Religion and Writing

 I have a writer friend who has told me writing and religion do not mix. I disagree. I point to Gogol  and Dostoevsky and Marilynne Robinson. Kelsey McKinney's  How Writing a Novel About the Evangelical Church Helped Me Grieve the Loss of My Religion gives me another perspective, 

What’s hard to understand now is how much I believed it. When I first started trying to explore my experience as an adult, the only way I could find to really process was through fiction. I needed to create a separate but similar environment to the one I’d grown up in to really see it. I needed to create someone else to be able to see myself. That work of processing became my debut novel God Spare the Girls.

*** 

The problem with losing your religion is that you are left adrift in a world that used to have clear rules and guidelines for how to exist in it. Leaving evangelical Christianity is even more stark: there is no liturgy or culture without belief. I knew how to handle stress or disappointment or frustration as a Christian: to pray, to seek counsel, and to read my Bible. But if your only method of processing is prayer, what do you do when you aren’t sure if there is a God anymore to hear you?

For me, fiction became a space where it was safe to ask the questions, I was afraid to look at. Initially, I worked on this story just for me. I was writing for an audience of one, writing to understand where I came from and to appreciate the culture that had both built and harmed me. In this story, I found the solace I could no longer find in my faith. Through these fictional girls, I learned how much the church gave me, and not just how much it took. I remembered everything: the youth group and the women who supported me, the hurtful beliefs I held and that were held against me. It was a painful and terrible to dredge up the pain of both my experience in the church. But it also gave me the space to recognize another feeling: that though leaving the church was the right decision for me, the decision itself was painful on its own. Writing gave me the ability to grieve that loss at the same time it gave me the tools to recognize just what I had lost.