Outside of the snobbery of what constitutes a ‘real’ academic discipline, some Christians are skeptical about the arts (the literary and performing arts in particular) believing them to be secularised spaces that represent only the proliferation of anti-biblical worldviews. They therefore scoff at the futility of mind of those who choose to study them, or, worse, regard them with contempt for desiring at all to enter the ideological cesspit that is an education in the arts. I studied literature so I can only speak for the discipline I graduated in. If a Christian’s avoidance of literature is based purely on disinterest or the misguided idea that there is no ‘use’ to it outside of appreciating aesthetics, who can fault them? It’s not the worst thing in the world to not care to analyse how language is being manipulated in a religious polemic or learn the ways in which language has historically been used in specific mediums to communicate otherwise unutterable ideas in ways that persist today. But if it is rooted in a fear of being indoctrinated by the ways in which the discipline will be taught to them (or a fear of encountering the representations of sexual violence, infanticide, incest, and idolatry that are famously absent from our own Bibles), I think they’d be unsettled to find as the remedy to those fears of indoctrination the very thing they’re so averse to.

When someone tells me that I shouldn’t read this or watch that, that I should stay away from anything by this author because they have ‘the wrong theology’ and have voiced support for ‘the wrong ideas’ in the past, and should instead stick exclusively to the trusted texts and media by people with ‘the right ideas’, I wonder about their relationship with thinking. Besides the incongruity of our ability to celebrate, empathise with, and derive comfort from texts in our own Bible written by people with chequered pasts and their morally dubious past actions not discredit them in our eyes, but object to reading literature by somebody with another kind of past or undesirable theology by our standard, what I find most worrisome about this kind of thinking is the idea it betrays that we can completely trust our own not to lie to us. Lectures and seminars on Ovid and Aristotle are not the only places where evil can be called good. When somebody suggests I or others stay away from something or someone because their ideas come from the wrong sort and corruption will certainly follow, I think they would benefit from an education in literature the most.¹ 

Studying literature at university is simply the routine close reading of fiction (novels, short stories, plays, poems, and cinematic and stage representations of written work) and non-fiction texts (theoretical books, treatises, essays, articles, manifestos, and pamphlets, whether religious, political, philosophical, or literary in nature) in order to convincingly articulate your position on them through an argument constructed by careful assessment of which ideas can be sufficiently and most persuasively substantiated for your argument and which cannot. It is an impossible thing to engage in well without becoming confident in your own ability to think, which may be the reason for some people’s desperation to do away with it entirely. Some people are afraid of exposing their children to ‘the wrong books’ and ‘the wrong films’ lest they become tainted by harmful ideologies as though assent is inhered in the reading or watching of any given thing. (The idea that the study of the literary arts involves being brainwashed into accepting every idea fed to you as unquestionable is also a misconception that I’ll address later.) The arts are not bereft of ideologies that deviate from the teachings of the Bible. In that they resemble every other created thing, including our own churches. It is a mistake to think we are the safest in our own communities, as though we are not all made of flesh — Paul warns us of this many times. By developing in a person the skills to carefully analyse and evaluate how something is being presented or argued to them and distinguish the idea or argument proper from its representation by another person, studying literature equips a person with the skills to identify when even ‘their own’ are leading them astray.

It’s simply not a robust enough critique of studying the arts to say that there is evil within them and they teach you that it’s good — plenty of Christians also do this, intentionally or not. It’s also, in my experience, not accurate. In all of my lectures and seminars, the emphasis of my lecturers was never on getting us to think a certain way, but on encouraging us to consider how exactly thought is proliferated through the manipulation of language in different kinds of writing; that is, how a religious apologetic is successful in appearing to make a strong case for its position through its rhetorical devices even if the case is flimsy in actuality, how language can radicalise in ways that are less obvious to us than those we may be used to, how meaning is created through a poem’s visual and aural presentation as well as through the imagery chosen by the poet, and how certain ideas are equally being communicated by a novel’s paratext as well as through its body, for example. An awareness of how the form an author has chosen to depict something and the devices they’ve employed in their text are working in tandem to influence you to think or feel a certain way empowers you as a reader, viewer, and listener. Devices such as appeals to authority, the register of an author’s language, the structure of the text, their use of punctuation, and the motifs, images, and tradition they keep evoking – not incidentally – can reveal a lot about what somebody is trying to do, especially in a text that wants to have the appearance of objectivity. (Think of what might be suggested by the Middle English words for wiliness, cunning, or a trick of sorts and the word for vagina being almost identical and how we might then read Middle English translations of texts and Bible passages concerning women in light of this connection.²) So when somebody in church or outside of it recommends you a non-fiction book to read, you can squeal with excitement at the prospect of something new to read as I do, but you can read it with an awareness that whoever has written it, whether one of ‘our own’ or not, is trying to do something to your thinking about a particular thing.

