Consider this carefully: try to find any positive representation of Christians, um, anywhere in modern media. What do we find instead? And why do we find it?

Consider just three glowing examples of objectivity towards Christians:
• In the film “Easy A”, our hip protagonist argues “as any war will tell you, there are about a hundred ways to interpret [the Bible].” This comes after she is subjected to yet another round of almost caricaturely-bad judgemental youth group kids. By the way, the preacher informs her Hell is “right below China”, deep in the Earth.
• In the series “Weeds”, one of the characters goes toe-to-toe with a teacher wanting to teach Intelligent Design (in this case, Creationism), because every Christian obviously is after turning your kids’ classroom into a church.
• In one of my favorite shows, “The Office”, the only Christian I’ve seen is Angela, a cold-hearted, judgemental hypocrite.

What bothers me about all this should be obvious: I’m a Christian, I wear my faith on my sleeve, and I’m deeply troubled over the fact that we are never given a fair shake in fiction. The vast number of Christians I know don’t fit into these stereotypes, nor are we some sort of pseudo-troglodytic cavemen — there are doctors, scientists, writers (hello), philosophers, poets, singers, artists, and civic and business leaders everywhere in our ranks. I have found that at least half of us, by my estimation, were not Christians at birth, and many were even atheist at some point, as I was for a while.

I suppose part of the stereotyping is symptomatic of our larger culture, but what is perhaps most troubling about this seeming-deliberate effort to castigate any sense of balance in the observation of our faith and the people therein is this idea that Christians are hideous, backstabbing wretches is not only accepted by many of our secular kin as “simply accurate”, but that these same people, by what I am seeing of the almost cartoonish examples of Christianity in what they craft and create, are not interested in any possible consideration that they haven’t gotten us 100% figured out.

I would have never left atheism if I hadn’t the humility to acknowledge that I needed to keep an open mind, and needed to consider all possibilities. This is no Christian that has stopped examining the world around me, and my beliefs. I take faith in God, and what I’ve seen done in my lives and others that I simply can’t explain, and I do believe this is the one true faith. But I have free will, and I am always examining my beliefs.

An element of modern atheism (note, I’m not saying all of atheism or all atheists) has as one of its points of view that a sort of fundamentalist absolutism exists, i.e. “we simply have this point of view that is absolutely correct, and you are irrational to think or even consider otherwise”. Something is lost in the movement that I find absolutely essential to an ability to grow as a person: humility. No one would put a filter on a lens if they wished to capture the undisturbed image of a sweeping vista, but it is considered enlightened and in some cases brilliant to do this when examining religions as a whole; Christianity in particular. Perhaps the stereotypes are comfortable, or for some fit easily into a world-view of intellectual superiority, or allow the people that propagate it a measure of comfort and a feeling of control over themselves and their surroundings that they haven’t stumbled onto in any set of ideas before.

When Richard Dawkins argues that there really is no difference between different religions, or Bill Maher openly declares religion as the root of all war, they are fawned on and admired. (By the way, Bill, I personally challenge that claim — for example, are you really telling me that when King Henry VIII created the Church of England on the backs of dead Catholics, there were no other motivators at work? How do you explain Mao’s Great Leap Forward since there was not religion involved?) No thinking man would ever call all government systems identical, or all cultures completely alike, or even go so far as to say that critical analysis of differences are irrelevant when comparing something as mundane as cars, but for religions the cessation of analysis seems to be viewed as an act of great intellectual genius. I find this kind of absolutism particularly ironic in modern science. Isn’t the greatest ability of science to postulate an idea and then test said theory? If a scientist enters a study or experiment with pre-conceived notions and considers those notions “fact”, then aren’t they violating the scientific method.

Is it any wonder that our increasingly secular society produces as its pop-culture artifacts characters that are openly one-dimensional and represent the worst (or perhaps, only) elements of what they see when they look at this faith?

I don’t know how my fiction can ever make a dent in this trend, but one thing I strive to do is produce believable Christian characters. Not perfect or idealic Christian characters, because there are no perfect or idealic Christians, but characters that are living, breathing, multi-layered examples of the thinking and feeling individuals I know within the bounds of this faith. They make mistakes, but they try their best. Sometimes they slip into utter evil. Sometimes they almost glow. But they are realistic people. So I toss these characters like pebbles into the ocean that’s forming in this nation and the wider world, and I hope they make ripples, and that those that notice step back for at least one moment from what they consider fact, and consider instead the chance to be objective; that the absence of reason is found not in the act of embracing a faith, but shutting ourselves away from any opportunity to examine the journey we all make through life, and asking ourselves the really hard questions about what it all means.

Much love to my fellow Christians, and all the atheists, agnostics, and peoples of other faiths. We tear at each other too much. Seriously.

Stay tuned.