"Bad Christian Art" by Tony Woodlief

This is one of the best articles I have ever read- Mr. Woodlief perfectly describes all my frustrations with Christian books/movies/entertainment. Washed out, over-simplified plots with Sunday School morals and cheesy sentimentality are not what I call good reading/watching/etc. He, however, explains the plague much better than I do- enjoy! 


“Why,” asks the title of a recent movie review by Salon writer Andrew O’Hehir, “are Christian movies so awful?” He asks this after watching Soul Surfer, a film targeted at American evangelicals, about a one-armed surfer girl. It’s supposed to be a true story, insofar as anything can be true once it has been plucked from the web of human interdependence and stretched across a fifty-foot screen.
Apparently this is a bad movie, though the only question when such movies hit the screen is not whether they are bad, but whether they are better than Left Behind, or better than Facing the Giants, or better than whatever else has been served up to good Christian people who judge art by criteria like message and wholesomeness and theological purity.
I’m convinced that bad art derives, like bad literary theory, from bad theology. To know God falsely is to write and paint and sculpt and cook and dance Him falsely. Perhaps it’s not poor artistic skill that yields bad Christian art, in other words, but poor Christianity.
Consider, for example, some common sins of the Christian writer:
Neat resolution: You can find it on the shelves of your local Christian bookstore: the wayward son comes to Christ, the villain is shamed, love (which deftly avoids pre-marital sex) blossoms, and the right people praise God in the end. Perhaps best of all, we learn Why This All Happened.
Many of us are familiar, likewise, with that tendency among some Christians to view life as a sitcom, with God steadily revealing how the troubles in our lives yield more good than ill. It’s sad that he died so young, but look at how his brother has turned to Christ. The earthquake killed thousands, but see how God’s people are coming together in response.
What good God works from a three year-old who is raped, however, or a teenager who succumbs to schizophrenia, is His domain entirely, and to speculate on how these horrors fit into the Great Plan borders on obscenity.
Sometimes we suffer and often we fail, and there is no clear answer why, no cosmic math that redeems, in our broken hearts, this sadness. The worst Christian novels seem to forget Oswald Chambers’s insightful observation, which is that God promises deliverance in suffering, not deliverance from suffering. And so they lie about the world and about God and about the quiet, enduring faith of our brethren in anguish.
One-dimensional characters: In many Christian novels there are only three kinds of characters: the good, the evil, and the not-so-evil ones who are about to get themselves saved. And perhaps this saved/not saved dichotomy—more a product of American evangelicalism than Christian orthodoxy—accounts for the problem.
I think we might craft better characters if we accept that every one of us is journeying the path between heaven and hell, and losing his way, and rushing headlong one direction before abruptly changing course to dash in the other, and hearing rumors about what lies ahead, and hoping and dreading in his heart what lies each way, and grabbing hold of someone by the arm or by the hair and dragging, sometimes from love and sometimes from hate and sometimes from both.
Sentimentality: Like pornography, sentimentality corrupts the sight and the soul, because it is passion unearned. Whether it is Xerxes weeping at the morality of his unknown minions assembled at the Hellespont, or me being tempted to well up as the protagonist in Facing the Giants grips his Bible and whimpers in a glen, the rightful rejoinder is the same: you didn’t earn this emotion.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s warning against cheap grace comes to mind, a recognition that our redemption was bought with a price, as redemption always is. The writer who gives us sentimentality is akin to the painter Thomas Kinkade, who explicitly aims to paint the world without the Fall, which is not really the world at all, but a cheap, maudlin, knock-off of the world, a world without suffering and desperate faith and Christ Himself, which is not really a world worth painting, or writing about, or redeeming.
Cleanliness: I confess that the best way to deter me from watching a movie is to tell me it’s “wholesome.” This is because that word applied to art is a lie on its face, because insofar as art is stripped of the world’s sin and suffering it is not really whole at all.
This seems to be a failing—on the part of artist and consumer alike—in what my Orthodox friends call theosis, or walk, as my evangelical friends say. In short, if Christian novels and movies and blogs and speeches must be stripped of profanity and sensuality and critical questions, all for the sake of sparing us scandal, then we have to wonder what has happened that such a wide swath of Christendom has failed to graduate from milk to meat.
And if we remember that theology is the knowing of God, we have to ask in turn why so many Christians know God so weakly that they need such wholesomeness in order for their faith to be preserved.
This, finally, is what especially worries me, that bad Christian art is a problem of demand rather than supply. What if a reinvigorated Church were to embed genuine faith in the artist’s psyche and soul, such that he need no longer wear it on his sleeve, such that he bear to see and tell the world in its brokenness and beauty? Would Christian audiences embrace or despise the result?

He Says It Best

Okay people, so Lucius has been abandoned for the time being. I'm too busy; well, the deadline is, um, tomorrow, and that doesn't give me time to edit.

Anyway, L.B. Grahm is one of my favorite authors, and here's an exerpt from one of his blog posts. It is so true... so true... and he says it best. Enjoy! (My favorite part is in bold, in case you're wondering.)

