I’m really tired of people saying that all books or movies with explicitly Christian elements are preachy.
I am.
I know I’ve called several books “preachy” in the past so you’re probably glaring at me and calling me a hypocrite right now, but over the past several months as I’ve tried to figure out what my representations of Christianity in fiction look like, I’ve unveiled a poison that I think needs to be addressed.
We tend to work in extremes. Either Christian fiction is entirely sloppy and terribly made and every critic thinks they can do better, or we can’t judge Christian fiction at all (even if the book has harmful or untruthful themes) because at the end of the day that person is someone made in the image of Christ and they did their best to glorify God with their work.
I believe that there can be a middle ground. I think we can point out the trope issues with Christian fiction while giving constructive criticism on how to write it well.
Because the other option is what is happening to so many Christian fiction novels today: they stop writing explicitly Christian fiction all together. More and more I watch authors argue for books in Christian theme only as to being the only REAL way to write truth, that anything else is heavy-handed and being preachy.
But here’s the truth: Christian themes have a major weakness, and that is deism. The belief that there is a God, but He doesn’t really do much in the world of Christianity. I’ve met more deists (or agnostics, those who are fifty fifty as to whether God exists) than atheists. I’ve met more lukewarm Christians than atheists.
The issue I’ve seen over and over in modern Christian fiction market books (mostly in the speculative market, which I get it, it’s hard to have Christianity in a fantasy world) is that they don’t really have Christian books— they actually have deistic books. There’s a god, but the characters have no relationship with him unless they are suddenly in deep trouble and they need to pray to calm their mind.
Not dissing that kind of prayer, but to quote Tobymac, “God is not a crutch; you can’t use him when you want him”.
This is not to completely dismiss Christian-in-themes-only books, but it is something to consider that I don’t feel like many authors bring up. And I’m really tired of high and mighty readers dismissing explicitly Christian fiction because it’s “preachy”.
The truth is, Christian fiction has tropes, just like every other genre on the planet, and those tropes and poor writing are really what cripples the story— not the fact that it has explicit mentions of Christ.
Today I’ll be exploring the five tropes that cripple explicitly Christian fiction, and what you can do to avoid them.
Trope #1: The Atheist With a Vendetta
There are lots of atheists with vendettas, don’t get me wrong. I’ve met them (although honestly a lot of them were people who have been deeply burned by the church, so that’s something to consider). I think the issue is, however, is that we treat these Atheists Antagonists the same way we’d treat the Joker or Lex Luthor or Emperor Palpatine: one-dimensional, villainous caricatures whose only purpose is to hate the Christian MC and make their life miserable. Personally.
While there’s certainly extremely evil people in this world, they don’t fall into the box that most movies draw the Atheist with a Vendetta into. Some of the greatest acts of evil have been done under a guise of good. Hitler claimed he slaughtered Jews in the name of Christianity. The Church of England burned hundreds of Protestants for heresy.
Atheism certainly has a lot of people who hate the church, but it also has a lot of people who don’t know better. It has people who don’t want to trust in something false, so they trust in what the world tells them is “true”— science and mathematics. Atheism is not a personhood. It’s an ideology that many people put on, and express differently. There’s a simple fix to this: develop your atheist characters beyond their atheism! It’s that easy.
This is not as much of a current issue in fiction, but it’s definitely prevalent in Christian movies.
Trope #2: Vending Machine Prayers
I’m sorry, I’m going to call out some current fiction books with this.
I really, really hate vending machine prayers. It is a plague in Christian fiction. It’s everywhere. It’s why I never got past Raising Dragons in Bryan Davis’s series or A Time to Die from Nadine Brandes. You’ve seen it: the Christian character prays, and then BOOM, plot happens just as they need it or they’re miraculously provided for. Every. Single. Time. They win the football game. They have the perfect words beyond their vocabulary. A flood comes and takes out the bad guys. The infertile couple gets pregnant. You want me to DNF a Christian book? Include this trope!
It’s lazy writing. There. I said it. It’s lazy writing.
I 100% believe in the power of prayer. I ramble to God about everything from missing Loops to dying animals to my coworkers salvation. No prayer is too big or too small and I won’t hesitate to point to something and say, “Hey, God did that!” and give Him the glory.
But the prayers always feel so cheap and fake. Prayer is a method to move the deity working behind the scenes to put the story in your favor. A way to get what you want when you want it. When in reality, a lot of prayers end with “wait” more than a yes or no, and even the yeses take time. We’re supposed to take all of our needs to Christ, but He also doesn’t just want a relationship where all we do is give our orders like we’re at a spiritual diner.
