Finally, seven months after its release, someone has objected to the religious content of In Pieces. Before publication, I had thought it would be the first complaint I’d hear. That it took seven whole months is proof that I’m small potatoes.

Don’t feel sorry for me. We are all free to like or dislike a book, the religious critique doesn’t bother me, and I am not here to debate a reader—that would be silly. But the fact that I finally did receive that criticism reminded me that I’ve been meaning to blog about religion in fiction generally, and religion in the Molly Chase series specifically. I’ve been thinking through approaches and guiding principles, and I’m curious to know what y’all think.

No one likes “preachy” fiction. The workings of grace are mysterious, and our attempts to describe religious experience often fall flat, especially for readers outside the writer’s denominational soup pot. Authors are instead advised to depict religious experience at a slant, rather than directly, whenever possible. Doing so keeps the themes from reading on the nose.

But what do we do when we have a story about religious people? Who grapple with religious truths? Who experience religious awakenings? Who live within and react to the particularities of their religious culture? Whose beliefs shift or make demands and effect their choices and comprise the story’s plot? Do we ignore these stories all together, out of fear of writing preachy fiction?

Of course not. Many great novels take up religious subject matter. Novels like Brideshead Revisited, Kristin Lavransdatter, The Brothers Karamazov, Silence, anything by George Eliot…

…but I am no Evelyn Waugh or Sigrid Undset or Fyodor Dostoevsky or Shūsaku Endo or George Eliot. Therein lies the problem.

What to do?

Dostoyevsky's notes for Chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov (Wikipedia).

Let me pause to lay my cards on the table. I was raised in the Church of God and became a Catholic my senior year of college. While I was in the process of converting, I met my husband, a cradle Catholic and “revert,” or a fallen-away Catholic who returned to the faith. He is now a theologian and professor of Catholic studies at a Protestant college. (You can learn more about his story here.) I am not a bitter convert. I have nothing but love and gratitude for the people who taught me about Jesus and baptized me. I see my conversion as a continuation of the journey I began under their care. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all.

I say this not to downplay the real and painful divisions in the Church, but to emphasize that a person can embrace what is common to all Christians, in the hope of restoration and full communion, while holding to one’s own beliefs.

Despite my background, I never set out to tell a Protestant-to-Catholic conversion story. Conversions are notoriously tricky to write, and I was plenty annoyed when Josiah Robb decided this was his (and consequently Molly’s) path. I understand now why the story itself demands a conversion, but I was and continue to be uncomfortable writing it. In the early draft of what became In Pieces, I tiptoed around the subject, not wanting to annoy or upset future readers—it’s a subplot, after all, so no need to draw attention to it. Right?

This was the manuscript I submitted to WhiteFire Publishing at the end of 2019, several months before they—we—founded Chrism Press for Catholic and Orthodox Christian voices. WhiteFire serves a broad range of Christian audiences, yet I remained concerned that my book was too Catholic for them, even with my soft-shoe approach. Again, I’m a convert. I know both sides, and certain things simply do not translate across the Tiber.

Little did I expect WhiteFire to ask me to lean into the book’s Catholic themes.

Which makes sense! Better to write with boldness than to placate a hypothetical antagonistic reader, right? (I can hear my publisher’s voice right now: “Let the audience self-select!”) Yet I still wanted to write something that engaged, rather than enraged, non-Catholic readers. The Catholic viewpoint is as valid a storytelling viewpoint as any, but I wanted to avoid preaching to the choir. After some back-and-forth (“Are you sure?” “Yes, we’re sure”), I got to work.

These are the tactics I employed:

(1) I reframed the fundamental conflict as personal and familial rather than theological. Know thy genre: this is a story, not a theological treatise. (Zzzz…) I moved most of Josiah’s theological wrestling to the backstory so that he has but a handful of questions remaining when the book opens. The conflict instead centers on his relationship with his devout Congregationalist mother, Sarah Robb. He doesn’t want to disappoint or worry her. A reader may or may not care about the religious stakes, but family conflicts are universal.

