Literary journals shouldn't dismiss Christian fiction

Once upon a time, a young man named Henry was called upon by his master to go on a crusade to retake the Holy Land.

Henry was pretty excited about the prospect. Young men in all times and places love the idea of war, and he knew this war was a righteous one. After all, he was legally bound to serve his lord—he could just as easily be going to war fighting the next jerk in the next town—this was a lot more exciting and meaningful than that.

For his part, the lord had similar incentives! Nobody was allowed to attack his lands while he was on crusade. He had to maintain himself and a half-dozen knights anyway, not only as part of liege obligations, but simply to defend himself. So why not go on crusade, get plunder, fight, maybe go to heaven and all with no risk of your own lands being attacked?

They did it, they went.

Henry participated in the crazy rout of the Turks that broke their back and let the crusade march onwards to Antioch. But on their trek through Asia Minor, Henry fell sick with dysentery.

His master didn't seem to care or notice—kept pushing him to march to keep up. The master finally left him in the care of a local Greek family, who muttered in their own language, while Henry shat his brains out, hardly able to move. They had no priests, nobody to help him. When he finally recovered, he was left on his own for virtually the only time in his life. He had no money whatsoever—his master hadn’t even allowed him to keep the sword he'd looted from the body of a Turk. He asked what to do? Where should he go next? Nobody could tell him. He asked for food, but they pretended not to understand what he wanted, so he had to take it. Had to assemble a pack and fill it with provisions, not knowing if the man of the house was about to assemble a bunch of other men to set upon him.

Then he simply started walking, utterly alone and without protection, not knowing where he was going, in a land full of Turks. He knew that Antioch was by the sea, and he could see the sea, so he went down toward it, and he went east, but the roads were rocky and barren. When he asked for food, sometimes people gave it. Sometimes they said no. Once he had to walk into a hut and argue with a woman to give him something, anything. He recognized bread. He took some, and she yelled at him. A man came and yelled too. Henry had fashioned a branch into a club by now, and he was angry, battle-hardened. The man thankfully let him go without a fight, but this terrain was barren—Henry was afraid to stop walking, because there was no forest where he could get lost and hide himself from the men who might come looking.

He came upon some ships who were headed to Antioch as well, and when he told them his lord, and his lord's lord, they gave him passage. Finally, somebody knew him and his part of the world—so they gave him food, treated him like a human being. But he forever after remembered those months of being utterly alien, utterly without succor.

And he understood well who was to blame. His lord. His lord was worried about being caught by Turkish raiders if he fell behind. But still—he should've carried Henry on his back, rather than leave him in such a place. Henry wasn't worth much, but he'd lived on this earth a score of years, and he'd gone to war and fought, and he'd deserved more. His lord would've had many reasons that justified his behavior, Henry knew, but Henry came away from that experience knowing deeply, beyond a doubt, He behaved wrongly towards me. And, furthermore, Henry knew something different, He shall be repaid for these sins.

Perhaps Henry would repay the lord himself, but he knew the lord didn't deserve to die, precisely. Nor even to be punished. But the sin ought to be expiated.

During the siege of Antioch and the ensuing campaign to take Jerusalem, Henry took and sold several horses. Instead of depositing his winnings with his lord, who promised to remit them, Henry gave them to a cleric who'd followed the expedition. Knowing he’d made an enemy of his lord, Henry stayed in Jerusalem, taking orders. He remained under military discipline, but early life in the order was relatively egalitarian, with members all living and sleeping together, and his quiet fervor, good heart, and common sense won him many friends. He died confident in the promise of eternal salvation, and indeed upon his ascension an Angel greeted him with a warm smile.

Henry was given a register of all his sins: he'd invaded a foreign land, killed men, and, in the passion following the sack of Jerusalem, he'd succumbed to lust and raped a woman.

Our hero couldn't read the register, but he knew the sins: he'd lived them. He was also told these sins had been duly forgiven.

—Are everyone's sins forgiven? he asked the Angel.

—No.

—Then why forgive mine?

—Because you went on Crusade, bro! Didn't you think the promise was real?

—So who exactly goes to Heaven?

—Everyone who's promised Heaven can go. It's complicated. You can learn the details if you want, but right now you're here.

He was ushered to the broad pastures of Heaven, where everything was held free, and you were given unlimited quantities of whatever you could use and enjoy. He met the infidels he'd killed, and he saw the anger they still bore towards him, but in Heaven all could understand each other. He could've talked it out with them, but neither felt particularly compelled to do that, so he pressed onward.

