Today I will be trying out a new Blog series on a subject close to my heart, Christian World-building. written for my contemporaries and perspective writers, I want to propose and dissect some important considerations for the genre, as well as how I handle them in my own way.
A Christian’s Guide to World-building: Intention is Everything
One of the things that have been in the back of my mind for a while now was how to formalize my creative process for other Christian writers. There can be no doubt that many Christians are apprehensive of stories containing magic or mythology. After all, there are literal forces in our world that proclaim such things as truth, and thus deeply deceive many. And truth be told, just because someone can tell a wonderful story, or create a believable world, does not mean they know the bible well enough to teach it rightly, even obliquely through allegory. So today I will be writing to writers, in hopes that as we pursue our creations we can recognize and subvert some of the common traps that might “Secularize” our created worlds, peoples, or abilities.
The fact of the matter is that God has a personality and a process. It is said that a creator always reveals more of themselves in their art than they realize. God, on the other hand, creates for the express purpose of revealing himself. As writers, we ought to take great care that when we craft a Christian Fantasy or Sci-Fi, we reveal the nature of that creator as accurately as possible. Part of the wonder suffused into every element of the Chronicles of Narnia can be found to do this. Certainly, we see the passion C.S. Lewis had for mythology (particularly roman) and his deep love of medieval archetypes. But beneath the nobility and legend, we see something else. The Deep Magic written before the dawn of time is a song of creation, a song that creates with beauty, humor, and challenge. Why I always come back to this series is because it’s a world in which I truly want to live. It is in truth a world like our own, only without the blinders and corruption of sin except for what the villains bring into it from the outside.
But how is this accomplished? How do we create worlds, peoples, and histories that still reveal the creator? I think the beginning is found in starting with an underlying assumption, and two consequential rules.
The Necessary Assumption: God is not only loving and good, but has the right to determine categorically his creation by the operation of his intent. That is, he makes things right, and any resulting harm comes not from design, but misuse. This is vitally important, because when we consider evil we have to tie it not to a created nature (like say a race of evil goblins) but instead to a corruption or misuse (such as eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil before it’s rightful time). Otherwise, we risk conveying that God creates evil, or else creates imperfectly. Most importantly, that which is good must be sourced in the intention of its design, and which ultimate standard must be in the nature of the ultimate creator.
Rule One: What is truly good will always be sourced in the intention for what it was made. To put it simply, if you are to judge a saw by its ability to create music you will have mixed results at best, but if you judge it by its ability to cut through wood there are few better! When deciding what is right or wrong, ask yourself if what is considered good is aligning with its foundational purpose.
Rule Two: That which is Evil comes from the misuse of otherwise beautiful principles, abilities, or objects. When we decide what our conflict or challenge is, a good question to ask is whether or not it is coming because the situation is inherently evil (such as classic light versus dark scenario where the solution is restoring balance, as opposed to redemption or judgment) or because of a misuse of an otherwise goodly power (such as how the ability to imbue an item with the creators intent is wonderful for Frodo’s glowing weapon Sting, but horrific when applied to Sauran’s malic in creating the One Ring).
These concepts might seem unnecessarily pedantic, but understanding them is foundational to presenting a world reasonably consistent with the God we seek to represent. To use our own world as an example, we leave ourselves in the position of the question, “If God is so good, then why does evil exist?”. When we allow our own morality to determine the intent, and thus the goodness, of a situation, we put ourselves in direct conflict with a God who has the right to determine the design himself. We can easily fall into traps of decisions feeling right (such as sexual relationships between different species) or conversely judging that which is different by a standard set for us (such as a species created with three marital partners being evil because we only are created for two).
Now, I admit these are structurally built for a more Hard World approach. But certainly even the most mellow attempts should pay close attention. Remember, all who seek to tell stories are trying to convey an idea, and we who seek Christian fiction need to be doubly aware of what we present. If we do not, we run the risk of leading believers astray and becoming guilty of the very thing halting our genre from growing among the very people who ought to be clambering for it.
Interesting thoughts. You’ve certainly thought deeply about this. It is hard to write allegory well.
Thank you! One of the coming articles will be on the difference between writing allegory and Christian speculative fiction. It’s one thing to say that Aslan died for Edmund the way Jesus died for us, and an altogether different thing to write on what are the different ways god might sacrifice himself for his creations
Excellent analysis of the essential paradigms that must be addressed when writing Fantasy from a Christian world view. In Lewis’s time, location and audience, the Christian perspective was understood regardless of whether or not it was adhered to. With today’s audience, the underlying perspective or world view is largely influenced by a media gone dark, cultural atheism and often anti-Christian. How then can one write the salvation story linked to the reality of its actual existence, when the background truth is not already established ,at least as a cultural understanding? In learning theory, we know that learning is best established when it can link to prior knowledge or previous learning. Teachers call this the “preparatory set” when they seek to establish where the students have or lack sufficient prior knowledge in order to proceed with the lesson. How can a writer link the salvation or God based message in a Fantasy or Sci-fi story as a truth, when the reader lacks the prior knowledge to attach it to? Would the writer need to assess which audience, (Christian or Atheist) they are writing to? Would it change the approach or require more explicit explanations? You are correct in stating that we would not want to lead a seeking soul away from the gospel rather than toward it. I have known many children and adults who read Narnia as children that totally missed Lewis’s brilliantly crafted analogy. They had no prior knowledge and dismissed it as a just another Harry Potter type story. Whereas Lewis created in me a yearning for the truth, for God, for Narnia, for heaven. I knew for Whom to look for to find It. Harry Potter, explicitly points the reader to witchcraft. How can we write as powerfully and compelling to point the reader to Christ?
My next article will deal will explore how Christian writers might approach resolving the conflict in their stories in uniquely Christian ways, so I won’t dive too deeply here, although it addresses some of your excellent points.
Truly, I think you have hit the nail on the head when it comes to audience. Christian fiction and non-fiction both share two important elements. They are designed to evangelize and/or promote growth in the body of believers. Too often writers fail to consider the former, relying instead on “preaching to the choir”. The job of the modern Christian writer is twice as hard as it once was. If we wish to evangelize, a worthy endeavor, then we ourselves need to provide a “preparatory set”. As a matter of fact, my main series is middle grade for this exact reason, to provide a framework to understand theological concepts rarely addressed outside of academia. I think the approach depends mainly on the goal, and the answer the writer determines ought to inform if they are focusing on speculative or allegorical fiction.
As for Harry Potter specifically, I think its important acknowledge that the underlying intention is not how to perform acts of magic. Rather, it is about accepting your fate, and what motivates someone to rebel against it. Wicca and other pagen practices are specifically about obtaining the power to take control of your circumstances, which is actually more what the villains in the narrative do then the hero’s. Much more dangerous then the Harry Potter franchise are those who promote the empowerment or expression of the self above over objective realities, as seen in some of the later Rick Riorden novels.