In just the last few years, some of our most popular fantasy stories include material that at one time would have been considered porn.

These include films such as Passengers, Blade Runner 2049, and The Shape of Water, as well as TV shows such as Game of Thrones, Westworld, and Altered Carbon.¹

Concerns about content like this are often raised in relation to children and teens, whose emotional and physical development make them more impressionable. When it comes to adults, however, we find little concern expressed.

In fact, a lot of people claim to have no issues watching films with explicit sexual content. The material doesn’t affect them—or so they say.

But is this true? And if so, should it be true?

Let’s give a little pushback and look at four considerations. (This article will conclude in part 2.)

By many accounts, Blade Runner 2049 was brilliant–and yet bristled with images of undressed persons.

1. Criticism of fantasy porn from inside the church

If you asked a fish to describe what it’s like being wet, what would happen? Provided that you could actually speak fish, the answer might be unhelpful. After all, everything about a fish’s life involves water. The inability to detach itself from an aquatic existence would severely limit, if not eliminate, its ability to answer your question with any real accuracy or objectivity.

We need to acknowledge at least the possibility that we are in a similar situation.

After all, ethnocentrism (using the customs of one’s own culture as the standard by which to evaluate all others) and chronological snobbery (asserting that beliefs held by previous peoples are inferior simply because they are older) are temptations for most any given person in any given culture and time period. That our culture is now more lenient toward explicit sexuality only proves that social and moral standards have changed, not necessarily that they have gotten better (or, for that matter, worse).

Westworld season 2 is currently airing. Like many other “prestige drama” shows, the series features human nudity.

It would be wise for us to ask if we have progressed or regressed as a culture: why exactly is it now considered normal, and possibly even defensible, for there to be graphic nudity and simulated sex scenes in our entertainment?

Are we considering other cultures and time periods in evaluating answers to questions like that?

And for Christians, what does the wisdom of ages past have to say about where we are now?

When it comes to entertainment, we have no church fathers commenting on film and television, for these mediums are fairly new. What we do have, however, is thousands of years of commentary on the theatrical arts, and much of that commentary can apply, at least in principle, to the visual arts of our day. If the concerns of men like Tertullian, Lactantius, Richard Baxter, Pascal, and William Wilberforce seem legalistic and archaic, we need to ask ourselves why these giants of the faith were horrified by certain types of entertainment that we find permissible.²

Is it not at least possible that we, as ambassadors from another kingdom, have grown so comfortable with this culture’s norms that we have lost sight of the standards from the eternal and heavenly culture we are called to represent? I would argue that, to a certain degree, we have. To quote author Joe Rigney:

Cultural engagement (and enjoyment) can easily become a cover-up for indulging sinful desires, an excuse to watch trashy movies. We must never forget that worldliness is easy, that plundering the Egyptians is hard, and that many an Israelite has convinced himself that he is absconding with the world’s wealth when he’s merely in the process of going native.³

2. Criticism of fantasy porn from outside the church

Porn is losing much of its original stigma.

In fact, terms like “food porn,” “word porn,” “car porn,” and even “wedding porn” show just how normalized—and even standard-setting—porn consumption has become. It is safe to say that ours is a porn-ified culture. And within this environment, some people, deeply entrenched within our culture, are raising red flags—or, at the very least, pointing out some inconvenient truths.

Consider the responses to various sexual acts portrayed in HBO’s Game of Thrones. Each time the show pushes the envelope a little more, there’s a backlash of some sort, with cultural commentators asking some form of the question, “Has the show gone too far?”

What I have found interesting—or, more like disturbing—is that most of the genuine and intelligent critiques of Game of Thrones have come, not from Christian sources (those ostensibly “in the world but not of it”), but from within the culture itself (those ostensibly just “of the world”).

Sure, conservatives and Christians have criticized the show, but often with a poorly constructed, knee-jerk reaction that unconvincingly communicates any real depth of thought.

Meanwhile, in articles I read and conversations I participate in, I see and hear Christians excusing and defending Game of Thrones’ sexual content.

Expanding our focus, observers outside religious circles freely admit the gratuitousness of much of the sex and nudity utilized in popular culture today—groups like Beauty Redefined, Collective Shout, and Feminist Current. They have brought pointed, thoughtful, and specific critiques of the sexualization and objectification on display all around us.

In the realm of film and television specifically, here is what Richard Brody, movie-listings editor for The New Yorker, has to say:

I think that very few sex scenes…are ever of use in movies. Most sex scenes simply check boxes for viewers, providing visual confirmation that a relationship has been consummated; the pneumatic heaving and thrusting has no additional dramatic or emotional significance.⁴

None of the above critiques are coming from those with a strict, let alone a Christian, sexual ethic. Still, they are pointing out what is obvious to them.

