On truth, fiction and being a Christian writer

Christian Century, Dec 17, 1997 by James Calvin Schaap

I was never a big fan of the Sugar Creek Gang novels, but I must have been the odd boy out, since our church library had tons of them, all lined up straight and tall on their own shelf as if they were proud of all that parental and ecclesiastical approval. Even today, those books stand in my memory as righteous stories for righteous boys.

Of which I didn't know many. Perhaps that's why I didn't care for the books. Though my mother wanted me to read them, though the church library was full of them, though the boys in their pages occasionally got into trouble, I found the novels rather odd. They seemed unreal. The boys were naughty, but they always came out of the fray on their knees in prayer, smelling as sweet as the rose of Sharon. I attended a Christian school, went to church twice every Sunday and lived, for all practical purposes, in a verifiably Christian community. But I didn't recognize a soul among the Sugar Creek Gang.

When I began to think seriously about writing books myself, a "Christian" writer still seemed to me to be someone bound to churn out the next generation of Sugar Creek Gang novels--a job I didn't covet. By that time, I'd grown to love two mainstream novelists who'd emerged from my own Dutch Reformed background, Peter De Vries and Frederic Manfred, both of whom had established national reputations. In De Vries's Blood of the Lamb, I found characters who looked, talked and acted like people I knew.

I may be the only reader in the world who loved Manfred's now long-forgotten The Man Who Looked Like the Prince of Wales, a novel I read as a freshman in college. In it I also found people I knew. Via Manfred's work, the felt life of fiction became palpable, and I knew for the first time the magic of literature. Manfred made me want to write.

But both De Vries and Manfred had left the church, my church. So for me the equation was quite elementary: write Sugar Creek Gang books and stay in the fellowship of believers, or write the truth and leave.

Some may bridle at the parochialism of Christian higher education, but for me a Christian college education offered a broader perspective of both Christianity and literature and, in the process, totally destroyed the old equations. In college I encountered writers whose work didn't assault my sense of either good fiction or faith. I began to understand that fiction that grounds itself in the truth does not have to renege on commitment to God. I read the English novelist Graham Greene, the Canadian novelist Rudy Wiebe and the American novelist Shirley Nelson. And I read Flannery O'Connor. When I was a student at the small Christian college where I teach today, O'Connor was championed, even canonized, as the premiere Christian writer, the role model, the Joan of Arc. She was one of us, a Christian writer who made it big on sheer excellence.

I was surprised, a few years later, when I attended Raymond Carver's fiction-writing class at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, that he assigned Mystery and Manners, O'Connor's book of essays. Carver told us he thought no other book on the craft was quite as comprehensive, simple and strong.

Carver said we all had to read the whole book, not just selected essays. So I did. And, in the context of the secular university, I blushed when I read lines like this from "The Fiction Writer and His Country": "I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that. I don't think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these times to make transparent in fiction."

Today, almost 30 years and several books of fiction later, I still hold before me O'Connor's work and testimony, even though I'm not the symbolist she is and likely never will be, given her Roman Catholic sacramentalism and my own deep Protestant heritage. But today I've got other heroes, other role models to demonstrate the ways to link faith and writing: Wendell Berry, Doris Betts, Andre Dubus, Ron Hansen, Madeleine L'Engle, Lee Smith, John Updike, Larry Woiwode and many more. A burgeoning group of American writers seems to understand not only that fiction that preaches isn't literature at all, but also that literature that does not take into account the religious impulse fails to negotiate the full territory of our humanness.

A crowd of good role models does not necessarily make the job of writing a novel easier. Those "Christian" writers who, like me, live within the community of believers face a task that hasn't changed substantially from what it was in the world I lived in as a boy. Wonderful, devout believers--good friends, compassionate human beings--don't always see eye-to-eye about what is or isn't righteous. What I may see as a deep plunge into the depths of human sin, other believers will see only as shameful and unbecoming to a Christian bound by the words of the apostle to think about only "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable." Some good Christians--Christians I pray with--see the use of vulgarity and profanity--language today as ubiquitous as the media themselves--as beyond the pale. I draw their ire and condemnation when I say a naughty word. Years ago, my mother offered to buy me the very finest electronic typewriter I could find if only I'd promise not to write bad words. I kept my old beast.