(2) I developed Sarah Robb’s character to ensure she wasn’t a straw man. With the help of my writing group—all Protestants—I worked to make sure Mrs. Robb’s side of the conflict read well. I had already determined she was the daughter of a minister; it wasn’t a stretch to show her as educated, well-catechized, and wise. I reworked any dialogue or narrative that smacked of small-mindedness or bigotry. I also legitimized her criticisms of Josiah’s discernment process—she can see his shortcomings. (For the record, I adore Mrs. Robb. She’s one of my favs.)

(3) I brought in other viewpoints, including Molly’s. Molly’s family is Episcopalian, and her late mother had a rich faith life born of redemptive suffering. One of my favorite Molly lines: “Molly never understood why these distinctions mattered. Her mother had taught her that God’s grace was at work in every person who sought Him.” However, Molly’s opinion is decidedly a minority opinion, because…

(4) I set the conversion in its particular historical context. In Pieces opens in 1793, thirteen years after Massachusetts amended its constitution to allow the free practice of religion and two years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights. At the time, once-Puritan Boston was going through a religious upheaval, seen in its new denominational plurality and felt most acutely in the rise of Unitarianism, as church after church renounced “irrational” Trinitarian theology. This was (and is) a big deal. Bostonians of 1793 cared deeply about theological and philosophic principles. We may live in a relativistic age that sees “religion” as antithetical to faith, but not they. That Josiah is an armchair theologian, and that Mrs. Robb is panicking about her son’s unorthodox views, fits the setting.

(5) Finally, I left certain questions unresolved—most importantly, the matter of Josiah’s conversations with his dead father. Was his childhood vision real? Is this wishful thinking, as Mrs. Robb thinks it is? He may very well be delusional. His experience is sketchy even on Catholic grounds, despite Catholicism’s theological framework for private revelation and saintly intercession. The reader is free to interpret things as he will.

Was I successful? Well, at least one reader thought I failed miserably. C’est la vie.

Panning back from my own work, it’s worth asking ourselves what we’re looking for when we read “religious” stories. Do we want to recognize ourselves? Do we seek edification? Affirmation? Knowledge? Understanding? Familiarity? Unfamiliarity? What conflicts and questions are we interested in? Not interested in? Do we like our religion explicit on the page, or kneaded into the story’s dough? Do we not like religion at all? And why are our preferences what they are?

Writers: Are you eager to write about religion, or do you shy away from it? Why? What do you think is the best approach to take?

Have thoughts? Contact me here.

Happy Easter, everyone!

Last week I learned that In Pieces is a finalist in published historical fiction in this year's Cascade Awards, hosted by Oregon Christian Writers. It's an honor. Thank you to all the contest organizers and judges for your hard work!

I have gravitated to historical romance fiction since I was a teen. Love stories resonate deeply with me as a reader, a writer, and in my spiritual life. And history itself fascinates me. Add a dash of suspense (I also love classic murder mysteries) and I am in my happy place.

Why do these two genres—romance and mystery—resonate so deeply? Maybe because they are a response to humanity’s fundamental brokenness, and therefore my own brokenness. In them we hear echoes of the Garden of Eden. The romance is concerned with union, love, wholeness, and the imago Dei. The murder mystery is concerned with life, death, and justice. These things are what we had—and lost—in Eden.

Interestingly, they are connected thematically in the person of Eve. From Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s Daughter Zion:

[Eve] comes, not from the earth, but from himself [i.e. Adam]: in the “myth” or “legend” of the rib is expressed the most intimate reference of man and woman to each other. In that mutual reference the wholeness of humanity is first realized. The necessary condition for the creation of mankind, to be fulfilled in the oneness of man and woman, becomes apparent here, just as previously Genesis 1:27 had portrayed mankind from the very beginning as masculine and feminine in its likeness to God, and had mysterious, cryptically, linked its likeness to God with the mutual reference of the sexes to each other. Admittedly the text also allows the ambivalence of this reference to be evident: woman can become a temptation for man, but simultaneously she is the mother of all life. In my opinion it is significant that her name is bestowed in Genesis 3:20 after the fall, after God’s words of judgment. In this way the undestroyed dignity and majesty of woman are expressed. She preserves the mystery of life, the power opposed to death; for death is like the power of nothingness, the antithesis of Yahweh, who is the creator of life and the God of the living. She, who offers the fruit which leads to death, whose task manifests a mysterious kinship with death, is nonetheless from now on the keeper of the seal of life and the antithesis of death. The woman, who bears the key of life, thus touches directly the mystery of being, the living God, from whom in the last analysis all life originates and who, for that reason, is called “life”, the “living one” (Ratzinger, Daughter Zion: Meditations on the Church’s Marian Belief, pp. 16-17, emphasis mine).

