by Bruce BethkeIt seemed like an innocuous question. "Is The Friday Challenge a Christian site?"
Hmm. I'd never considered the idea before. I know that quite a few people who post or lurk here are Christians, of one sort or another. Since it's bound to come up eventually I'll go on-record now and state that I was raised Socialist-Methodist, but as an adult became a Christian, and an Anglican. No, that is not the same thing as Episcopalian, and no, I will not explain that "Socialist-Methodist" crack. Yes, the Mrs. truly has spent the past four years studying for the Anglican deaconate, and when you spend four years living alongside someone while she reads through the Bible front-to-back three times in different translations and works through an in-depth study of church history since the Babylonian Captivity, a certain amount of it does rub off on you.
But is The Friday Challenge expressly and explicitly a Christian site?
Hmm, again. I don't think so. It's definitely a Christian-welcoming site. I'm not much for the idea that Christians should hide out from the world and associate only with other Christians. I firmly believe that the best way to demonstrate the virtue of one's faith is by living it, out in public, every day. We are not to the point—yet—of having to hold our services in secret in the Catacombs, for fear of repression.
And yet I must confess that those are my two great gripes with science fiction and fantasy: that the one seems to encourage a sort of shallow, infantile, and angry atheism, while the other somehow imagines that you can arrive at a society precisely analogous to Medieval Europe without going through Rome's battles with the Judeans, followed by Christianity's struggle for survival against expansionist Islam.
So I suppose my answer is that The Friday Challenge is a Christian-friendly site. But by the same token, it's also a Judaism-, Hindu-, Buddhist-, Mormon-, and pretty much whatever else you have -friendly site. I've had good Moslem friends in the past, although none are on the active-duty roster at the moment. Some of the kindest and gentlest people I've known have been Iraqi and Iranian Baha'is. I know what I believe. I don't much care what you believe, provided that you believe it sincerely, and are more interested in trying to live up to the ideals of your faith than in tearing down the faith of others.
On the other hand, I also believe that I am tired right down to my bones of seeing fiction that ignores the seemingly universal human desire for faith. I am especially weary of science fiction stories that somehow imagine that if we can just jettison Christianity we will achieve some sort of shining technocratic Utopia, and I am truly, deeply, profoundly tired of fantasy stories filled with transparently nonsensical religions run by venal and corrupt priests and priestesses.
Humans have a profound desire to have faith in something larger than themselves. The evidence of the past century is clear. If you abolish one faith, you do not make the leap to shining scientific rationality, but rather only create a void that is quickly filled by something much darker and more dangerous.
Does that answer the question? Or does it merely open the door for more?
~brb
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