Librarians' Christian Fellowship

Diana Guthrie reports on the 2011 lecture...

LCF members returned to the Reading International Solidarity Centre on Saturday 1 October 2011 to hear this year's annual public lecture given by Dave Roberts, author of The Twilight Gospel and other books.

Dave Roberts started by putting popular literature into its historical context. Pre-literate society depended on oral story-telling for entertainment, and as more and more people learned to read and write, the newly literate wanted something entertaining to read. Fiction has been enormously important in the growth of literacy, with Christians involved from the beginning, from the Sunday School movement and the 18th century desire for edifying literature, to the growth of the woman’s magazine; many publishers (even Mills & Boon!) have Christian roots. However, the 1960s counter-culture, fascinated by myth and world religions, loosened the hold that Christianity had on fiction. This created a new openness in the West to other world-views, and the resulting fiction picked up and combined elements from the Christian and the mythical traditions.

Earlier thinkers, such as Isaac Newton, had few difficulties in marrying scientific materialism with spirituality, and although since World War II there has been a strong emphasis on rationalism, this does not seem to have dented the popularity of mystical or Christian fiction. It’s reckoned that one in twenty of the world’s population has read Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer, who look for spirituality within materialism – but it’s a spirituality arising from within the person (not from God). Atlantis – the mythical city that disappeared beneath the waves, taking with it many supernatural powers – has proved to be fertile ground for these writers, who have built on the idea of the supernatural being not drowned but merely submerged, just waiting for the right conditions to bring it back again.

What have been the traditional Christian approaches to this?

First of all – radical denouncement; this approach finds even the work of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis very dubious, and tars most non-overtly-Christian fiction as dangerous stuff. But ‘the occult’ encompasses an enormous range of beliefs, from ‘nature religions’ to Satanism; so-called ‘white magic’ throws up quite different ethical concerns from the evil of Satanism, so they need different approaches.

Secondly - ‘it’s only a story’, an approach that looks for a redemptive analogy, trying to link the good in the story to Scripture. And indeed this approach has sound antecedents, as St. Paul, in particular, was obviously familiar with Roman beliefs and mystical religions and was happy to use them as a bridge to his hearers. Writing a story is one of the best ways of popularising an idea, as witnessed by Dan Brown’s use of the Jesus-married-to-Mary-Magdalene theory, which has been around for centuries.

Thirdly - prophetic discernment. Can a mythical story contain truth? Many myths (such as the flood myth, which occurs in so many traditions) obviously do. We need to take a step back to look not just at the details, but at the meaning at the heart of the myth – what is it trying to say? Parables are a wonderful example of how a deep truth can be clothed in a story.

Dan Brown’s novel, The Lost Symbol, deals with ‘the power within’ (a Gnostic heresy); he uses Scripture (amongst other works) as a mystical handbook, mining it for ideas about secret knowledge (e.g. Satan’s ‘ye shall be as gods’ promise in Genesis 3). Brown believes that the supernatural is an adjunct of the mind, a much more persuasive idea than obvious mystery. And this idea can be found in other writers, such as Rhonda Byrne (The Power, and, The Secret), who propounds the idea that what you say can alter reality.

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series also draws on religious themes, though it preaches worldly views. It plays on the idea of a beautiful, powerful elite (a belief which has in the past bolstered the evil of National Socialism).

The Christian response to all this needs to arm people with Godly wisdom, not to ban books (never an effective deterrent). Jesus’ teaching (especially his parables) makes people think, so that they can consider and reject destructive ideas. We believe in the supernatural, but it has to originate from God, not from within ourselves.

One of the questions following the lecture focused on whether Christians should read authors such as Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer. Dave Roberts believes that superstitious fearfulness (rooted in a withdrawn, Essene Puritanism, and found in variants of Evangelicalism) can be overcome by spiritual discernment; many major authors use elements of Biblical teaching, even if they have rejected a personal faith.

Another questioner wondered why the secular Western world is so attracted to spirituality / other-worldliness; Dave Roberts believes that people are looking for a moral construct, and that the occult is always there, bubbling away beneath a rational approach to life; even Christian festivals such as Christmas incorporate a lot of mythological traditions.

Back