Faith-Filled Fiction: Sharing Truth or Idolizing Exclusivity?
(Or, why I, as a Christian, no longer support Christian fiction in most cases.)
(Essay from Spring 2022 with minor edits for the public.)
Seven years ago I was hired for the publicist position at a start-up publishing house owned by a best-selling Christian author I’d never heard of. I’d been referred to the lady (who is now a dear, dear friend) as a virtual administrative assistant by one of my clients, so the difference between the behind-the-scenes expectation of an admin gig and the reality of a forefront, public promotion position was a bit blindsiding.
Being a virtual admin allowed me to focus on public relations, website maintenance, and tech support behind the scenes to bolster a business…but being a publicist required me to be actively excited about a certain flavor of religion and faith—and promote that flavor as Absolute Truth without question—and hide anything I disagreed with or did not wish to conform to.
In Kevin Davis’ essay, “Does Coming to College Mean Becoming Someone New?” he defines some of the barriers to joining new discourse communities—groups with their own communication styles and values. In response to his attempts at integrating with the academic English world, he says, “I found I didn’t like the someone new I was being asked to become” (Davis, 236). I said this very thing to myself when I finally decided to leave Christian publishing, and I resonated with his struggle to belong.
While I had a faith-based background similar to that of the Christian publishing industry, as I’d gotten older I found myself leaning toward a model of faith that was simultaneously more progressive, yet more traditional. If I’d only been an admin assistant, I could’ve retained my privacy as a more liberal Christian. But as a publicist I had to craft an entirely separate online persona to network and build connections and follow books and care about authors that conflicted with my own personal interests and values. I’d expected a need to be careful of how I engaged with others professionally, but what I hadn’t expected was a need to utilize my real name as a “fake person” online and use a pen name to maintain my authentic self in private.
Many readers of Christian fiction gravitate toward the genre in search of “clean” literature more than for a spiritual experience. They don’t want to read books with sex or bloody violence or profanity, and Christian fiction is often the most reliable solution for those criteria. Which, just to state, is a perfectly reasonable preference.
But eventually, I found the disconnect between my values and the values of the Christian publishing community boiled down to a fundamental disagreement on the value and meaning of storytelling in general. For me, I believe art is a conduit connecting the visible (tangible reality) with the invisible (spirituality, the supernatural, God), and as such storytelling allows me to explore the broad scope of the human experience and how it may reflect a variety of spiritual states.
But Christian publishing as an industry prioritizes evangelicalism and preservation of tradition. Eventually, hearing the same set of restrictions over and over leads to an unspoken evolution of doctrine in which “clean” can begin to mean “nothing unpleasant,” and “nothing unpleasant” can begin to mean “holy” and “pure.” As a lover of horror film myself, this language caused a great deal of anxiety for me as my interest in very non-Christian things had brought the state of my soul into question in previous Christian communities I’d attempted to belong in.
I never knew what type of content would be labeled “objectionable” in the public eye with Christian fiction. I would ask my boss for a set of criteria to go by so I could represent the community properly, but there was this assumption that what would be objectionable should be common sense. The marker for what was acceptable constantly moved and sometimes transformed into something I didn’t even see coming. This provided an incredibly difficult challenge for me to maintain my own personal autonomy as a private individual while simultaneously investing in this world enough to do my job well. And the thing was, I understood the desire to share hope and good stories. I understood the desire of so many authors to teach.
However, even years before joining Christian publishing, I encountered another barrier as I attempted to embrace my own passion for religious writing through a review of Fifty Shades of Grey written for a Christian website under a pen name. I wrote a 2,000 word review on the book analyzing the perversion of “love” in the book and how it contradicts the biblical idea of love. At the time I was extremely excited, as I felt to some degree that I’d finally started to understand the dialogue and culture of evangelicalism by delving into something taboo and shining a light on it. Instead, I was “slut-shamed.” I was accused of having hidden sexual sin in my life which I “justified” by reviewing the book. My personal favorite insult was being called a “worshipper at the temple of Aphrodite.”
My integrity was attacked despite the purely clinical nature of my review and the approval of the website to publish it. This was jarring because, for me, I felt like I had embraced “common sense” by addressing this book as abuse whereas any other Christian response to it just said “erotica is bad,” or even, horrifyingly enough, a wonderful example of wifely submission. Once again, I had failed to understand the language and presuppositions used in this subset of Christian culture’s relationship to storytelling and fiction.
Nearing the end of my time at the publisher, I had established two fully separate personalities online: my fake personality curated and refined to appeal and market to the Christian reader crowd—she had a kind smile, naturally colored hair, inspiring quotes, and nothing but positive things to say—and my sincere personality under a pen name, who shared morbid jokes, loved horror film, said “shit,” and swam in the pool of nihilism as easy as breathing. But because I was so split, I could not honor the needs of either part. Instead of investing in Christian publishing enough to truly understand the industry and empower my authors, I did the bare minimum. Instead of feeling confident in my film review writing, I lived in fear of it being tied back to me or never having any audience who’d care. I was dying two separate deaths behind two separate smiles.
I realized, eventually, that the kindest thing I could do for myself and for the company (which I truly wish nothing but success for!) was to leave. I had to make a decision to either sacrifice my fierce belief in the power of story as spiritually rich and read Christian fiction, play the pure church girl game, make friends with others who sought to craft sanctuaries from worldliness, and more…or stop pretending and be true to who I was made to be.
While it sent my boss into a panic, I finally chose to step down. She had supported me through so many things, and I’d learned so much through her kindness and patience with me in this industry, but ultimately I knew that for her business to thrive she needed someone who spoke the language and could speak to the hearts and needs of her readers. It was a hard lesson, however it was also a beautiful one: I didn’t need to belong everywhere to belong somewhere; I didn’t need to be everyone to be me.
Works Cited
Davis, Kevin. “Does Coming to College Mean Becoming Someone New?” The Subject is Writing. Edited by Wendy Bishop. Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., 1993. pp. 235-241. Canvas. https://canvas.uccs.edu/courses/134602/assignments/564092?module_item_id=1836706
“IlluminateYA.” ShopLPC, LPC Books. n.d. https://shoplpc.com/illuminateya/
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