Analysing texts from a range of disciplines and genres not only gave me the tools to identify what makes writing effective for its intended purpose, it also taught me how to read according to genre and form and how not to conflate the mere presence of a theme in a text with its promotion by its creator. While both of these abilities may seem obvious to the point that they cannot really be considered skills at all, through my conversations about literary works and other cultural productions with people who had a disdain for the study of literature, one in which my love for Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ was construed as my enjoyment of uxoricide itself, I learn the extent to which this is not the case. Meaning is created not just through the contents of a written or staged work, but through the combination of the contents and their presentation, which takes multiple forms at once. Reading with an awareness of this —  reading critically — is how we can infer that Lot’s rape by his daughters in Genesis 19 was not the author’s encouragement of filial rape. It’s how we can also conclude that Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, while appearing to be a subversive play in its depiction of cross-dressing, masculine women, and effeminate men actually depicts a (quite aggressive) social conservatism and that Lolita was not necessarily glorifying paedophilia through its portrayal of Humbert’s abuse of Lolita. Robert Browning probably didn’t want noblemen to kill their wives and then boast about it in monologues to guests either. 

While understanding how meaning is created may not seem an immediate concern in ‘the grand scheme of things’, rather appearing more like a niche thing that people who have too much time on their hands like to do, given the fact that we can’t get away from media, its necessity for our ability to engage accurately with the world we live in cannot be overstated. Media literacy becomes much more important when we recognise that outside of working (and within work for some), an earthly existence in the 21st century is constituted by media – that which we would rather not engage with and that which we willingly do through the books, film, television, radio, and music we consume. Poor media literacy, which the study of literature explicitly combats, is what causes some people to interpret a film’s message as the glorification of an evil by virtue of that evil being represented in the film alone. We have our Bibles for teaching us how to live as Christians, but we also have things that are not that. The Christian who reads a poem as though it is a theological treatise, or in the first instance conflates the voice of the poem with the poet’s own voice (the two are not always the same), will come away from it having spotted multiple heresies and run to warn everybody of the false teaching in something that was never intended to be read didactically. The Christian who approaches a worship song with lyrics intended poetically, as a representation of that believer’s own relationship with their Saviour, as a doctrinal statement will do the same. 

Reading according to genre and form and examining the various ways meaning is being produced in a text (how those values that we might be resistant to are actually being presented through the characterisation of those who hold them and what is happening to those characters over the course of the film or novel, for example) are what prevent us from saying that a film is teaching our children something it is not in actuality. Art isn’t primarily for our extraction of some great moral or some profound commentary on the human condition. That most art allows us to do this is no bad thing, but before it is anything else, art is an expression of a person’s creativity for their purposes, purposes which can be to the benefit of others, but are not exclusively or even intentionally so. Whether through language in poetry and novels or through colour, texture, and use of space in painting and sculpting, art is the expression of a person’s humanity. We should therefore not impose 2 Timothy 3:16-17 on that which is not Scripture as though it has purported to be Holy Writ. 

Reading more fiction combats the tendency to read all things as though they were presenting themselves to us as anything other than the work of a creative mind. Fiction, however ‘whacky’ (to use the language of its enemies), acquaints us with perspectives different from ours and allows us to envision experiences different from our own. It fosters empathy for others and nuances those thoughts that were previously black and white. This does not mean an abandonment of Christian ethics, it just means a more meaningful appreciation of the humanity of people outside of our bubbles — not distantly and in a tightly controlled environment through sermons or talks on ‘what goes on out there’ but through seeing it for yourself through the eyes of those that some may have been taught to keep at an arm’s length. If we read more poetry and short stories alongside our Christian books, we might get more of a sense of the feelings somebody is trying to convey through an unorthodox image or phrase in a song/poem. We might understand that some works have at their helm their creator’s heart rather than their head and that they ask us to engage with our hearts in response, resisting understanding by head alone. Reading the forms of literature we might scorn for being frivolous or meaningless better equips us to hear that worship song for what it is, which is its creator’s feelings towards their Saviour, and not what we want it to be. If we read more fiction, we might just decentre ourselves and our need to be right from someone else’s expression of their subjectivity.

So much of a literature degree is independent study so that you learn to develop your own thoughts through your own analyses of texts rather than regurgitate what somebody else has told you about them. Those thoughts are then refined by the discussions you have with others in seminars through which you come to more fully appreciate the subjectivity of your own mind by seeing that somebody can read the exact same text as you and, approaching it with the same honesty and integrity, come to a different, equally well substantiated conclusion about it. You therefore grow in your ability to think for yourself and evidence your position and in your ability to engage truthfully with alternative positions, without the intellectual dishonesty that can sometimes infiltrate our discussions of those who hold positions different from ours on secondary issues. Routine engagement with the thoughts of others builds empathy by allowing you to see those who come to conclusions different from yours as people just as capable of reasoning as you are and not as unfeeling nameless facelesses in a mass of nameless facelesses named Enemy or Heretic. A literature student knows things are rarely as clear as some people insist they are, and that translation, like just about everything else we do, is not an apolitical endeavour. Just look at the rather starkly various ways that the Beowulf poet’s depiction of Grendel’s mother has been translated into modern English, or more close to home, the differing translations of Genesis 3:16. When everybody around you has different motives for telling you that something ‘clearly’ says one thing and that a group believes or practises something they may not in actuality, being able to assess the validity of another person’s representation of something against the source material is an invaluable skill. 

