What is the Duty of the Christian Writer?

From the Worldmagblog of Harrison Scott Key. Do you agree or disagree with him?

What is the duty of the Christian writer?

by Harrison Scott Key - October 10

This question is both important, and rather impossible to answer in any absolute way. On one hand, the Christian writer (and by that, I mean to speak about those who write imaginative literature: personal essays, novels, short stories, poems, plays) has the same responsibility as any writer: to write well.

But on the other hand, the Christian writer, if he has been paying attention during the last two or three decades, has a certain burden to build in some kind of Christian apologetic into his work.

I’m not saying this is right or good; I’m just saying that in the Culture Wars, the Church has – sometimes passively, sometimes actively – enlisted Christian writers with this task.

“You’re writing novels! They should be Christian novels!”

“You’re writing screenplays! They should undo the damage of a thousand depraved screenplays!”

“Flannery O’Conner and C.S. Lewis wrote books that had something to do with Jesus! So should you!”

These kinds of entreaties and enlistments can really burden the young writer with far too much to think about. Writing good stories is hard enough. Writing good stories with built-in apologetics is nigh impossible.

The best answer for the Christian writer, then, is to look at other writers who were Christians: O’Connor, Lewis, Walker Percy, Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, George Herbert, John Donne, Tolstoy (depending on who you ask), and especially Dostoevsky.

There are, of course, a thousand other famous Christian writers, but we don’t know who they are, because they were kind enough not to write about their faith too much and instead focus on good stories. But Dostoevsky hid nothing in this regard, as critic A.N. Wilson points out:

[T]he better Western novelists have tended to fight clear of theology. Their works might contain a religious element, but they are not vehicles, as Dostoevsky’s great novels are, for the presentation of raw metaphysical debate. It simply is not possible to read The Brothers Karamazov without becoming engaged with the God questions: Does he exist? If he exists, how can the suffering of a child even be thinkable? Is there an alternative to the seductive, and ultimately blasphemous allure of the Grand Inquisitor’s creation of a religion which offers mystery and authority?

Wilson continues:

Is the novel the most Christian fictional work ever written, or the most damning indictment of religious faith, from which in fact no “realist” account of religious belief could ever be extrapolated? Or is it neither? Is it a book which enables the reader to wrestle with these questions, unshackled either by obedience to a tightly defined religious system, or by that equally limiting worship of science which the nineteenth century erected as a substitute?

That novel, and Dostoevsky’s other novels, are about as far as one can get from the Left Behind series without actually leaving the bookstore. Dostoevsky gives no easy answers to these questions, and as such, everyone (pagans and Christians alike) walks away with more to think about. Pagans leave this novel having read about a devout believer who is not unlikable. Christians leave this novel having read about a devout pagan who is not unlikable.

Sounds like real life to me. And that’s what Christian writers should be writing about, after all.