This is Part 3 of a three-part series. Click here for Part 1, which talks about lack of research in some Christian historical fiction. Click here for Part 2, which talks about how Catholicism is misportrayed.
Also, I totally threw my filter out the window when I was writing this. I share EXACTLY what I think about lust and smut in books without regard for what people might think is “indelicate” or uncomfortable to hear. I don’t get this way often, but I’m just so done with people justifying this. So if you think you might be sensitive to that, this might not be the post for you! Just a friendly warning before you get into it. 🙂 There’s also a smattering of actual philosophy so be warned lol.
Issue #3: Lust
A mere 3400 words in, we come to the issue that trips up approximately 98% of all Christian romantic fiction, historical or otherwise.
Lust.
This is the biggest issue I remembered from the first time I read CBTM a year and a half ago. Coming back to it now, both with a matured perspective and post-marriage, I wondered if I would find that I overreacted the first time.
I did not.
These couples—in both books—lust after each other at least once every two or three pages. It’s described as desire, but that’s euphemistic. I’m not going to give any quotes because I have extremely strong feelings about mental and emotional purity, but suffice it to say that essentially every time they see each other, the characters are thinking about the other person’s body, describing their physical reaction to the other, wanting passionate kisses or worse, and more. This series is particularly graphic about it, way more so than most Christian fiction. Ultimately, for the most part, the problematic scenes are fade-to-black, but a) they fade a heck of a lot slower than in most other Christian romance novels; b) some of them I wouldn’t even describe as fade-to-black but more as describing the scene with little enough detail to stay in a book labelled Christian but with enough detail that I would honestly describe it as steamy; and c) it is my strong and unshakeable opinion that fade-to-black scenes are still occasions of sin (we’ll get to that later).
Most Christian romance books dilute the lust by making the characters appreciate each other’s good qualities or whatever. So yeah, we’ve got physical attraction, but we’ve also got emotional attraction so it’s okay. The problem is that, while both physical and emotional attraction are parts of loving someone romantically, it’s actually still objectification if that’s all you’ve got. Pope John Paul II talks about this in, if I remember correctly, Love and Responsibility. I couldn’t possibly explain it as well as he did, but here are my thoughts in a nutshell, using an illustrative example:
When it comes to my husband, I love him. I love Nicholas. I don’t love him because he is handsome, generous, thoughtful, outdoorsy, hilarious, tender-hearted, goofy, responsible, etc. I love all those qualities in him, but if one day he stopped being outdoorsy, or if he stopped being such a goof, I would not stop loving him. My love for him isn’t based on those things. It is based on seeing him as a whole, individual person in his own right and loving him. It is desiring the good for him. As the Church teaches, love is desiring the good of the other.
If it helps, think of the way God loves us. His love isn’t conditional on any one of our personality traits or even if we care about Him at all. It is because He created us as a person, something good, worth loving in and of our very existence.
I don’t know if that makes any sense. It’s a pretty philosophical concept. And I tried to explain it to a friend once and I couldn’t phrase it well enough to make myself understood 😅 But basically the idea is that true love, romantic or otherwise, follows the way God loves us, as a person not a conglomeration of random personality traits. If we “love” someone for how they make us feel, we’re treating them as an object, a thing, not a person. If I loved my husband because he (for example) protects me and that makes me feel warm and fuzzy, I would be stripping him of his identity as a subject, i.e. his individual existence as a person beloved by God, and relegating him to what I get out of our relationship.
Ugh, I really don’t know if that makes any sense. I also have no idea how I would approach writing a romantic relationship like that, although it’s what I aspire to. So I’m not claiming to have the answer to this problem. All I know is that what Christian romance novels are presenting in most cases is still lust and objectification, just masked. Because I guess what I’m trying to say is that lust isn’t just physical desire. You can also lust after someone emotionally, like in the example above, if I were to deliberately seek out that warm fuzzy feeling from my husband’s protectiveness and divorce it from loving him as an individual. I think that’s the element we tend to forget. Again, of course, enjoying being protected, or admiring someone’s personality traits, isn’t necessarily lust. It’s when we relegate the person in front of us to those lesser things that it becomes a problem.
