Do you know any nice people?
Do you know any nice people who aren’t Christians?
I do. I’ve met wonderful people who don’t believe in Jesus. They don’t swear, they don’t get drunk, they’re polite and generous.
But they’re missing something. While their lives appear clean, they don’t carry the light.
There’s a difference. You can follow the rules, you can be a responsible citizen, but only God can make us good.
In some ways, nice people are worse off than troubled people. Troubled people can see their problems. Nice people without Jesus can have the false impression that they’re just fine.
Nice people can have a false sense of security—a false sense of their own goodness, virtue, and their standing with God (whether they’re willing to thing about God or not).
There’s a difference between being nice and being full of the light of Jesus.
And we can see the same thing in fiction. Yes, there are clean books, but does that make them Christian?
Just because a book doesn’t have spice, or swearing, or bloody violence, does that make it Christian?
No, it just makes it clean.
A book is Christian because the author is full of Christ. And because the author is full of Christ, that book will do the work of the Gospel, even if it’s in subtle or unexpected ways.
Just like that “nice” person who assumes they’re right with God, when we find a lot of clean books, it can give us a false sense of a thriving “Christian” book industry.
But are those books actually doing any work for the Kingdom?
One of the reasons I like books like Outlaw Blood or Beyond the Mirage is that they do work for the Kingdom. Without being conspicuous or over-bearing about it, there’s something of our true spirit-reality that’s embedded into those stories.
When books are truly imbued with something of the Holy Spirit, amazing things can happen.
One of my favorite examples is Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852 by a Holy Spirit-filled writer, this book galvanized the abolitionist movement and contributed in major ways to the end of slavery in the United States.
Stowe’s impact was so substantial that when she met Abraham Lincoln, he was rumored to have asked, “Is this the little woman who made this great war?”
And that’s the power of great stories. Not just clean stories, but stories that do Kingdom work.
And we need more of that. Clean is fine, but it’s not clean that the world needs. It’s Christ that we need.
Just like it’s not “nice” people who will truly change the world. Only Holy-Spirit filled believers can do that.
For too long we’ve been content to slap a “Christian” label on anything clean. I think it’s time for more real Christian fiction—books that change the world.
Tell me in the comments, what’s a favorite book that you like that does real Kingdom work? What’s a book that you like that’s more than just “clean”?
Honestly, I find the word “clean” a little off-putting, when it comes to adult literature.
I think a more accurate word would be “sanitized,” which does not describe the life Jesus lived.
That’s a great way of putting it. Are we choosing to ignore parts of real life and pretend they don’t exist, or are we choosing to focus our story in a way that loves our audience?
The Traveler – John Bunyan, The Chronicles of Narnia, Patricia St. John books…
Those are great examples. I must admit that I’ve never read any John Bunyan, and I really should!