J. B. Phillips on God in Fiction #1

In his 1966 book, Your God is Too Small, the Oxford educated clergyman and translator J. B. Phillips wrote, “There are three main ways fiction can mislead us, and in consequence profoundly affect the idea we unconsciously hold of God and His operation in human life.”

He goes on to list 1) the tacit ignoring of God and all “religious” issues, 2) the willful misrepresentation of religion, and 3) the manipulation of providence.

Over the next three posts I’ll comment on each of these, as we readily see them in modern fiction.

Fiction misleads us with…”the tacit ignoring of God and all ‘religious’ issues.”

If an alien with a literary bent sought to understand our culture strictly through reading modern fiction, it  would assume there to be very little religious concern or consideration among us. If our extraterrestrial reader happened upon Marilynn Robinson or John Updike they would be seen as significant outliers. Very possibly our reader from the stars would happen into the Christian fiction stacks. There it would conclude faith must be a superficial practice shared by a small subset of the population.

As Phillips points out, this is misleading. There is a complex matrix of religiosity and faith in our culture. Our lives are impacted, more often positively than negatively, by diverse faith practices. Our national history was founded and shaped in such a context. Most novels, films, and plays ignore this fact, and represent characters as wholly consumed by individualistic and materialistic motivations. As I review the list of novels I’ve read so far this year, the point proves out.

Writers of fiction have an opportunity to give religion it’s proper place in our work. We don’t need to write fiction with the intent of accomplishing this, but we do need to ensure we’re not perpetuating an inaccurate view of humanity. And being aware of this missing element is the first step.