Introducing: Touchy Topics
Over the next several months, I’d like to do a series of blog posts titled “Touchy Topics” exploring the ways a Christian author might handle controversial subject matters.
Now, when I say controversial, I’m excluding almost everything you see bickered about across social media platforms. My thoughts on those topics won’t be helpful or insightful for most of my reading audience. Instead, I want to share my approach to topics that are most likely to trip up readers who are evangelical Christians.
First, a bit of background on why this is important to me as I begin my career as a writer. I grew up in one branch of evangelicalism, coalesced with another during college, and have now landed outside evangelical tradition entirely. The specific denominations aren’t relevant, and I look back on my various experiences as being overall positive. I won’t be ranting on a bitter past or taking a cheap shot at the church. But as I came into adulthood and engaged with a larger variety of books, shows and films, I felt some confusion about the parameters I’d observed other Christians using for entertainment. These parameters were often inconsistent, allowing one type of content because it was less abrasive or explicit, and banning another type of content for seemingly arbitrary reasons.
As I’ve wrestled with my own beliefs—beliefs about truth, story, beauty and art—I’ve formed a method for evaluating content which makes sense to me. It’s a method informed by my history as a Biblical Studies major and a student of classical literature.
While I could discuss a broad range of applications for this method, I’ll focus on how I approach sensitive topics in my writing. To that end, I’d like to take a touchy topic each week and examine it from two angles—what the Bible has to say about it, and how we observe it being played out in the human community. By stripping away a topic’s stigma and examining it with equanimity backed by the authority of Scripture, it’s possible to put any subject matter in its rightful place.
I believe in the importance of understanding the world through the lens of God’s greater Story. This lens reveals two realities at play in every human interaction: the seen and the unseen. These two realms create an atmosphere in which holy things and ordinary things exist side by side, often intermingling. The holy isn’t merely ‘out there somewhere in the sky’ where we often imagine God to be. The incarnation is the ultimate example of these two realities colliding. Which is why every good story reflects this cosmic event.
Human beings bridge the seen and unseen. Forces are at work within us that are part of the unseen. While we are in a corrupt state from birth, both good and evil influences us over the course of our lives. This debunks the assumption that a person is primarily corrupted by being exposed to negative influences, and undercuts the effectiveness of avoiding negativity in general. What we do with the content we absorb is far more important, I would suggest, than what type of content we avoid consuming.
As with anything, there is a hard line we must not cross. We’ll get into that regarding each of the specific topics. Please don’t think I’m advocating consumption of garbage! Rather than practicing gratuitous indulgence, I intend to discuss how a person’s literary palate can be discretionary without being prudish.
There are two types of people I hope will find these posts to be beneficial. First, the writer who is a Christian and wants to know how to navigate these turbulent waters. Second, the Christian reader who enjoys a good story, but sometimes feels as though they shouldn’t like a book if it contains subject matter Christians consider sensitive. I’m not an expert on either the Bible or Holiness, but both are things I study and would like to grow in imitating. I hope my thoughts can offer something helpful to you, be you reader or writer, Christian or not. If the methods of evaluation I offer do not help, please discard them in favor of better ones.
