Christian characters in mainstream book?

I can't give you a whole lot of practical advice since this is something I've struggled with in my own writing and I still don't have any answers. But I know that books like Peace Like a River are considered mainstream fiction and yet the way that one in particular deals with religion is wonderful, though it does take some liberties with the faith. That might be a good place for you to start.

Well, this probably won't be a very helpful response, but ...

In the secular culture in which I live (England), almost any mention of faith is the utmost taboo. You can talk about someone belonging to a particular faith, but you can't talk about any of the spiritual aspects of that. My impression (which is hopefully completely wrong - I'm no expert) is that no mainstream publisher would touch a story which openly and honestly depicts the spiritual life of a Christian character. Personally I think that's ridiculous. Few other subjects are so taboo - it's okay to get into the mind of a serial killer. I hope I'm wrong.

I don't know much about the CBA; mercifully, perhaps, we don't have that kind of thing in the UK. But my view is that "Christian" books that oversimplify as you describe are no better and no more true than the kinds of unreality portrayed in secular books. Real Christians struggle with the world and temptation, and not always successfully: like you say, quoting scripture doesn't immediately solve problems. I'd say that any writing which pretends otherwise is hypocritical and damaging.

I think your story sounds really good. It strikes me as a great example of (historical) literary fiction, writing about a real human (who happens to be a Christian) and seeing the world through their eyes. Better still if it's using its historical setting to draw parallels with the current day. I have no doubt that then, as now, being a real Christian would have been very hard, set against a tide of people who happily went to church and took the name Christian without it making any difference to their everyday lives. You'd have to make sure that the character's faith was true to what they would have known at the time, rather than based on your own (contemporary) understanding of faith; the Bible hasn't changed, but the way people see it has. But then, you could have fun researching the religious movements of the time (maybe the character was an early Wesleyan?)

I guess if you're writing because you want to write and be true to yourself, this would be a great thing to write. If you want to write professionally (i.e. be published), then you have to think about who will publish it and who will read it. If you can get "Christian" booksellers and publishers to create a market for honest Christian fiction rather than escapist trash, you will have done a great service. But then, as a freind of mine says, you have to choose your "vegetable moments" (Daniel 1:8-16). God can change the world through you, but whether in this way or not isn't for me to know, and you have to pick your battles.

On your questions:
(1) Make the character struggle sometimes to know what's right, and make them sometimes fail to do what's right due to the pressure of what's going on around them (everyone else is doing it ...) Put them in a lot of grey situations, not black and white. Make them compassionate rather than judging. My own view is that since we're saved by faith and not by works, it's not only stupid but also misrepresenting our faith to try to force people who don't believe into living the way believers should - although there's nothing wrong trying to persuade them of the immediate material benefits of a healthy lifestyle.

(2) Don't make the character "super spiritual": write their spiritual life the way yours is, not the way you'd like it to be. If anything, tone it down to make it believable. If you're the kind of person who starts every day with an hour of prayer, make your character more like those of us who aren't quite up to that level. Don't have them lay hands on and heal everyone involved in a battle, have them pray and pray and watch their best friend die in screaming agony. Or something.

I know the CBA does have fairly well-defined guidelines as to the kind of fiction they carry; you might look into those and see if you can keep within the letter of them without compromising your integrity too much (oh, the irony!)

Does any of that help at all?

Tom

Me? Pray an hour every morning? i don't see how anyone ever could! Especially not with a ship to run, in the case of the character I was talking about.
I couldn't find the CBA guidelines. Actually, I think that's more for bookstores than publishers and authors. And some of the restrictions are getting looser, I think. And they've always been fairly permissive about violence, which I handle carefully anyway.

Just...that "the way things are" bit...aaaaalcohooool! In the Royal Navy on foreign stations, each man had half a pint of spirits (rum or, in the Indian Ocean, arrack) a day, which is like...four shots? This was an alternative to the gallon a day of beer that was served out in home waters. The infamous rum was apparently stronger than the rum you can buy today too. Ashore, alcohol seems to have been used a lot for medicinal purposes, and of course no formal dinner was complete without wine. More like the modern European or Quebecois perspective on drinking than the rest of North America. (I live in western Canada.)
Said character doesn't get drunk, but it don't think it would be realistic for him not to have the odd tipple.

