Why Christian Literature Still Matters and Why So Few Understand It
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Every so often, someone attempts to compile a definitive list of “the greatest Christian novelists,” as if such a ranking were as easy as sorting baseball stats. The channel Write Conscious recently took a swing at this perennial challenge, rattling off a roll call of familiar names: Gene Wolfe, Wendell Berry, Flannery O’Connor, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Dostoevsky, Marilynne Robinson, Graham Green, and Tolstoy.
Fair enough—most of these authors deserve the recognition. But the video also unwittingly demonstrates why most conversations about Christian fiction start shallow and end in confusion. The problem isn’t just that faith is hard to measure in literature. The problem is that nearly everyone discussing it starts from the wrong premise: that Christian storytelling is a tidy little genre, a sandbox in the bookstore for safely sanitized tales.
Let me be blunt: Christian literature is not a genre. It’s the taproot of Western civilization’s literary tradition. And most of the best stories the West ever produced are Christian by default because they were written in a world where the Gospel was the air people breathed—even when they rebelled against it.
Related: The Case Against "Christian Fiction" and For Christian Storytelling
The video spends considerable time on Gene Wolfe, and rightly so. It’s almost a running joke among serious readers that nobody truly finishes The Book of the New Sun—they just circle it endlessly, gleaning another facet of truth each time. Wolfe’s mastery of unreliable narration, symbolism, and moral complexity is so far beyond the sanitized pabulum that passes for “Christian Fiction” today as to not only comprise another genre, but another species.
Wolfe understood that sin doesn’t merely stain our actions—it distorts perception itself. That’s why his narrators are never fully trustworthy. Severian’s inability to see grace clearly isn’t a literary gimmick; it’s the human condition. “We see through a glass darkly,” wrote St. Paul. Wolfe took that Scripture seriously, while most modern novelists take it as a vague metaphor.
The best part? Wolfe’s novels never devolve into clumsy allegory. He didn’t feel compelled to label his books as Christian Fiction™ because he trusted readers to wrestle with his ideas on their own. Christian themes in Wolfe are subterranean but seismic. They work like grace: hidden until you learn to recognize them.
Write Conscious also highlights Wendell Berry, whose work shows Christianity as the unspoken framework beneath everything his characters do—how they farm, marry, raise children, and bury the dead. Berry’s fiction testifies to the truth that the Faith isn’t something you bolt on top of ordinary existence. It is ordinary existence, rightly ordered.
Contrast that approach with the thin gruel of contemporary “inspirational” novels. Too many Modern Christian writers believe faith must be explained at length, justified with footnotes, or sugarcoated for marketability. Berry knew better. His stories embody what the late Roger Scruton called “the sacred and the ordinary meeting face to face.” You don’t have to shout about the Gospel in every scene if the Gospel is already baked into the soil where your characters stand.
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Flannery O’Connor gets her due, as well. O’Connor’s fiction is frequently grotesque, violent, and disconcerting. She once observed that in a world deaf to grace, the Christian storyteller sometimes has to shout. That’s why her tales invert expectations and push readers out of complacency. There’s nothing soft or sentimental about O’Connor’s work. She wasn’t writing to coddle Christians; she was writing to confront them.
Tolkien and Lewis receive obligatory mentions, too. You almost can’t avoid them in these lists, but let’s have no illusions as to why they endure: not because they stuffed their stories with tidy religious analogies, but because they wrote books with enough beauty, danger, and moral weight to stand on their own.
The Lord of the Rings has the pacing and structure of an epic. Tolkien didn’t need to wave a flag and declare it Christian. He simply made it true. Lewis, meanwhile, wrote Narnia for children and still managed to craft stories that adults return to with gratitude.
If you want an illustration of how far we’ve fallen, just consider how most publishers would treat Tolkien or O’Connor today. Their manuscripts would be rejected outright for lacking market fit.
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The video also briefly touches on the temptation of Gnostic despair—especially in authors like Melville or McCarthy. It’s a point that shouldn’t be discounted. Gnosticism flatters the writer’s ego by making him feel like the sole possessor of hidden knowledge in a universe rigged to crush us. But Christianity doesn’t peddle secret codes or nihilistic resignation. Wolfe’s achievement was to avoid that trap. He showed that even when perception is warped by sin, redemption is still possible.
That is another reason I find most so-called Christian Fiction so anemic. It often tries to resolve every tension into a happy ending. But real faith acknowledges darkness without surrendering to it.
Dostoevsky knew it well. He didn’t pretend faith was easy. He wrote novels in which grace claws its way into broken lives as doubt and conviction collide in every paragraph.
Write Conscious ends with Tolstoy, who is a cautionary tale in his own right. Tolstoy’s zeal for pure Christianity turned him into a scrupulant who drove himself—and everyone around him—to distraction. Yet the video correctly points out that sometimes we need zealots to remind us that the Gospel can’t be reduced to civic religion. Tolstoy’s fiction remains powerful because he never let Christianity become just another cultural accessory.
But here’s the danger: if you mistake Tolstoy’s personal zeal for the Faith itself, you end up with self-righteous scolds instead of saints. True Christianity doesn’t encourage spiritual elitism; it demands humility. You can write novels that grapple with radical ideals, but don’t confuse them with the totality of the Faith.
Lists like this are entertaining, but they ultimately serve a deeper purpose: They remind us that Christian storytelling at its best isn’t confined to the Religion section. The greatest Christian novelists didn’t settle for pious platitudes. They took the risk of creating art that reflects the whole fallen human experience: sin, suffering, and grace.
If you’re a Christian writer, take note. You don’t have to write Christian Fiction™. Nor need you explain every symbol or hold the reader’s hand through every theme. You just have to tell the Truth. That means showing life as it is—and as it could be transformed by grace.
If you can accomplish that feat, you’ll be in the company of Wolfe, O’Connor, Dostoevsky, and the other giants. You’ll be tapping into a current that runs all the way back to the Gospels themselves. And you won’t need anyone’s list to prove your work matters.
Watch the Write Conscious video here:
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