Some call it cheesy, but the Golden Filly series by Lauraine Snelling was extremely refreshing in this area. The FMC Trisha is awkward with her prayers at first, but as the series goes on, she gains an extremely close relationship with Christ that I found really sweet and true to life— especially when her biggest prayers were sometimes answered with “no”. I’d really like to see more fiction like that.
Trope #3: Americanized Christian Persecution
Persecution is real, guys. But Christian flicks— and contemporary books— tend to give a very sanitized, American version of persecution. Persecution in the church is bloody and horrifying— look at Christianity in any third world country and you’ll see what I mean. American Christian films tend to view persecution as losing out on popularity, status, and very shallow, material things that our society values.
While this is definitely somewhat true to life, most of the time this antagonism (I won’t even call it persecution) is shown in comical ways that aren’t true to life. I’ve actually been antagonized more by other Christians for my choices in what I read and do than by non-Christians (with the rare exception of teenagers growing up in Christian homes who are currently quite bitter about God for one reason or another and thus felt like they had to take their anger out on everyone around them). And with social media, such antagonizers usually hide behind a screen with their remarks.
The other concerning element of many of these Christian movies is that it shows the antagonists as “true evil” when their actions are… not that much of a quandary. But it still puts it in a harmful “us against them” light that only inflames the bridges between Christians and unsaved people. There is deep evil in the world— but it doesn’t come from a school board fining a teacher for talking about Christ (sorry, God’s Not Dead 2).
(I’ve never been in a public school setting, so anyone can feel free to disagree with this point. The heart of it is, stop calling social status loss persecution. We need more stories that show the uncomfortable side of being a Christian that isn’t… trite and shallow.)
Trope #4: Sanitizing The Hard Things & Clean Fiction Elitism
Ah yes, the part that currently has the clean fiction community up in arms right now.
This is definitely a major flaw in Christian stories and one that has to stop. There is a surge of clean fiction elitism right now and I’m annoyed with it— and I’m extremely conservative in what I read! Like we’re talking no Harry Potter conservative.
And I’m annoyed with the clean fiction elitism I see everywhere.
Does every story have to include hard things? No. I am currently reading contemporary romance fluff. It’s awesome. I love it. I adore books that tackle hard things but sometimes I just want to read about a cute couple going to a drive in movie or two best friends trying to deal with an invisible chicken.
But Christians love to throw out the Philippians 4:8 verse everywhere as an argument as to why we shouldn’t have books where characters drink excessively. We shouldn’t have books, ever, no matter the circumstance, with swearing. We shouldn’t have books about sexual abuse, or trafficking, or gore— you name it, it’s there.
I have watched people rate excellent Christian fiction novels horribly because broken people acted like broken people.
Do I like swearing in fiction? No. I personally won’t read anything with the f-bomb or s-word, among a few others.
However.
Broken people act like broken people. We can’t sanitize that. We should have appropriate content per age group, yes, but we also can’t just whitewash every story to make it PG and applicable with our interpretation of Philippians 4:8. If we’re rating a book 2 stars because the depressed character got blackout drunk, regardless if the story was good, is that really helpful to anyone? Will that show people that Christ is loving?
Depiction of sin is not the condoning of sin. No one watches Hacksaw Ridge and comes away thinking, “man, I really want to go to war now!”. No one watches Sound of Freedom and comes out of it celebrating child sex trafficking. Hard stories and hard topics give us the tools to navigate the evil in our world and reach broken people with grace. Sanitizing them only ostracizes us more.
Clean fiction does not necessarily mean better, and for too long the lines of clean fiction have become dividing ones in Christian media. This desperately needs to stop.
***
Trope #5 “The Ten-Squared Guy Who Magically Fixes Everything”— AKA, Marriage, the Emotional/Mental/Spiritual/Physical MacGyver from God
I am really tempted to post a stupid amount of book covers of stories that I see doing this, but given that some of the authors are on Substack, I will refrain.
The Christian fiction market started in romance books, and since it’s dawning it has only seemed to perpetuate so many of the harmful elements seen in secular romance, just with cherry-picked verses and “it’s Christian so we can’t judge it” labels slapped on.
