“Christian” is a Worldview, not a Genre

U2. Believe it or not, they’re a Christian band.

The beauty of WordPress is I can schedule a blog to be automatically posted, which is what I did with this one. I actually wrote it a few days ago. Why did I do this? Because I’m in the middle of the “fortnight from Hell” at my day job. (Long story).

Anyway, I grew up in a Christian home, so I’m well-versed in the Christian subculture. Honestly, the older I’ve gotten, the more annoyed I am with it. Not so much that I’ve rejected my faith (I think Christian faith and Christian culture are two completely different things and may as well be mutually exclusive), but enough to see how they usually don’t match up.

I’m going to focus only on one particular facet today: the idea that “Christian” is a genre.

This idea was initially sparked a year or so ago when I was talking with a friend on the phone who said she didn’t want to read my books because they weren’t “Christian enough.” As in, they wouldn’t fit into the Christian “genre” as defined by booksellers.

Christians, despite being commanded to go into the world and make disciples (Matt. 28:16-20), have for many years seemed intent on isolating themselves from the rest of the world and creating their own little culture complete with its own brand of entertainment. It goes all the way back to 1970s with the advent of “contemporary Christian music” thanks to the Jesus Movement. This has since expanded in other forms of media. Most recently, “faith-based films” such as God’s Not Dead have been popular the last few years.

While I have issues with the often poor artistic merits of many of these media (that’s a blog for another day), my biggest gripes with the so-called “Christian genre” are the mindsets it creates. First, it makes Christian culture very insular. I’ve known many fellow believers who refused to consume any media that wasn’t obviously Christian. In other words, listening to Carman was fine, but not Run-D.M.C. If it wasn’t didactic about faith, it was “too secular.” Some of it was even erroneously seen as satanic. These were things to be shielded against, especially when it came to kids (it’s always about the children, isn’t it?). So, new media was created by Christians for Christians. Considering the aforementioned often poor quality of their substitutes, it’s no wonder many Christians in the last 30-40 years grew up with bad senses of what makes good art. (Not to mention Christian creators were making obvious rip-offs of “secular” entertainment long before the Asylum. Anyone else remember the Spine Chillers Mysteries books?). It created an “us vs. them” mentality. It was about being “safe” and avoiding risky ideas that might challenge one’s faith.

Second, as I’ve already hinted at, it made “Christian” into a genre. Demon Hunter wasn’t just a metal band; they were a “Christian” metal band. (For the record, Demon Hunter is a genuinely great band). Like any genre, this automatically establishes the intended audience and the content (which, as I’ve noted, was often didactic and subpar). The problem is that “Christian” shouldn’t be a genre. It should be a philosophy, a worldview. Do atheists and other religions turn their beliefs into genres for the sake of marketing? For the most part, no. (Although some may do so in response to “Christian” stuff or as satire). In the history of literature, Christian authors didn’t concern themselves with whether their stories fit nicely into a “Christian genre”; they just told their stories. Think about how classics like Moby-Dick by Herman Melville or Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky or The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (did you really think I’d get through this without mentioning my all-time favorite book?) if they were published in today’s environment in Christian publishing. I have a feeling they’d either be rejected by Christian publishers or watered down in the editing process.

“Christian,” as I’ve said, is a worldview, not a genre. It’s something that, when done correctly, flows naturally into a creator’s work because it’s a part of him. Art is an expression of its creator, so it’s impossible for him to not imbue it with how he sees the world. But, as I’ve said for years, story must be king. The moment someone starts sermonizing in his story, whether it’s about religion or environmentalism or whatever, it brings the story down. The storyteller will lose his audience. Heck, even kids will see through that.

Readers and critics will discuss themes and ideas when dissecting a story, but they usually don’t do something like label Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game “Mormon fiction.” Those elements are part of that book because they’re part of Card. To tell his story honestly, he had to write it that way. He wasn’t trying to proselytize anyone. I know that to my fellow Christian creators that might sound crazy, even sacrilegious, but I believe your witness can be helped by not being didactic with your stories.

I’ve been listening to U2’s Greatest Hits albums while writing this blog. U2 is a Christian band (specifically, they’re Irish Catholic). Even a casual listen to their music makes that obvious. They don’t hide or flaunt that. They make their music and let it impact people. Jesus said you can know someone by their fruit (Matt. 7:15-20). That fruit doesn’t need to have “Apple” written on it for people to know what it is.

If you’d like to hear more about this, I highly recommend listening to these episodes of the Derailed Trains of Thought podcast hosted by my friends Nick Hayden and Timothy Deal: Episode 57: And the Moral of the Story is… and Episode 64: Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink.

What are your thoughts on this? Should “Christian” be a genre unto itself? Why or why not?

But I Digress…, Episode 39: Interviews with ‘Missing Pieces’ 2016 Authors

“But I Digress…”
Hosted by Nathan Marchand

Two episodes in one week? What madness is this?!

Anyway, my annual Gen-Con video is an actual, episode of my regular show. I interviewed many of the authors who contributed to the “Missing Pieces” anthology, which is a collection of short stories by authors who sell books at Authors Avenue at Gen-Con.

You can buy the anthology at www.DragonRoots.net or on Amazon.

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But I Digress…, Episode 38: Suicide Squad vs. Sinister Squad

 

“But I Digress…”
Hosted by Nathan Marchand

“I’m not gonna kill ya,” says DC Comics and Warner Bros. “I’m just gonna hurt ya…really, really bad.”

