Straw Men and Their Architects

I've discovered some shocking things about myself over the past few years of watching PBS and doing more fiction reading than usual (you know, Covid, and that whole mess). I've learned, for example, that I am shallow and robotically doctrinaire. Apparently, I am also bigoted, hypocritical, and buffoonish.

I encountered these disturbing revelations after I'd run through most of the classic mysteries  (Agatha Christy, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, etc.) on the shelves of my local library and decided to sample a few contemporary writers in that genre during my afternoon reading sessions. Come evening, I might plop down to catch an otherwise entertaining episode of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.

You see, I am a Christian. And among the new generation of whodunits—televised or penned—virtually every token Christian character possesses the ugly traits of small-minded pettiness: a coldly unforgiving, judgmental, pedantic attitude toward others that turns them into overblown comedic caricatures. Not flesh-and-blood human beings with an average number of flaws and quirks, but flimsy cardboard creatures, all cut out of the same moldy material.

God forgive me, but there was a time in my misguided youth when I would have nodded in agreement with that depiction. No wonder I was such a confused 20-something. And no wonder I had such a distorted view of the very Christian believers I had once attended Sunday school with. I was a smug, Vietnam-war-era, liberal arts college student, immersing myself in the works of John Updyke, Bertrand Russell, Desmond Morris, and Mary McCarthy.

My point is this: Christophobic literary biases have enormous potential to skew one's thinking, no matter how stealthily they are woven into the scenery of a manuscript. The current crop of "enlightened" scribes churns out cookie-cutter images of people of faith like so many identical gingerbread men on a Christmas cookie baking sheet. But on some level, the sameness from storyline to storyline actually serves to reinforce the stereotype as legitimate.

To the unworldly reader or viewer, these images of one-dimensional, unlikeable, stiff-necked sinners-in-saints'-clothing may buttress a need to deny the notion of eternal destiny in order to dismiss the whole intimidating idea of God's unfathomable sovereignty. If Christians are all platitudes and no intellect, if they are without true conviction, sputtering in the face of their atheist protagonists' arguments, then why bother trying to understand them as individuals or give credence to their beliefs?

My personal experience? Some of the brightest, kindest, most loving, generous, and accepting people I know are devout believers. My dearest Christian friends are humble, sincere people, yearning to share the joy their faith brings to their lives and the comfort God brings to their troubled hearts.  

I'd say that the traits of blind allegiance and ignorance unfairly assigned to these good folks by Hollywood and most major publishers attaches instead to the screenwriters and authors who write in unimaginative tropes about that of which they know so little.

Perhaps these lost souls have been reading all the wrong books, too.