ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION # 6: Christian Science Fiction.

Coincidentally, R2 just sent me an Email yesterday about the Neanderthals being Nephilim. He was joking, I'm pretty sure.

I got sort of fascinated in them as a kid, when one of my bibles said 'The sons of God took brides from the daughters of man' or whatever, and called them the 'Nephilim.' My other Bible called them 'Giants.' My preacher explained 'em to me, and I was hooked. Alas, back in the early '80s, it was hard to get access to these things.

The book of Enoch is a trip!

I liked the first prophecy movie, and I liked elements of the second two, but man was that series a victim of plot and budget erosion, or what? I was really surprised Walken stayed on board for the trilogy. Some very creepysexycool stuff in there, though. I love the angel skeleton!

>>>Commitment is healthiest when it's not without doubt but in spite of doubt.<<<

Yes. R2 and I were just nattering about this yesterday.

The behavior we all-too-often fall into is that if new facts contradict old faith, we reject the new facts out of hand. My own thinking is that if, after some healthy skepticism and investigation, the new facts prove to be actually real, then only an idiot would ignore them. The task then is to find a way to integrate the new thing into our faith in some useful fashion that doesn't destroy our faith.

As a Jewish friend once told me, "The truth doesn't change, but our understanding of it does. If the truth appears to contradict the scriptures, then clearly you've been interpreting the scriptures wrong."

I like that.

>>>it's prevelent in just about anything that advertised as "Christian Entertainment". There are further issues involving using the entertainment as a manifesto, just as you find certain author's on both sides of the spectrum demonize there politcal opponents in their works; you rarely see someone who is not a Christian shown to be a good, upstanding person in their own right.<<<

Well, that's the fundamental failing in propaganda, isn't it? Our side rulzzz, your side drooolz. We're saints, and you people eat your own babies with a tossed salad on the side. Of course the other people are saying they're saints, and we're bastards. There's no end to it. It's pointless from both sides of the equation, so I don't like to get involved in it. That's why we don't spend a lot of time name-calling here. The occasional joke now and again, but that's it.

Some issues - and obviously Religious faith is one of these - are simply too important to be sullying them with propagandistic messages. It's demeaning.

And there's and issue of disingenuousness to it, it ruins' ones' witness if people believe you'll say anything just to seal the metaphysical deal. And there's the whole question of money: Are you doing it because you really believe in it, or because there's a whole lot of maiden aunts out there who buy Stryper albums for their nephews because they think it's their religious duty to do so? Believers are traditionally easy marks, just ask Jim Bakker.

And don't even get me *STARTED* about how an artist's ego gets confused with the message if handled hamfistedly. As the Swirling Eddies sang about twenty years ago:

Bibles dressed in spandex pants
If you could get the girl to dance, she'll follow you all the way to heaven
And grab your heart through your sweaty chest
Clutch it to her longing breast
She'll go with you all the way to heaven

She's crying now, but tell me what she's crying for
She'll follow, too, but tell me who she's following
She's longing, but tell me who she's longing for
She thinks of your image as a stained-glass window

>>>>Officially "Christian XXXX" gets it backwards. They start with the primacy of the Christian theme and then tack on some story. It's a mindset more akin to propaganda than good storytelling.<<<

Astute observation. It's so needless. It's not like every episode of Star Trek was written around being a dogmatic secular humanist. They just said "How can we entertain the kiddies for 44 minutes and get paid?" Then they fit the secular humanism stuff in where they could. I know it's unexpected of me to say this, but I here tell that there are episodes of Trek that aren't preachy at all! (Gasp!) Likewise, Christian SF doesn't need to ALWAYS have a message. Sometimes an adventure or a neat idea is more than message enough. Sometimes it's good just to get out there and swash yer' buckle.

>>>But what you seek can and will be done effectively. It's just a question of how long you have to wait between nuggets. Heck, that story I reviewed, Sometimes a Stupid Notion, is not a Christian story per se. But it does effectively utilize a crucifixion subtext that is recognizable in some form to Christians.<<<<

There's a lot of Christian stuff in secular SF, actually. Starting off from a completely opposite direction, BSG ended up surprisingly Judeo/Christian/Islamic. Stargate: Universe had some nice ruminations on the role of faith in our lives. Babylon 5 made a point of showing positive portrayals of actual real human religions like Judaism and Christianity. And always has been: There were a lot of religious themes running through George Pal's War of the Worlds, Conquest of Space, and When Worlds Collide. Most of the good Christian stuff that's happening in the genre at the moment isn't being driven by Christians. (Pal was very Christian, but Straczynski is very atheist, and RDM describes himself as a "Recovering Catholic.")

