My Monster Rant about Christian Fiction, Part 1 (Research)

Boxing Day was decidedly a stay-in-bed-all-day kind of day for me this year. I’d picked up Come Back to Me by Jody Hedlund for a reread a couple days previously, so I finished that and then decided to borrow the sequel, Never Leave Me, from the library and sped through that whole thing in the same day. From the first time I’d read CBTM, I remembered having a few problems with it which stuck out to me again this time, but on top of that, there was a scene in NLM that was just The Last Straw. I couldn’t let it rest, so I took to Instagram and asked my followers if they cared about my thoughts, and 100% of you encouraged me to let off the steam… so here I am. I tried to write an Instagram caption but I was WAY over the 2200-character limit and not even close to done, so instead you get an essay. (It’s over 7000 words and split into three parts over three blog posts. Read at your own risk. There will be no chill. There is ranting. There is also philosophy and Church history.)

I’ll begin by saying that I did enjoy CBTM enough to read it a second time. The premise is fascinating, I love time travel stories, and those aspects were executed fairly well in the first book despite the underlying issues I have. Sadly, NLM let me down in that regard and I lost interest in knowing how the overarching storyline of the trilogy would wrap up, so I won’t spend the time on the last book. But I did want to start with that (somewhat) positive statement before getting into why the two books ultimately frustrated me so much.

I can sort my issues with the books into three general categories (and will be giving special focus to the scene in NLM that I mentioned, as a subset of one of them). Interestingly, I realised this series, Waters of Time, largely encompasses all the issues I have with a lot of historical fiction, Christian historical fiction, and Christian fiction in general. For ease of reference and because this series falls into the category, I’ll just refer to Christian historical fiction (CHF) throughout this post, but a number of my points could apply to several of those genres. Anyways, the first category is research, which involves the scene that triggered this whole monster. The second is portrayal of Catholicism, and the third and juiciest one is me, for the First Time Ever, sharing my thoughts on lust in Christian fiction.

Issue #1: Research

I have read a lot of great, fairly well-researched CHF novels. I love Christian Regency and western novels, for example, and while they’re not always perfect, you can usually tell that the author has done an acceptable amount of research. However, CHF falls flat most often when it tackles the Middle Ages. I see a couple reasons for that, one being that the period is so vastly different and removed from our own whereas nineteenth-century society is much closer to ours in experience, perspective, and especially faith—which last point I’ll be digging into in Part 2.  

The medieval setting in Waters of Time felt like Hedlund was portraying her own perception of what the Middle Ages were like, instead of truly delving into the era. The reason I say this is because the setting relies so heavily on tropes like heavy, hot clothing, smelly people who rarely bathe, cruel and superstitious people, and burning people at the stake. Small details that were clearly researched were sprinkled in from time to time, like descriptions of medieval clothing or buildings, but these were all very surface-level. Ultimately I sensed that the author researched what she had to for physical details like those, but when it came to society as a whole, relied on knowledge of the shallow tropes we’ve all been fed about the Middle Ages.

The fact that most of us have been raised on a false view of the Middle Ages—that it was backwards, superstitious, and what-have-you—is something of an excuse, but not if you’re an author seeking to write a serious novel (or really any novel) set in that period. If there’s one thing my liberal arts degree taught me, it’s that history (and every other discipline) is complex, nuanced, rich, and awe-inspiring, and the Middle Ages are so, so far from being an exception to that. Think of the cathedrals they built! That feat on its own should be enough to trigger a thought that maybe, just maybe, we need to take a closer look at the people who built them. It’s disrespectful to a huge part of our western heritage to accept a narrative that is easily disproven by quite minimal historical study, not to mention it’s lazy authorship, as I’m sure my writer friends would agree.

It’s also unfair to readers to perpetuate, again, easily disproven tropes like the ones I mentioned above. I’m not going to go into all of them, but I need to let off steam so I’m going to talk about a couple. The one that got my goat the worst was some of the comments about medieval clothing, thanks to my own interest in historical dress and my resulting slightly-more-than-basic knowledge about it. The first thing Marian (the main character of CBTM) thinks when she changes is that she’s hot because there are so many layers. The whole point was that a) people throughout history used natural, breathable materials like linen that WEREN’T super hot despite the multiple layers, and b) there was a practical purpose for each and every layer. (Also, when Marian referred to her “heavy linen” clothing, I needed to scream. LINEN IS NOT HEAVY!)