So why is this not as obvious to followers of Christ? When Scripture tells us not to be like those in the world, I don’t think the implication is that our standards should be lower than those who profess no love for God’s truth. Should we, as those who have been rescued out of darkness to “walk as children of light” (Ephesians 5:8) and to no longer “live according to the flesh” (Romans 8:4), exhibit standards of moral decency that are more lenient than those who are still conformed to the “elemental spirits of the world” (Colossians 2:8)?

Of course, to ask the question is to answer it. Light should not succumb to darkness—especially in ways that the darkness itself would criticize.

Next week, we’ll look at two other possible answers to the excuse that “explicit sexual content in media doesn’t bother me.”

This article will look at how “dark matter” is a concept used to explain what would otherwise require massive amounts of coincidence to explain, colossally improbable amounts of random movement of quantum particles all in the right direction on a continuing basis.

Scientists who are for the most part forced to accept the highly improbable, very low entropy distribution of matter after the Big Bang (which I covered in part 3), who cannot offer any verifiable explanation for the constants of particles in the Standard Model or the predominance of matter over antimatter in our universe (part 4), are not willing to accept that the current form of the universe in rotating galaxies and clusters of galaxies constitute random events. No, these observed, er, anomalies, have a single rational explanation, according to theoretical physicists.

Enter dark matter.

Dark matter explains a problem observed in astronomy, first defined by the astronomer Fritz Zwicky in 1933. You see, if you start to calculate the mass of the visible stars in the galaxy–well, not “the” galaxy, any galaxy actually–it isn’t nearly enough. Even if you account for dust clouds and oodles of planets so small they can’t be seen in fields of stars, the amount of matter observed in the universe is not enough. Not enough to maintain the gravitational relationships within clusters of stars (which is what Zwicky observed), not enough to keep stars rotating around the center of the galaxy as quickly as they are observed to be rotating out in the far ends of galactic arms, and not enough to maintain galaxies in clusters (all galaxies should therefore be free-ranging loners, but instead are in groups).

So, since more matter is needed to explain observed gravitational effects, and more of the matter we actually know about would block light and also have other measurable effects on electromagnetic radiation (which includes light and other things like radio waves), therefore this extra matter cannot be any kind of matter that’s actually ever been observed (according to general scientific consensus). It has to be a special kind of matter that does not react with any of the known forces except gravity (leaving it totally immune electromagnetism and probably to to the strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force as well). It really probably should have been called “invisible” matter, because that’s what it is proposed to be–if something does not react to light, you cannot possibly see it.  But instead, it’s called “dark” matter, perhaps because it cannot give off light.

Note that dark matter is usually assumed to be some kind of undiscovered particle. Certain particles known as neutrinos barely interact with anything and are likewise invisible. They pass right through you and I and everything else without us ever knowing about them or seeing them, slipping through the rather large amount of empty space contained in every atom. But these particles are known to exist from the Standard Model of particle physics, have a role in atomic reactions that have been verified, and actually have been detected by special experiments that make use of the fact that once in a very great while a neutrino hits the nucleus of an atom directly and causes a reaction.

But there aren’t even any genuine hypothetical ideas about what dark matter could be. The Standard Model does not allow for it. It has never been observed, not in the LHC or other particle physics accelerators. And yet, not only is there are lot of it around, there’s supposedly five times as much of it as there is of regular matter. That’s right, 80% of the matter of the universe is invisible stuff nobody knows anything about. Supposedly.

It’s probably evident already that I find the common acceptance of dark matter among cosmologists, astronomers, and theoretical physicists galling. Really? Scientists, who are all about facts and observation,  believe in stuff that cannot be observed or factually verified? For which there isn’t even a likely hypothesis? Really?

Though it is true that sometimes intense gravitation causes a lensing effect that makes images of distant stars or galaxies double or otherwise distort. This so-called “gravitational lensing” is cited as providing direct evidence of dark matter, because regular matter is calculated to be insufficient to explain the real distortions observed. There are also variations in the background temperature of the universe (a.k.a. the CMB or Cosmic Background Radiation) that also are thought to show evidence of dark matter.

