The Fifth Reflection from a Protestant Church Library

or The Fictional God

So called 'Christian Fiction' is an almost purely Protestant phenomenon. While it is true many devout Catholics have written works of fiction (J.R.R. Tolkien, Flannery O'Connor, G.K. Chesterton, etc.) the stories these people write are never classified as 'Christian Fiction.' On the flip side, it is the rare devout Protestant who writes a work of fiction which is not, for the most part, explicitly Christian. Almost half the books within the Protestant Library were works of Christian Fiction, with maybe a half dozen fiction works that were not implicitly Christian. Why thi dichotomy?

Christian Fiction is, essentially, works of fiction which are overtly about God and how faith in him helps people solve their problems. Sometimes this will manifest itself as nothing more than a romance novel where one member of the couple has to get right with God before their relationship works, or it might go so far as to make supernatural conflicts between God and the Devil to be the center of the work. Sometimes if the work is particularly good it will be picked up by a mainstream publisher, but usually they are restricted to Christian publishing companies.

Because Protestantism has rejected anything outside of the Bible, their foundational worldview must be based on their interpretation of that single book. As such, what they can know as true is very limited, shrinking in turn their worldview. They have very little true philosophy and a limited understanding of the Church in the world. Protestants know the Church is in the world, but they feel to see the deep connections the world must have to the Church, the Pillar and Foundation of Truth.

Because of this, Protestants can only really relate to the world via the visible faith of people. Churches, in the Protestant sense, come and go, but Sola Fida remains. As the churches fade out, their world view fades away, and the only part that endures is that which is fairly explicit within the Bible. Thus Protestant fiction must be about that which endures and the only way to present that is through explicitly Christian characters. Even most Protestant written works of the Fantastic involve an essentially Christian God transposed to another world.

The Catholic idea of the world, on the other hand, involves a philosophical belief that, what ever happens, their is a certain foundation to the world which never changes, a core philosphy if you will. Because of this, Flannery O'Connor could write dozens of stories and novels that are very Catholic and yet almost never mention God or his Church. The characters within her world, their responses to their situations, and the situations themselves reveal the Catholic understanding of the world.

Likewise, J.R.R. Tolkien makes almost no reference to religion throughout the entire Lord of the Rings, yet he claims the work is "fundamentally religions and Catholic." It is not the presence of God which makes it Catholic, but the presence of the world God made, obeying the natural and supernatural laws he placed in it. Tolkien refered to history as "a long defeat," understanding that our world, just like Middle-Earth, will not improve despite the victories we win, but will eventually be remade in the new heaven and new earth.

Catholic fiction, because of its understanding of the world, is not forced to present itself in the guise of being simply 'Christian.' It is a univiersal fiction, capable of speaking to people of all creeds, understanding that there is more to the world than dreamed of in Protestant philosophies.