Britain may be peppered with beautiful churches and Christianity retains its status as the state religion, but in my business, TV drama and publishing, there is a definite queasiness around the faith on which much of our national culture is built.
It’s not the kind of overt hostility with which other faiths are met. It’s more of a suspicion: a not wholly unjustified sense that the church is so tainted with the sins and oppressions of the past that there’s no excuse for a rational mind to have freely taken a regressive turn.
In 30 years working as a writer I’ve met only two openly practising Christians, both Catholics: a senior fiction editor (who wore her faith lightly) and my good friend Jimmy “Two Guns” McIntyre, a former gangland lawyer turned TV screenwriter.
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You can be into Buddhism or shamanism and not turn a hair, but an actual church-going believer? At best you might be silently dismissed as odd, having chosen the wrong therapeutic crutch, or worse, be taken for a narrow-minded bigot.
I’ve always been chasing the next commission, so stayed silent.
I was forced out of the spiritual closet four years ago, when our youngest son, Will, died at 23, while studying Spanish in Bogotá. Like me, he had an instinctive faith, as well as a wild, irreverent side and a ceaseless curiosity about the mysteries of the universe. He often spent all night arguing friends out of their atheism.
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Will was a fearless soul, reckless even; one of those who was never quite fully here – we’ve all known a few. His one good fortune was to leave this world never having been compromised by it, which left me with a challenge: to be as brave and as honest as he was.
His faith had sustained him through harrowing bouts of illness spanning a decade. How could I not share it?
I didn’t hide my faith from everyone, of course. I’m the warden of a small country church and regularly lead Bible study. Having spent decades exploring strange philosophies, I found studying Christianity to be the most mind expanding, challenging and, yes, comforting experience of my life. But I realised I rarely shared it outside a small circle of trusted friends, hesitating even around some family members.
I began at Will’s funeral, explaining Christ’s bold statement in John to a congregation largely of agnostics and unbelievers: “In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” It’s my constant reminder that in this inevitably harsh theatre of experience we call life, suffering is part of the deal – it is possible to be battered but not broken by it. A simple truth that has sustained me through the darkest of times.
I copied Will’s tattoos – a Christian fish and his favourite Bible verse, Romans 5:8 – and had them inked on to my forearms, where they tend to invite questions, especially in the intimate meetings we writers have with drama commissioners, which always start with a good 10 minutes of get-to-know-you.
To my surprise, these conversations have invariably been filled with warmth and curiosity. I sense I am more novelty than freak. For my part, it’s a chance to explain that there are Christians like me who treat their faith not as a set of rules, but as a bottomless source of insight and inspiration.
It also tells an utterly outrageous story: placing us in the midst of a supernatural cosmic drama. As a writer, I can’t get enough of it.
So I resolved to admit that I’m a Christian writer. I’m not an evangelist, but rather an explorer of the human condition navigating with a Christian compass – one I used in my latest novel, Totem, an eco-thriller that tells a love story across racial and cultural boundaries. There’s not a Bible quote in it.
I am, though, an evangelist for the idea that the creative industries desperately need God back. Cut out the metaphysical and stories are confined to superficial thrills, politics and hedonism with a smattering of sci-fi around the edges. So much TV and commercial fiction has become the dramatic equivalent of modern architecture: formulaic, uniform, occasionally impressive but seldom truly inspiring.
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Freed from materialist handcuffs, unafraid to plumb the depths of the human psyche, fiction can be world-changing. But we don’t often go there, for fear, perhaps, of what we might discover if art is allowed to do what it’s supposed to and gather the scattered fragments of our being into meaningful order. But what’s for sure is that, if the biggest questions remain taboo, art can’t exist at all.
Will my Christian confession mean I’ll be shunned by publishers and TV commissioners? Hopefully not. Categorised? Maybe. Liberated? Definitely.