Back to Waters of Time; unlike most Christian romances, the lust that Marian and Will, and Ellen and Harrison, feel for each other isn’t even masked by emotional lust. It’s nearly entirely physical lust, which is why it’s so extra shocking. And this is where I want to get into a specific discussion of portraying physical attraction and situations in books.
There is a huge discussion in Christian circles about smut. I’ve seen it come up on Instagram multiple times, especially recently. We’re largely all in agreement that outright erotica is sinful to read, but beyond that, there’s a spectrum of viewpoints surrounding what level of “clean” is okay, ranging all the way from “You can’t describe anything at all” to “As long as it’s not graphic sex you’re fine”. In my opinion, both extremes miss the point.
First off, I don’t like extremes. In nearly every situation, as Aristotle said, virtue is found in the middle. You balance out both sides of the scale and search out the nuances. Consequently, my position on this conversation is that this issue is not black and white. There’s no definitive dividing line between “this is good” and “this is sinful” to read. So many factors are involved, like the author’s intent, individual readers’ weaknesses, occasions of sin, purpose, beauty… This is why I’ve never actually participated in the Instagram discussions in any meaningful way, because it would take this essay to delve into what I think 😅 And another part of the problem is because it’s so nuanced and abstract, I’m struggling even now to pull my thoughts together coherently.
Let’s start with what the Catechism of the Catholic Church gives us as the elements which constitute the morality of any human act. These are the object, the intention, and the circumstances. The object is what the action or thing actually is. So in this case, the object would be the actual words of these scenes. Now a moral object can be good in and of itself, it can be evil in and of itself (that’s where you get the term “intrinsic evil”—no matter what someone’s purpose in doing it is, it will never be good), or it can be morally neutral, in which case it’s the intention and circumstances in a specific situation that determine whether the action is good or bad.
Words, obviously, aren’t intrinsically good or evil. It’s what they say and why they’re said that determine whether they are good or evil. So that would be intention and circumstance. I’m going to start with intention, and in this case, specifically the author’s intention. What does the author intend the reader to be thinking when they read this scene? Are they seeking to show the reader what good, pure, beautiful love looks like? Or are they trying to create that little thrill of warmth-and-fuzzies? From the many, many Christian romance novels I’ve read, I’m going to say that in most of these scenes, the point for the author is to give that thrill. I’m not saying there’s something necessarily wrong with pure, fluffy romantic scenes per se; in this case I’m talking about the scenes that have a sexual element, the ones that have to do with physical attraction or touch, especially when it comes to kissing scenes and what have you.
I like to beat around the bush when it comes to this stuff, but because I think it’s important I’m just going to say it: that little bite of thrill we get from reading that well-described kiss is a sexual reaction. The moment we accept that reaction and sit with it, the moment we decide to enjoy that little thrill? That’s a sin. And before someone tells me that enjoying that “harmless little flight of the imagination” is fine, remember that Jesus told us that if a man so much as looks at a woman to lust after her, he has already committed adultery in his heart. Oh heckin yes our deliberate enjoyment of that thrill is lustful. Even if our imagination is abstract, even if our thoughts aren’t directed to a specific person to treat them as a sexual object for our mental enjoyment, it is still disordered sexual desire. Yes, that sounds harsh and blunt and “gross”. I am just going to say it because I am done with how we humans beat around the bush and justify the “little” sins that don’t seem to harm anyone. Spoiler alert: they are harming you, AND they are harming others because at some point (and that point might be nearer or further depending on each individual reader) this begins to affect the way we look at our real-life relationships and interact with other human beings.
And let me tell you that I KNOW this aspect of Christian romance novels has that real-life effect from my own personal experience. It’s sometimes subtle to the point that maybe you don’t notice it growing in yourself, but it. Is. There. We humans are body and soul united. What we put in our minds and our imaginations is NOT separate and distinct from the other parts of our lives. You can’t expect to live in one world in your imagination and not have it affect your life in the real world.