>>>Christian sci-fi authors need to be passionate about the genre first and not just someone who wants to use it as a tool.<<<

EXACTLY! EXACTLY! EXACTLY! EXACTLY! EXACTLY! EXACTLY! Exactly my point! The first mission of a writer of fiction should always be first and foremost to give the reader a compelling story that is worth reading, and doesn't just waste their time. The Left Behind books and whatnot - it's not my bag. It only barely held my interest when Salem Kirban did it back in the '70, and it's not holding my interest at all now - are basically preaching to the choir. We all know the end times will come, we all know there's an antichrist feller' scampering about making life miserable for people, we all know the bad guys lose. As you pointed out, it's a very limited story to tell, and it's pretty much only of interest to the believers. So even as a tool for evangelism, it's mostly preaching to the choir, or so it seems to me.

Something that consistently bugs me about Christian entertainment at the moment is basically that it's not terribly challenging. (I wave my rights to complain about Christian music since my knowledge of it is about a generation out of date) There's nothing wrong with entry-level stuff like that, but as St. Paul said, eventually you need to move on to more solid food, and you're just not getting that in Christian SF or movies or what have you. There are those in the church who need something a bit more thought provoking and interesting and maybe theoretical. It's not for everyone, of course, some people never are interested, but for those who are - myself included - giving us the same strained peas over and over again becomes extremely frustrating, and many - myself included - begin to look elsewhere for enlightenment. I eventually came back because my search led me home again, but I suspect most don't.

I mean, I get it: the UN is evil, the Atheists are trying to take over the world, and Evolution is somehow incompatible with Christianity (Despite the fact that it clearly isn't). Fine, fine, duly noted. That's all swell, but what else have you got? Because the human brain is programmed to learn, it's programmed to seek stimulation, and the same lesson over and over again...isn't what I'm looking for.

When I was a kid my youth group kept trying to get me into the whole "Christian Rock" scene. I don't follow it, so maybe it got better, but in the 80s it was pretty awful and bandwaggony. Whatever was popular at that moment, the industry would try to do a knockoff of, usually a bad one. Thus you had acts billed as "The Christian Cyndi Lauper" and a general refusal to admit that there was a lot of Christian music coming out of secular acts like U2 and The Alarm at the time. Weird.

Anyway: there is hope so long as the insane desire to copy what the bad kids are doing in order to trick the more slow-witted among them into being good kids. That's also the curse, however: The Christian entertainment industry generally only follows, and/or rejects what the mass media is doing at any given time. It needs to be more active, it needs to create, not simply copy or (occasionally) destroy. If it manages to do something genuinely good, it's generally only after a zillion other people have already done something better. (I joke that Cyberpunk is going to be the next big thing in Christian SF since it was the next big thing in 'real' SF twenty-five years ago )

I totally agree that as a sub-genre, it needs to take chances, and be committed to telling a good story rather than to the specific dictates of a particular denomination or even school of interpretation. Why can't you have divorced characters in an SF story? Why can't people drink and cuss and sleep around? I'm not saying glorify that, I'm simply saying that's what people do, and there seems something false on this end of history trying to fit everyone into a very tight behavioral and intellectual shoebox.

Just as all secular music doesn't set out to make kids get pregnant out of wedlock and reject the Tri-une God, so all Christian literature doesn't need to be about making people pretend they're living in Ohio in 1955. The world is a messy, chaotic, and beautiful place, and Christian lit needs to capture some of that sense.

It also needs to ask the fundamental question "How do you know you're right about everything?" Here's my one published Christian story http://republibot.com/content/original-fiction-just-moments-end-age which tends to make people apoplectic with rage, but which is nevertheless a very Christian story. My story Dog Days *isn't* Christian - in fact, it goes out of its way to resist being Christian - but it touches on a very fundamental Christian issue in what I think is a very positive way
http://republibot.com/content/original-fiction-dog-days

But then there's those people in Texas who want none of that. Just paranoid UN-dominated antichrist futures (Yawn) and Chrichtonesque thrillers about the evils of technology invented after 1975. (Bigger yawn.)

>>There is a ton of faith based SF.<<<

"A ton" is probably an exaggeration. What there mostly is at present in my experience is very didactic and a little too pointed. I'm a Christian and obviously I love Science Fiction, but it sticks in my craw a bit that *everything* is apocalyptic and second coming and the UN is the vessel of the antichrist and we're never going to go outside that little storytelling box. It's needlessly limited, and not *everything* Christian needs to be evangelical.

