Your Worldview is Not a Genre

Should there be a separate shelf for Christian Fiction?

Dear Reader,

Before we dive into the meat of this article, I want to disclaim that this is an opinion piece. I like to poke at the ideological guardrails around many of our assumptions about how the world works and the traditions we inherit. This article will be much sharper than the one from last week and may invite disagreement. I welcome it. Just as I enjoy examining frameworks, I am completely comfortable with having my own examined and tested under the pressure of another perspective. If you disagree with my premise or framing, feel free to comment. I invite civil discourse because I like to learn.

I. Is the Shelf Really Necessary?

The marketing of fiction as Christian and secular is a relatively new construct. This article is not a slam on the genre, or on the choices of some authors to market their fiction strictly as Christian.

What I question is the underlying idea that scaffolds the “necessity” of such a label.

As I mentioned last week in my article, “Your Novel Is Not a Gospel Tract,” Bethany House Publishers credits Mrs. Oke’s *Love Comes Softly* with helping give rise to the modern Christian-fiction market in 1979.¹

As I argued last week, good fiction contains theology. It is in the characters, in the relationships, in the arcs, in the plot. The studies of mankind, truth, virtue, redemption, vengeance, and emotion are tested and broken in the world of stories, where the narrative can carry the author’s viewpoint.

Good fiction inevitably contains tension. Sometimes between good and evil, sometimes between two people who see things differently, and sometimes when the protagonist has a quest to fulfill. That tension is most often written from the way the author sees the world.

Fiction is one of the best places to test ideas because story allows writers and readers to follow a belief into its consequences.

Ideology may break when forced to live in reality. Truth does not.

A story faithful to human nature, consequence, and the moral structure of the world can expose the difference.

And this leads back to my question.

Is a separate shelf for Christian fiction truly necessary?

II. The Trailblazers Who Knew the Map

Before Christian fiction became a distinct modern marketing and publishing category, there were dozens of examples of writers who simply published fiction that we would distinctly name as Christian. Tolkien, Lewis, Bunyan, George MacDonald, etc.

These men published in categories such as trade fiction, allegory, fairy stories, fantasy, and science fiction. Their fiction held distinct truths about doctrine in story and symbolism. I argue that much of it is apologetic in nature, and the best part is that fiction allowed these storytellers to write what happens when one asks, What is true? and then makes a character live with the consequences of the answer.

Indeed, apologists should be some of the best storytellers out there, because the answers to their questions are full of consequence, the grace of a holy and loving God, and redemption offered at the cost of the cross.

There is no happier ending than a man finding that Jesus died for the worst of his humanity. Even if that character must now face the consequences of his sin, he no longer must face them alone.

There is no greater tension than a character’s struggle with God Himself. When a character is allowed to make his own choices within the guardrails of the story’s greater plot, it makes redemption that much sweeter—and rejection of that same mercy that much more heartbreaking.

The authors above knew what they believed foundationally, and it is utterly obvious in their storytelling. They did not have to manufacture tension. It was already there in the reality of living in our sin-cursed world that Christ redeems one soul at a time.

So how did they successfully convey such a deep grasp on doctrine while still being able to write amazing stories?

III. Better Understanding of the Fundamentals Leads to Mastery

I argue that the better one understands the simplicity of the gospel and the reality of primary doctrines, the more their worldview simply shows up in the story.

The test is to take any classic and look at it from an apologetics perspective. Pull out its underlying beliefs about God, mankind, evil, good, suffering, justice, love, death, responsibility, and redemption.

Then ask:

What does this story say is true about any of those things?

For the author who is a Christian, their answers should always point back to the biblical doctrines that provide those answers—never in a way that preaches at the reader, but simply in a way that dictates the rules of the story.

This is stewardship of craft: to let the story flow from the way one views the world. And that view is better stewarded when we as authors know what we believe and why we believe it as more than just vocabulary. The nuance of the story and craft ought to come from the life of a sanctified person living out the truths we find in the Book given to us for all the answers that pertain to life and godliness.

In the book of Second Peter, the apostle begins by exhorting believers to grow in virtue and knowledge, then warns them about false teachers, and finally urges them to remain steadfast and “grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” Christian maturity assumes discernment. We are expected to know truth well enough to recognize what is false.