On that note, one of my favourite youtubers, Katie Emmerson, made a video years ago about how Christian romance novels are basically porn for Christian women. While you may not want to go to that extreme, I think there is a lot of truth in the comparison. Porn is a fantasy which rewires your brain to think that that’s how sex is supposed to be in real life (and if you don’t believe me, check out fightthenewdrug.org for—be warned—very disturbing, true anecdotes about how it’s teaching young boys and men to approach women). As a teenager reading Christian romance novels, I came to expect that what was described in them was normal for relationships and constantly imagine myself in those situations. As such, when I began dating in reality, I had a lot to work through mentally to relearn the reality. Spoiler alert, it’s nothing like what’s described in these books. And it’s one thing to read stuff like this from my now-married perspective and recognise how stupid and unrealistic it is, but think of how many young girls who don’t yet know better are being taught a warped view of how a romantic relationship “ought” to look.
So to wrap back around… author intent definitely has something to do with the rightness or wrongness of these scenes. If you as an author are writing a scene with the intention of giving your reader those little thrills of sexual excitement, that’s a sin. (My filter is gone. I am saying what I think.) Heck, if you’re writing the scene to give yourself a thrill, that’s a sin. But if your purpose is the former, then it’s even more grave because you are deliberately creating something that is going to be an occasion of sin for at least some of your readers.
Which brings me to my next point, which relates to the circumstances aspect of morality. Not all readers are the same. Based on our pasts or personal sensitivities, some of us may struggle with our minds straying into sinful territory from reading something as “tame” as “He bent and kissed her on the lips.” Others can read something quite a bit more descriptive before our minds begin to stray. You and you alone know your own areas of temptation. So it’s not all on the author, because it would be literally impossible to completely avoid writing any situation where our story might nudge a reader towards temptation. The author’s responsibility is to consider what she is writing and why, and discern whether she maybe ought to tone down the level of description; the reader’s responsibility is to know where their weaknesses lie and avoid what they know is an occasion of sin for them, regardless of what anyone else thinks. No person’s opinion matters when it comes to your conscience except your own.
Ask yourself, whether you’re reading or writing—does it take a hard wrench of your will to tear yourself out of that mental scene? If it does, there’s something wrong there.
I called my friend Magda to try and get my thoughts in order about this topic, and since she’s doing a literature master’s and the art aspect of literature is very important to her, she pointed out that St. Thomas Aquinas defined beauty as “that which leads to contemplation” (and art ought to be beautiful). That leads me to my next point, which is Philippians 4:8. “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” My question is, even if your imagination isn’t as easily led astray by a little extra description, why are you spending time on something which doesn’t fit St. Paul’s description of what we should be filling our minds with? Are you feeding your imagination beauty, do the books you read lead you higher and closer to God, or are you eating junk? And if the latter, why? I’m not guiltless myself here; I like some mindless entertainment from time to time and I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem as long as I’m cautious and deliberate about that intake. But if the content of your mindless entertainment is leading your thoughts anywhere near what is actively NOT noble, pure, or admirable, then how do we excuse spending our precious time on that? And why as Christian writers are we creating something that St. Paul tells us to flee from? It’s implicit in Philippians, but utterly explicit in 1 Corinthians 6:18: “Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body.” How can we joke around with this, how can we justify reading something that so easily leads to the lustful thoughts St. Paul tells us to flee from?
It’s like how teenagers ask the chastity speaker “How far is too far to go with my boyfriend/girlfriend?” and the speaker’s response is that that’s the wrong question to be asking. The question we ought to be asking is “How can I love my boyfriend/girlfriend?” Similarly, we shouldn’t be asking how much of a thrill we can get out of reading about kissing before it becomes sinful. The question should be how we can honour God and stay as far from even the idea of sin as possible.
As an aside, I know we like to think that Christian romance novels are about faith, which is why we add the adjective “Christian” to the genre. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that they are not. Not the mainstream ones, anyways, or at least the vast majority thereof. Usually, one or both of the lead characters will be portrayed as struggling in some aspect of their faith, and it gets prettily resolved at the end of the book once they’ve kissed a few times. I have rarely seen more than that kind of extremely surface-level depiction of a faith journey in any mainstream Christian romance. In my experience, the point of these novels is the romance and even the sexual tension (the when-will-they-just-kiss-already?????), whilst the faith aspect is tossed in there just because. As Magda aptly summed up every single male lead in the genre, “This guy is Christian and has hot forearms.”
