Fiction, Fact, and Truth

Does the subconscious notion that fiction is deceit dull interest in the evangelical novel?

What is the relation between fiction and lying (“telling a story”)? What sort of message must the Christian novel or short story convey? And is there such a thing as artistic freedom in Christian fiction? These questions, ancient and basic and obvious as they seem, are still causing trouble in the evangelical world.

First things first. In his effort to get several prominent Christian magazines to publish fiction, Joseph T. Bayly (Eternity, April, 1965) quotes Dr. A. W. Tozer’s view that there can be no such thing as Christian fiction because “if it’s Christian, it’s true; but if it’s fiction, it’s false.” Dr. Tozer’s remark is reminiscent of Richard Baxter’s rejection of “false stories” in A Treatise of Self-Denial (1675) or of Thomas Goodwin’s condemnation of “playbooks, … romances, feigned stories” in The Vanity of Thoughts Discovered (1638). As Lawrence A. Sasek points out in his excellent study of The Literary Temper of the English Puritans, “the word ‘feigned’ appears regularly as a pejorative term indicating that the puritans thought of fiction not as an imaginative view of reality, but as simple falsehood” (p. 64). Fiction, of course, aims to tell the universal, philosophic truth, rather than the particular, historical truth; but popular misunderstanding of fiction forced many early American novelists to preface their noveltitles with The True History of … in order to avoid the stigma of “lying.” Ironically, the artist was thus forced to falsify in order to please the Christian public; for while good fiction presented as fiction is an embodiment of universal truth, fiction presented as fact involves a miserable deception. Dr. Tozer’s comment indicates that the concept of fiction-as-lying is by no means dead in certain evangelical circles.

Sir Philip Sidney wrote the definitive defense of the values of fiction in “An Apology for Poetry” (1595). About the writer of fiction, Sidney says:

Though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true, he lieth not—[unless] we will say that Nathan lied in his speech … to David; which as a wicked man durst scarce say, so think I none [is] so simple [that he] would say that Aesop lied in the tales of his beasts: for who [ever] thinks that Aesop writ it for actually true were well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth of.

Today the issue of fiction-as-lying is rarely mentioned openly; it merely lurks behind the façade of evangelical thought, causing a poor market for adult novels and apparently helping to close many evangelical adult magazines to short stories. The concept also causes a subconscious or scarcely conscious sense of shame in certain Christians who are readers of fiction but who have not properly understood its values. For all those who feel apologetic about spending their time reading “only a novel,” Jane Austen provides some thought-provoking satire:

“Only a novel!” replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. It is only … some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

More detrimental to the quality of Christian fiction than the concept of fiction-as-lying is the popular conception of the sort of message a Christian writer should express. Too many Christian authors feel compelled to use novels or short stories as thinly veiled sermons; but this is to confuse art with propaganda. Art is the incarnation, the fleshing-out in plot and character and setting, of an individual vision of reality, as opposed to the pleading or cajoling or persuasion of propaganda. Art attempts to share an experience, whereas propaganda attempts directly to impose the writer’s will on the reader’s.

Perhaps the paucity of interesting, compelling, artistically excellent Christian fiction reflects a confused notion of what the Bible means when it instructs the Christian to be a witness. Many evangelicals automatically equate witnessing with “winning souls,” but the scriptural emphasis is on knowing God: “Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord … that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he …” (Isa. 43:10). If the Christian author is aware of this, he fearlessly writes the truth about man and life and God as he sees the truth, giving witness to that which God has shown him of Himself. He subscribes to the words Robert Browning put into the mouth of Fra Lippo Lippi:

God’s works—paint any one, and count it crime

To let a truth slip.…

… we’re made so that we love

First when we see them painted, things we have passed

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;

And so they are better, painted—better to us,

Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;

God uses us to help each other so,

Lending our minds out.…

… This world’s no blot for us,

Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:

To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

In other words, the Christian novelist is not under any obligation to preach the Gospel in any direct sense. His work is to delineate as accurately as possible the world as he sees it from his angle of vision; and if that angle of vision is genuinely Christian, then Christianity will breathe through his prose even though there may be no overt mention of basic Christian truths.

