Writing Faith “Realistically”

The Truth About Quotation Marks
Do you have writing pet peeves? We can’t help but develop them, I suppose. When I started as a technical writer, I immediately noticed that my supervisor had a quotation mark pet peeve. He refused to allow quotation marks for any reason. He claimed that in a technical environment, bold could be used for emphasis and italics for quoting text or naming conventions. His contention was that we’ve overused and misused quotation marks to the point that they imply a tone of skepticism or condescension whether intentional or not. For example, consider: Beth is wearing her “real” fur coat to the party. Our reader-writer contract has trained us to pick up that the writer is being snide about the authenticity of Beth’s coat.

A Snide Faith
I don’t agree that we need to nix quotes (a must in academia) but I wonder if we tend to put invisible quote marks around what we can’t genuinely or realistically express.

I’ve been reading entrance essays, and I find that as Apostolics we know when and how to assume our faith voice—to other Apostolics. We talk—in our members-only jargon—about praying through and having “good” church and following the will of God.

Two Problems:

1. When we assume our faith voice, it only works Apostolic-to-Apostolic. I don’t think anyone outside our ranks follows it.
   
2. I’m not sure it rings real. I’m not accusing us of being insincere. I’m saying that we have compartmentalized church life separately from “real” life (there are those quote marks again—this time to show that I think it’s silly to subtract our faith from our overall existence). So when I read someone’s article filled with church-speak, it doesn’t sound anything like anything a “real” person would say outside of the jargoned words on the page.

Developing a Faith Language
Now after my last post, the last thing I want to do is add a voice of criticism. But I believe it’s healthy to look at ourselves realistically, develop solutions to our issues, and work to improve what we find lacking. Given the two problems I’ve pointed out, I think the solution is developing a faith language that (1) anyone (Apostolic or not) can understand (2) in a tone that is both realistic and sincere.

Here’s the challenge: how do you write the supernatural realistically?

My whole idea is that we need to find a way to talk about our incredible experience with God in such a simple way that others would get it without fluffed-up rhetoric or insider jargon. But it’s hard to write our supernatural experience “in such a simple way.”

A Call to Action
At PWI, Kent challenged us to think of a way to write about joy or hope. Sounds simple, right? But for weeks I batted around different models to try to make the experiment work. What I found is that it’s so much easier to describe (1) tangible things and (2) bad things like pain and death. Honestly, it’s harder to write about good things because our tendency is take the easy road or sarcasm with something larger than life and hard to describe. Ever notice that most popular fiction that touches on religion does it with sarcasm or with a critique (the fallen preacher, hypocritical saints, etc.)? It’s as though they stick in those pesky quotation marks around anything faith-related. I think this trend is not just a result of anti-Christian writers with an axe to grind, but because it’s just easier to write something that tears down instead of builds up.

Apostolic writers, our job is to find a way to talk about faith in a way that rings true and genuine without encasing it in A/P-only rhetoric. I’m confident that there’s a way to express the incredible joy, hope, peace, and love we have from our faith with simple sincerity, minus the invisible quotation marks of sarcasm.

Currently Reading
The Church God Blesses by Jim Cymbala