Writing Religion that’s Not Cheesy

I’m going to start out by being clear –this article is not going to be for everyone. I don’t mean that it’s going to offend anyone or anything like that (I hope) It’s simply not going to be useful information for everyone. Not all of us want to write religion into our books. But my hope is that it will be helpful for someone, or at least some encouragement. So this is how I do my best to write about religion by swapping being preachy and forced for something that is real, raw, and true. 

Before we get into anything though, I want to define what I mean when I say religion. This could mean different things for different things for different people, but for me when I say religion, I’m talking about Christianity. That’s what I’ll be referring to when I use that word in this article ;).

I didn’t always write religion the way I do now. When I started, there was no intention to my writing. I was raised Christian so I just wrote about how I lived –with strong morals, trying to be good people, etc. As I developed as a writer, I began to naturally incorporate themes such as selfless sacrifice and redemption. 

And to be honest, I believe that if I’d stuck with that for the rest of my writing journey, my stories still would’ve been pleasing to God. So if that’s how you write, keep going! 

For me and my writing though, I was called to write about religion in a more direct way. Since I was writing Urban Fantasy at the time of my transition, it was easy for me to seamlessly slip God in. If fit with the characters, the plot, and the themes I was tackling. And because of the gravity of what I was writing about, I could offer what I believed to be the real solution: Jesus. 

That’s why I switched to directly writing about God in my books –because He was the answer to the issues I was writing about. 

I had a character who loathed herself, and the best way I knew to show her that she was, in fact, worthy of love was to write about someone who really did sacrifice everything for her. And thus, my characters started praying. In the fourth chapter of Tiger Lily, to be specific. 

Tiger Lily is a blatantly Christian book. Sometimes I worry that it’s too Christian. I think about changing how it ends. I’ve looked back through to see if there was any other way to conclude the first book, and there really isn’t. I had to write about God. 

A lot of the time authors shy away from such clearly Christian writing because they’re afraid it will come off as preachy or cheesy or just plain silly. I tried to avoid all of that by finding the heart behind it. To me, it’s very clear when a book is trying to preach at you. The characters go off on long monologues about God and religion that feel stiff and formal, not like they’re being spoken by real people. Everyone has perfect morals and nothing bad happens to them. 

I wanted to change the heart. My goal with writing about God in fiction wasn’t to tell everyone about Him and convert them. I wanted Tiger Lily to feel like a hug. Like someone setting their hand on your shoulder and saying “I see you. And I’m not the only one.”

To me, my characters are not vessels to preach through. They’re representations of real people. Christians go through some really tough, messy stuff. We don’t have all the answers. God doesn’t always say yes. He doesn’t always rescue us in the ways we want him to. 

I tried to embody that in Jason. He’s not forcing this information, these ideas onto Lily. She’s asking for them. Before he says anything, he leads by his example. His life is his opening. And yes, there is still plenty of room for someone to read Tiger Lily and say that it’s preachy or too Christian. They’re probably not wrong. You can’t please everyone. I still have so much space to grow in writing about religion. I’m sure I’ll look back in a few years and cringe at how I wrote about God. But you have to start somewhere. 

That’s all fine and dandy for people who want to write about God blatantly, but what about those who don’t? 

If you’re one of those people, theme and character are two of your greatest assets. I have so much to say about theme, there’s a whole post on it you can definitely check out. But as a quick overview, theme gives books their magic. It empowers them to talk about things we could never talk about if it weren’t a fictitious book. Redemption is a huge one in Christian-themed books. Others that I’d encourage you to try out are mercy, forgiveness, and sacrificial love. 

Characters are tiny bits of our souls we’ve stuffed full of traits and trauma. They have the ability to connect with someone we never could. They don’t have to be perfect. Actually, it’s so much better if they aren’t. Because Jesus doesn’t come to us in our perfection. Otherwise we wouldn’t need him. He sits with us in our imperfection, our flaws, our shortcomings. 

Your characters may be broken. They may even be evil. Their morals may not be strictly Christian. But their lives can still display his love. Someone rushing into a fire to save a person trapped inside is an example of sacrificial love. Forgiving someone who lied to you, betrayed you, even just hurt your feelings. All examples of Christ. 

In the end, it comes down to the author. What are you comfortable with? What has God called you to write about? By the way, books with writing directly about God are not more valuable or more important than books with themes. Someone who put down a book because page thirty-six had a character praying might pick one up that is brimming over with themes of unconditional love and mercy. 

We are all called to different things. But in the end, we are writing to people. For people. About people, fictitious though they may be. Don’t lose sight of the heart of everything.