I was an occasional Catholic until my parents divorced in the mid-1980s.Hardly a month after the divorce was finalized, my father left Houston, Texas, where we lived, for a seaside town in Orange County, California.The woman who would become my stepmother went with him.She was a passionate, lifelong evangelical Christian, and about year after arriving in California, she became a children’s pastor at a large evangelical church in Orange County.It wasn’t a megachurch—her church was, in fact, just down the street from Rick Warren’s enormous Saddleback Church—but it was clearly aligned with them.It was a religion unlike any I had ever seen, characterized by dramatic skits, rock-n-roll style music, and a lot of energy among the crowd. I was exposed to it in intense, but brief encounters, during the few weeks each summer when I escape the oppressive Houston heat for the Southern California beaches.Evangelicalism thus became, for me, associated with good weather, long days at the beach, movie stars and new beginnings.I was thirteen when I converted.
Even then, however, I felt the pull of narrative.I was a hungry reader (largely because reading was a quiet, solitary experience), and I felt an inclination to write.And, though not often perceived this way by the media, evangelicalism is a very narrative-oriented religious world.Sermons often last a good hour, and braid bible verses together with stories. Moreover, evangelical sermons, at least in my experience, are highly anecdotal, driven by personal reflection and storytelling.Though my stepmother’s church was outwardly wary of contemporary fiction, as they were wary of secular movies and music, the structure of the services reaffirmed the value of all three media—stories, movies, and music—by employing all three in the service of an argument about the relationship between faith and daily life.It was during this time that I found myself reading and writing more, and more specifically reading and writing about the contemporary world.
It wasn’t until I was in college, however, that I really began to write in earnest.By then, I was a full-fledged, card-carrying evangelical.Maybe it was the intensity of the circumstances surrounding my conversion, but as a teenager and early adult, I found myself drawn to fiction with religious leanings, to writers thinking and imagining the frictions between our human and spiritual impulses.The sacrifices required of faith I found charged and dramatic, as well as gorgeous and meaningful.I’m a huge fan of Flannery O’Connor, as well as Walker Percy, and Andre Dubus.Andre Dubus first captured my imagination in college and has never left it.But when I began looking for writers closer to my own religious life—contemporary Protestant writers, I didn’t find too many names.John Updike, maybe, Garrison Keillor and Rick Moody, sort of, and Marilynne Robinson—she’s about as close as we get.When it comes to evangelicals—especially the evangelicals who occupy the Sun Belt suburbs—I couldn’t name a single one.
And when I expressed my desires to write, my friends and family often said things like, “God needs people who can write,” or “Writing is such a useful tool for sharing your faith”—neither of which I felt applied to the kind of writing I wanted to do.This desire to make all tasks and talents utilitarian, and for a messianic purpose, is endemic to evangelicalism, which is organized around the calling out of faith, the sharing of Christian good news.So, I can’t fault my friends too much for saying the things they said.But I quickly understood that if I was going to be an honest writer, and write about the people and subjects I cared about, in the ways that I cared about, I was probably going to get into some trouble.I knew I couldn’t do “Christian fiction.”The very term turned my stomach.(A few years ago, when the novelist Jane Hamilton visited the campus where I teach, she described these books as “saccharine,” and I’ve always felt it was a good word—artificially sweet, but deep down sort of acidic.Too much of it will give you cancer.)But, I thought about faith a lot, and most of my stories leaned toward faith in one way or another.I didn’t want to not write about it, but I worried about what would happen if I did.
When I moved to Salt Lake City, in 1999, I began to drift away from evangelicalism and in 2001, my girlfriend (now my wife) and I began attending St. Paul’s.I didn’t surrender my religious interests or longings, but rather shifted them to another form; my hunger for God remained as strong as ever.And moving away from evangelicalism allowed me to see the culture with more clarity and sympathy.I’ve always believed evangelicals are mischaracterized and misunderstood.They’re often shown in gigantic stadium-like churches filled with rock bands and strobe lights and people swooning in the aisles.Or, they’re shown demonstrating outside a courthouse, seemingly in lock-step with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.Such depictions aren’t totally unwarranted, but the picture of all those people swaying en masse seems to suggest that these people lack inner lives, or that their inner lives are constituted entirely by doctrinal maxims.Like the suburban communities in which they often reside, evangelicals are often portrayed—at least in my opinion—as simplistic and homogenous.I still have a number of close evangelical friends, as well as a few evangelical family members, and so I know that they—like all people—are in possession of a complex psychology.They have reasons for their beliefs, and those reasons are deeply rooted in their personal experiences and traumas.And despite all their rhetoric promoting chastity and conservative gender relationships, they, too, have fervent sexual desires.Evangelicals are often are lampooned for this very thing, this apparent contradiction, but lampoons rely, for the most part, on superficialities.I felt had been given a challenge: to depict the zealous with compassion and complexity, to give them a more interesting voice than they often gave themselves.
A short seven years later—during which time I got married, finished my Ph.D. in English at the University of Utah, moved to Wisconsin to begin a teaching job, and had two boys—I published my first book of stories, The End of the Straight and Narrow.The stories, as the title suggests, explore the ways religious faith is both the compass for navigating daily life and the force that makes ordinary life impossible. The characters who speak their beliefs are often propelled into moments of crisis in their personal relationships, and in their relationships to the world.
Which leaves one last thing to worry about—audience. How can I ensure a reader won’t see the word “Christian” or “faith” on the back of my book and replace it on the shelf with a quiet frown?Or, how can I ensure my friends and family won’t think I’m judging them?My first answer is nothing more than a shrug: I have no way of knowing how people read, or what, or why.I’m sure a potential reader or two has been chased away from my work by the blurbs about faith and religion on the back of the book.But, it’s also my hope that the artificial divisions that separate the questions of faith from mainstream literary fiction might start to break down.It was Andre Dubus’ interests in religion that brought me to his work, and Catholicism permeates nearly every corner of his work, but he’s not necessarily known as a Catholic writer.The two films made from his stories, In the Bedroom and We Don’t Live Here Anymore, make little more than a passing mention of faith.He has endured because he tells good stories.It’s my hope that readers will find their way to my work, too, because I’m also telling good stories; the fact that I’m telling stories about the crazy religious people down the street who often go to church twice on Sundays, as well as on Wednesday nights, only adds to the mystery and to the appeal.