IV. Sanctification Should Not Come with Walls

Labels are just labels, and if we were content to simply relegate Christian fiction to a convenient marketing strategy, perhaps I would not be so concerned with the shelf itself.

I fear, though, that the need for the label is sometimes indicative of a larger issue in Christianity: the wickedness of compartmentalizing our faith. When we confine Christianity to certain approved spaces and leave the rest of life untouched, we deny the power of sanctification to remake the whole person.

“Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.”

—1 Corinthians 10:31

Sanctification should touch every part of the Christian life—our prayer, our place in the body of Christ, our witness, our work, and the execution of the talents God has given us.

Sanctification is not a box we check before returning to life as usual. When God saves us, He adopts us into His family, gives us power to become the sons of God, and makes us new creatures in Christ. That changes everything.

The renewing of the mind is a rebuilding: old presuppositions and assumptions are stripped down and examined again in the light of Scripture. What does God say about this? What does obedience look like here?

And if there are no walls between being saved and the rest of who we are, then our theology should not have to be pasted onto our stories after the fact.

It should already be there. It should come through in the way we understand people, sin, sexuality, suffering, mercy, justice, consequence, redemption, beauty, and hope.

By the time a story reaches whatever shelf a publisher or bookseller places it on, the reader should be able to encounter a work that is not preaching ideology but is theological at its foundations. It may not make everyone comfortable. That is not the writer’s first obligation.

Our obligation is to offer Christ our best in the craft He has given us and say: You saved me. You are changing me. Therefore, I have a story to tell—and I want to tell it well.

V. Fiction As Art: Art As Offering

The label of a shelf does not make a story “Christian,” nor does the absence of such a label mean a reader could not pick it up and find moral resonance.

Fiction is art. We do not usually walk into an art gallery and find a separate room for “Christian paintings” unless the subject matter itself is explicitly religious. We do not separate sculpture into “Christian sculpture” and everything else simply because the artist happens to be a Christian. A person can stand in front of a painting and appreciate the beauty of its composition, its form, its restraint, its truthfulness, without needing a label to tell them what worldview shaped the artist.

I think fiction ought to be able to do the same thing.

A reader should be able to pick up a novel and recognize the beauty of the craft and the truth underneath it without the author having to stamp *Christian* across the cover. Not because the story is preaching. Never because it is preaching.

Because it shows.

It shows what the author believes about mankind, evil, love, justice, sexuality, suffering, mercy, redemption, and hope.

False ideas eventually break against reality. Truth does not.

Good fiction gives both somewhere to be tested.

That is the nature of the gospel in story: it does not need to come with a marketing disclaimer. An astute reader can recognize the truth of our reality in a good story without having to be told what label belongs on the spine. Such a story holds within its construction the truths of Scripture—not because it preaches them, but because they shape the story itself.

As I wrap up this piece, I will say that I humbly submit that “Christian” is not the category into which I place my authorship any more than it is a compartment into which I place my motherhood or my marriage.

I am a Christian. I am also an author, a wife, and a mother.

Christ’s lordship should permeate all of them.

It is my prayer that no matter the shelf on which a reader finds my fiction, they may see that God does not shy away from the person who is almost persuaded, or struggling with trauma, or walking a dark path. There is heartbreaking grief and beauty and lesson in the character who rejects Christ, just as much as in the one who believes on Him.

Should there be a separate shelf for Christian fiction? Maybe for marketing, but not for craft, and certainly not as a boundary around the kinds of stories Christians are allowed to tell. A beautifully told story does not become less Christian simply because its theology is embedded in worldview, doctrine, and the truths of Scripture rather than announced by a label.

I encourage my fellow writers, whatever shelf you intend to publish under, to let your worldview dictate the terms of everything from craft to marketing, and to make the offering we bring to Christ one of true sacrifice of self to the calling He has placed upon our lives: to be conformed to the image of His Son, Christ Jesus, and to invite others to see what it looks like when that calling is lived out.

1. Bethany House Publishers, Spring 2016 Fiction Catalog (2016), 10. Bethany House credits Oke’s 1979 Love Comes Softly with helping launch the modern era of inspirational fiction.