It seems to me that these days most fiction writing is areligious. That is there is not particular reason to know if the author is religious, althought the characers may or may not be. Or is this just because of the genres I choose to read?
It accords with my impressions too, Vein. Unless the author is actively promoting the value of religion to one of the characters, or writing religious allegory or fables, or poking holes at a religious institution or some school of religious thought, it can be hard to tell what sort of spirituality a writer has. Le Guin, for instance, is an atheist who writes about gods, and a lot of her fiction is spiritual. An author like Julian May is passionately Catholic, but it might take three or four of her books to realise that.
Over all, I notice a few trends appearing:
- The power of churches is waning. Communal religious faith(something you act on), is increasingly becoming solitary religious belief (some form of opinion with some supernatural hope attached - making it akin to superstition). In consequence I think that we see a lot of fiction in which traditional religions play very little part;
- Markets for religious music, fiction have become speciality markets. The practice of mainstream fiction pushing strongly religious or atheistic messages seems to have ebbed since the mid-20th century. Writers now specialise, and readers hunt for gospel and other spiritual messages on specific shelves;
- It's now considered rude to lampoon religion in fiction - though still okay to critique it in non-fiction. I attribute this to political correctness, and perhaps an upsurge in some forms of fundamentalism. People can't discern critique and disagreement from hatred, which is a bit disturbing.
It seems to me that so long as this remains the norm, the need for specifically non-theistic writing may well be rather limited. Just food for thought....
What does this mean for non-theistic spiritual writing? Well I think it's a mixed message.
On the one hand, there's still plenty of non-theistic New Age writing around, and people are still sucking it down. But if you find New Age thinking murky, fatuous and self-serving (as I do), then that may not help you much.
There might be a small market for soft religious lampooning still, but I don't know of an English-speaking market for really biting religious satire the way we saw in the mid-20th century, say. I'd look to countries in South America, Asia and the Middle East for that sort of writing. They probably have the most to say about what religion is doing to their societies right now - and how they need it to behave.
In the English-speaking countries, non-theists might have run out of much to say about religion (and if we
do say it, it might be better presented in non-fiction more than fiction). But we are nevertheless faced with a huge array of complex global social issues that require examination from diverse humanitarian perspectives, and this is perhaps where we should turn our attention.
Among these I'd include environment, immigration, trade equity, human trafficking, child warriors, euthanasia, fertility management, gene technologies, carbon trading, food trading, housing, water management, education, information and privacy management, wealth sharing and the shape and destiny of human families and parenting.
Religion is floundering with many of these issues. We have religions preaching to poor people to avoid contraception, who are now looking at calling carbon emission 'sinful', who are preventing affluent gay couples from adopting poor children, and who are teaching poor sick people to pray for healing when they could be helping to build medical insurance infrastructure, who are teaching poor people that you can pray for wealth, rather than educating them in how wealth is built.
They're trying to frame complex social problems and sweeping social change in terms of superstition and ancient, punitive moral codes and it's just not working.
Meanwhile areligious fiction largely sensationalises these issues - turning them into blockbuster movie scripts - and non-fiction presents dry scientific and social policy perspectives that give us very little wisdom on what to do and how to help.
Is there room for a non-theistic spiritual perspective on the above topics? I think that there should be - even
must be
! However, it requires us to lift our heads out of worrying about who's knocking at our front door, what's on 4am TV, or what it says in the Book of Revelations.
