Dirty Deeds & the Christian Author

I’m sure much has already been said on this matter somewhere on the blogosphere, but I got to thinking about it today:

My characters are generally bad people. The whole stinkin’ lot of them simply reek of original sin. They’re perfectly awful which is only perfectly natural given the general state of humanity. Even us Christians are only sinners saved by grace.

But how do we write it?

Take swearing. [Those with gentler constitutions probably should stop reading and go do something else now.]

My characters never really swear. Oh, they use the words “friggin,” “sodding” and “crap.” I suppose some would consider that cussing of a sort. As someone who wasn’t always a Christian, someone who sang in a horrid little metal garage band and spouted and sang the F-word at every available opportunity, I can honestly say that my pastor found these tamer substitutions immensely preferable! Did you know that if you sing something, it becomes second nature? That’s why congregational singing is so important and should not be neglected for the sake of current musical trends in worship; congregational singing helps to form our shared liurgy! In any case, I swore in song and was in such a habit of swearing that I did it as unconsciously as breathing. I’d raised it to an art form. Of course, my favorite profanity was the F-bomb. The F-word in particular has always been versatile for the more brazen soul: a noun, adjective, verb.. you could even add new syllables to common words for added effect: for example, out-friggin-rageous! I digress.

Yes, this is me before I became a Christian

 

So if you were to ask me if those words were cussing, I’d laugh. I do laugh! I laughed when people used them back when I peeled the wallpaper off the walls with every profane utterance! It wasn’t really swearing at all. It was hinting at it.

When someone who grew up in church all their life or has become now so acclimated to Christian social norms that they’ve forgotten what they were like hears those words, some of them are convinced that I may as well be cussing.

Thus, we have a great divide in Christian fiction, an is/ought contradiction that must somehow be dealt with. As I understand it, there are two camps on the subject [I'm oversimplifying, I'm sure]: the Honesty camp and the Holiness camp. The Honesty party thinks we ought not sugar-coat sin. We ought to paint it as it is so real people can then see themselves reflected in the pages of our books and then be pointed to a real Savior. Something to that effect anyway. The Holiness camp thinks we ought not do anything of the sort. We ought to write our characters as role models. A sort of what would Jesus write crowd.

Which is an excellent question all it’s own, btw! What would Jesus, the Master Storyteller write? His parables reflected the lives of real people. The Prodigal Son’s protagonist is a disrespectful hedonist who finds grace. It would be intersting to study His parables anew with that question in mind.

Anyway, two camps overgeneralized. And I don’t really fit into either. I think the Holiness camp authors write saccharine pieces that are a little too gilt-edged. They don’t show people as they are, but how they prefer them to be. Are we really to suppose these fictional worlds contain no cigarettes, alcohol or dice. The characters seem too plastic. If any of them have flaws or sins they are either destined for conversion or they’re the villains. No one struggles with a thorn in the side. Yet I know Christians who struggle with addictions. I know Christians who don’t always do the right and proper Christian thing. I know Christians who often act self-righteously instead of graciously. One of them looks me in the mirror every day!

On the other hand, the Honesty guys are equally unappealing. Take gore and violence. I’m writing a sci-fi adventure piece. There are super-powered fist fights, guns, rockets, alien death rays and all of the high-flying action you’d expect out of a classic good versus evil brawl through downtown. Now, I could write a scene with lots of graphic gore and blood with people spitting out teeth and what-have-you [I don't] and that would be honest, but it would also be unnecessary. To be honest [and brutally so, as is my custom], I do have a scene where I note that someone’s shin bone is jutting out of their leg. That’s my goriest scene and it’s simply necessary so that you know the extent of the character’s injuries at that point and that, well, its a serious leg injury, not a sprain or a mere fracture. That sort of medical gore is necessary in a case like that, but I think that there’s a line that can be crossed where it becomes gratuitous. Where we might as well follow that act with lions and Christians…

There’s also the issue of the protagonist’s faith. In almost every Christian novel I read, the protagonist is either a Christian at the start or he is by the end of the book. In my current book, only two Christians are evident. One’s a preacher [supporting cast] and the other is the protagonist’s dead father. The protagonist’s Christian upbringing is evident, but it’s also evident that he’s not actually converted himself. As a preacher, I’m not a fan of forced conversions, in real life or in fiction. In my novel, which takes place over the course of one action-packed day, there simply wasn’t time for reflection much less the sort of mini-sermon some Christian authors force into their novels. I’m not disrespecting those guys, if it’s forced, it’s superfluous – and it would never, ever happen that way in real life! So write something else.

But this raises a question: Should the protagonist be a role model? Or are we free to write our characters in different stages of their lives? What I mean by this is are we justified as Christian authors in writing a novel with a protagonist who isn’t saved and doesn’t get saved in the book and might not even get saved if I write a sequel? Or to give a more personal example, can we write about a protagonist from my foul-mouthed band days, influenced somewhat [or even greatly] by his Christian upbringing, but nowhere near the point of conversion in this segment of the plot of my life?

In exploring this [and I apologize for the length of this rambling discourse!] subject, I find it interesting to note that Christian authors can freely write murders and lies – it’s the matters of Christian conduct [swearing, drinking, smoking, dancing, listening to metal, wearing Goth clothing, reading Harry Potter] that seem to set us off.

Any thoughts?

Rev Tony Breeden

*re-posted from http://www.creationconversations.com/group/christianauthors/forum/topics/dirty-deeds-the-christian

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