I must admit to skepticism–if five times as much matter is dark matter than regular matter, shouldn’t gravitational lensing affect far more distant objects than are actually affected by it? (I mean, shouldn’t gravitational lensing be virtually everywhere in the night sky? Shouldn’t most objects outside our galaxy be distorted or doubled by lensing, instead of just a few?) And shouldn’t there be dark matter black holes? And shouldn’t movement of dark matter in general be towards the centers of galaxies instead of remaining out on the edges, where it has to remain to make the arms of galaxies rotate at the speed they are believed to rotate at? I mean, dark matter should go to galactic centers because gravity pulls things into any gravitational center and dark matter must be affected by gravity to create the forces it that are attributed to it. And if this dark matter is supposedly everywhere, then why doesn’t it cause a spacecraft, say a NASA probe, to ever veer off course? Which hasn’t been documented to happen, not even once–begging the question of how could dark matter could possibly be so evenly distributed, if it is in fact affected by gravity? And aren’t variations in temperature of the universe (the CMB) possibly explicable as previously unknown and unimagined physics at work, instead offering of “evidence” of dark matter? (Note that dark matter requires previously unknown physics–so why couldn’t it be that other unknown physics could affect the CMB?)

There are at least some explanations offered for the questions I raised above (which I won’t cover here), but I don’t find the answers offered wholly satisfactory, since they require dark matter to have a number of special properties which have never actually been observed in nature and which go beyond dark matter merely being invisible. I find the hypothetical ideas behind dark matter to evoke a lot of unobserved principles that really should have been observed if dark matter is everywhere.

Maybe my skepticism is simply a result of not knowing enough physics, but I don’t think so. Some professional physicists have doubted dark matter as well, though not necessarily with my same questions, proposing that perhaps gravity at great distances simply functions differently than the current laws of gravity say it does. One formulation of this idea is called Modified Newtonian Dynamics or MOND (concerning which if you read through the Wikipedia article I attached, you might get the impression that recent measurements of gravitational waves mostly rule out MOND as impossible, but if you read more than just the title of the original highly technical article, you’ll see that isn’t true at all).

I started these posts saying the reasoning they contain would be based on commonly-accepted modern science, which is not the category most people would put Young Earth Creationism in. So I haven’t talked about Creationism at all at up to this point and may not again, but on this topic, a young universe also happens to completely solve these problems (though it causes others, like the “apparent age” problem). Why do galactic arms rotate the way they do? For the Young Earth Creationist, they’ve barely rotated at all and their speeds require no explanation for a period of 6,000 years or so. Why do the galaxies we see seem to be in clusters? Well, first of all the light had to somehow be provided by God for us to know they are there, because there isn’t enough time for it to have traveled naturally–but if you accept that, then the answer to the galactic clusters question is simple. There hasn’t been enough time for them to fly apart.

Though there is another possible explanation that I alluded to in my first paragraph above. If, as far as human-created science currently understands things, quantum mechanics allows for individual particles to assume random motions, if in the very unlikely event that all the particles in all the stars assumed the pattern of rotation we observe and also moved all the galaxies  just right to form clusters, then we could have a randomly forming universe in the clusters and motions we observe without any other principle causing it to come about. (Mind you, this is super improbable, worse than the odds of throwing a thread at a needle from 30,000 feet and actually putting it through the eye. But random quantum fluctuations alone do in fact make it possible.)

Evoking a crazy unseen principle (like dark matter) simply because it eliminates massive improbabilities is something atheist scientists usually avoid–especially if the “crazy unseen principle” invoked is God. But these same people, some of them at least, accept dark matter without any serious doubts or objections. Because without dark matter, the improbabilities of the universe forming itself are too staggering to make any sense.

I would say though that these scientists should give the unseen principle of “God” more serious consideration than they actually do. With dark matter, they are putting  their confidence in another unseen principle, one I think is less feasible than a concept of a creator God. To explain why I say that, let me return to the analogy I established in previous posts of a car moving either up or downhill.

Let’s imagine that on one side we have the mountain of an early expansion of the universe that produced radically improbable very low entropy right after the Big Bang, a time when the “car-universe” more rationally could “climb” better if it had a “motor” (something driving it, such as God) than if it didn’t. Then, as if there were a rough chasm downhill and a rocky climb back up another mountain, this second rise being that of galaxies formed in the clusters we observe and spinning as we observe them to do (i.e. showing signs of greater mass), our observers decide there is no way the car(universe) could have made it up that second climb on its own, since they are sure it’s simply running downhill on its own inertia. It had to have taken a bridge from the first hill to the second (i.e. there must be something that explains the highly improbable arrangement of the “second mountain,” something that makes the transition from the first mountain to the second “natural”).

A bridge, not quite invisible…

But there is no bridge in sight. You might question the observers about this, but they say, “Don’t worry, the bridge is invisible.”

