Wednesday, December 10, 2008

What I'd Like...


If I had my way, Christian Fantasy would lose its fixation on Spiritual Warfare. A book has angels or demons in it, so it must be about spiritual warfare. A book has knights on horseback who take up swords to fight the enemy. This too must be an allegory for spiritual warfare. Someone steps in a mud puddle and it must have something to do with spiritual warfare.


While there is nothing wrong with writing about spiritual warfare, if it is handled in the right way, do we really need so much of it? Fantasy is an excellent place to talk about a wide variety of subjects, but at some point we have to question whether every sword must represent the Bible and whether we really need to talk so much about demonic forces when its real flesh and blood people that we need to be concerned about.


Christian Fantasy needs more pure fantasy in which a sword is just a sword and the evil king is just the enemy. I would like to see more Christian Fantasy that is written for no other reason than the enjoyment of the writer and reader. Allegories have their place, but sometimes it’s not to not have to figure out the hidden meaning behind the author’s words.


Among Allegories, I would like to see Christian Fantasy have more books that deal with current events. Good allegories are opinionated. Animal Farm was written to ridicule Communism, for example. They let us talk about people who may be offended without calling them by name. When I look at Christian Fantasy and see so much Spiritual Warfare, I wonder if some of these authors have an original opinion at all or if they are just blind to the stuff that’s going on around them. Can we honestly say that we believe demonic activity is a more important subject than something like divorce among Christians or some other current issue?