Religious genre fiction

Well, let me start at the beginning. I was looking for some good contemporary YA adventure on Google Books search, limiting my search only to books published in the 21st century. I found one that looked like it might be interesting judging by the title and cover - it looked like an adventurous thriller.

The next step was to use the book preview feature to see what it was like, and if it would be worth checking out. So I did, and found someone talking about God, while in danger, and how he would help them, etc.

Now, first off let me put up a disclaimer that I'm nonreligious. But that said, I know there are a lot of people who are, and fiction tends to gloss over it, so the idea of integrating someone's religious views into a thriller seemed interesting. After all, nothing about the cover or blurb indicated this was a religious book at all.

So, curious, I did a "search inside" for the use of the word "Jesus". 2 results. Then I searched "God". About a dozen or more. I skipped to one of them, and it was a girl asking one of the main characters "Do you believe in God?" and the protagonist saying "Yes, even if I don't act like it sometimes," and the girl saying "Good, we can be friends" or something along those lines.

Interesting. This isn't just a YA thriller with a Christian main character, but a Christian thriller to begin with. Absolutely nothing in the book's description, cover, title, anywhere indicated this. If I'd bought this book only to find myself being preached to, I'd feel ripped off. Not to mention that I don't consider "Are you of my faith? You are? Great, we can be friends" to be much of a moral, as it implies that people who don't share the same faith should be avoided. It makes me wonder what else in the story involves messages I personally disagree with.

But the fact that the cover and blurb made no mention of this rather major element, combined with the fact that this is actually a thriller with danger and suspense, made me think of a couple of things. For one, I'd actually read a couple of kid books that have occasional religious content (for example, a character quoting a Bible verse in The Landry News, or a sarcastic prayer in the comedy Operation: Dump the Chump), which simply fits seamlessly into the story and merely indicates the main character's religion and religiosity and gives them an added dimension, without dragging the story into preachy territory. But there is also specifically religious fiction. I'd read blog entries criticizing religious fiction for going out of its way to avoid offending members of the faith in question and being very bland as a result.

I didn't buy this book, so I can't argue for its ratio of danger and excitement versus preachiness. But I find it interesting both that it exists and that it seems to want to hide what it is, perhaps in the interest of getting a larger audience. Which makes sense, I think, as I don't want to be preached to. Who does?

What do you guys think? Any thoughts to give? And please keep the discussion respectful.

edited 12th Jan '12 1:30:28 PM by BonsaiForest

I personally dislike not knowing if my book is suddenly going to turn into a sermon.

Mura: -flips the bird to veterinary science with one hand and Euclidean geometry with the other-

The Dresden Files is a good example of a fantasy story that uses religious elements well, although it's not the core of the series, and I think the element is there mainly because Jim Butcher likes using tropes that are frequently stupid (in this case, The Paladin, Church Militant, and Clap Your Hands If You Believe) in non-stupid ways.

Currently taking a break from the site. See my user page for more information.

Did you get a chance to read the back cover or endflap? That often gives more about what's in the story.

I never got it physically, and was only reading on Google Books, so I got whatever the official description from the publisher was, which made no indication that an exciting adventure overseas would turn into a sermon.

If given the chance, I would prefer to be alerted to the religious aspects beforehand if a book contains them. I mean, when you think about it, it's just good marketing, and not just so people can avoid your book. If someone goes out looking for a book with Christian themes, and your book runs on them but doesn't advertise it, then how will it find its audience?

"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~Madrugada

I personally think that's a terrible idea, because it quickly leads us down the merry path to literary apartheid. People will be screening books for homosexuality and mental illness like it's the baby testing of the shiny, fascist future.

@OP: I think it's worth interrogating the original text more closely before concluding whether it's a)trying to indoctrinate people and b)whether it's Christian positive. The scene you describe is ambiguous at best — is this little girl to be considered a unbiased and well informed human being? Is she the book's moral compass? Can her judgement be wrong?

Discarding the fact that she's a young child and young children talk like that all the time, I think it's disappointing to think that you'd drop a text just because it explores religiousness. There's a lot of classic literature that's inherently non-secular and largely designed for the promotion of Christian or other theology. Narnia's a classic example, and probably the most appropriate to the topic at hand. Paradise Lost. Faust. Charlotte's Web.

Eh. This guy isn't going to be amazing, probably. So it won't hurt you for giving it a miss. But it'd certainly hurt the world if all texts were interrogated and filtered for us by third parties, based on a summary investigation of their individual parts, instead of considering context and such. Plus, I know that if I was only ever reading things that agreed with me, I'd be much poorer for it. Thesis and antithesis and all that blah.

Could we get the name of the book, too?

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I was going to mention the Dresden Files to some degree. I don't know what Jim Butcher's religious beliefs are, though.

Me neither. I guess that's a sign of a good writer, when you can't tell what their actual beliefs are, only the beliefs of their characters?

Currently taking a break from the site. See my user page for more information.

I don't mean "Any book that has religious themes at all," I mean "Christian lit targeted at a Christian audience," or heck, any other book designed to affirm a person's belief in a particular faith.

Literature is already segregated by genre. We treat fantasies differently from sci-fies differently from mysteries different from "real-world" dramas. "Religiously inspirational" is already a genre, and if it's a genre a book is written in, it should be evident so the book can find its audience. Our current system of literature separation and sorting has hardly lead to libraries and bookstores imploding out of the need to ensure, say, the streams of romance and thriller NEVER CROSS, so claiming that identifying books by genre will cause "literary apartheid" is more or less a slippery slope argument.

"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~Madrugada

Well in my experience usually the religious fiction is in its own little section, except in libraries. Even then the summaries usually make it obvious that the person is going to find Jesus or something.

