"The notion of 'Christian fiction' is problematic..."

Paul Kingsnorth is a novelist and an adult convert to Christianity. From "The promise and peril of the 'Christian novel'":

The notion of 'Christian fiction' is problematic in the same fashion as is the notion of a 'protest song.' Consider: how many good protest songs have you ever heard, in comparison with the number of bad or terrible ones? I would be willing to bet that the latter list was a lot longer, and the reason is simple enough: polemic and poetry don't mix. Making a point or pushing an agenda sits very badly with the task of exploring the complexity of human being in all its fullness. ....

C.S. Lewis once claimed that it was much harder to present the Christian story to a post-Christian culture than to a pre-Christian one, and today we can see how true this claim is. Where I come from, people are largely inoculated against Christianity, or what they imagine Christianity to be. The history, the cultural baggage, the half-formed prejudices: all of these are compounded by a stark lack of understanding of what the Christian Way really is. Recently I was admonished by an editor for making a reference to one of Jesus's well-known parables in an article I was writing. 'Young readers today', she said, 'won't understand the reference.' I was shocked. When I was young, we all knew these things even if we didn't believe them. No more. The shared stories we once took for granted are blowing away on the wind. For all of these reasons, a Christian who wants to write a novel which even touches on his or her faith faces a steep climb. ....

How could a Christian write a novel in times like these, and what models might we have? Recently I read C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, which I thought was a brave attempt to disguise the Christian pattern of the universe in sci-fi clothing. Some of it was inspiring or intriguing: the treatment of space as heaven — literally — and the portrait of an Earth occluded by evil spirits and thus cut off from God since ancient times, offers up powerful images to the imagination. That Hideous Strength, the final novel in the trilogy, points at our current spiritual dilemma with perspicacity. Lewis's ambitious, grand sweep of a tale showed me how a conceptual trilogy about the spiritual realities of Heaven and Earth could be constructed. But the novels are dated now, as any book written about space exploration in the 1940s would be. ....

Last year I was approached by the editor of the Buechner Review, a publication dedicated to the work of an author I had never heard of, and asked if I would write something for them. What they told me about him piqued my interest: Buechner was a novelist who had become a Christian — indeed, a Christian pastor — and then had to answer for himself the question of how to reconcile the two callings. So I said yes, and then I sat down with Buechner’s 1980 novel, Godric, which is a fictionalised account of the life of  St Godric of Finchale. ....

What he does is, in some ways, almost at the opposite end of the spectrum to the one that Lewis was inhabiting. While the Space Trilogy spreads itself over the widest vista imaginable, both literally and conceptually, Godric is a small book, in its scope if not its concerns — or its writing. Buechner sets out to tell the story of one obscure saint in one period of time in one particular place, and through that to illuminate the spiritual struggle that is the Christian Way. He does so, in my opinion, with great success. .... (more)

Paul Kingsnorth, "The promise and peril of the 'Christian novel,'" The Abbey of Misrule, April 9, 2025.