You go to where the end of the bridge is and try to touch it. “Oh, you can’t touch the bridge either.”

“Has anybody ever seen an invisible and untouchable bridge before? What’s it made of?”

“We have no idea. But it has to be there. See where it touches the mountains?” You can in fact see a pair of indentations, one on each side of the chasm, that might have the shape of the ends of a bridge, but you aren’t at all sure what’s causing them.

“So the car climbed the first mountain on its own? Just by the wheels rolling?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then crossed down the invisible bridge, the one we can’t touch or directly observe, onto the second mountain?”

“Yes, we’re sure.”

“Maybe the car just had a motor it used to find roads to climb both mountains?”

“Oh, that’s crazy talk!”

I hope my illustration makes it clear that those who accept dark matter as real without hesitation but who dismiss the idea of God are actually contradicting themselves. I would say that suggesting that something may be driving the development of the universe, guiding its final form, is actually no more “crazy” than imagining dark matter to be real, because both ideas make use of something that cannot be seen or directly observed (as of now). That’s true even though dark matter has been defined by various observations of gravitational lensing and mathematical modeling. If dark matter is supposed to be where we are, passing through us right now (and it is imagined to be like that), we should be able to directly measure it. If we can’t (and we can’t), we should at least remain skeptical.

God, of course, cannot be directly measured either. But like a car which drove by us with its front closed, which is no longer available for us to observe, we can make deductions about whether it had a motor or not based on its behavior (did it climb hills on its own?), even if we can’t get our hands on it. We can likewise deduce that seeing actions of God in the creation of the universe cause it to make more sense than it would without God (and God explains a lot more than just galactic clusters and their rotation).

And I would also say that those things we know we have access to, but we in fact cannot detect, deserve more skepticism than things we do not have access to.  God will not walk into the lab for us to poke and prod him–but dumb, invisible particles that are supposedly everywhere, including right here and now, and which are subject to our instruments, cannot refuse our investigation. If we cannot find them, not even with methods similar to the ones used to find neutrinos and the Higgs boson, we ought to seriously consider that perhaps they aren’t there. Perhaps the effects scientists think they cause are in fact caused by something else.

It may be that dark matter is actually discovered some day. Perhaps someday soon. But as of now, it has not in any way been directly observed, so I remain skeptical about it.

In the analogy I created, dark matter functions something rather like an invisible bridge–a piece of roadway connecting highly unlikely states, making the second “run downhill” from the first. Even though it would have to be made of things that have never been seen or observed and causes nearly as many problems as it solves, it’s an explanation of past events that insists that what happened with the (car)universe is well accounted for “naturally.”

But the universe isn’t well accounted for “naturally.” I think there’s a simpler and more reasonable explanation.

But what are your thoughts on this topic? Please share them below.

I once read an article claiming that steampunk is an aesthetic rather than a proper fiction genre.

For a long time, I argued with this assertion, believing steampunk was more than just window dressing. But the more I delved into the genre, I found that in many ways, the claim was right. That aesthetic was something I wanted to see done in a specific way for a story, which is what led me to writing For Steam and Country.

Since the genre has fallen a bit out of the main public eye the last few years, here’s a little primer of what steampunk is and where I envisioned the genre going.

A brief history of steampunk

Steampunk is a catch-all term for Victorian-flavored fiction. Whether it’s set in 1800s England proper, or just using the way of dress and cultural flavors, steampunk is flavored much like one would see at a Dickens Faire, with ladies wearing corset and flowing dresses, men in dapper suits and top hats.

The “punk” often comes from leather and brass accessories added onto these looks, with goggles, monocles, holsters for strange contraptions. This all is often paired with alternative technologies developed from steam power, or imagined from various Tesla or Edison experiments. Most depictions of steampunk have some form of airship or dirigible in it.

The genre in fiction really began with Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, with Captain Nemo and his odd steam-powered submarine spurring the imagination of many. The next book to really capture steampunk flavor was much later, with The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, which very much brought about the modern aesthetic we think of a steampunk with its alternate history really giving birth to imaginative alternate technologies.

The steampunk aesthetic in modern fiction

In the early 2010s, steampunk exploded in the cosplay scene, with people holding entire “punk” Victorian balls at large conventions such as Dragon*Con. The costuming gave birth to Girl Genius, a web comic which received a lot of success. Fiction soon followed with popular series.

However, there wasn’t a clear style developing in the genre to match the aesthetic. Most of the books at the time fell into one of two categories: horror or romance. The first is best exemplified by Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, which brought zombie fiction into a steampunk aesthetic. The latter was apparent in Gail Carriger’s Soulless or Cassandra Claire’s The Clockwork Princess. While both had fantastical elements to them, they at their core were romance novels.