Hitting a pivotal birthday like 40 tends to produce some reflective moments. Looking back ten years, I think about the fact that when I turned 30, I was an unpublished school teacher developing a fantasy idea that I'd had in college. If you'd told me I'd get someone to buy, not just the first book, but all five, and that ten years later the books would be on many different shelves in many different countries, I would have wondered what you were smoking. As I look ahead, I wonder what the next ten years hold. My brain is an idea factory, and I'm not quite sure where the shut-off valve is. Stories cram into my skull, and I have to write them down to relieve the pressure. Unfortunately, it's easier to conceive an idea than to write a novel, so I'm fighting a losing war.
I wonder what the next ten years hold for the publishing world. Will ebooks and digital publishing revolutionize the industry? Perhaps the better question is how much? Will I look back one day and think, "How quaint that my first series was in paper." Kind of like some classic rock band who made it big with vinyl but now sells most of their music via iTunes.
In the end, I don't know that I care a whole lot. I mean, I like writing and care about the world of writing, but the business side of things is something that I do, only because I have to. What really matters are the stories. They're part of me, and I can't not write them.
Don't get me wrong, there are way more important things in life than writing and being published. I know that. Still it's also true that a big part of my heart and life lives in the space between my fingertips and my keyboard, and that's just how it is.

Isn't he awesome? And his books are just as good! Beyond the Summerland is my favorite. Here's the link to his blog: 
   http://blog.lbgraham.com/

Have a good week!

Lucius's Short Story

So... it's been a while. Life gets in the way, doesn't it?

Anyway, I want to enter a short story contest, which requires me to write one. Here's what I have so far- I don't know how it ends. No clue. Nada. Zilch. Nothing. It'll only make things more interesting for me! Tell me what you think of it.

It was his turn to die.

Lucius stared at the noose, his hands tied behind his back, counting the last moments of his life. Eighty-four, eighty-five, eighty-six...

That was all it took. Eighty-seven seconds before, men who had never known him decided his life was forfeit, decided they had the right to judge between life and death, decided that the rope hanging before him was worth more than his own existence.

Everything had been in vain; all his labors had been for nothing.

The noose swung in the breeze, smiling at him.

Ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight...

How did it come to this?

Clinging to the knife in his hand, Lucius slunk around the darkened corner, trying to steady his wild heart rate. This was his duty, he had to do it. It was his task, it was his responsibility... he wiped a sweaty palm on his thigh, trying to sort through the raging emotions in his heart.

This is right. He kept telling himself. This is right. This is right. This is right.

But he couldn't convince himself that it was- why was he trying to lie to himself? His duty was sick and twisted; his task was, simply put, wrong.

But he had to do it.

He had too.

He had too.

He avoided the puddles of milky moonlight that spilled into the street, slipping from shadow to shadow. No money in the world was worth his duty; he was wondering if his reward- the one thing he had wanted his whole life- could ever heal the scar his task would give him.

Was murder worth his freedom? Was another's life worth more than his own?

That was the question- that was the dilemma. Lucius heard the clock tower chime eleven; he had only minutes left to decide. Minutes till he could be free; moments until he could be a murderer.

Was it worth it?

He knew that no one except himself could answer the question- it was his freedom, his choice. He didn't even know why he agreed to it in the first place; everything about it was so sick and wrong.

How could he have been so desperate? Even slavery was better than living with a guilty conscience-

Was it?

The pale moon offered him no answers. The wind, tossing his hair around his head, whispered no solutions; the empty street told him to keep moving, keep thinking...

Every moment meant his time was running out, slipping away like water over rock. Every passing second brought his decision closer and closer...

His master had made his duty very clear: kill the one with the golden telescope, and he can be freed. The thought of liberty made Lucius weak in the knees; he had dreamed of it since childhood, since he realized there was another kind of life, where he was his own master.

Was his life worth more than another's?

Lucius didn't even know what the golden telescope meant, why that man needed to be killed. But his freedom...

Creeping down the dark road, Lucius headed towards the upper-class section of town, closer to a prestigious theater called the White Fox. Perhaps he could... perhaps he wouldn't... his mind split down the middle, cracking under the pressure, and Lucius felt sweat spring across his forehead even thought the night was cold.

He slipped on the mask he had been given, just in case. He couldn't be too careful, could he?

Fanfiction

I swear I posted this yesterday... evidently not, though. I don't have any clue how that happened.

But all my energy has been pouring into my fanfic, Sons of War. Why? Because I love the characters, I adore the plot, and I drool over every review I get. On fanfiction.net, you can create a username and post stories for books and movies (etc) that aren't technically yours. And people from across the world can read them and tell you what they think- hense, my addiction to it.

Right now, Sons of War has 144 reviews, 36 alerts (when someone subscribes to a story to know when it's updated), 33 favorites, and 11,143 hits. In other words, a lot of people have read it. The problem is that there are so many different kinds of stories, and people are looking for specifics (specific characters, specific writing style, etc) and so it's hard to find the people I'm aiming at. But when I find them, or they find me... it's wonderful.

I've never met any of my reviewers in my life, and they're from all over the world- England, Australia, Brazil, Russia, and Egypt, for example- but its like I'm finding some long-lost friend. They're brutally honest and gleefully energetic, and I love them so much! I mean, everyone loves being encouraged and hearing people say that they're awesome, but when it specifically refers to my writing... I get the shivers.

So, if you want to know, honest to goodness if your writing is worth a dime, get a fanfiction account and post something. Anything- write a one shot about your favorite character, a poem about some inner turmoil about an angsty character, anything. And people will tell you, honestly and sometimes brutally, if they think you're good.

Or, if you're simply waiting for the next in a series or are bored, get on and start reading. Tell people what you think- trust me, people want to know. The authors are on there for a reason.

So... that's fanfiction.net! Enjoy!