DL: The Problem of Evil

I am a metaphysician working on the concrete. I try to make the Catholic universe of evil perceptible, tangible, odorous. The theologians give us an abstract idea of the sinner. I give him flesh and blood.
—French Catholic novelist François Mauriac

Someone asked me once who my favorite Christian songwriter was. “Paul Simon,” I said.
“Paul Simon? He’s a Christian?” my questioner asked, wide-eyed.
“Not as far as I know,” I said.
“Then how can you call him a Christian songwriter?”
“Many of his songs so perfectly describe the futility and anguish of life apart from God,” I said. “They’re like the musical equivalent of Romans chapter seven, or Romans 3:23. But not many Christian songwriters echo those verses with any power. I wonder—do they just think that part of the gospel sounds too negative?”
***
Many years ago, my friend Carol was signed by a Christian publishing house to “write” the story of her life. I put the word write in quotes because, like many people whose life is worth reading about, Carol was not a writer. So the publisher chose a writer to work alongside Carol, translating her memories into autobiography.

And what horrible memories she had. Carol had been five when her mother ran out on her family—and Carol’s father installed her in his bed to satisfy his sexual longings. A Fagin-like figure, he established a ring of boys in his neighborhood to steal for him—and he offered them Carol as inducement and payment. He rented her as well to his adult friends. When she was fourteen, she bore her father’s child. He was arrested after that, convicted, and sent to prison.
But that’s a very ugly story for a Christian publisher to publish. Afraid of a harsh reaction from readers if they told that story in its horrendous completeness—and afraid, frankly, that no one would believe it—the publisher urged the writer to keep the details implicit and to keep the evil off the page. And she did. So completely, in fact, that more than one reader of the book approached Carol afterward and said, “I don’t understand—why did your father go to prison?”

He went to prison because he was an evil man who not only broke laws but also inflicted unimaginable evil on his own daughter. And as truth-tellers, we should not be afraid to say so. It is, after all, part of the gospel message to say that we live in a grossly fallen world. But that’s a problem, isn’t it, if we publish with Christian publishing houses. There are undeniable market constraints. Editors are under pressure to eliminate anything that might result in getting the book “banned.” Bookstore managers are protective of the conservative tastes of their customers. No one wants to write or publish a book that lasts only a week on the bookstore shelf before it’s pulled and shredded.

All true. And yet, as writers of fiction, we need to be able to name the evil. Like Mauriac, in the quote that began this essay, we need to make the universe of evil “perceptible, tangible, odorous.” That doesn’t mean that we need to pepper our stories with four-letter words or names of body parts, or to slather blood and gore on the walls. But it does mean that our descriptions of evil should leave no doubt that this is why the world is without hope of redemption apart from Christ.

Perhaps this is why many Christian novelists I know seem to feel such affinity with writers of secular horror stories—Stephen King, Dean Koontz—or writers of fantasy—J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling: Those writers are free to name the evil—to show it, rather than simply tell it. Always a difficult task for writers who oppose evil and have no wish to glorify it. But then—those are the people I would most trust with the task.

I’m sure I’m not the only writer who, careful of words, sometimes pauses in choosing them—for instance, do I say, “Have a good day,” or “Have a nice day”? But I’m rarely puzzled, these days, over which of those two words to use; I see them as very different. There’s nothing wrong, necessarily, with being nice. But neither is it enough. Good is much larger, and much more powerful. Good is what opposes evil. And sometimes, to be good, you have to discard niceness. I try to be nice—when I can. But, in writing fiction and in life, there is a time to forget niceness and become a warrior for good—a warrior who has no time for distinctions about nice.

Evil exists. And I mean true evil—not simply lack of niceness, but the true absence of goodness. It exists in hell, on the face of the earth, and in the human heart. Would God have subjected Jesus to the suffering of the cross if our worst sins were that we were rude to each other and cheated on our taxes?

In our own stories, let us leave no doubt why Carol’s father went to prison. Let us make sure our readers feel the horror of it in their bones. Let our stories be good—even when the truth they speak is not nice.

Dave Lambert is a novelist, an editor, and author of the fiction curriculum for the Christian Writer's Guild.