But steampunk fell as an aesthetic into different genres. These were the settings used to tell tales that were clearly horror or paranormal romance. There wasn’t anything to define steampunk as a story itself.

I also wanted something a little different from the genre conventions. Thinking about Verne and the exciting costumes I was seeing around at different conventions, I was hoping more for swashbuckling fantasy adventures. I wanted exploration, airship battles, a use of the steampunk technology in a fantasy setting. The only place I’d seen steampunk used in this manner was in anime, with Studio Ghibli films such as Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle, or in the series Last Exile.

The birth of Zaira Von Monocle

Seeing nothing like that in the book market, I wanted to create that adventuring feel.

For Steam and Country was ultimately born out of a desire to see a different type of steampunk on the market, to present the adventure first and foremost. I wanted to capture the feel of what I’d seen in the costuming, as well as the feel of old video games like Final Fantasy VI, which also utilizes the steampunk flavor in a lot of its elements.

I crafted a coming of age story within a fantasy world with late 1800s technology. A kingdom that has a fleet of airships, where steam-engine powered horseless carriages are just starting to pop up. The airship is central to the story, the travel and the wide-eyed feel of exploring the world for the first time. I think those are the hallmarks of great fantasy and perhaps I just applied an aesthetic to a coming of age story and a hero’s journey, but For Steam and Country is what I always wanted the genre of steampunk to be.

The movie Black Panther, just released for home viewing, has broken all kinds of records. It’s passed the billion-dollar mark worldwide.

For myself, I enjoyed the movie twice in theaters. Perhaps it has something to do with the eye candy in this movie.¹

Yet, Black Panther also problematically showcases the pagan practices and rituals. These practices go against my beliefs as a Christian.

For instance, there is ancestor worship, necromancy, and occultic–dare we say “witchcraft”–ceremonies in the movie. After all, if you’re going to do a movie about a fictional country name Wakanda in Africa, these things should and must be portrayed.

I saw a YouTube video not too long ago about why Black Panther was not:

1. A black movie
2. Not for black people
3. Not for Christians

Ouch, right? I kinda knew that going in, but to have such things blatantly stated, I kinda shook my head.

Part of me wanted to say, “Can I just watch a movie without having to have this stuff in my mind? I just want to see Michael B. Jordan fight Chadwick Boseman with his shirt off!”²

Joking aside, should I really be thinking about my faith and my beliefs when it comes to movies I enjoy that are completely against it?

Does my enjoyment of the movie make me a supporter of those things?

This is such a hard question to answer because I don’t think it’s a “yes” or “no” answer.

Or maybe it is. I don’t see my enjoyment of a movie that have these elements in it, and believe me, there’s a lot of them, as my supporting it.

To take it a step further, in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ultron, the sentient global defense-system-turned robot villain sings:

I once had strings, but now I’m free … There are no strings on me!

And later, Ultron, sitting in a Sokovian church, says:

This church was built in the middle of the city, so everyone could be equally close to God. I like that, the symmetry, the geometry of belief.

So now we have a singing, philosophical robot villain who used quasi-scripture-like ramblings to suggest helping mankind is to simply destroy them. (Not unlike Hollywood’s Noah who thought saving the animals was more important than people.)

My good friend Marcia Montenegro, from Christian Answers from the New Age³ wrote an extensive article on the movie Avatar, showing its occult bends, worship of a nature goddess, and other pagan elements. Marcia pointed out how so many Christian enjoyed a movie with pagan elements in it.

How many of the Speculative Faith community and contributors enjoy Harry Potter?

Oh my gosh, there’s all kinds of uproar among the saints with that. There those who say they’re good books or movies. Other say, “You’re letting Satan take control of your mind when you make light of these things!”

What about some of us who enjoy darker tales?

I always pick on Jess Hanna, author of Road to Hell, and the short story, “If It Causes You to Sin” performed by Untold Podcast. I found a fellow lover of horror when I met him. Once he wrote an article in which a commentator harshly criticized him for even postulating the idea of Christian horror, much less saying it was okay.

To take it a step further, in February, Mike Duran an article about Christians and horror at The Gospel Coalition. The comments! Let’s just say I hurried to give him support to show that not everyone thinks he’s a lunatic.

I’ve used a variety of examples to show divided the saints are about belief and entertainment. Does the entertainment we enjoy show our hearts? If we enjoy good clean wholesome movies, does it mean our hearts and good and clean?