Women on board in port: avoidable on practical grounds, very bad for discipline.

And of course the ship's company will want to go on the ran-tan ashore and kick up Bob's-a-dying. Not much he can do to get around that...just the view that he's not responsible for what his men do ashore and it's none of his business.

And all this in a service where the first Article of War was, in the 1757 version, "All commanders, captains, and officers, in or belonging to any of His Majesty's ships or vessels of war, shall cause the public worship of Almighty God, according to the liturgy of the Church of England established by law, to be solemnly, orderly and reverently performed in their respective ships; and shall take care that prayers and preaching, by the chaplains in holy orders of the respective ships, be performed diligently; and that the Lord's day be observed according to law."

Problem?

What? Literary, you say?

To continue, I don't know if there's a real rule about this, but it's tacitly understood that a character's spiritual issues will be resolved by the end of the book. As I said, these things take time, and might take so much time that they don't get resolved until the end of the /next/ book (this is looking like a 12-to-14-volume series, something that happens a lot with sea stories it seems (Hornblower: 11, Aubrey-Maturin: 20 and unfinished 21st, Bolitho: 28, Kydd: 8 so far and more on the way, Ramage: more than my library has!) but not often with Christian books.)

So from what I've said, what does everyone think: would any Christian publisher you know of have a look at my novel...a long time from now, when it's done?

I keep thinking of more to add. What do you mean by "vegetable moments?"

Sorry, I thought I'd explained the "vegetable moments" bit, but I can see that I didn't really.

It means times when you make a stand against doing what you're told / doing what everyone else does. Daniel refuses to eat the food he's supposed to because presumably of kosher issues or something, and proposes instead to go vegetarian. The point being, sometimes you have to go with the flow, sometimes you have to fight against it. Like in that prayer, "grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I cannot accept, and the wisdom to know the difference."

I couldn't find anything about CBA guidelines either, but I did find this interesting article. Maybe by the time you've finished witing your epic, the world will be ready for it? Not that I'm remotely comfortable with the "postmodern" label, but it's interesting to see that there does seem to be a desire for "real" Christian writing. (That that isn't a tautology is deeply sad ...)

I quite take your point about alcohol. I actually remembered it being more than a quarter of a pint - wikipedia says half a pint! It seems incredible to me; if I drank that I'd never be sober! But times change, and I you can develop a tolerance - I can only assume that the sailors were tough enough that this didn't actually cause drunkenness. I suppose you could simply not mention it - arguably it might be such an innate part of navy life that the character might not even think about it, but that's dubious and not really fitting the true-to-life thing. Of course, from a biblical perspective it's not an issue (in fact, "grog" existed precisely for the same reason that the bible says to "take a little wine for your stomach's sake", because of issues with the quality of drinking water).

I also wonder how your MC will cope with the contradiction between being a naval captain involved in battles on the one hand and the vast weight of Christian teaching that is anti-violence? For 300 years it was simply assumed that being a Christian meant being a pacifist, until Christianity became the official religion of the Roman state, with all of the compromises that involved. I suppose if your character was true to the times he probably wouldn't have noticed the contradiction, and the same might apply in many other areas of his life. Again - how much has really changed?

That's right, I said half a pint, which is 8 shots, not 4 like I said (opposite mistake of the one I made when calculating broadside weight of metal--this is going to need a lot of editing). You can develop a tolerance, but this was still enough that historians point to it as one of the causes of the many recorded shipboard accidents, and speculate that it may have had something to do with the higher incidence of lunatics in the Navy vs. rest of the population! That, and constant hitting of heads on low deck beams.

The grog issue was a part of navy life, not in a way that one would stop thinking about it, but in a way that you can't /not/ mention it. It was a ritual as much as holystoning the deck in the morning watch, mustering by divisions on Sundays and Thursdays, and exercising the great guns. There's even at least one song to go with it.

