This post is a slight revision of the May 2023 version which appeared on my writing blog.
While reading a new compilation of CS Lewis’s ideas in On Writing (and Writers), I was particularly struck by this quote (originally from the essay “Christian Apologetics” found in God in the Dock) as it might apply to the Latter-day Saint writer: “What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects – with their Christianity latent.”
In the surrounding paragraph, Lewis claims that in general, it’s much less beneficial to write works of apologetics than it is to write books on other subjects with a definitively Christian worldview. Ignoring the fact that this statement is exactly the opposite of what CS Lewis did in his own writing practice (both in nonfiction and fiction), I wondered whether I buy the argument.
Lewis’s point was that it’s rarely the reading of Christian apologetics that causes people to gain or lose their faith but rather the reading of other books that are materialist or atheistic in the way they frame the material. Worldview is an insidious thing because most of the time it’s an assumption, something that we don’t even notice we’re imbibing, the water to the fish as it were. I don’t really want to talk about the worldview present in books about science or our modern news coverage. There are many other outlets that can cover that more adequately than I can. (If you aren’t following Get Religion, I highly recommend it. They do a great job of pointing out the religious “ghosts” missing in mainstream coverage.) But (how) does this concept apply to fiction?
There are certain advantages to writing from an LDS worldview without LDS subject matter. As the popularity of LDS speculative fiction and romance writers suggests, it’s certainly much more commercially viable than writing Mormon lit. But what if we consider that our goal is to, if not spread the gospel outright, than to use fiction to create more moral human beings? Will people better understand moral truths by reading speculative fiction? Is it qualitatively better for the purpose of spreading light and truth than explicitly LDS fiction?
I’ll return to my favorite analogy of choice, Brandon Sanderson. Why did Brandon Sanderson fail so badly when trying to write to the market early in his career? It’s because the market at the time wanted George RR Martin and Joe Abercrombie. Whenever Sanderson attempted to write something with the outward trappings of a gritty and bleak epic in the style of Game of Thrones or the First Law trilogy, it fell apart because the story didn’t match his underlying worldview. And what was that underlying worldview? A picture of humanity as heroic. That even though a person might struggle with their circumstances or their past actions, they could eventually change and become a better person through their own agency and commitment. In a word, it was a Mormon worldview. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Sanderson’s career really took off when he started writing a series that embodied his hopeful view of humanity (though of course finishing the Wheel of Time didn’t hurt).
And one doesn’t have to stray far on Reddit to find stories of the people who have been uplifted from personal tragedy and struggle by the positive, empowered outlook of the Stormlight Archive. Has anyone been converted to the Church over it? I can’t say that I’ve heard of it happening. Yet maybe when the missionaries knock on their door someday, they’ll recognize the principles of agency, repentance, and personal growth that are at the core of the plan of salvation. (You could tell similar stories with Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, I suspect. I know it was massively empowering to me as a gifted kid.)
For a long time, this was enough for me. I’ve always been a champion of the latent religious worldview that was available to fantasy authors. Religion and fantasy share an interest in myth—not as something untrue, but as a story so powerful and iconic that it creates meaning that isn’t reduceable to an analysis of its parts. And as a genre where humans have to wrestle with divine power and where human agency can have world-changing effects, fantasy literature is a genre built for exploring religion. It allows us to explore morality without the instant rejection you might get for a blatantly religious book.
But lately I’ve found myself leaning more in the other direction, towards fiction that more explicitly includes religion. This is for two reasons. First, some very smart people who I’ve talked to have found the LDS connections in Brandon’s books I’m constantly explicating to be quite tenuous. They don’t see the deeply LDS worldview that I do. I wish it was easier for other people to see it. It’s harder to dig into the small but important saving details of doctrine without including religion itself in the narrative. Perhaps this is why Lewis’s fiction has stuck around so strongly in spite of the frequent accusations of being too “allegorical.” He wanted to really get into the interesting details of what it meant to be Christian not just skim the surface of salvation, and he couldn’t do that without having direct analogs of the questions he wanted to ask in his world. In some ways, this makes the fantasy aspects of his world more shallow, but it makes the Christian aspects more deep.
The second reason is my exploration of explicitly LDS speculative fiction the last few years, including writing some few stories myself. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying seeing recognizable Mormons interact with aliens or deal with portal worlds or unexplained magical powers. There’s something inherently powerful about representation, about seeing yourself as a legitimate topic of fiction, rather than something you have to twist through metaphor and sneak into people like spinach in a smoothie. (Though on the other hand, if they can see the green, the ones who need it the most won’t drink it anyway, if you follow my analogy.)
Now, I’m not saying I want an apologetics for the Church in fiction. The Work and the Glory really never clicked with me, though such blatantly faith-affirming fiction has its place. But I’m also fed up with the fact that the vast majority of portrayals of Latter-day Saints in fiction or entertainment are from the perspective of people who no longer share our worldview. Where’s the portrayal of the LDSS Nauvoo from the people who understand why Latter-day Saints would build such a ship? Where’s the Mormon version of Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and Children of God exploring the LDS missionary experience on a galactic scale? Where’s the Ms Marvel starring a young Latter-day Saint woman?
Part of the reason we need fiction written for outsiders by faithful insiders is to accomplish what the “I’m A Mormon” campaign started: to get people to see us as people, not as a strange religion/possible cult to escape from. No one can see the beauty of our theology until they see us.
Hi Liz, this is an interesting topic, even if I’m not one who reads a lot of speculative fiction. I’m curious what you think is holding LDS writers back from casting characters like themselves (re: religion) in their SF/F fiction. It seems to me it would require either anchoring Mormonism in a story as what it is today, or projecting what it may evolve into in futuristic stories or stories in alternate worlds, which may make believing LDS writers uncomfortable. And how are LDS publishers and readers going to respond to imaginative projections about Mormonism?
Is this something you’re playing with in your own work?
I have been working with more LDS characters in my own work. In fact, I have a science fiction story coming out in Wayfare soon which you’ll see playing with these ideas.
I’ve been thinking about your comments about the publishing world for a while. Within the LDS publishing world, I think there will always the fear of stirring up trouble with the establishment (or your neighbors/bishop). However, I don’t think the only way to write LDS characters into a SF novel is to focus on projecting future changes in the church. Eric James Stone’s “That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made” presents a far future church that seems largely the same but doesn’t really go into specifics because that’s not the point of the story. Similarly, the conflicts in Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow are conflicts that every believer deals with, the question of theodicy and intercultural missionary work, in spite of the details being those of a Jesuit priest and a secular Jewish woman. I see no reason why a similar story couldn’t be written about an LDS spacefaring group.
However, your question seems framed for people publishing for an LDS audience in particular. I was thinking more in terms of a national audience. Orson Scott Card got away with his one explicitly LDS SF novel (The Folk of the Fringe) with Tor based on the goodwill of his Ender’s Game/Speaker for the Dead success. (You could argue that Alvin Maker and Earthbound are explicitly Mormon, but not in the same way I’m talking about, where characters are actually LDS.) I wish some of our other popular authors would do something similar.
Maybe they just don’t have the inclination. Maybe they are worried about using up their goodwill. Maybe they are worried that their fantasy or science fiction version of an LDS character would upset their relationship with the church. Maybe they’ve tried and gotten turned down or whitewashed into “general Christianity” like Shannon Hale’s Real Friends series. It’s hard to tell the difference from the outside. But I think in an age where we can see an Islamic American superhero, we may be nearing the point where such SF stories are not only possible, but overdue.