I grew up watching Aliens, Predator, and other monster movies. Does it mean I’m looking forward to the day where we land on a planet, eagerly searching for the Alien queen to lay eggs and give birth to facehuggers who come to Earth to eradicate mankind? (By the way, that’s a no!)

This does not mean we can just ignore what movies we watch. Not at all. You do have to guard your mind. Going back to Philippians 4:8, thinking on these sorts of things help to guard our minds. We certainly won’t lose anything if we only watch movies which only align with our beliefs (although they may be incredibly cheesy, boring, and snore material). And we all know some movies and shows take the disregard of our faith too far.  Shows like Preacher, some episodes of Rick and Morty, Family Guy, Lucifer, and I’m sure dozens more, can be downright blasphemous.

And then again, some of us watch the shows and say, “What’s the big deal? I like the show. I don’t believe in their philosophy!”

Which is why I think this ultimately comes down to a matter of the individual and personal preference.

I don’t think enjoying a movie against our beliefs will makes us abandon the faith.

Circling back to Black Panther, some positive elements I enjoyed was the world building of the Afrofuturistic country.

I loved the portrayal of blacks as kings and queens instead of gangsters and baby mama drama. I walked out the theater with a renewed sense of recognition that I come from the line of earthly kings and queens. However, of more importance is that I am the child, the princess of the Highest King, Jesus Christ, my Lord, my Savior, and my Redeemer!

I loved T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman). But although his power can be taken away by drinking a heart-shaped flower, my Lord’s power remains forever!

I loved seeing dark-skinned actors as opposed to light-skinned actors, Michael B. Jordan as a black and brilliant complicated villain, and the film’s portrayal of tribal-based technology.

To end my thoughts, I’d simply say, “Hey, if a movie disturbs you so much that you can’t sit through it, then I would suggest leaving. If you can divorce the movie from your beliefs, then go for it.”

Perhaps I’m wrong. What do you think? What do you do when you see a movie you enjoy that goes against your beliefs?

The Pure Flix movie Samson comes out on DVD this week. I haven’t seen it yet but the trailers certainly caught my attention. If I didn’t know anything about the story from the book of Judges, I would say it looks like another Conan the Barbarian remake. I can’t speak about its acting or storyline but the production values look quite well done.

Especially for a Christian movie.

Image copyright Pure Flix Entertainment

Gasp! Yes, I said it. Despite continuing progress in delivering higher quality entertainment, the stigma remains. The instinctive reaction from Christians and the secular world alike is that Christian entertainment is inferior to the mainstream stuff. That’s usually because it is, at least from an artistic viewpoint. The reasons for this are myriad, not the least being more money being thrown towards secular studios and publishers, the fact that there are simply more secular than Christian entertainment creators, the sometimes-real, sometimes-perceived apathy of the church towards Christian art and entertainment, moral and spiritual boundaries that Christians are hesitant to cross, etc.

We could talk about what makes good art, whether Christian or secular, all day. We could also talk endlessly about what makes art “Christian.” Does it have to point to the Gospel somehow? Is art made by a Christian automatically “Christian art”? Is historically Christian art actually “Christian” considering its abundant errors, heresies, and the artists’ moral failings?

These topics are better left for other conversations. Here is what I want to consider: every Christian entertainment creator I know, myself included, would love to put out books with more expensive cover art, or produce movies with blockbuster-quality action scenes, or record music with higher production values. But does better artistic quality mean better Christian entertainment?

Since this article will reach more of the reading and writing crowd, let’s use books as our rubric. What writer hasn’t looked with envy at a beautiful cover image on someone else’s book? I’m not just talking about Christians envying secular books. There is a wide variety of cover quality within the Christian literary world as well. Everyone would agree that a better cover is one ingredient of a better book. A writer (and reader) will take greater pride in the finished product with that vibrant, glossy cover grabbing everyone’s attention. From a sales and marketing standpoint, this is certainly a wise move to make. The book itself, the content inside the cover, is not affected, and that’s what truly matters, but it would be dishonest to say that a reader’s enjoyment of a book, and the author’s pride, is in no way affected by the attractiveness of the cover.

Does this make it a better product from a Christian perspective? It will most likely reach more readers with a flashy cover. It will make people pay more respect to the book, the author, and perhaps to Christian publishing as a whole. It may get attention from secular sources that otherwise wouldn’t look twice at a Christian book. So naturally, a bigger budget and a better produced product means better Christian entertainment, right?

