Blog on the Lillypad
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
 | A Passion for a Diverse Fiction
At this point, the background music should be "Heard it Through the Grapevine," only change the words to "Heard it through the weblog." Fiction afficianado Cindy Swanson dropped me a line to check out BJ Hoff's website where a debate about the quality of Christian fiction was ongoing. I went by and jotted a quick assessment of the inherent problem at the heart of the CBA: having to target the most lucrative market and therefore steering the majority of Christian adult fiction to that market (white middle class women). |
I went out again and went back in the next day, where Ms. Hoff reminded me that the topic was actually Christian fiction and not the CBA itself. (She was kind about it.) So I corrected my error by writing a more thought-out assessment of the problems in Christian fiction: that it targets white middle class women and it is subject to errors in its very premises: Christians are not depicted as sinners; sin is not dpeicted as the tragedy common to all of us, and salvation takes up more space in the literature than is reflected in actual Christian life. (In other words, our Christian lives start at salvation, but a lot of Christian literature focuses on it as an endpoint.) The role of Christ as our enduring High Priest ought to take up most of the ground of Christian literature, and it does not. What Christ does in us as we live as Christians is just as amazing (if not more so) than the moment of salvation.
When I visited Cindy's blog today I saw a note that Ms. Hoff has closed down her website. The response to her discussion from a good number of readers, it seems, was a bit overwhelming for her.
Man, I thought. If I could get people that fired up about fiction, I'd be thrilled. Anything to get Christians away from TV and video games. Reminds me of the time back at BJU when I was put in charge of the Society (a Christian version of Sorority) games for our all-girls outing. I organized us into four teams, and we all had to have a team flag that we carried with us for a week to each meal and to chapel. Anybody who could steal the flag during the course of the week got a thousand points. The contest ended with a game of Capture the Flag at the picnic-style outing.
On the last day, at the outing itself, a shoving fight got started between girls on opposing teams. They started yelling at each other and calling each other cheaters. Our Society officers had to break it up. I was heart broken. My plan to pull off the best games in the history of Tri Sigma had fallen flat.
I went off to cry. One girl followed me, and she said, amazed, "I can't believe you got everybody so fired up about those flags! Nobody's ever done that! You did a great job! Nobody ever cared about the Society's games before this year!"
That's how it goes when you get people to care about something. Their feelings get involved. They get passionate. They have to think up ways to defend their views. They start reading. (Try "The Religious Writer and the Tired Reader" by Flannery O'Connor.) They quit being couch potatoes and start participating. Maybe they even yell a lot. When I opened SECRET RADIO up for comments, it got REALLY passionate, and I got yelled at a lot---especially by IFB preachers. I didn't care. Every time the preachers would yell about SECRET RADIO, the readership would increase by at least a third. I wanted them to keep yelling.
I think Ms. Hoff was onto something. Perhaps, in time, she'll feel more comfortable with passionate readers and try an open forum again. Or, if she doesn't, maybe I'll take a turn. I'm thinking through a lot of ideas about this. Maybe it's tiem to organize an Underground Christian Fiction Forum, for stuff that's hard-edged, culturally diverse, and yet still points unflinchingly to Christ.
Drop me a line at graceblog@earthlink.net if this idea appeals to you.