He felt none of the lust that had tormented him in life. He saw people coupling in a strange and exotic fashion, but he had no desire to join. The woman he’d hurt also dwelt somewhere in this vast land, but the Lord saw no reason to bring him together with her.

Instead he was reunited with his family from back home, who'd gone so many years with no word from him. They lived well, ate well, learned together, and for the first time in decades he heard his native dialect spoken all around him. He was happy. His sins didn't need to be repaid or punished. Somewhere, his former master was also in Heaven, enjoying nature's bounty, and Henry was certain that, if he wished, he could seek out the man and confront him, force him to apologize, but to what end? Henry had sinned, and so had his former master. Now they were both forgiven, and their sorrows were at end.

Afterword

America's a pretty religious country. Lots of people are believing Christians. They can profess the Nicene Creed and genuinely say, "I accept these tenets". People talk about some crisis of faith or about how people need some secular replacement for God. But...do they? It just seems (to me) like something beyond the material world probably does exist. And if it exists and it wants to communicate with us, then it's probably done so in the form of the world's major religions. Yeah, you can experience the divine through art or through music or through mushrooms, but I'm pretty sure you can also experience it through...going to Church? Or reading the Bible? I know I've experienced the divine through reading the Bible, and it was a great experience! If I'd been in a position where I was hungry for meaning, I probably could've reified and enhanced that experience by reading a lot more Christian stuff, then seeking out other Christians, going to church, etc. Maybe even praying! But I didn't want to, so I didn't do it. Still, finding Christianity is a whole path. Even for people who were raised Christian and rejected their religion, when you 'find Christianity' you just find a different sort than you were raised with! Protestants become Catholic, Catholics become Protestant, Mormons and evangelicals turn to mainline Protestantism, and vice versa. This is something lots of people are doing, even amongst intellectuals and the literati.

A while back I got into Italian literature, and I was reading about their 19th-century novel, The Betrothed. It's their big realist novel. Every country has one. America has Moby Dick. England has Middlemarch. France has Madame Bovary. Like, when the romantic tradition had faded, but not totally lost steam, and realism was taking over, people wrote these incredible novels where they treated seriously the idea of attaining some kind of transcendence on Earth. Anyway, I was reading that The Betrothed is kind of an outlier in Italian literature because it's so religious! It takes seriously the Christian dogma. Other Italian writers aren't like that. The other major 19th-century Italian writer, Ippolito Nievo, is so secular. And every other Italian writer I've read or am familiar with is extremely secular (even a lot of their Renaissance writers, Dante excepted, seem shockingly secular. I could be wrong, but I do not get the sense that Boccaccio worried overmuch about religion).

America's kind of similar. Our literary culture is very secular. Even overtly religious writers (Marilynne Robinson comes to mind) would never write the kind of story that, say, Tolstoy did, where he took seriously the metaphysical dogmas of Christianity. Tolstoy wrote the kind of stories where you read them and are like...wait a second...did Christ actually die for my sins? Am I actually redeemed through his sacrifice?

Marilynne Robinson doesn't really do that (in my opinion). She writes about very religious people, who believe in the truth of their own religion, and that's great, but the books don't really make the case for Christianity.

Look at my story above. I could never get this story published in a mainstream sci-fi journal. They get stories like this all the time! Christians love writing stories where people go to Heaven at the end and are redeemed. If you've read the slush, you'll know that my story is a very recognizable 'type' of story. People want to write them, and people want to read them. I'm not a Christian, and I too personally want to read them! Maybe there's a Christian journal where they can be published, but I've never read an overtly Christian story in any journal to which I regularly submit.

When I was reading slush for a sci-fi journal, I passed the editors a story that I thought was great, about a girl who has sex with her sentient childhood teddy-bear, and it got published. I passed up a lot of sex stories, actually. Another story I passed them was Carmen Maria Machado's "Inventory", which also got published and which was also amazing (I think it was her first published story).

Anyway, talking to the editor, she was like, "I think that author was a furry." I hadn't known that, but it made sense. I googled the author, and there was a lot of stuff about anthropomorphic animals. That's what they're into! That's what they write about, and they wrote a good story about it.

I don't know if the editor would've published the story if they'd known the author was a furry. Maybe, maybe not. I guess you always worry about whether a story is actually good, or if it's only good for people who are into that sort of thing. But as an editor, you have your own judgement! I'm not a furry, and I thought the story was good. Similarly, I'm not a Christian, and I think Christians can write good stuff even if it takes seriously the metaphysical implications of Christianity.