I will acknowledge that to someone used to the minimal clothing we wear now, the layers take a bit of getting used to. When I put on my Regency ensemble, I’ve got three layers of skirt going—shift, petticoat, and gown—and yes, it’s obviously a bit more cumbersome than I’m used to. But it doesn’t take long to get used to, and if it’s made with period-correct materials, it’s not going to be overly hot. The thing we like to forget is that our ancestors were not stupid. They’re not going to give you multiple random layers of underclothing and top it off with a wool gown in the summertime. Clothing and materials were varied and adapted to the seasons and every single layer had a purpose. Do we seriously think our ancestors would choose to be swelteringly hot for literally no reason? Putting a little thought into the plausibility of a trope will often show you pretty quickly that there’s probably a lot more to the issue than you’ve been led to believe.

At least the medieval setting meant I didn’t have to deal with any corsetry misconceptions (my #1 pet peeve and I-will-not-let-myself-get-started-I-will-not). Small blessings! XD

The only other thing I’m going to say before leaving this topic is that Marian longs for a bath and thinks she smells disgusting—fair enough, when you’re used to modern standards of cleanliness—but somehow the super hot love interest always smells good even though he probably hasn’t bathed in six years. (Hyperbole! That is hyperbole.)

I should move on now, but to wrap up, this is something that authors, Christian or not, need to step up their game on. Again, it’s lazy and disrespectful not to do some serious research into your perceptions of a historical era before portraying it in a novel. Obviously, the level of research you ought to do depends on what exact genre of historical novel you’re writing. You don’t need a PhD in medieval history to write a medieval romance novel, but at the very least you need to spend some time to challenge your assumptions and perceptions of the era. That way, if nothing else, you’ll avoid falling into tropes that should be obviously false.

Issue #1.5: Childbirth Scene

There was a scene in NLM where (spoiler alert) Marian gives birth to her first child, and this was the scene that killed it for me. Up till then, I’d been rolling my eyes or internally screaming every now and then, but my jaw dropped in actual shock at this scene and I couldn’t resist taking to Amazon and Goodreads to see if anyone else had commented on it (which they hadn’t). This scene was horrifically sensationalised, which hit close to home for me since I’m currently pregnant myself and have been learning a tonne about childbirth. A normal birth is a NATURAL PROCESS, not a medical emergency as it’s portrayed in media. A woman’s body is literally made to give birth and it knows what to do. Coming from that background, coming across this scene was incredibly jarring. I say the following not to attack the author personally, but to illustrate how much disbelief I was in: I literally googled whether she has children because I couldn’t believe someone who’d given birth would write this scene this way!

To be perfectly fair, the birth in this scene is a breech birth, which is definitely more complicated than a fully “normal” birth. However, that wasn’t the problem for me. Marian was described as writhing and screaming in agony through the contractions. This is not normal. Okay, you argue, maybe something is seriously wrong. Fair enough. But the speed and relative ease with which Ellen (her sister) is able to resolve the birth once she arrives belies that argument. Second, Marian is pushing so hard that she’s straining till her veins bulge and her face is beet red: this is not the way to handle a contraction productively. Finally, Marian is lying on her back until Ellen gets her to squat instead. Lying on your back to give birth is largely a modern, medicalized view of how women “ought” to give birth. Going back to how a woman’s body knows what to do in labour, if your body is telling you to squat, or get up and walk around, or whatever position, you do it.

(I want to add that when I posted this section to my Instagram, one of my friends there who used to be a doula commented that in a breech birth, the mother should be upright, definitely not lying down, that birthing stools were usually used in the past, and confirmed that birthing on your back is a very relatively recent practice. Thank you, Nichole, for confirming what I with my much less education thought!)

Maybe I’m wrong, but I really feel that, in a time so much more attuned to natural physical processes, medieval midwives would know that Marian needs to breathe through her contractions and should probably not be lying on her back. In the absence of modern medicine and interventions, these midwives surely would know how to properly guide a woman through labour. And regardless, we NEED TO STOP making birth look horrific and terrifying. Is it always pretty? No, and yes, it had a higher maternal and infant mortality rate in the Middle Ages. And it’s okay to depict that in fiction. But that’s not my point. The problems I’ve outlined with this scene have less to do with mortality rates than the simple inaccuracy and misportrayal of labour. If we’re going to depict difficult labours, we need to do it sensitively, realistically, and non-sensationally. Again, the author seemed to be assuming that medieval childbirth would have been a life-threatening event, period. And the fact that Ellen with her modern nursing knowledge is able to so speedily resolve the birth implies that the narrative here is supposed to be that the medieval midwives don’t know what they’re doing.

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This is Part 1 of a three-part series. Click here for Part 2, which talks about how Catholicism is often misportrayed. Click here for Part 3, which talks about lust in Christian romance novels.