The Christian Lit Renaissance?

A response to two recent posts from Ecstatic and Solum Literary Press

Afternoon sunlight alights on a bookshelf in the reading room at Pusey House, Oxford.

Within days of each other, two different publications I read here on Substack published an essay and a discussion post on the state of Christian literature today. Here is the essay by

Heidie Senseman

for

Ecstatic

, and the discussion post by the editors at

Solum Literary Press

. I’m intrigued that this topic is getting attention again, and couldn’t resist weighing in.

Heidie Senseman’s essay does a fantastic job of exploring the weightiness that’s missing from the Christian writing that seems to sell well. You only have to take a look at the inventory for major Christian imprints like Multnomah and Waterbrook to see what I mean: romances, biblical period pieces, and sharply gendered marketing abound. I have no doubt that this portfolio is dotted with a few decent reads, but these aren’t the kind of novels that are being picked up and read and discussed by the public at-large. As far as the public is concerned, to label a book “Christian” is to label it as “insular”—fundamentally disconnected from the rest of the literary world.

What concerns me, as Senseman writes in her piece for Ecstatic, is that sincere Christian writing tends to get blocked at the acquisition level:

MAINSTREAM PUBLISHERS, on the other hand, wanted literary writing, and they were open to work that was spiritually conscious. But they wanted it slant. The subtitles on their display books helped me understand their angle. Lots of verbs like escaping and rejecting and shattering. Lots of breaking free and deconstructing. One editor, as he watched me scan his booth’s sample titles, announced that his press was “interested in the stories that Christianity wasn’t ready for.”

Was it always like this? J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis—the two Christian literary giants of the 20th century who usually get mentioned in the same breath—also faced secular headwinds in their time. But then, Tolkien and Lewis’s first works of fiction rolled out in the late 1930s, well before publishing houses became the sprawling conglomerates they are now. They also seem to predate the invention of dedicated labels like science fiction writer, fantasy writer, and romance writer. Certainly, genre fiction was out there, and it was already beginning to separate from what we now call mainstream “literary” fiction.

We could define literary fiction in a lot of ways, but for this article I’m positing that literary fiction is fiction that endures. I think that’s what makes it so rare. The preamble to Solum’s discussion post alludes to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Flannery O’Connor, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky as writers who continue to have literary and scholarly weight in Christian and secular circles today. I would also add Graham Greene and Shūsaku Endō, whose novels The Power and the Glory (Greene, 1940) and Silence (Endō, 1966) were like lightning bolts to me. None of the authors and works above are renowned for tidy morals, but all of them engage with spirituality in significant, intelligent ways.

There’s clearly a desire for a renaissance in Christian storytelling. Less than a year ago, Christianity Today (which owns Ekstasis Magazine) launched a fellowship for young artists called Nextgen Accelerator. The program’s goal is to expose these emerging creatives “to mentorship, dialogue, research, and problem solving to better serve within their current contexts or prepare them for vibrant careers as part of any storytelling environment.” And at Biola University, where I work, our cinema school has attracted multi-million dollar facility investments, and is enrolling new students at an exponential rate. What remains to be seen is whether all this patronage will result in work that is emotionally intelligent enough to handle the abuse, the divisions, and the ugly parts of Christianity with a steady hand. That’s literature.

There is a pathway to encouraging and discovering more of this real, resonant sort of writing. As a first step, I try to practice readerly hospitality in every encounter. To be a hospitable reader is to postpone the initial judgement on whether a book “counts” as literature or not. Hospitality also requires an ecumenical outlook, which means supporting and fostering dialogue between denominations and different expressions of Christianity. Literature shouldn’t have to be theologically correct for us to endorse it to each other. And literature shouldn’t have to vindicate God, the church, or religious experience at all. That’s not what it’s for.

Secondly, I’m persevering in hope for the present and future marriage of genre fiction (sci-fi and fantasy) with mainstream literature. The two can coexist, and do coexist in authors like Tolkien, Lewis, and Madeleine L’Engle. If you’re interested in more of this, check out ezines like Mysterion, which is actively publishing top-quality science-fiction, fantasy, and magic realism from writers you likely haven’t heard of.

Lastly, let’s keep commending new discoveries (and rediscoveries) to each other! I hope to do at least that much here. One such novel, published to mainstream acclaim a few years ago, is Daniel Nayeri’s Everything Sad is Untrue (2020). It’s an excruciating refugee story (I think the trendy term for it is “autofiction”) that chronicles one family’s flight from Iran to Bible Belt Oklahoma. You won’t find tidy resolutions here, either, but the pages resound with hope. We could use more books like that.

If you have any books or authors you’ve discovered that are contributing to this hoped-for renaissance, drop a comment on this post! I’d love to see what you’re reading and what’s been watering your literary desert.