There is so, so much more I could say about this whole topic. But this essay is far too wildly long already. Instead, I’m going to leave you with my big hot take: Christians these days are obsessed with sex. Like, we talk about it ALL THE TIME. We have chastity talks for teenagers. We write books about how to improve our sex lives from a Christian perspective. What have you. And all of that comes from a good place: when it comes to sex, our society is broken, and we’re trying to fix that by teaching people the truth they’ve been robbed of.
But it went wrong.
Cuz let me tell you how this affected me as a teenager.
My high school catechism group did a year-long study of “theology of the body for teens”. I went to “pure life” retreats. I was sold books about purity. Unfortunately they were not books by John Paul II. (If they had been, I would probably have been fine.) They were all dumbed down “to be accessible to the youth” (🙄) and what their message came down to was “Don’t have sex before marriage. Stop thinking about sex so much. Think about it later.” Of course, you see the problem. When you’re told a hundred times a year not to think about sex, you’re going to think about sex. A lot. And that leads nowhere good, let me tell you.
So then you get novels like Arms of Love that come from a noble place; they want to depict what a true, loving relationship looks like. But they’re coming from a reactionary, defensive place: “The world says you can have sex whenever and however you want, but that’s not true.” A better starting point would be an open question, “What does a pure, loving relationship look like and how can I portray that?” Instead, because authors of books like Arms of Love are starting from, “How do I show that sex before marriage is harmful?” the result is that not having sex becomes kind of the point of the whole fictional relationship. And then you get weird creepy scenes where a book goes into waaay too much detail about the couple being tempted—oh, but ultimately they resist temptation, which sets a good example to The Youth, which means depicting the situation was a good thing! It’s not like the mind of The Impressionable Youth (or, let’s be honest, The Impressionable Adult too) is going to latch onto the details so the reader puts herself in the scene and then, boom, she’s imagining or at least wishing herself in sexual situations. Nope, couldn’t possibly happen. And then in the end the characters get married and you have a closing scene where they finally get to go to bed together, and it’s such a wonderful and exciting thing! Not like The Impressionable Youth might possibly (or even probably) start imagining what they’re doing after that fade to black!
And I’ve heard that excuse from fellow writers, that we need to depict the beauty of sexuality in our fiction. I 1,000,000% agree with that. However, I disagree that the right way to do that is by detailing our characters’ sexual attraction and physical affection. I’d argue it’s because we’re obsessed with sex that we think that’s the way to portray a loving relationship. Like I talked about above, physical and emotional attraction are parts of romantic love. But they are not the substance of romantic love. And when it comes to something like sexuality, one of the realms where it’s easiest for our weak wills and imaginations to fall into sinful territory, we have to be so careful.
We as a society, secular and Christian, are obsessed with sex. Now sex is, indeed, a beautiful and wonderful gift from God. But we have placed it on a pedestal so high as to be disordered. What we need in Christian fiction are not more portrayals of physical affection “to show that sex is good”. We already know that sex is good. What we need are portrayals of the truth that “love is desiring the good of the other”, where couples work to love their spouse as God loves that spouse, where they seek to help their spouse towards heaven, where moments of warm-and-fuzzy love and affection occur because the two are one in mind and heart. That does not require us as writers or readers to poke around in the gory details of a kiss. We writers should care about our craft enough to learn how to show our characters’ deep love without making public what should be private.
When we push sex to the forefront of romantic love, we are not solving the sexual deviance of today’s society. Rather, we are perpetuating the underlying falsehood that sex is the greatest possible good. No. The greatest good we can achieve is union with God in heaven. The goal of marriage is to help each other reach that union. And if we want to start healing our world’s sexual brokenness, that is what Christian romance novels need to show.
I absolutely welcome your thoughts on all this! There are so many aspects to the issue and I couldn’t possibly bring them all into the structure of a single essay; I can’t even articulate all of them well enough. Do know, though, that I will almost certainly not engage in an extended discussion if we disagree about something. I’m pregnant, working more than full time, have a husband to love and feed, and never enough sleep 😀 So I don’t have the time or mental energy to engage in online discussions, especially about things I know I won’t change my mind on. The only reason this essay is even before you is because I got totally triggered by a book and happened to have the time to rant about it because it’s Christmas week XD I just wanted to say this so you know I’m not ignoring or dismissing you if you leave a dissenting comment and I don’t respond. Thank you so much for understanding that I have so much to prioritise away from my computer screen! ❤
Benita J. Thompson 