LONG FORM Can Christians Write

My wife worked briefly in Christian radio promotions in the early 2000s, and the tagline of her radio station (“104.1 The … Fish!”) sums up the perspective: “Safe for the whole family!” In the short term, this sort of declawing of the arts to appeal to the underdeveloped comfort zones of (largely evangelical) churchgoers has hurt us. People are right to want something better. But we must be clear: This is to be rejected not because this sort of thing is Christian but because it is not Christian enough.

Christian art has the effect of telling the truth about people—that we are a sacred, disastrous mix-up of the divine and the debauched; that we are, through overwhelming grace, beloved candidates for unreasonable redemptions; and that all things, everywhere, are fitting objects of deep and sustained attention. Christian art assumes the transcendentals of truth, beauty, and goodness, is able to describe why they are as well as what they are, and is able to partner with them to intentionally connect the soul to the “upward” draw of the divine eros, which seeks eternal satisfaction in the life of God. It humanizes both artist and audience, increases their ability to know and love the good, and becomes a way for us to participate in what St. Paul calls “the divine nature.”

We’re not abandoned to trying to reinvent the artistic wheel with a Moleskine notebook in a third-wave coffee shop. We can learn what makes Beauty beautiful, and how to partner with it.

As an editor, a significant portion of my work is to help writers extract their gaze from their own navels. The only way to reliably do this is to help them see writing as an act of love, centered beyond the self and meant as gift. It is not coincidental that the uncurling process this demands of a person looks precisely like the shape of Christian sanctification. St Augustine’s image of sin as being incurvatus in se—curved in on ourselves—makes for bad writing as well as bad living. Christian art, when consistent with the metaphysics of our worldview and our weatherbeaten wisdom on how to live those out, shows myriad paths to an uncurling. It allows us to enter a world whose dimensions are larger than the contours of our own selves.

resorting to a single platitude or cliché. It can show us how our lives may climb up the very universe like a vine climbs a trellis. It can shrink the continents, to make time null. It is able to pass dreams and songs and tales across the very veil of death, and give them to us not as a cold or distant artifact but as a generous inheritance. This is not to say that Christian art has any sort of corner on the market of human truth, goodness, and beauty, but it is to say that the tradition provides an incomparable architecture to know and inhabit them—and to do so in the glorious company of other people. This tradition is both objective and deeply personal. It is larger than us, but it belongs to us, and we can belong to it. This is incredibly energizing to the creative mind. Good writing requires form and craft. Good writing involves technique, and the mastery of the principles of your chosen genre. Good writing requires more than novel arrangements of words. It demands an encounter with truth.

can see myself and St. Augustine working on the same project from different angles. I can delight in that work, in the eternal freshness of certain questions and dispositions of the soul. In that spirit, I can set aside my own cramped smallness and breathe. Loneliness and artistic claustrophobia are trounced by a higher calling than our own appetites. We, as the psalmist says, have a “goodly inheritance.” We are invited to build and give and play with its riches.