The Evolution of Christian Fantasy
The label “Christian fantasy” has not been around for very long, but I have a lot of thoughts on the topic of Christian fantasy and its evolution through the early 2000s to now.
Part 1: Christian writing blogs in the 2010s.
I’ve followed Christian blogs and online communities talking about writing for over ten years, and it has been interesting seeing how things have changed through those years.
In my teen years, people tended to say, “the Christian label just means that you are writing for a Christian audience.” But now, I’m not so sure.
Now when I think of Christian fantasy, I often think about these authors:
Wayne Thomas Batson, Donita K Paul, Sharon Hinck, and more recently, Nadine Brandes.
These writers have done Christian fantasy well. Batson’s The Door Within was the first book that got me into reading larger books and fantasy when I was 10. That trilogy touched my heart about the cost of following Christ and the struggle of being a Christian when you have loved ones who don’t believe. Donita K Paul’s Dragon Keeper Chronicles enchanted me and encouraged me deeply in my faith walk. Sharon Hink’s The Restorer with its parallels to spiritual warfare and mental health struggles was so refreshing to read at a time when mental health was not being talked about as much. And Nadine’s recent Wishtress brings a splash of wimsy to the Christian fantasy genre and tackling traditional themes of love and self-sacrifice in a fresh way while subtly pointing to the capital T Truth of Jesus (I would say something about her earlier work as well but I still need to read it first).
One thing that is difficult to do when writing Christian fantasy is writing something that people will
Recognize as having a Christian worldview, and
Enjoy because of the Christian elements, not despite them.
In the past, the main pitfall that I and others had begun to notice and write about in blog posts was the flaw of preachiness in a book. Now, when I say preachiness, I don’t mean theme or message, because most good books have at least one moral or message to share with the reader. What makes something preachy is related to how it is done in the story. It has to be natural, not forced. But also, I would argue there are instances where something someone could call “preachy” could be a good thing, or even have been done well. For instance, some allegories might be called “preachy” but that doesn’t make them bad, because that was the intention of the book, and it was meant to be the way it was, for the readers who wanted something like it. For another instance, I have noticed an instance of a cynical reader calling a good book “preachy” because it wasn’t what they were looking for or expecting in a book, but it was still a good book. You might find some intellectual athiests calling Narnia “preachy” or Lord of the Rings “morally simplistic”. So now I have to be careful with the term “preachy” because just because it is used doesn’t mean that a book is badly written anymore, although it might, and probably most of the time still is at least weak in certain areas.
Anyway, through the years, many writers began to blog or speak at conferences about the dangers of coming across as “preachy” in our writing, and that being “preachy” was to be avoided at all cost. Thankfully, within the mix of blogs, someone had broken it down in very helpful and practical ways on the One Year Adventure Novel blog here: Part 1 and Part 2. I definitely recommend these two blog posts to anyone who is writing Christian fiction who wants to find a helpful balance between the two.
Part 2: College
In college, I was introduced to the world of Christian Aesthetics—a realm of thought by Christians determining how their faith ought to influence the way they make art, and what it means to be an artist as a Christian. My inspiration was fueled by reading essays about the meaning, significance, and use of art in the world. Around these years I was also pointed to Madeleine L’Engle’s work Walking on Water, a required book for an art class my sister had told me about at some point. I now highly recommend this book to any Christian artist as well, though I too should reread it and see how much of my opinions have changed now that I’m an adult.
It was also in college that I read an essay I wasn’t sure I understood—either I misunderstood it, or I disagreed with it. But the way it was written made it sound as though the author was saying that any artist/writer should write in such a way that the reader cannot know what the author believes from reading the book/partaking in the art. Now, I see where it is coming from now, but at the time, it also baffled me. “Why write if no one is going to get the point?” I thought something along those lines. It sounded to me like he was saying Christian artists should take their beliefs out of their writing/art, basically hiding what they believe, so that people would not know that they were Christians. And I disagreed with this idea very much so. I understand the art of subtlety, but I also have begun to get frustrated with the elite field of literary art which so prizes subtlety to the point where no one knows what a work of art is about. When I was a teenager, I so admired the literary arts and wanted to make “high art” myself. But now, I’ve decided that certain arts only alienate the audience and turn them away for their oddness, emptiness, and really, a vague sense of or hints of what feels like nihilism. It was perhaps here or around those years that I also realized, “maybe what the world says is good art is not what God says is good art.” And, “maybe how the world says you should make art is not the way God wants you to make art.” And so I pondered these things.
Fast-forward to now. I have begun to notice a growing trend of Christian fantasy which is labeled Christian, but you wouldn’t be able to tell it’s Christian from reading the book. It feels as though everyone got the memo, “Don’t be preachy!” and instead of understanding what it meant, decided it meant they should not even try to write about Christianity in their fiction in the first place out of fear of the dreaded “preachiness” label. But the result is fiction which really could have been labeled clean fantasy without the Christian label.
In the past, people could have called the preachy fiction “preaching to the choir” with many redemption arcs and characters being saved, when the people reading them would already be Christians. But now, many are not even doing that.
I have many more thoughts about this but wanted to share this for now.
What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you think Christian fantasy should have a clear Christian worldview portrayed in it that anyone could tell it was a Christian book from reading it?