So, my dad talked to this girl at his church who heard that writing fantasy isn’t appropriate for a Christian.  She writes fantasy.

Putting aside my gut reaction of an eyeroll, sigh, and “Oh hell,” I decided it was worth a blog post.

Now, I don’t want to be one of those people that acts all superior and knowledgeable because they’ve been writing longer or took more classes, or who looks down on people who aren’t writers as bourgeois morons with no sense of art.   I feel confident about my abilities but I don’t want to (ever) become the kind of arrogant self-important twit who talks down to others.  Because of this, I will always take a simple “Stop acting like a jerk” to heart.  So in this post, I’m going to lay out all the sides before I state my own viewpoint.

Parental Censorship

I believe in the kind of censorship where a parent keeps unreasonable material out of their kids’ hands.  I, for one, have no interest in trying to explain rape to a child.  Many parents don’t want to have to explain things like menstruation before their daughters are ready for it, others want to keep foul words out of the way until their children are old enough to know better.  There are benefits to limiting what you and yours see and hear.  Stuff like that, cool.  Do what you need to do.

Overbearing Censorship

This is the part where I draw the line, the part where people try to impress their own views on what others should watch or read or write on the folks around them.  As a Christian, I acknowledge and respect self-censorship — the censoring of your own input and output — but it is completely unreasonable to tell others what they can and cannot do.

The Christian Confusion

Fear and Ignorance: The only information some people ever get on fantasy-based pastimes (i.e. D&D, Magic the Gathering) comes from news stories where something bad happens: people taking games to the extreme and getting hurt by it.  This can lead to a perception of these games where players get engrossed and lose all reason and perspective.  This line of thinking brings fear with it, the fear that anyone can fall prey to whatever it was that made those people lose their reason.

Scripture: Scriptures that denounce the practice of witchcraft and magic should, of course, be taken seriously — it’s always unwise for a Christian to dabble in the occult.  As a result of these scriptures, the presence of magic as a theme in fantasy further prejudices some against it.  Some people believe (whether they admit it or not) that reading about magic takes the reader only one step away from practicing it.  While this does happen on rare occasion, it is (like the kid who played Warcraft without eating or drinking until he died) the exception and not the rule.  (To paraphrase a popular WoW news source about the kid who died: most of us aren’t that stupid.)

Dislike: Some people just hate fantasy.  I read about it in my Children’s Lit class, some kids are drawn to fantasy and others hate it.  The way to encourage any child’s interest is to read it to them and to enjoy doing so.  Naturally, if someone can’t comprehend why anyone would like fantasy, they’ll have even less compunction about discouraging it.

Conclusion: To some people, if you add fear and scripture on top of a deep-seated disdain, they believe that anyone’s fondness for fantasy is simply the devil getting his hooks in you and promoting magic.  This leads to overbearing censorship “for your own good.”  This line of thinking is rarer than you might think, but the practioners are very very vocal.  They tend to belong to the most conservative lines of thought about Biblical interpretation, and they’re more often older Christians.

I understand how people can reach this line of thinking, but it is completely unsound.

Fantasy From This Writer’s Perspective

I could list a bunch of Christians who write fantasy and yank C.S. Lewis around a bit to show him off, but to be honest I never read any C.S. Lewis and his books had a religious theme.  I don’t want to talk about books with a religious theme.  I want to talk about fairies and unicorns and gosh-darn elves, all of which have no real purpose other than to bring pleasure to the reader.

I want to talk about reading and writing for pure, slavish, ridiculously self-indulgent fun.

Sometimes, silly people believe you shouldn’t have ridiculously self-indulgent fun, or at least that you should have fun doing things they approve of.  I disagree.  I think this world has enough problems and if you can play a video game or read a book without suffering psychological or physical harm, you deserve to play and read (and write!) without anyone nagging you about it.

It’s important to keep perspective.  The Bible warns against practicing magic, but it also warns about anything that makes you draw away from God.

Fantasy doesn’t hurt your relationship with God.

There, I said it.  It doesn’t.  Not any more than anything else.   Any hobby can be dangerous.  The key to the danger isn’t magic, it’s being an idiot.  Failing to recognize that you shouldn’t hit someone in the head with an axe just because your orc does it, forgetting to eat or sleep for days on end, throwing yourself off a cliff with the idea that you can fly, playing a shooting game in prep to shoot people — these are not problems with the product, they’re problems with the person.  Some people love to point and say “That object did it” instead of “That person was completely messed up,” but that’s wrong.

The truth is that games, guns, books, movies, all of these things can’t do anything bad until they fall into hands willing to twist them.  Christians, of all people, should know that anything can be twisted if someone tries hard enough.  But that’s no reason to ban things just because someone might twist them.

It is offensive to those of us who aren’t psychotic for anyone to assume we can’t handle something as simple as reading or writing about magic.  We are not idiots and we are not weaklings who will jump into witchcraft with dazzled eyes the moment we see a character casting a spell.

Responsibility lies in each person’s hands to maintain their own equilibrium with the world around them.  Some people let that slide so far that they have dire consequences.  But for every one who can’t balance reality and fiction, there are millions more who can and do.  Every day.