R-Rated Apostolic Writing?

I almost despair to touch the Apostolic Fiction topic since Kent has done such a perfect job capturing and articulating exactly where we are with the mission. However, at our Christmas family shindig, with no provocation at all, my family began commenting on the dearth of “good” Christian fiction.

Little did they know they had unwittingly become lab rats. Carefully I questioned them and realized quickly they weren’t looking for the next Tolstoy or Graham Greene; they said they just wanted “good, clean” books to read.

Their complaints with the Christian fiction at the local library/bookstore:
#1 - “The sentence structure seems like a fifth grader wrote it.”
#2 - “If we wanted to read ‘junk’ [translation: profanity, adult content], we could pick up any other book off the shelf. We’re getting a Christian book because we don’t want to read all that.”

I approach this post at an intersection of a few issues:

I. Vacancy
We have established there is a need for an Apostolic presence in fiction.

II. Only Our Best
From Complaint #1 above and Kent’s reminder that this is our gift to the King of kings, we need to create the most finely crafted work we possibly can.

III. Keep It Clean, Kids(?)
The last few weeks I’ve been trying to whittle down a reading list for my upcoming literature class. I feel a natural inclination to keep everything PG for many reasons, not the least of which is that I realize I’m exposing young and impressionable minds to a lot of new ideas and content that they will be breaking down and processing. I want to be careful with that responsibility. I’m reminded of Alison’s recent warning about The Golden Compass and my own much older question about how we deal with censorship.

Throw all that in the blender along with Comment #2 above, and then analyze what’s left from a writer’s perspective. When we’re creating Apostolic fiction, how do we (writers) deal with the “junk,” as my relatives labeled it?

Interestingly, a student recently came to me about a short story he was creating. He asked this very question. It was a conversion story where someone “in the world” was going to come to church and have a conversion experience. The student writer didn’t know how to handle the pre-church part. The character had moral issues, used Apostolic-unfriendly words, and so on. “Does my story have to be G-rated?” my student wanted to know.

I don’t know. Maybe this is one of the struggles every writer will have to decide individually. Our fiction can’t be one-dimensional, and it has to address a real world. We can’t ignore that there are “others” out there with a different lifestyle. But at the same time…

• Is that a carte blanche to write whatever we want?


• Should the audience wanting to escape all the “junk” (complaint #2) just look elsewhere?


• Or should Apostolic fiction have standards concerning no profanity, grotesque violence, sex scenes, etc.?


• Or is the question simply solved by making all our stories conversion stories or moral lessons where in the end, the character with the potty mouth meets the Lord and repents of his vile ways?

What to Do?
As Apostolic writers it’s more than just, “Can we say the D-word?”—although that’s a part of it. I think what we’re asking is how we reflect that alien world out there and what do we do when it clashes with ours?

I can’t say that I’ve figured it out. I just finished a story that’s not overtly Apostolic, and I’m not sure that my squeaky-clean non-Apostolic characters are believable. But at the same time, I’m not going to drop an F-bomb in to make them a little more realistic.

We’re left needing to ask ourselves some serious questions about where our lines are as artists, who our potential readers are, and how we want to portray ourselves (and our worldview of the “others” not like us).