I'm not sure about the violence issue. That's for the character, not the publisher--CBA books have characters actively and voluntarily participating in combat fairly regularly, in various time periods, from Crusaders (!) to American GIs and bomber pilots. There are even pirates and privateers! That, I find really, really, really weird. I know there is at least one book in the university library that could help clarify the opinions of the time, but it's on the next floor up from where I'm sitting now, so I'll have to shut down the lappy and go get it.

But I'm still wondering...this is literary?

Ha, now I can't find that book!

Is it literary? Well, obviously it's historical fiction, but that doesn't mean it's not literary. To me, literary means you're trying to say something about reality rather than just presenting a fantasy, and it sounds like you at least have elements of that. I guess it depends on the balance of what you're trying to do - if the main thing is telling an exciting naval story then that's historical, but the more parallels you draw with real life, and the more you are essentially challenging people's perception of the Christian faith through the story, that makes it more literary. At least a little bit :)

That's just my take on what makes literary though. There are lots of arguments about that.

What a wonderful discussion! Thank you. I too am aiming at mainstream with Christianity in the book. You have given a lot of food for thought! I'll flag this forum and watch. I've missed NaNo forums and NaNoPubYr isn't as thought provoking so far. Thank you, Gentlemen!

I'm pretty sure, going by Jaina's username, that tomdg is the only gentleman here. There's been some confusion on this point, but I am female.

(I am also of a feminine gender, but I'm not really certain if that matters here...)

First thing's first: worry about publishing -after- you finish the novel. If you focus on the publisher's ideas of what is a good ole fashioned, God-fearing Christian novel, you won't be able to enlighten the real audience (that is, the readers you want to target) with your message about what a Christian novel is, or what a Christian is, for that matter.

To answer your questions...

1. Nobody really lives in "higher moral standards" than anyone else chiefly because "morality" is subject to culture. For example, people raised to eat human flesh wouldn't consider themselves "cannibals", at least not in the negative sense. In their culture, eating humans is a-ok; however, they may have certain restrictions on who they eat (e.g. relatives or tribal leaders are off limits), when they eat (only after winning a victory against the enemy), where food is eaten (meals can only be enjoyed on the neighboring Isle of the Dead) or what parts of the food are eaten by whom (men can only eat women's organs and vice versa). You character might believe himself to be superior to others that perform taboos of his culture, thinking that he is right because he lives he life in a Christian manner. IF so, then to most of the other characters, he probably would be disliked, ignored, and ostracized, etc. You could have a revelation where he realizes that his ideas border on God-complex and perhaps he may try to amend his prejudices or you could keep that revelation from him until it's too late.

2. Prayer and personal relationship depend on the type of Christianity your character practices and the situations you place your character in when he thinks of God. How often he thinks of God needs to be addressed as well. If your character is French or Spanish, he is likely to be Catholic, which stresses communal prayer via the Church, so you may need to focus more on the community than the individual in that case. When this question pops up the solution is research & more research.

P.S.: Read books of other genres (eg: the Historical Fantasy of Brian Jacques's |Castaways of the Flying Dutchman|)involving sefaring &/or christian religions, even if they aren't pertaining to the time period, so you know what's out there.

Funny you mention cannibalism. Protagoras (Greek, several hundred years BC) observed this custom in Asia Minor and came to the conclusion that "man is the measure of all things", i.e. that there is no absolute standard for morality. Sokrates who came after him said the opposite, that there was in fact an absolute standard fo morality, even if people only knew and followed it in part. Christianity definitely takes the Socratic view (q.v. the book of Corinthians or the sermon on the mount). So if the story is written with a sympathetic Christian main character, it's necessarily going to take the view that there are absolute moral standards. Obviously there will be friction if the MC tries to follow those standards in situations where they are counter-cultural.

As an aside, I don't think the view that there are no absolute standard holds up, since I can't accept that a culture which exterminates Jews (for example) is ok; it only makes sense to criticize a culture's moral values if there is in fact a higher, absolute right-and-wrong. But both views are logically consistent so it's not something one can really argue one way or another.