In many cases, yes. But not automatically. The key difference in Christian and secular art is the reason why it is being created. A secular artist wants to make a statement, or achieve fame, or impress people. A Christian artist should create primarily for God’s glory. How that is manifested is different for each person, but every Christian artist, if they are being honest with themselves, knows why they wrote this book or directed that film. If it was for secular reasons, then it doesn’t matter how flashy or well-produced or well-received their product is. God’s glory must be the primary, not secondary or incidental, motivation behind its creation.

This doesn’t mean that Christians shouldn’t strive for success or should be ashamed of spending lots of money on their creations. However, Psalms 127:1 tells us that unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain. More money, more fans, more likes – these are the world’s measurements of success, not God’s.

Frayed began as flash fiction.¹ What is that, you ask? Flash fiction is an extremely brief story, typically of a thousand words or less. It is written for those who like to read, who often don’t have time to. The sort of story you could read in a single bathroom break. (Maybe it should be called flush fiction?)

Shortly after Amish Vampires in Space was released, the editor-in-chief of Splickety magazine, Ben Wolf, encouraged me to write a story for his speculative fiction magazine, Havok. He stipulated that the story had to be a thousand words or less.

The challenge intrigued me. I hadn’t written a short story in quite a while, but I was a little stumped with how to start. A thousand words wasn’t a lot of canvas to work with. It certainly didn’t lend itself to another Amish story. Every time I go into that universe a ton of characters come out, bringing wagonloads of words with them. I can’t go low tech and not use a lot of words. Strange, but true.

Kerry Nietz, author of Frayed, is this week’s featured novelist in Lorehaven Book Clubs. Stop by the flagship book club on Facebook to learn more about this story. You can also join our ongoing book club selection this month, reading through James L. Rubart’s novel The Man He Never Was.

So where would my flash fiction story come from?

The only thing that felt right was to craft something in the world of my first novel—A Star Curiously Singing (ASCS). Written in first-person-present tense, and centering around a single character, those books tended to be smaller. Plus, since much of that trilogy was set in space, there was still a good deal of its future Earth left unexplored. There had to be a million short stories there.

I didn’t want to use the characters from that series of books, though. The story of Sandfly, HardCandy and DarkTrench felt complete in my mind. Well enough, and best left alone.

So who should the story be about?

The debuggers of the DarkTrench Saga are, to me, the most interesting part. Techno-slaves fully connected to their information stream and to each other through an implant in their head. They’re introspective, sarcastic, and able to fix nearly anything. Fantastic and fun.

I needed another debugger. Someone equally intriguing, and with an equally cool name.

I read through the first chapter of ASCS and discovered this young, troubled debugger named ThreadBare. Perfect! Then I got to thinking about what Thread did when he wasn’t out in a storm with the rest of the debuggers. I saw this dim, smelly garage on the edge of a dusty battlefield. Then I realized Thread worked on battlefield equipment (heavies) and wished for a better life. I had the makings of a story. I started to write.

Twelve hundred words later I was done. I figured it was close enough to a thousand. Shouldn’t matter in a magazine, right? They can squish it all in somehow. Use a smaller font.

Nope. The editor of Havok, Avily Jerome, told me the story had to be under a thousand words or they couldn’t use it. Being the sensitive writer that I am, I threw my hands up in disgust, and went back to work on another Amish book. Who needs that sort of pressure! All my words are important!

Months went by.

Finally, I finished the second Amish story (Amish Zombies from Space…because, why not?) and had a chance to look at ThreadBare again. I started trimming—a couple descriptive words, a backstory sentence there—and slowly marched my way to 1012 words. And the story still made sense!

Wasn’t quite short enough yet. Argh.

I went over it again and again. I’d already cut nearly two hundred words. Everything that remained seemed essential to the story. Then I found a sentence that referenced HardCandy and Sandfly. I liked that sentence because it showed that Thread wasn’t alone. That there were other debuggers in his world with him. But for the purpose of the Havok story, it didn’t add much. I selected it in my word processor to get a word count. It amounted to 14 words.

Cut!

I sent my flash-sized story off to Avily and it was published in Havok a few months later.

I couldn’t leave ThreadBare like that, though. All alone on the edge of Delusion? I had to know what happened to him. What was his life really like? He started in a garage and went…where?

A few years back, I read a book entitled I Was Saddam’s Son. It is the memoire of Latif Yahia, an Iraqi soldier who became the body double for Saddam Hussain’s son Uday. It gives a unique glimpse into that brutal and dictatorial regime. It is fascinating reading, but also unsettling—like the story of any tyrant. It stuck with me, and in many ways its portrayal of Uday inspired the prince in Thread’s story. (Uday would eat Aadam for lunch, however.)