My friends Sergio and Luke join me to review the newest DCEU film, Suicide Squad. We watched it as part of a “Squad Double Feature”–we watched the Asylum’s “mockbuster” Sinister Squad first. All three of us had choice words about both movies.

What’d you think of Suicide Squad (or Sinister Squad)?

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NEW BOOK – ‘The Worlds of Nathan Marchand’

The cover that CreateSpace kept refusing to approve.
The cover that CreateSpace kept refusing to approve.

You read that right—the title of my new book is the same as my website. (I guess I’m just that pretentious. :P)

The familiarity doesn’t end there, though. This book is a collection of “unpublished” short stories spanning my entire career. I put quotation marks on “unpublished” (I did it again!) because many of these stories have already been posted here on my website. I learned at a Gen-Con writing seminar that stories posted on an author’s website are considered published. I may have tom rethink how often I post stories on here, then.

Regardless, I wanted to have this book finished in time for Gen-Con last week, but CreateSpace, the website I use for my self-published stuff, kept being nitpicky about the cover. It took me too long to make it happy. (I still had great sales at Gen-Con, though).

What’s the theme of this collection? I’ll let the back cover copy explain:

From the mind that brought you
Pandora’s Box & Ninjas and Talking Trees
comes…a little bit of everything.

  • An amnesiac cybernetic vigilante confronting the man he once called “comrade”—after he was murdered by him.
  • A pro-wrestler accosted in the ring by a mysterious hooded figure the night before his brother takes him to court.
  • A living gargoyle who protects a young wayward woman from her persecutors—and a demon.
  • Santa Claus’ race with a flying saucer on Christmas Eve.
  • A young man flying a hang glider through a ruined city to save his stranded twin siblings from a giant monster believed to be an angry god.

You’ll find these and other fantastical things in this, the first short story collection from Nathan Marchand. This anthology spans the vast breadth of the universe and genre. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and then you’ll do both again. Herein you’ll find adventure, drama, tragedy, and…ninjas (because they make everything better).

Prepare to enter…

The Worlds of Nathan Marchand

That pretty much says it all.

Barring any more unforeseen hiccups, the book will be available on Amazon within the next few days. The eBook should follow soon afterward.

Sidenote: Speaking of eBooks, I’ve been making eBook versions of some of my other books lately. 42: Discovering Faith Through Fandom is now available as such. The next will be Ninjas and Talking Trees.

Hacked and Slashed

Here’s my first proper blog in two weeks. If you’ve been following my Facebook page, I said that my website was shut down by my host because it was hacked. It affected not only me, but Nick Hayden’s website, the Derailed Trains of Thought podcast website, and the Children of the Wells website. To make matters worse, this happened when Nick went on vacation and when he went to a youth conference with his church and when all of our domain names came up for renewal! In other words, I was out a lot of money getting all this crap sorted out—and right before Gen-Con to boot. (Speaking of which, I’m writing this blog from the Hyatt Regency, where I’m staying for Gen-Con).

Thankfully, as you can see, my website is up and running again. We’re all still working out some bugs, but everything seems to be fine. We’re considering moving to a new website host, but no decision has been made yet.

This is the latest in a series of setbacks I’ve been having with my writing career of late. GigaGeek Magazine doesn’t update much anymore, Exaimer.com shut down (all of my content there is gone), and I’ve been inactive so long at IPFW (where I want to get a teaching assistanceship to pay for M.A. in English) that I have to re-apply. Even then, there’s no guarantee I’ll get a T.A. position, and I refuse to take out more student loans. The former will require me to find more clients to freelance for. Honestly, I worked with Giga as a means of building my resume and creating something from the ground up; I wasn’t paid for my content. From now on, I’m not doing that. As a wise (and mad) man once said,

These sorts of things are depressing. I knew the writer’s life would be hard—I was warned of that in college—but I still expected I’d be doing better than this. This will require that I reassess what I’m doing and how I do it. I started the year feeling like God was giving me a positive vision for 2016. Stuff like this has made me question that. But the year is not over. While last year’s Gen-Con was so good, I’m unsure this year’s show will live up to it, I’ve still had decent sales today (the first day). Once I recover from this harrowing but exuberating weekend, I’m going to make new strategies for how to go about my writing. Don’t worry: I’ll still keep publishing books (I have a few forthcoming). However, if there’s one thing I can say for sure will happen before 2017, it’ll be change. That’s been the common theme I’ve gotten from most of my friends when I talk to them about this stuff. I think God is trying to tell me something. Perhaps He ripping the “training wheels” off, so to speak, so I can progress to a new level in my life and career.

I’m confident I can get more work as a writer. After all…

I made this meme myself! :)
I made this meme myself! 🙂

But I Digress…, Episode 37: An Epic ‘Ghostbusters’ 2016 Rant

(This is my first post in weeks. My host site was hacked, in case you didn’t know. I’ll blog about it more later this week…assuming I find the time at Gen-Con 2016. wOOt!)

 

“But I Digress…”
Hosted by Nathan Marchand

In the longest episode I’ve produced so far, my friend Sergio Garza and I review the “controversial” new Ghostbusters movie. Well, the bulk of this video is our review. We start off by talking briefly about the original Ghostbusters and then try some Ghostbusters Twinkies. But when we start the review…oh, man! I’ve rarely seen Sergio rage this much. This could’ve been a NERD RAGE! episode.

What’d you think of the new Ghostbusters? Agree or disagree?

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