Eve is an icon of the themes proper to the romance and mystery genres—the one who, with Adam, images God in his wholeness, and the one through whom death came and yet also bears the key of life. Like Eve, these genres “touch directly on the mystery of being” through the art of story. Romances and mysteries poke and prod at fundamental questions, the inscrutable mysteries of God. And if Eve, “the woman,” is the one touches on the mystery of being, then the popularity of the romance genre with women comes as no surprise. We are trying to understand the Divine Mysteries as women, which necessitates grappling with being bearers of the key of life and the mutual reference of the sexes to each other. For us, these questions are inescapable.

Yet the romance genre is often a matter for controversy. As with the real life relationships they depict, love stories can easily veer the reader toward false ideals, emotional manipulation, or voyeurism. Shallowness is also a risk: we want the things we want without having to exert much effort. Love without sacrifice. Feelings without virtue. Catharsis, but no personal growth.

I’m sensitive to the genre’s pitfalls. During my prodigal daughter days, I was in an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship. The topic of love is a deeply personal one; and thanks be to God, I have experienced much healing around this area of my life. But “hot and bothered” scenes stir up my yucky stuff, even after all these years. Triggering scenes will cycle through my mind on loop playback. I’m careful about my pleasure reading, but sometimes one of these stories sideswipes me and throws me off for days.

Yet I love to read stories that are bold in the telling. I want to write stories that are bold in the telling.

The question of how to be honest about sexuality without assaulting the reader’s imagination (or my own) plagued me as a younger writer. After a few years of hemming and hawing, I reached out to my college friend and historical romance author Roseanna White and asked her opinion. Not only is she equally interested in the theology of marriage, but she is equally concerned about the effect her stories have on readers. Roseanna helped me think around my scruples—my fear of leading my readers astray was an indicator that I had their best interests at heart—and directed me toward matters of writing craft. She brought up the matter of tension: story conflict can be set up in such a way that a story’s dramatic tension is built on something other than sexual tension. Sexual tension can play its part, but it need not the only point of a story, and it needs to be subservient to other, higher story goals.

Depending on where a scene’s tension lies, it’s possible to be “edgy” while minimizing the “hot and bothered.” But this requires a skilled hand and a judicious use of descriptive language. For example, I loved Lisa Samson’s The Passion of Mary-Margaret and Susie Finkbeiner’s Paint Chips, both of which delve into prostitution/human trafficking. Yet I was able to read both stories and gain something by them despite my own past trauma. The content was hard, but the craft made it readable—for me. I can’t speak to other people’s experiences; what bothers one reader doesn’t bother another.

My exchange with Roseanna set me on a path toward exploring love in my own storytelling in a prayerful, conscientious, soul-searching manner. Guess what? So much good has come from it. So much healing; so much freedom of spirit. I’ve seen its effects on my marriage. I’ve seen its effects on my imagination—I can ponder scenes and topics that I would have shied away from ten years ago. Most importantly, I’ve received spiritual consolation; the connection between marriage and God, especially its connection to the Eucharist, is no longer theoretical, but one that lives in my heart.

From this exploration came In Pieces, my debut novel and the first of my Molly Chase series—a series that is frank about sex while careful in its depiction. As I’ve bragged to friends and editors ad nauseam, I managed to escape the first book without the requisite “first kiss”—In Pieces fulfills that genre convention in a different and (I think) entirely satisfying way. Is there sexual tension? Yes. Does it overwhelm? I hope not. Does it serve character development and the plot itself? I hope so. The reader must be the judge.

Human love serves a higher purpose: to be a sacrament. To touch directly the mystery of being. Let the romance genre follow suit.

Further Reading: Memento Mori, the Romance Genre, and the Catholic Imagination (Chrism Press blog)

I stepped into the arena. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. But I took some pot shots at Immanuel Kant in the process, so it’s worth it.

Read my latest article, Popular fiction and the Catholic Literary Renaissance, over at Catholic World Report.