Is There a Need for Christian Stories?
Well, since there is plenty of good secular media out there, do we even need ‘Christian’ media?
This is an entirely reasonable question. There is quite a bit of excellent, moral, and creative secular stories out in the world and once the Christian audience is well-equipped to navigate them, they should have all the storytelling they could ever want. This overabundance, however, does not negate the purpose and value of intentionally Christian media.
Now, the term “Christian media” can come with all kinds of baggage or a definition so narrow and strict it immediately turns off half the audience. For most people, “Christian” media implies a lack of quality, where even most B-rated horror films have more in the way of acting and writing than many mainstream Christian stories. Or, “Christian” media implies hypersanitized, slice-of-life romances a la Hallmark Channel. While there is nothing wrong with these kinds of lighter, romance-focused stories, they really only appeal to a specific demographic (which will be discussed more in next week’s article).
Christian media must not be confined to only these two options. It does a great disservice not only to the Christian audience who consumes it, but to the world at large who looks at this media and goes “haha, funny Christians and their silly little stories”. Simply with this point, there is a great need for Christian stories of all kinds, formats, mediums, and genres to push back against the negative stereotypes that mainstream they have picked up in recent years.
Okay, but why is secular media, which tends to be fairly high-quality and is in a wide variety of genres, still not enough?
Yes, secular stories may get it right on occasion. They may profess and hold in high regard good, Godly elements such as self-sacrifice, kindness, gentleness, bravery, however, there is the element of the broken clock about them. A broken clock — at least an old timey analogue one — is right twice a day. By happenstance, its hands will “correctly” tell the time, but it will be wrong for anything other than those two minutes. It is not functioning properly and therefore cannot be as fully useful and realized as it could be if it was working.
Similarly, is no intentionality in any Godly message that a secular story may have. It is a message that is right, but not functional on a deeper or more spiritual level. There will always be something missing in the good messages of secular media because, ultimately, the creators do not understand why something must be good or bad. This is especially the case in the West, where moral subjectivity is the name of the game. It’s easy to say that stealing is wrong, it’s much more difficult to explain why stealing is wrong without the foundation of a good and just God to build upon.
Christians have both a wonderful opportunity and the ability to explain that missing why. Why there is good and evil is no surprise to the Christian, neither is why stealing, lying, adultery, greed, or any other number of sins are wrong. They are wrong because they go against the Word and law of God, whose very nature is the complete opposite of these things. Even if a Christian story uses no references to the Bible or presents itself as sermonizing, the ability to depict pieces of God’s nature — the goodness, the mercy, the generosity, forgiveness, etc. — intentionally and fully brings a richness to the morality of stories that secular media simply cannot grasp.
With this, Christian creatives need to make certain that their chief creative input is the Word of God and that they are surrounded by their brothers and sisters in Christ. Whether by studying the Bible daily, praying frequently, attending church, regularly repenting of sin, being discipled and discipling, or (ideally) a combination of all these things, the Christian creative must take care of their spiritual health in order to create stories that can answer that why.
