering my ticket). Looking back now, I wonder how much these activities–these efforts of mine to bridge the gap between two disparate worlds–were attempts to assuage my internal guilt over still enjoying comics.

I was also an English major, following in my dad’s footsteps. And in majoring in English at a Christian university—reading lots of great and classic but often secular literature—you inevitably must deal with the ever-present tension between faith and fiction. As I got into my upper-level courses (and later grad school too), my classes encouraged us to ask questions like, “Should Christians read fiction—and if so, why?” In high school, my stock answer to that question would have been something like, “Well, it’s okay to read fiction, because God has given us all things for our enjoyment” (I Timothy 6:17). But now I began thinking about the topic more deeply. In some cases I was still parroting back answers that I’d first heard articulated by my professors (isn’t that what all learning is at first?). But the answers included things like “We need to be able to recognize the worldviews we encounter in fiction—and engage with them from a Christian perspective.” And also, “God is creative, and since humans are made in God’s image, we also should appreciate creativity, beauty, and the arts.”

A creative writing class I took in my junior year helped me to articulate a principle I’ve long since used as a basis for my Christian consumption of fiction. The principle says that part of what makes a story “good” or “bad” isn’t what is portrayed, but rather how it’s portrayed. For example, lots of stories portray, describe, or depict immoral content—even the Bible does so! But is the author celebrating those things or condemning them? Does the story falsely portray sin as glamorous and desirable, or does it rightly show the ugliness and consequences of sin? A story that did the latter—and pointed toward redemption in some way—was deemed to be acceptable, and perhaps even edifying, for a Christian. Catholic author Flannery O’Connor (a favorite of the Christian English department) even took it a step further when she wrote that (and I paraphrase) sometimes, in order to point toward redemption, a story must first accurately show the brokenness of the world and the need for redemption. And therefore it was okay—sometimes even necessary—to include things like strong language, violence, and sexual content in a story, as long as we were careful not to glamorize or idealize those things, not to vicariously indulge in them through our reading or writing, but to portray them realistically, as symptoms of a fallen, sinful world.

A college friend of mine—who was a seminary student training to be a pastor—expressed a similar idea. When I told him about some of my lingering concerns with comics, his response was, “Well, the good guys usually win.” However wacky, convoluted, and cheesy the storylines often are (assessing literary merit or lack thereof is outside the scope of this blog post), superhero comics almost always affirm justice and redemption by showing the triumph of good over evil, the hero over the villain. Sometimes, particularly for characters with darker tones and themes, that justice is scant and veiled, and the story does indeed show us the ugliness of the world more than the redemption. But the justice is still there. And, in my friend’s rationale, this seemed to mean that there were many worse vices a man could choose than comic books.

This mindset was a stark contrast to the one I’d been taught in youth group—where I remember our youth pastor once specifically telling us that, for example, any movie that contains rape is inherently inappropriate, even if the characters at fault were then punished for their wrong behavior or the creators showed that the rape was wrong and ugly. I internalized these new, freeing principles and used them to influence—or perhaps justify—my media consumption going forward.

There was a sharp difference between my perspectives and media consumption at age 14 and at age 24. In my college days and beyond, I not only kept reading comics, but I also read and watched a lot of things that I wouldn’t have before. Admittedly, my younger self would have been ashamed and very uncomfortable watching shows like Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, or Marvel’s Jessica Jones. (I’d also read the Walking Dead comics, which are even worse than the show in terms of mature content.) Even the sexual jokes on a show like The Big Bang Theory would have once made me blush. But I watched all of those shows and more. And yes, I watched my share of R-rated movies by the time I got to grad school. Like many Christian men, I still made it a point to avert my eyes if there’s direct nudity (another principle I still hold to is that you shouldn’t consume any work of fiction that will tempt you into sin). But apart from that, most of the content I would have once considered objectionable bothered me much less than it once did.

I still had a limit, which I did and still do think is important to have. For example, I read the first volume of Garth Ennis’s comic series Preacher (after a spiritually questionable friend in Comic Book Club recommended it) and then decided I didn’t need to read the rest. It felt too crass, gruesome, and borderline blasphemous even for my more accepting tastes. I read The Handmaid’s Tale in grad school for a class on utopian/dystopian literature and appreciated the book’s social commentary. However, when the TV series started streaming a few years later, I watched one episode and realized that seeing sexual acts performed onscreen bothered my sensibilities much more than reading about them in a book, even if the story is rightly criticizing this society’s sexual objectification of women.

Yes, I did still have a limit and some lines I wouldn’t cross—but I’d pushed my boundaries a lot further than I ever had before. While the media I consumed typically didn’t tempt me into sin, and if I had to I could write a thorough academic paper explaining the redemptive content of most of these stories, I sometimes still wondered whether my more accepting standards for fiction were a positive thing for me morally or spiritually. And these wonderings have led me to where I am today.

To be concluded in Part 4!

Questions for discussion:
1. Have your personal standards for fiction consumption changed over time? If so, why? Have they changed to be broader and more accepting, or narrower and more restrictive?
2. Should Christians consume fiction–especially “frivolous” fiction by secular authors that doesn’t seem directly related to the spiritual realm? Why or why not?
3. I wrote about the principle that “what makes a story good or bad isn’t what is portrayed, but rather how it’s portrayed. Do you agree with this principle? Why or why not?
4. Even if Christians can and should consume secular fiction, is it important for us to still have a limit and certain lines we won’t cross? Where should those lines fall, and why?