Give Them Something They Can Carry

A few years ago, before the end of the world, a college student asked me a very smart question at a Q&A that has stuck with me ever since. They were religious by upbringing and by personal inclination, but also interested in writing, and they were experiencing great anxiety about the ways in which the two intersect. I’m going to butcher the question somewhat because I didn’t write it down word-for-word, but it was essentially this: how do you write stories for people outside your religion, while also remaining true to what you believe?

I’ve realized that the best way to answer this question is to show, not tell. First, here’s an oft-cited scene from Ms Marvel, in an issue that came out about eight years ago:

And here is a scene from Poison Ivy #3:

Want to hear something wild? Something that may not make sense until the end of this essay, which I promise is not very long? This is essentially the same scene, twice.

Let me roll back the tape. When I was very young, my dad read me and my sister The Lord of the Rings all the way through. Then we listened to the stellar BBC radio play, which is at least two dozen hours long and has an incredible voice cast, including Ian Holm (who plays elderly Bilbo in the Peter Jackson films) as Frodo. I was mildly obsessed. When I got a little older, I became interested in Tolkien as a person as well as a purveyor of stories, and gobbled up whatever I could find about Tolkien and the Inklings and the unique relationship between their work and their religious beliefs. Tolkien’s good friend CS Lewis took the propagandist route and said so openly; his nonfiction is (in my inexpert opinion) of far greater value than his fiction, which stales on successive readings because the overt evangelism begins to feel parochial and patronizing.

Tolkien took a different view. In The Lord of the Rings, he’s not out to convert you. He simply thinks that there are ideas within his religion that are valuable, and he makes them as portable and easy to understand as he can within the confines of fiction. Is it somewhat dorky? Sure. Does it always work as intended? No. But it’s given profound comfort and guidance to millions of people over many decades, most of whom don’t share Tolkien’s faith. If your religious beliefs are worth anything, you should be able to extract from them principles and truths that are useful to anybody, whether they believe what you believe or not.

An awful lot of religious people in our present moment cannot do this, and in fact cannot describe the underlying ethical or philosophical principles of their religion at all, which goes a long way toward explaining why we find ourselves in the political and cultural sh*t show unfolding around us as we speak. Theocrats and fascists are generally not deep thinkers, nor are they motivated by pesky morals, which demand far more of you yourself than you are permitted to demand from those around you.

Anyway. Over the years, I’ve boiled it down to one simple maxim: give them something they can carry.

Now, with the caveat that I am a layperson, not an expert, much less a member of clergy, there are two simple pieces of wisdom that I have found to be of great comfort over the years, especially in bad times (and there have been so many). Like so much of what is most valuable in both Christian and Muslim thought, they both have roots in the Jewish tradition. One is summarized poorly but succinctly in the two Ms Marvel panels above, which is taken from Chapter 5, Verse 32 of the Quran. In this instance, the connection between subject and text is obvious; Ms Marvel is Muslim, so it makes sense for her to think of that verse when she is about to risk her own life to save someone else’s. The reference in the scene from Poison Ivy may be less obvious, but is no less real:

In other words, your work is valuable even if the outcome is uncertain. In fact, your work is valuable even if the world collapses into a fiery pit anyway. Don’t let the pollyannas sell you on hope; give yourself something more durable. In this scene I call it faith, but as soon as the book went to press I said “awww man I should have called it purpose.” Too late; that’s publishing. Purpose is less abstract and perhaps more useful, but either purpose or faith would work because neither is outcome-dependent. Maybe the world really is about to descend into a hell of climate change and weird new diseases and rampant theocratic nationalism no matter what we do. But that does not mean we are entitled to down tools and fall into despair. Because if we can make things even a little bit better for even a few people — if we can cushion the fall for whoever comes next — then we must.

So, to the wonderful young person who asked me the original question, and to anyone else who finds this kind of thing useful: there it is. How do you write for a general audience as a religious person? You take the best elements of your faith and phrase them in a way that is simple, useful and universal. You make those ideas portable. That’s part one. Part two is having the guts to nurture and protect your audience, even if it means occasionally putting yourself between your readers and those elements of your faith community who might wish to hurt them, or vice versa. It’s not easy; you’re building a community based not on shared identity, but on shared ideals, which is tricky to maintain.

The third thing you have to do is keep yourself honest. Meet your characters where they are. Don’t try to shoehorn them into your own belief system. (This is good advice for all writers, really, not just religious ones.) There is no better example of a religious writer going terribly sideways than Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited, which is a fantastic and well-observed novel until you get to the last few chapters and everybody magically converts to (or returns to) Catholicism, the end. All this time spent setting up brilliant observations about the tension between desire and faith and duty, all squandered in an unearned and pedantic payoff. (I have read various defenses of the third act of Brideshead and I do not buy any of them.)

If this is not a role you want, don’t audition for it. I know successful religious writers who write solely for and about their own faith communities and never have to deal with the push and pull of writing for a general audience. There’s nothing wrong with that. And they’re probably happier.

Religion, when functioning as intended, quiets the self, allowing one to better hear the voices of others. It is much less interested in who am I? than it is in why am I?, which should make it fertile ground for any creative person. The problem, of course, is that religion rarely functions as intended; mostly it functions as tyranny. We are seeing this sad fact play out all around us in any number of ways. In light of this, I feel, on a personal level, that writers who are religious have a special responsibility not to be assholes. Stand up to the tyrants, even if they share your faith. Plant the seedling, even if you’ve run out of hope. Plant the seedling and then hold fast.

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