Will Shetterly, the genius author of Dogland and many other fine novels, has written a fantastic article for a Unitarian magazine, explaining how reading science fiction and fantasy can make you a better Christian, by providing a framework for understanding how to digest and comprehend parables and fables.
These implicitly spiritual stories, just as explicitly spiritual ones, can be divided into parables and fables. Mysteries and romances, like Jesus’ stories about servants, are meant to be plausible. Because the stories could be true, we can learn from Sherlock Holmes, Scarlet O’Hara, or the Good Samaritan. But fantasy and science fiction, like the stories about Jesus’ miracles or divine birth, are meant to be implausible. By asking us to consider something outside our experience, like traveling in time, becoming a monster, or turning water into wine, they ask us to throw off our preconceptions and see the world as if we had never seen it before. Because it’s impossible for a story to occur in our world, we know that it’s about something more than its details, and we can learn from Santa Claus, Superman, or the Son of God.
As they do for many adolescents and adults, fantasy and science fiction gave me fables that were spiritual and fables that explored the desire to be spiritual. I appreciated the personal and public difficulty of promoting a faith by reading about Paul Muad’Dib in Dune and Michael Valentine Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land. Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light made me think about the nature of pantheons. As an atheist who yearned for meaning, I saw my struggle in Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man, the story of a time traveler who goes back to meet Jesus. I found answers to questions that traditional religions are reluctant to pose: James Morrow examined the literal death of the conservative Christian God in Towing Jehovah and Jesus’ second coming as a woman in Only Begotten Daughter.
(Thanks, Tom!)
Update: Medievalist writes ” in mind that
Unitarian Universalism is a non-
creedal religion, and that most UUs are not Christians. Thus Shetterley is
writing from the perspective of a minority within both Unitarian Universalism
and Christianity.”