Well, there's definitely a market for books (even fiction) that exist to confirm the reader's own opinions. There are also parents scared about the media their kids consume and eager for The Moral Substitute.

Anyway, I don't see how religious preaching is any different from any other topic that an author may decide to soapbox about at the plot's expense. The protagonist of a Frank Peretti novel sees the light and comes to faith in Jesus; the protagonist of a Michael Crichton novel sees the light and comes to doubt anthropogenic global warming. Either way, readers from outside the congregation roll their eyes and wish the plot would get moving again.

Where do we draw the line between the author exploring a concept and the author preaching? Is VALIS a Gnostic sermon, or just the musings of an SF author who saw something really weird and was trying to make sense of it? Is Crime and Punishment a novel of ideas, or a pro-Orthodox anti-nihilist sermon? (It even ends with its protagonist converting to Christianity!)

I definitely agree with what Nicknacks said regarding context. I recall reading several sources attributing quotes to Fyodor Dostoevsky, which upon examination turned out to be quotes from characters in his novel The Brothers Karamazov. And nothing in the context really suggested that said characters were meant to be speaking as the author's mouthpiece.

I don't remember what my point in all this was.

Whether the characters are speaking their own views or whether they are meant to represent the author's is the critical difference, I think.

"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~Madrugada

Going to bring up three different examples of literature with christian themes, from the three different categories:

Les Miserables

The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe

Left Behind

Not going to explain them, but just say that these are the three categories I see: "Literature that mentions religion and that makes it better", "Literature that's written for religion, but still also as good literature" and "Literature that exists because Moral Substitue ANDKBIEADKLFENGAD". Sorry, I can't talk about moral substitute without getting... very angry.

Go play Kentucky Route Zero. Now.

This. I utterly loathe when characters get onto a soapbox and it's blatantly obvious that it's actually the author soapboxing, I can deal with religious main characters or books with religious themes, {I am not religious} but I hate being preached at by the author, if I wanted to be preached at I'd go to church.

^^ I admit, I haven't read Left Behind, but is it really The Moral Substitute? From what I've heard of it, it sounds like it's in the same genre as Pilgrims Progress, which I would tentatively state is also the genre of Narnia.

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

I haven't read Left Behind, but it's definitely not an allegory. It's a sci-fi/thriller that's set in the last years before the Apocalypse, with the heroes fighting the Antichrist and his henchmen.

I just chose a random hotly debated christian book to rag on. I apologize for not doing the research. It was very stupid. On that note, please replace it with whatever Christian Book is poorly written and an obvious take off of a different book, as their are many.

edited 16th Jan '12 11:31:26 AM by Jimmmyman10

Go play Kentucky Route Zero. Now.

Left Behind is the defining example of The Moral Substitute. All the magic in fantasy literature is of the devil—seriously, some of these kids aren't even allowed to read The Chronicles Of Narnia because it's just too pagan—so if you're into fantasy-type stuff, here, have a nice Evangelical novel about the Apocalypse.

edited 16th Jan '12 11:29:50 AM by jewelleddragon

I have read Left Behind, and Doctor Von Eurotrash is right. It's not remotely allegorical—it's events that the authors think actually could happen, and which they think would fulfill the visions from Revelation. Left Behind could be a moral substitute for, maybe, Michael Crichton or Dean Koontz, I guess.

Narnia isn't really an allegory either—it's a fantasy series where the cosmology is based on Christian theology, so it deliberately parallels the Bible at points, while at other points it does its own thing that's tangential to Christianity. If you want to see CS Lewis write a real allegory, check out The Pilgrim's Regress (it's kind of weird).

The thing about modern Christian writers, Ted Dekker especially, is that if they delve into non-Christian fiction it tends to be really really strange. Ted Dekker wrote a book called House, no connection to the tv show, and it starts to get almost Lovecraftian at parts, and it seemed unintentional.

One good example of the Moral Substitute would be the Lamb Among The Stars trilogy. It's basically the only Christian space opera I've ever seen. Although, even if you don't like Christianity, a well written piece of Christian genre fiction should approach the topic from a different angle.

Not Three Laws compliant.

I liked the Firebird Trilogy, which was basically Jews In Space. It was fascinating - delved into worldbuilding and personal redemption.

ophelia, you're breaking my heart

A novel having a major religious theme or even focus doesn't mean that it has to be low quality, although that's sort of the stereotype attached to it. Some explicitly religious authors can pull it off very well (The Chronicles of Narnia, for instance, are widely regarded as some of the better children's fiction of the 20th century, and they're very explicitly Christian).

I've never read Left Behind, but I don't imagine that it's a moral substitute, because that would imply that it's substituting for some branch of mainstream fiction rather than belonging to a distinct literary genre. Left Behind falls into the genre of apocalyptic fiction, obviously, but it's a distinct type of apocalyptic fiction based on the idea of a pre-tribulation rapture.

edited 8th Apr '12 10:11:31 AM by DigitalMadness

^ I'd like to draw an analogy here: While there seems to be little market for Mormon religious fiction, most of the Mormon writers I've read have written stories with a moral message. These include some stories I like, and even my favorite story of all time. Now, while I usually agree with the moral messages in Mormon stories*

, I don't just read stuff by Mormons, and I've read stuff clearly influenced by other religions that I've liked despite not agreeing with the moral message (e.g. The House Of The Scorpion.)

The problem with that analogy, of course, is that most of the writers I've read who directly tackle religious themes suck in direct proportion to how directly they tackle them.*

I think the subject encourages people to turn heavy-handed and self-certain, declaring that they know the one true way things should be, rather than showing the problems with a certain way of being and inspiring the reader to question alternatives.

edited 7th Apr '12 5:35:59 PM by feotakahari

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

See also Fyodor Dostoevsky's work, post-conversion.