In a climate where misinformation seems to be thriving more than ever, that literature develops in you a sensitivity to the ways that we can be misrepresenting one another’s thoughts, beliefs, and ideas every day (and consequently a sensitivity to the importance of hearing from the horse’s mouth) couldn’t be a more valuable skill in and outside our churches. When Christians who haven’t studied literature tell me or others that the study of literature is ‘full of’ (which is to say saturated by) immorality, I wonder who has convinced them of that and what interests of theirs it serves for others to hold strongly to that idea. It would be dishonest of me to say I didn’t study texts and theories that pushed back against the worldview that derives from my faith, but to say that the arts are characterised by every imaginable perversion of God’s righteousness, as some do, is a misrepresentation that is no less problematic than the kinds of accusations levied against Christianity by non-Christians. Of the novels, poems, short stories, plays, essays, treatises and theoretical writings on religion, on philosophy, on history, on psychology, on cultural phenomenon, on the environment and nature, on animals etc that I studied during the course of my degree, only a handful could possibly be said to be promoting the adoption of anti-biblical values en masse, which, again, is not the same as the mere existence of those values in the text. Just as the people who make claims about Christianity from a distance are not without motives for doing so, neither are those who make their claims about what literary study involves from a distance.

It should be easy to see that the skills developed through the study of literature—wherein you are exposed to ideas and assertions of many kinds and are invited to contend with their validity—teach you how not to be an ideology swallowing machine. Further, it should also be apparent that they aid, rather than hinder, Paul’s multiple exhortations to test all things, holding fast to what is good. Through the examination of the multiple ways meaning is formed, studying literature encourages you to consider the purposes behind even the most innocuous seeming linguistic or framing choices in a text or directorial choices in a film, making you sensitive to the possible motives of any person with anything to say about anything. Put simply, it trains a person to think carefully and critically about the presentation of ideas through all the ways ideas can be presented, whether from the press release or the pulpit. 

It doesn’t further the cause of Christ to lie to our children or lie to one another about what goes on in places we’re not a part of because we’re afraid of our own or their corruption. If we’re unsure or curious, we should ask our brothers or sisters who study or work in these areas, asking to truly hear from them and possibly hear responses we might not be expecting, not to confirm our suspicions. The suspicion and fearmongering does a disservice to the arts generally, from which we can see so much of the goodness of God in the creative expressions of humankind across history and cultures, and it does a disservice to our fellow believers involved in these areas who we may grow to despise because of our misconceptions. Let’s not become so insular that we can’t exist among other people and that we alienate those God has called into these areas through the giftings and propensities He’s given them by judging them for their pursuits. The solution to the spread of anti-biblical ideologies in the realm of art and entertainment isn’t to lie to one another or exercise a dilute totalitarianism within our communities by telling one another to not handle, not taste, not touch — it’s to think. 

A few months after graduation, when I reflected on all the texts I had read throughout my degree, I found that more than anything, studying literature revealed to me the limits of human wisdom. Examining the rhetorical devices and the uses of language in Tertullian’s On the Apparel of Women, Isidore of Seville’s The Etymologies, William Salisbury’s A Dictionary in English and Welsh (the dedication addressed to Henry VIII in particular), the anonymously authored ‘Dutch Church Libel’ of May 1593, Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, the various speeches made during the Putney Debates and Gerard Winstanley’s True Levellers’ Standard Advanced, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on The Revolution in France, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists, for example — all written (or spoken) at different times by people living in differing contexts and cultures, with different audiences in mind — revealed to me that without fail, we always return to the same methods to promote, defend, discourage, incite, frighten, or whatever else we seek to do. If you can misrepresent your opponent’s position well enough, for example, you can gain a following without even having to make a case for your own. We can do things in extremely inventive ways, so much so that they seem like a new thing entirely, but there is nothing truly new under the sun. Studying literature as a Christian showed me that we are not the gods we conceive of ourselves as being—that our humanness is never more on display than when we try to create. Along with all the beauty there is to behold in the exercise of the imagination in allegorical novels and in long pastoral passages of poetry, in the intensity of emotion and sisterhood in women’s coterie writing, or in the charm of children’s literature, chivalric romances, and medieval dream visions, surely this can’t be a bad thing for any Christian to be reminded of.  

1.  This is excluding the multiple admonitions in the Bible to stay away from those preaching a false gospel, spreading teachings that depart from the teachings of Christ, and those who love to quarrel about words, whom Paul characterises as conceited and lacking understanding (1Timothy 6:3-5).
   ↩︎