Reading Outside the Christian Shelf
Hey… long time no post…
There are so many updates to talk about, but let me take a second to talk about my Christian Snail Mail club!
Each month, I send out letters, Scripture cards, Bible studies, stickers, and small reminders that faith can be held in your hands, all for $12 (we ship internationally). It has been such a joy to use what I have to share the Word of God, and I would truly love for you to be part of it.
For a long time, I thought being a “good Christian reader” meant reading Christian books. There was even a season where I would carry around a well-known Christian book because I wanted people to think I was some theologian (which is honestly so embarrassing to admit). But somewhere along the way, I actually started reading them. And I LOVED them. Christian books have taught me so much about God. They helped me understand Scripture, introduced me to theology, challenged me, and gave words to things I believed but didn’t know how to explain. But because I loved them so much, I slowly started believing they were the ONLY books really worth reading.
Eventually, as my love for reading grew, I started coming across books outside of the Christian space that genuinely interested me, and weirdly, I felt guilty about it. I remember wondering if wanting to read them was “the world” trying to entice me or if I was filling my mind with things that weren’t going to help me grow in my faith. So for a while, I stayed in my little Christian book bubble.
I don’t regret that season at all. I learned and grew so much, but looking back, I think I confused discernment with avoidance. 1 Thessalonians 5 says, “Test everything; hold fast what is good.” My approach was more like, avoid everything and hold fast to what you already know is good. Which is definitely easier! If I only read people who believe what I believe, there isn’t much to wrestle with because someone has already told me what is right or wrong. But that isn’t really discernment. Discernment requires us to actually discern.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean we should read absolutely everything. There are books I wouldn’t read and others I’ve started and decided weren’t good for me. Something might not bother someone else but bother my conscience, and I think that is worth listening to. At the same time, encountering an idea isn’t the same as accepting it. I’ve read things I completely disagree with while still finding something valuable in the way an author understands people, and sometimes I’ve loved a sentence while disagreeing with the paragraph. Learning to separate those things has actually strengthened my faith because instead of immediately labeling something as “good” or “bad,” I have to think about what I believe and why.
Non-Christian books have also taught me a lot about people, which is probably why fiction has become one of my favorite things to read. You get to spend hundreds of pages with someone who might be nothing like you, slowly understanding their fears, desires, flaws, and everything that has shaped the way they see the world. There have been characters I’ve grown to care about that I probably would have judged really quickly if I met them in real life. That’s one of the things I love most about reading. It reminds me how complicated people are and how little we usually know about what is going on inside of someone. We are flawed, contradictory, and sometimes incredibly frustrating, yet still created in the image of God.
Reading outside the Christian shelf has also made me ask questions I probably wouldn’t have asked otherwise. I’ll come across something and think, wait, I don’t agree with that, and then realize I have to explain to myself why. Is what I believe actually biblical, or is it something I’ve just heard Christians say a lot? Where does Scripture speak into this? Would I have acted any differently than this character? Questions like these have sent me back to my Bible more than once, which is kind of funny considering I used to think these books would somehow pull me away from it.
There is something really beautiful about reading a story written by someone who doesn’t share your faith and still recognizing yourself in it. The way they understand the world might be completely different from mine, but loneliness still feels like loneliness. We understand the desire to be loved, the fear of death, grief, shame, and the feeling that there has to be something more. And sometimes those stories make me think about the gospel in ways I wasn’t expecting. A character carrying guilt makes me think about forgiveness, or someone desperately trying to earn love makes me think about grace. Not because I’m trying to turn every book into a Christian analogy, but because knowing God has changed the way I understand the things I read.
I still love Christian books. I’m literally going to seminary lol, so I’m definitely not giving up theology anytime soon. I just don’t think Christian books are the only books worth learning from anymore. There are so many things to learn about people, grief, beauty, history, culture, and ways of seeing the world that are completely different from my own. Maybe reading faithfully isn’t about making sure every book on our shelf is Christian. Maybe it has more to do with how we read, what we allow to shape us, and whether we are willing to bring what we encounter back to God.
“Test everything; hold fast what is good.”
P.S. I’m writing primarily about books, but I think the same applies to the other things we consume too: movies, music, social media, etc.
- Grace :)