Our literary and publishing world should be less secular. We ought to be more like Britain, where you've got all these Catholics running around—serious writers—but they also seriously think you should be Catholic! (I'm thinking mostly of Graham Greene, but there are so many examples of British writers becoming Catholic and writing fiction that basically proselytizes for it).

The difficulty in writing an essay like this is that while I do think overtly-Christian fiction should be taken more seriously, I simultaneously think overtly-Christian ideas in politics and governance and jurisprudence should be given much less credence by, say, the New York Times (and certainly by our culture in general). In the political and intellectual world, there are plenty of Christians willing to tell you that you ought to become Catholic. And their ideas are treated with a lot of respect (I'm thinking mostly of Patrick Deneen), even when they're basically arguing for theocracy. Ezra Klein, when he interviewed Patrick Deneen, tried to push back a bit, but in my opinion not enough people were like...this guy is being way too cagey about what he actually believes! If he has ideas about how our current system ought to be changed, then he should say them. If he doesn't say them publicly, then we shouldn't be writing about him, because he's not an intellectual, he's basically just a dude engaging in a conspiracy to overthrow our system of governance.

Meanwhile, on the Supreme Court, we've got at least three judges (I'm thinking of Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Gorsuch) who genuinely think the government's job is to encourage people to be more Christian? Which is an astoundingly distasteful idea.

On the one hand, maybe I'm the person who's a fool. I'm like...the fiction world should be more open to Christians even as I think the pundit world should challenge them more and the legal world should bar them.

Someone could say that I only want Christians if they accept the tenets of liberalism—I only want to read a Christian writer if they're willing to affirm free speech and the secular state, etc.

But that's not true. I think fiction by its nature is somewhat liberal. Because fiction creates a world. You can choose to accept that world to whatever degree you'd like. You can praise a fictional creation, even praise it unstintingly, without believing the ideology of its creator ought to be forced upon you.¹ It's just a completely different thing from someone like Patrick Deneen (who also has interesting ideas, but whose ideas I think ought to be scrutinized a lot more critically than they have been) or from someone like Samuel Alito (who is enforcing a judicial philosophy that'll lead to the collapse of our judicial system—because nobody knows what the law is anymore, other than "Christians win, no matter what", and who, through the collapse of the institution he is tasked with safeguarding, will ultimately make life materially worse for all Americans, right or left, Christian or non-Christian).

Deneen's rejection of liberalism has implications that really ought to be examined more—his critiques ultimately ought to be unconvincing, I think, even to other Christians. Samuel Alito's jurisprudence is an example, in action, of the flaws in Deneen's thinking. We need to know what the law is! Whatever it is, it has to be consistent. If a certain class of citizens is going to be a second-class citizen, then even the boundaries of what's allowable to us also need to be marked out by law!

Christian fiction, on the other hand, doesn't really need to be interrogated in the same way. The only risk is that some substantial portion of your readers might not want to be exposed to Christian dogma—but doesn't that apply just as much to the furry story? Some portion of your readers probably don't want to be exposed to someone else's sex fantasy.

But I also think the Christian dogma is beautiful. It was a great creation. I'm glad it exists! There's probably some truth to it! I just don't believe in the part where if I get baptized and say the Nicene Creed, then my soul will live forever in Heaven. I'm pretty sure that when I die, my personal identity will cease, and because of that deep certainty I tend to feel pretty unconcerned about what religion I ought to practice on earth.

Further Reading

You can do a lot worse than reading Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed. It’s a 19th-century realist novel, and, like Middlemarch and War and Peace, it is a work of historical fiction. In this case it’s about, I think, the 15th century. Two lovers are split apart amidst, well, a lot of family and religious drama. One joins a nunnery. The book is quite famous in Italy, but I’d never heard of it before finding it in the Strand bookstore one day. I remember reading it and thinking, “Wow, I’ve never heard of this book before—it’s like I just pulled Anna Karenina off a bookshelf and started reading it without knowing what it is.” Truly one of the best reading experiences of my life.

1. I think it's fair to say that in 99 percent of cases, the author of a story like the one I wrote above would be a believing Christian. Like, to assume that someone would write this kind of story without actually believing in Christianity is just absurd. But I also think it doesn't particularly matter. Maybe Marilynne Robinson is not a Christian! I have no idea! Wouldn't that be so funny? I've never read any of her interviews, I've only read two of her novels. What if Marilynne Robinson started a Substack and was like, "I don't really believe in Christianity. I just think the ideas are interesting. My characters, obviously, are Christian, and I write from their perspective."