Religious writers and audiences

Jerry Friedman · 06 Jun 2010, 20:12 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

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From: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2010 13:12:56 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Religious writers and audiences
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I'm one who felt betrayed by /TLtW&tW/, and as David Stockhoff said, timing was important.  I read all the Narnia books eagerly when I was seven.  When I was maybe 10 or 12, I learned the story of Jesus' redemptive sacrifice, and at some point I connected that with Aslan (and the end of /TVotDT/).  So Lewis had tried to trick me!  These books I was attached to were a covert attempt to advertise that religion that besieged me and my family, that continually tried to blandish and harangue and peer-press and maybe, under the surface, even threaten me into submission.  It was an unpleasant moment.

(This was in the early or mid '70s, by the way, a time when American Christians may have felt equally besieged.)

It was just a moment, though.  I soon learned to see Christianity in fiction as an appealing fantasy, and I could enjoy it in the Narnia books and the Space Trilogy and many other books.  In /Crime and Punishment/ and /War and Peace/ I may have sighed "This again" when I got to the Christian message, but no more than that.  Otherwise it was in the same category as the Greek and Norse myths that I read when I was little, or Robertson Davies's Jungianism and Ursula Le Guin's attempt at an indigenous belief system in /Always Coming Home/.

I went through a Rand phase around my last year or two of high school.  I don't mind preaching if it's done in a way I can enjoy.

Jerry Friedman

________________________________
From: John Watkins <john.watkins04 at gmail.com>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Sat, June 5, 2010 6:01:27 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) Religious writers and audiences

Do people feel similarly betrayed by Doestoevsky?

Again, I find it bizarre.  I can't imagine thinking to myself "How dare Author X have different views than me!"  I can imagine thinking "Well, I don't choose to spend time on this," but not a sense of betrayal per se.

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 7:58 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:

The comparison is a personally interesting one. Perhaps the difference is largely one of timing. I too felt somewhat betrayed by Lewis; I encountered Narnia not long after Middle-Earth, around second and third grade. 
>>Wolfe I discovered much later, and while I'm still waiting for the Great Atheist Novel, I don't feel betrayed at all. And Rand was clearly insane from the beginning.
>
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>Message: 4
>>Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2010 16:53:02 -0400 
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>From: John Watkins <john.watkins04 at gmail.com>
>To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
>Subject: Re: (urth) Religious writers and audiences
>Message-ID:
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>Personally I find the "betrayal" narrative bizarre whenever I hear it.
>Secular writers and religious writers alike "color" their fiction to reflect
>their political, moral and/or metaphyiscal beliefs, yet one very rarely
>>encounters this "betrayal" storyline outside of discussion of certain
>Christian genre writers.  I guess in the right-wing fringe media we hear
>about evil homosexual/pagan agendas hidden in works, but no one takes that
>>stuff seriously.
>
>I might ascribe this to the generally liberal or progressive attitudes of
>most literary critics, academics, and, plausibly, much of the educated
>reading class in the United States.  But that doesn't really wash in my
>>experience.  I know countless people, many of liberal predispositions, who
>have read and allegedly enjoyed The Fountainhead--and Rand is far preachier
>than Lewis, Wolfe, or even Card.  And Neil Gaiman has written about his
>>feelings of betrayal as to Lewis's religiousity, but never expressed similar
>feelings toward, for example, Kipling's imperialism.
>
>I think the problem (if there is a unique problem here and not just soft
>>bigotry against religion in general or a particular religion) must be the
>perceived deception.  The idea that Lewis might be planting ideas and images
>surreptiously in one's head that would act to soften one's views towards
>>traditional Christianity can be conceived of nefariously.
>
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