Joseph T. Bayly seems to be hoping with Van Wyck Brooks that soon the writers of the modern world will cease “to render” and will once again attempt “to elevate.” But if this world is God’s (and it remains God’s, no matter how fallen), and if by Christ all things consist, it should be quite enough for the Christian artist “to render,” for to render the universe as honest Christian eyes behold the universe is in itself an “elevation.” The artist should be under no other pressure than to write accurately and honestly about life, to “count it crime/To let a truth slip.”

No deliberately superimposed “message” can be allowed in a work of art. When Shaw spoke of the artist as prophet, and Kipling of his “mission to preach,” they were speaking of deeply felt truths that would inevitably emerge in their writing because they were so integral a part of their thinking. It is in this sense that fiction can be Christian, and in this sense only: never an overt polemic, but a sharing of the experience of being a Christian in this world of sweets and sours. Is it fear that perhaps the world does not“mean intensely, and mean good” which leads many Christian authors into falsification, the easy generalization or slick solution instead of the complex reality? Or is it simply a capitulation to the demands of the evangelical subculture? Either way, the situation must be remedied. Readers and writers must learn faith instead of fear.

It is the glory of art that it works obliquely, that it lets the reader arrive at the author’s intrinsic suppositions through sharing the experience the author has provided rather than through reading an extrinsic “message.” In other words, art shows rather than tells. Robert Browning illustrates this point very effectively in his masterpiece, The Ring and the Book, which consists of dramatic monologues concerning a seventeenth-century murder trial. In the course of the twelve long monologues Browning presents such a variety of viewpoints on the basic facts of the case that one feels the truth of his summary statement: “Our human speech is nought,/Our human testimony false, our fame/And human estimation words and wind.” Because of the extreme subjectivity of the human situation, Browning concludes, “Art remains the one way possible/Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.” Human judgment is always conditioned by subjective factors like temperament and past experience; thus, in direct methods of truth-telling such as preaching or pointing out someone’s faults to him, the truth often becomes falsehood in the very telling of it because of the way it is received by the listener and because of the difficulties of precise articulation. On the other hand, “Art may tell a truth/Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,/Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.” That is, the artist stimulates the reader to draw his conclusions in the way best suited to the reader’s subjective state. Art is therefore sometimes able to tell the truth more effectively than preaching in “mediate words” that suit the speaker’s subjective climate but not the listener’s. Nathan the Prophet, for instance, accomplished more by stirring David’s reaction to a short story than he could possibly have accomplished by a direct and furious denunciation. His story “bred the thought” of justice in King David’s mind, so that the only preaching required was a simple, “Thou art the man.” David was willing to listen to the following pronouncement of judgment because he had caught an objective view of his own behavior in Nathan’s fiction.

The final problem, artistic freedom, is and always has been a sensitive one. The evangelical public, alas, too often desires “a stimulating book which will not disturb my preconceived notions”; and it raises the hue and cry against any author who reveals the failures of Christians to “the outside world” (as if the members of “the outside world” had no eyes of their own!). In matters both of doctrine and of behavior, the evangelical author soon feels pressure to abandon his own insights and to conform to existing patterns: “Assent, and you are sane;/Demur—you’re straightway dangerous,/And handled with a chain.” The Christian public thus demands that its authors lie in the interests of Christianity, either by pretending that all is happy or simple when all is not happy or simple, or by conforming against their own better judgment to certain rigid norms. But Christ, who is Truth, needs no falsifying to save his face.

Christian colleges have had to learn that if they are to maintain any sort of academic and spiritual standards, they must first hire qualified professors who know God, and then must trust those professors to teach in the integrity of their hearts the insights God gives them. And the same liberty must be extended to the Christian artist. If evangelicalism is to clear away its extensive cultural slums, it must offer not only academic freedom but also artistic freedom to those whose gifts qualify them for cultural contributions. It is time for evangelicals to exchange fear for faith, and to put away the chain.

T. Leo Brannon is pastor of the First Methodist Church of Samson, Alabama. He received the B.S. degree from Troy State College and the B.D. from Emory University.

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