In the words of my dear friend Olivia Tonn, it’s the issue of “the ten-squared Guy who Magically Fixes Everything” (ten-square meaning a flat character (square) who is also a ten in looks). And I see this. Over. And over. And over. I could write whole articles about my opinions on the state of the Christian romance fiction industry, but I will refrain for the sake of not making this article insanely long.
The point of it, though, is that in romance fiction, women do not often write the male characters well. They often write their idea of a perfect man, instead of just writing… a male character. It doesn’t matter if this guy would never exist in real life— he’s perfect, he’s handsome, he’s swoony, and there’s no real spice, just a little heat, so no one will care.
Let me give you an example. I read a novel (will not divulge any name details to give the character away out of respect for the author) with an MMC that at first came off as the gruff military type. Trauma guy, good at fighting, short on words and just, yeah, you know the type.
I like that type. I enjoy a gruff military dude who slowly chips away his armor as he learns that he doesn’t have to be angry and rude all the time to protect himself.
But instead, I ended up with a mishmash character that was something between Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and Nigel from The Devil Wears Prada, and frankly he was the worst of both. Mood swings like a thirteen year old girl, excessive anger issues that were not attractive, cold and closed off, and yet he has a library and a baby grand piano and likes Jane Austen. He was violent and weirdly feminine in some areas and it was… jarring to say the least.
I know guys who like Jane Austen. I know guys with anger issues. I know guys with anger issues in Jane Austen novels. I even know of one story where there’s a military guy who likes Jane Austen (but he hides it because of course his guy friends make fun of him for it). The problem was that there was no coherency. It was literally a bunch of personality traits slapped onto this character to make him attractive to the FMC (and let’s face it, the readers)— and readers ate it up.
That wasn’t an explicitly Christian book, but I know of plenty of books like it, where the MMC will ditch all aspects of his former personality to be Whatever the FMC Needs Him to Be. Or he will be Absolutely Perfect and fix whatever is wrong with the FMC whether it’s selfishness or childlessness.
Which, there are guys who will go the distance for their girls. I love a male character who will go the distance for his lady. Like, chivalry is awesome. But a guy who changes his personality for you is… kind of a red flag. And perfect men don’t exist. A guy is not going to be everything he needs you to be. Sometimes he will obsess over his Sunday night football games when you need to talk to him about budgeting goals for the next couple months. Sometimes he’ll forget important dates and be confused when you’re hurt by that. They will say stupid things and do stupid things, because they’re human. Love is the action of caring for someone who’s imperfect. Marriage is hard because people are human. Perpetuating this trope is deeply harmful to not only young women’s ideas of marriage, but I’ve watched it destroy their current marriage. Christian romance fiction should be reflecting the messiness of trying to love your significant other when they annoy the heck out of you, not contributing to the issue of idolizing a relationship that doesn’t exist.
(And while marriage is sacred and beautiful, it’s also not the end-all-be-all. Look up Paul’s argument for singleness sometime XP.)
So, what if you finish reading this article and realize— GASP. I’ve included one of these tropes!
Simple. Cut it out. Add dimension and personality to your atheist. Have those vending machine prayers be rejected. Talk to people who have been attacked for their faith in the setting your character is in. Research the realities of the hard topic you’re tackling and pray over how to portray them. Add some flaws to that ten-square.
It’s the bad writing pitfalls of the genre. Every genre has its own pitfalls. Christian fiction’s just get more drama and attention because it’s connected to an entire market about our religion.
Which brings me to a final note.
Have grace for these creators. Yeah, I need to remind myself of that too. I get really worked up about these stories because I care about these stories and I care about good stories. But even though I might bring up harsh thoughts about how issues or characters or plot were handled… I still try to remind myself that these people are human. And fallible. And I want to call out the issues but also remind myself that I’ve made the same mistakes. These are honest issues in Christian fiction that need to stop… but also, maybe the creator didn’t know any better. Maybe the creator was just following the trends. Maybe someone’s life was changed by that poorly done story. They still matter and their work still matters even if it’s flawed.
Explicitly Christian fiction is not the problem. An overreliance on tropes and a failure to identify these tropes as issues is the problem. Christian fiction has such strong potential to be beautiful and life changing to so many people— I know of several explicitly Christian works that are beautifully written. But we can’t treat explicitly Christian fiction as if it’s lesser because of a prevalence of tropes that we’ve failed to identify as harmful in the first place.
To the writers with stories that expressly proclaim Christ— embrace the story God has given you to write, even if you’re afraid of being “preachy”. Be fearless to speak truth, friends.
God sees your effort. <3