Comments on: Faith

By: Fiona

Fiona — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 14:33:01 +0000

I also wrote this article because I had received a number of comments in reviews by American evangelical Christians that the books were not what they were used to or expected. Hopefully readers can see that I am hoping to do something different with these books and so should not judge them by a ‘Christian fiction’ yardstick as that is not what I intended to write.

By: Fiona

Fiona — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 14:12:57 +0000

Hi Sheila. I think what we were seeing in the post WWI years was the breakdown of cultural Christianity and the separation of church and state. Also, as the state’s role in people’s lives increased as a provider of education, healthcare etc, the church’s social role – as an institution – began to diminish in the Western world. As suffrage expanded to include the lower classes, the power they had to demand the government meet social needs meant that the church no longer had a clearly defined social role to play. In other words, what is the point of church, people began to ask. Faith became an issue of personal choice. That’s why the evangelical movement did so well, because it was down to the individual and God, not the individual via the church and God. In my Poppy books, the heroine is set adrift from church as an institution and needs to re-align her faith. Is it a personal faith? Is it a family faith? Is it a communal faith? And of course, as you rightly mention, what role does a God of love have to play in a world blighted by horror. The 20s were a decade where frankly God’s credibility was being challenged. It was no longer a matter of we believe because the church tells us so, it was a question of do ‘I’ believe it. Individual suffrage put political power into the hands of individuals. The question of whether to believe or not was now in their hands too.

By: SC Skillman

SC Skillman — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 13:28:54 +0000

This is a very interesting article on faith and how you handle it in your Poppy Denby novels, Fiona. I like your eclectic approach to this subject. One thing that I find people tend to think about ‘the past’ is, that somehow, more people attended church then, people found it easier to have faith, and Christianity had a stronger hold on hearts and minds. But I believe this is, in more than one sense untrue. I suspect people struggled with faith just as much as they do now and that church attendance, if it happened more often than now, cannot be taken as a good indicator of the faith that is in people’s hearts. Additionally I have often wondered how people manage to hold onto or recover their faith after truly appalling events in their lives (as in the holocaust, for instance, and both the world wars). It all seems to point to this one truth: that faith is, in itself one of the greatest miracles of all.