I mean, SF is first and foremost a genre of ideas, and Christian SF at the present is largely lacking in that. Why not write a few stories that explore the relationship of Aliens to Christ? CS Lewis did that. What if Aliens *aren't* fallen like us? Again, good area to explore? What if Earth is hated because *We're* the ones who brought sin into the universe when everyone else managed to pass that test? (I once wrote one like that) What if the stars themselves are alive and aching for some knowledge of the divine, but how do you communicate with an organism that's larger than worlds and has no knowledge that puny humans exist? What if it turns out that evolution *is* true, but that the Bible is also true, how does one reconcile one's faith to that? What if God really wants us on other planets, and we're continually going against Him by not leaving?

There's endless ideas that can be explored, and the purpose of these is to entertain but also to enlighten, to make people think, to make us believers a bit wiser. It doesn't all have to be cautionary tales and recruiting stuff. If people want to write that stuff, fine, but there's room for more kinds of things, and, I think, better things.

>>The lack of faith based space travel is because fundamentalist protestants aren't ballsy enough to go out on that limb. I've read on protestant message boards people asking questions like "If God put life on other planets, how does justification work for them? Does Christ's sacrifice on Earth work for them too?"<<

Oh? Are you a Catholic?

The problem as I see it is twofold: Firstly obsession with Revelation tends to work against SF. Many think that since the eventual end of the world is foretold, any other attempt to foretell a future for any purpose - even a clearly fictional one - contradicts the Bible, and is wrong. Many of my friends take a paradoxical approach, saying that "Space colonies will never happen because Revelation doesn't mention them, and since it says all the nations will be gathered together in one place, and space colonies couldn't be, it means they must've been abandoned by that point, so what's the point anyway?" I like to point out that America isn't mentioned either, and following their reasoning that means we must've been abandoned too. Then they get fuzzy-eyed looks and say, "No, America is mentioned figuratively in...blah blah blah."

Well which is it? Figurative or Literal? I don't think it's fair to just jump over that fence again and again whenever it suits you, but then I take the approach that God will do whatever God is going to do, regardless of what We try to pin Him down to through interpretations and successful book series.

The second major problem, I think, is the whole "Suspension of Disbelief" thing. A lot of Christians seem to believe that it's the job of SF to predict the future, and hence it's akin to divination and witchcraft and stuff. Obviously, it *isn't* an attempt to do so, but they think it is, and they assume that when an episode of Star Trek has Mr. Spock doing something 300 years from now, that means we really BELIEVE that's EXACTLY what's going to happen 300 years from now. They don't get that no one believes Trek/Galactica/B5/Firefly is any more accurate than an episode of The Love Boat - probably less - nor is it intended to be.

Speaking as a Christian, this is a very serious problem.

>>I am currently speaking with Cloud Ten Pictures (Left Behind Trilogy, Apocalypse Quadrilogy, Saving God, The Genius Club) about producing a screenplay I wrote which is a faith based superhero film (something else Christians seem unwilling to do, unless you count BibleMan and I don't).<<<

[Laughing] Yeah, that's a tough sell.

>>>The have the script I'm just waiting to see if they are going to option it (I would appreciate prayer on this subject). If this first movie works out I plan on trying to open the doors for more ambitious faith based genre fiction. I already have a space travel movie in mind.<<<

Absolutely I'll pray for it. Anyone reading this who's of the praying kind, please think about doing likewise.

>>>But all we need are writers willing to be ambitious.<<

Agreed. I had some run-ins a couple years ago with a specific ministry in Texas that made me very cynical about the prospect, alas.

I'll have to throw it on the ol' reading pile...thanks!

W/R/T PKD - I was aware of the experience itself, I'd even read that text before, but I was completely unaware of the R. Crumb comic. That was really cool, we should maybe do a feature on that here on the 'bot. That's really neat.

By the way, "Tess" in the comic you linked me to? That's our old friend and occasional commentator, Tessa Dick! Her website is available here http://tessadick.blogspot.com/ and also in our "Friends of the 'Bot" section on the upper right part of your screen.

It was fun and insightful, exactly what we're going for here on the 'bot. Thanks for the feedback!

I've never actually read "The Jesus Incident." What's it about?

I'm pretty happy w/ the way the roundtable turned out, andit's nice to have some feedback from other people. Thanks for posting!