When you think of Christian fiction, you might conjure up feel-good stories like Jan Caron’s Midford series or the action-packed Apocalyptic best-selling Left Behind books. There is even a large subgenre of Amish mysteries.
As a major religion of the world, Christianity is not just limited to genre pieces. Christians are present in many mainstream books. This week I examine three recent books featuring religious themes.
1.
Gifty is a first-generation American, the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants. As a child at a Pentecostal service in Alabama, she is filled with the Holy Spirit and reborn.
Years later, she is working on a PhD in neuroscience at Stanford, looking at reward-seeking behavior in mice. She has lost her faith after her older brother died of an opioid overdose. Her mother has fallen into a debilitating depression and rarely eats.
Her passion for science has certain parallels to her strict faith.
“I wanted, above all else, to be good. And I wanted the path to that goodness to be clear. I suspect that this is why I excelled at math and science, where the rules are laid out step by step, where if you did something exactly the way it was supposed to be done, the result would be exactly as it was expected to be.”
Alas, both science and religion begin to fail her. She is overwhelmed by her losses and the difficulty of life. Eventually, though, she has a moment of transcendence:
“But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.”
This is an excellent work of fiction about how faith can prop people up even in the darkest times.
2.
It is September, 1974, and Addis Ababa is in chaos. Emperor Haile Selassie has been deposed. A doctor’s son, Yonas, is watching his younger brother get pulled into the fray. And his daughter, after a fall, is clinging to life.
Yonas’s wife, Sara, devastated by this latest loss, has returned to her Catholic faith. She takes a taxi to St. Gabriel’s Church, stopping to converse with beggars. “May you be blessed with a life unlike mine,” one says to her.
She walks inside and gets on her knees. There is broken glass on the floor. She kneels on it, wincing in pain. She had been doing this for weeks, as a barter with God:
“She would give of herself until he was forced to concede, if not out of compassion and justice, then out of a damning guilt born of having watched his own son die on a cross while pleading to a father who had forsaken him.”
This is a bleak scene in a bleak novel about Ethiopia. Around the city, images of the Lion of Judah appear on flags and statues. This might reference the second coming (Jesus is named the Lion of Judah in Revelation), but it seems like an ironic contrast to the life under its gaze. It’s so well-written that you can’t look away.
3.
Dan is an aspiring photographer from Texas who visits Madrid with his parents. He meets Ana, a local whose parents were killed by Franco. She lives with her two siblings in a ghetto and works at the hotel Dan is staying at.
Through their friendship and through Ana’s family, we get to know Spain under Franco. Many people are struggling to get by. Ana’s cousin works in a Catholic orphanage and has begun to suspect that something nefarious is going on.
Under Franco, Catholicism was mandated. Protestants and Jews are not allowed to worship openly. Their funerals must be private. Information is heavily controlled.
With this as a backdrop, we learn that couples are beginning to talk about strange birthing experiences. Several are told that their baby died. A few have twins but are told that only one survived.
As readers, we are learning a dark secret: under Franco’s direction, more than 300,000 babies were stolen to be raised in Catholic families. Many of the stolen babies were taken from Republican families, his opponents in the Civil War. Others were deemed undesirables, victims of Spanish eugenics.
I had never heard of this, but it is historically accurate. To indoctrinate countries into one religion is nothing new, but this particular application is bone-chilling. And why have we heard so little about it?
Books Smitten 