Christian Crime Writer Andrew Klavan on Evil, Faith, and Art
Sometimes, it may be possible to find God in the darkness as well as in the light. In “The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness,” author Andrew Klavan explores the power of God to overcome evil.
“I’m a crime writer and I always get this letter, ‘You call yourself a Christian and you write about all these horrible things, and these horrible people and they say horrible things,’” Klavan told Faithwire. “I was just trying to explain that I think that’s an important thing to do. I think that it is actually a good thing to write about the evil that men do.”
Klavan believes important realities and lessons can be found in these stories. “Good things might happen in your life or bad things might happen, sometimes terrible things, but no matter what happens, your soul is your own,” Klavan has said. He often pushes back against the idea that Christian art must be sanitized or “squeaky-clean,” arguing that classic works by Christian artists have never shied away from the darkness of the world.
“When I look at the great works of Christian art, they’re very dark,” he said in an interview. “When you look at the great paintings, there’s a lot of martyrdom, a lot of crucifixion scenes, a lot of the reality of life and the harshness of life.”
Oversimplifying the existence of evil or pretending it’s not happening has real-life implications
Oversimplifying the existence of evil or pretending it’s not happening has real-life implications, Klavan warns. “As the gospels tell us, it’s a very dark world, and, so, if your faith is based on this kind of happy-talk idea that nothing bad happens or that everything is going to turn out all right because you have faith, I think you’re going to lose your faith pretty quickly when you confront the reality of life,” he said.
Klavan’s own journey to the Lord began after he recognized the moral order in life, the reality that there’s right and wrong and good and evil. “That idea that you cannot justify some things, that some things are just evil, started me thinking,” he said. “I went through some bad times in my youth. I had real mental problems. I lost 10 years to mental struggle. I came out of that in what I believe to be in a miraculous way. In two years, I went from being suicidal to being a joyful human being.”
Later, he was baptized at age 49. “It was a long, long journey,” he said. “Turning my life over to God was such a relief. It really has been a journey, and it informs everything that I think and write.”
–Dwight Widaman
