Apostasy lit, non-lit and not-yet-lit

Last December I read an article over at Reformation 21 that was (as they say in current affairs TV) “a story no parent can afford to miss”. It was a brilliant and frightening piece that Stephen Nichols had written about a genre of literature that he had christened (or de-christened!) ‘Apostasy Lit’—“a genre, usually taking the form of a memoir, in which the protagonist reflects on and recants her Christian, usually of the fundamentalist variety, upbringing”.

Examples that he analyzed included the films of Paul Schrader, the short stories of Garrison Keillor, Brian Dannelly’s movie Saved!, Julia Scheeres’ Jesusland: A Memoir, and Franky Schaeffer’s Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful novel Gilead also provides a paragraph of illuminating counterpoint.

At the end of the article, Nichols draws out two “teaching moments” for contemporary Christian parents, distilling the lessons we can learn from the sobering warnings over the ‘apostasy lit’ novels and films. The first is a warning against letting parental authority and conscientiousness overbalance into “sternness or harshness”; the second is a warning against creating a “stifling environment” that cocoons children away from the world so successfully, they think of Christ as a prison warden, not a saviour.

All of this was immensely helpful to me as a parent of young children, and it was enough to send shivers up and down my spine. Even if the books and movies that Nichols analyzes had never been written, there would still be something solidly biblical in his warnings against the kind of harshness that embitters and discourages (e.g. Eph 6:4, Col 3:21) and the encouragement to parents to get out a bit more (e.g. 1 Cor 5:10, John 17:15) and teach their children to do the same.

At the same time, it made me wonder whether cautionary tales like these need to somehow be counterbalanced with several other sorts of warnings. For every child of that era who rebelled against a harsh, stifling, fundamentalist upbringing and came out the other end so full of creative angst, that they made a movie about it, I wonder how many others there were who wandered away from Christ in other less interesting and less dramatic ways. I wonder, for example, how many others there were who smoothly and painlessly drifted out of the faith with the blessing and connivance of more permissive Christian parents, or scoffed and sneered their way into adult unbelief while their parents stood back weeping and wringing their hands, at a loss for what to do. There may not be a movie or a memoir in those sorts of story-lines (for want of a better term, I’ll call them ‘apostasy non-lit’), but surely there is still a warning all the same.

And what about the movies and memoirs that haven’t been made yet because their writers and directors are still in primary school (let’s call this genre ‘apostasy not-yet-lit’)? I wonder what themes will emerge out of an analysis of the apostasy lit in 20 years’ time when the world does an audit of the Christian parenting of our own generation.

If we were to illustrate and apply the warnings and encouragements and examples of the Bible with cautionary tales from our own time, I suspect that the horror stories of fundamentalism-gone-wrong emanating from the parenting of 20 or 30 years ago are only one sort of story-line we need to pay heed to. It would be a tragedy if we were all so anxious to avoid repeating the mistakes of 30 years ago that we ended up lurching together into the equal and opposite errors.

Any suggestions for where we might find some of these other sorts of cautionary tales to learn and take warning from? How do we avoid repeating the errors of the past, or overreacting in the opposite direction?