“Belief as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. All that is missing is the believer.”

–Paul Elie, “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith,” The New York Times, December 23, 2012.

Mr. Elie has written such books as Reinventing Bach and  The Life You Save May be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage . In its review of his writing on Bach, The Economist stated:”Mr Elie deploys considerable scholarship (the more notable since his previous book, about four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God, had nothing to do with music), and he writes beautifully.”

Mr. Elie says in his article:  “. . . if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O’Connor called ‘Christian convictions,’ their would-be successors are thin on the ground.”

So should this lack suggest despair?

“People of faith,” Elie states, “see decline and fall. Their detractors see a people threatening a rear-guard political action, or a people left behind.” Elie, however, seems excited by the new place Christian writers find themselves. “This development places the believer on a frontier again, at the beginning of a new adventure; . . . ”

We Christians, whether writers or not, can avoid acting as though our feelings are hurt because Christian culture no longer occupies the dominant position in our society. An old adage illustrates the times we live in: Some see crisis as danger; to others, it is an opportunity.