ThreadBare was also inspired by a fan question. A person once asked me if I ever intended to tell the story of the “remnant” that survived on Earth following ASCS. Many significant events had to happen, and while later books touched on some of those, there was still plenty of details to fill in.

Frayed is my attempt to start doing that. I hope you find it enjoyable.

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Often this time of year, writers are gearing up to attend one of the various conferences—or perhaps they’ve just recently come home from one. Others may be thinking, why attend a conference? After all, there are writer instruction classes and webinars online which are considerably cheaper than conferences (see for example, Udemey classes and Writers Digest tutorials or webinars).

Certainly online classes, workshops, tutorials, webinars by industry professionals and even writing retreats are helpful, even necessary, in this era of less editing and more self-publishing. However, there are benefits to conferences and the savvy writer will take advantage of what’s offered.

Some of the Christian writers’ conferences you might consider include Mount Hermon, SoCal, Realm Makers, Maranatha, Florida, Northwestern, Blue Ridge, Colorado, and Oregon, ACFW. But what makes the expense of traveling to a conference, paying for tuition and room and board, spending two or more days away from family and the regular routine of life, worth it?

Instruction. Despite what I said earlier about online learning opportunities, I don’t want to minimize the instruction aspect of a conference. The truth is, too often we don’t know what we don’t know. How do you take an online class to learn how to deepen your characters’ point of view if you don’t know you need to do so? Conferences often introduce writers to topics they’ve not thought about before.

Sometimes these instructional topics come packaged in an ongoing workshop. For instance, in my first conference at Mount Hermon, I sat in an extended class on fiction co-taught by Randy Ingermanson and Brandilyn Collins. These wonderful instructors covered any number of topics, including ones I hadn’t realized I was weak in.

Networking with other writers. SpecFaith webmaster guru, E. Stephen Bernett reminds me from time to time that we met at an ACFW conference years ago. Little did I realize at the time that we would be working together in this online venue.

At conferences I’ve met writers who critiqued my work, who became subjects of an article I’ve written, who write guest articles here at Spec Faith, whose books the CSFF Blog Tour has featured, who are currently judging for the Clive Staples Award, who endorsed my writing ebook. In other words, writers help writers, and often those contacts begin at writers’ conferences.

Opportunity to pitch to editors and agents. Critique sessions, online classes, and webinars can put writers in touch with a limited number of editors and agents. Writers conferences make it possible to meet face to face with a greater number of industry professionals. These are the people who know about this volatile and ever-changing business from the inside. They are the ones receiving hundreds of manuscripts each week and seeing the caliber of writing. They have insight into what books are selling well and who is buying what.

What an opportunity, then, for writers to pick the brains of these professionals at a conference, starting with a presentation—a pitch—of their own work. How else can writers find out if they have an idea that captures the interest of those who are experienced?

Inspiration and motivation. Often hearing about the writing journey of those who have gone on before is an incredible encouragement. Further, believers can share the ways in which God uses struggles and successes to form us into the image of His Son. These stories might come from writers we meet during informal gatherings or from the keynote speaker.

I’ll never forget the year Ted Dekker spoke at Mount Hermon and shared how he had reached financial bottom when God opened the door to his writing. His story was moving (he himself was choked up as he told it) and inspiring. It was a reminder that God’s timing is not our timing, that He has plans we most likely don’t see in advance, and that we can trust Him with our writing.

Get away. Some times the best thing about a conference is the chance to get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday and focus on writing. Many conferences offer places where the writer can be alone and think or journal or (shockingly! 😉 ) write. Conference venues can prompt ideas for story settings or even plot lines. And there’s a wealth of people from which to draw ideas for characters.

Fun. I can’t remember laughing harder than I did at the general sessions at Mount Hermon the year Liz Curtis Higgs was the keynote speaker. But apart from the humor speakers bring, conferences can be fun when writers prank each other as Randy Ingermanson did Steve Laube (ask either of them about it some time) or as writers hang together in the evenings over coffee. Of course there are also meals and banquets (sometimes including costumes) and award presentations and focus groups—all fun activities.

Prayer support. For the believer, conferences offer opportunities to pray for and receive prayer from other writers. And not just for writers, but for the editors and agents who often are on the front lines trying to get the best stories in print. Some from indie houses may be operating on a small budget. Some may have a small number of support staff. Others may face the task of breaking down resistance from those in house who are so concerned with the bottom line they aren’t eager to try something new. Whatever the case, we can pray for those we connect with at conferences.

So what do you think? Are conferences for you?

If so, you might take the plunge and register at a conference near you today.

This article is a revised reprint of one that appeared her in May, 2014.