Why True Christian Art Brings Beauty From Darkness: Andrew Klavan

In this compelling 15-minute conversation with Socrates in the City, author Andrew Klavan shares how becoming a Christian later in life reshaped — but didn’t sanitize — his approach to storytelling. He unpacks why true Christian art must confront darkness to reveal redemption, pushing back against both the shallow optimism of modern Christian fiction and the nihilism of secular media. From Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to his own experience in Hollywood, Klavan argues that art should reflect the real moral struggle of the world — because only then can it offer real hope.

Editor’s Note: The transcript that follows was automatically generated and lightly edited, so please be aware there could be typos or other small errors. The Stream is working toward a transcription service that does fast, accurate, and reliable work; thank you in advance for your patience!

(00:00) Did you feel when you became a Christian rather late in life that somehow you would have to change the kinds of books you wrote? Was there ever a sense that you might Oh, I was terrified of you were terrified. I was terrified. I was just reading a a Substack by another novelist in in England who said, I can’t remember which writer it was who said, “Please God, don’t make me a Christian writer.”

(00:24) I thought that was me because in my in my uh memoir of my conversion I was I realized that I was inescapably caught in the net of faith and I said to God please just don’t turn me into a Christian novelist because the idea that everything works out in life that justice comes around that God somehow sees that your your suffering is going to be have a happy ending it seems to be a staple of modern Christian writing even though it was never a staple of of Christianity in its in its heyday when it was the actual uh default of of western but to take it to a much pettier

(01:00) level uh I wrote a biography of Martin Luther and there are two pages filled with um the four-letter scatological term beginning with an S. And I once got an email. It was like I had denied the bodily resurrection and you know uh spat on the work of the Petristic fathers publicly. And I thought we live in a weird world where many people who do describe themselves as Christians don’t understand precisely what it is you’re getting at in this book.

(01:40) let’s say right the connection um between sin and darkness and redemption or the need uh well I don’t want to put words in your mouth but it really seems that that fundamental misunderstanding is huge. Yeah. And it’s not just religious people but it’s secular people who avoid faith because they assume it means I can’t think more deeply about the dark stuff. Yes.

(02:08) because I I cannot look at things certain things because they’re going to pollute me and all this. And I you know I think I’ve told you before that it was it was Dusty’s Crime and Punishment that was the book I read when I was 19 that three decades later was responsible for my baptism because I was in college and that moral relativism was just beginning to seep into the intellectual mainstream.

(02:33) And I read the scene in Crime and Punishment where he kills not only with an axe. He kills not only the this land lady but her sister. And it’s such a pitiful scene that that I sat there and thought, “No, there’s no place there’s no planet. There’s no universe in which this can be forgiven in which this can be good.

(02:50) There’s no that doesn’t exist.” So it actually completely erased the idea that I could accept moral relativism. And yet I often think that if I went into a Christian bookstore and say, “Do you have that book about the axe murderer who’s led to Christ by a prostitute?” You know, they’d be like, “Throw me out the door.

(03:07) ” And and I think and you call yourself an Amish man. Uh well it’s fascinating to me because that I often think of DSTVI uh you know in in in when we’re when I’m thinking about this larger um conversation which speaks to the sad fact that there are very few you know uh novelists uh who who deal as effectively with faith and with darkness and sin.

(03:34) and your description in your book. I mean, people should read your books if only because of your descriptions of other things in great literature. I mean, it makes me want to read, you know, dusty. But that scene, the way you talk about that scene, how you think, what kind of a monster, you don’t say this in the book, but what kind of a monster could fail to be moved by by that? Yeah.

(04:01) and to feel that there must be a moral order because this can’t be right. And and this is the thing you know I was talking to Jonathan height I believe his name is this famous evolutionary psychiatrist. He came on my podcast and I interviewed him and I said he started to say you know that I had always wanted to ask him this because I read his books and I always wanted to say to him you know we we see because there’s something to see.

(04:26) That’s how we evolved sight because there was light. We hear because there are things that can be interpreted as sound. why do we have a moral sense? And and he said, ‘Well, it’s this fiction that we all share. And I said, ‘Well, wait, you know, because he’s he is an atheist Jew, which I was myself, and I understand where he’s coming from.

(04:42) And I said, well, wait, if you landed on a planet of of Nazis, and there were only Nazis there, they’d still be wrong, right? that the Holocaust would still be wrong even if you were on all and he said well you know and he went into this you can see the interview it’s on YouTube and it’s quite amazing because the thing is he’s a lovely man and you know he doesn’t believe what the words that are coming out of his mouth and you can tell he doesn’t believe the word coming out of his mouth but he’s also an honest man

(05:07) and that is the honest answer if you’re an atheist and it just doesn’t make sense nobody believes it not one single person believes except maybe a psychopath like the Marquy Assad nobody actually believes that there is no moral world. I mean, all you have to do is hit their kid or, you know, do do something really bad and they they shot maybe that teach them a lesson.

(05:29) Uh, well, no, but it it it on some level the whole thing is funny because I’ I’ve had similar conversations. I was talking to u a Jewish woman uh in a home somebody’s private home about 30 years ago and the same thing came up about the Nazis and she found herself saying well yes it’s evil for them you know or or it’s evil to me or is it and you think this is nonsense right this is everyone knows this is nonsense but you are so trapped by some ideology that you cannot bear uh to see the absurdity of your point.

(06:08) You know, I in preparation for writing the kingdom of Cain, I was reading this book by a philosopher uh on evil. And she starts out the book by saying, you know, I’m not going to define evil because after Nietzsche, there can’t be any such thing. I thought you going to write a whole book about a word you can’t define that that alone.

(06:27) And I and I started out by defining it because I thought, all right, let’s let’s talk about what it is and let’s talk about the things that nobody can really deny that it is. And I think one of the reasons murder is so gripping as a fictional subject is because we all know that that’s the border.

(06:43) That’s the borderline, you know, and I don’t want to be fancy about it as a murder in a war. Is it? No. When when you commit a murder, you know, you have hit the borderline of evil. And there is no there’s no going back from it. there’s no, you know, changing it and everybody knows because it could happen to anybody that this is the border.

(07:03) And so that’s it’s an interesting place to start. When you hit that border, where do you what do you do? Do you like the marquee decide? Do you go on or do you head back the other way and start to think, well, where did this come from? And one of the things I’m trying to do is trace the ideas that that murder expresses that are inherently evil.

(07:20) Uh, and I just always feel the need to say it just because probably I wrote a book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Murder and killing are not always the same. David kills Goliath. That’s not murder. Uh, murder is murder. And the scripture does not forbid killing. It forbids murder, right? Um, so everyone who fights in a war is not committing murder. Uh, and so on and so forth.

(07:44) So we have to say that. But it seems when we’re talking about evil, it it’s interesting to me uh that you you have uh you know pietistic secularists uh maybe on the left like uh the woman who wrote the book about evil, but Blanch is at the thought of defining evil uh or the great Jonathan Height uh you know saying well he unable to really say what he wants to say an uncomfortableness with the concept of evil but similar Similarly to get back to the woman who wrote to you, you know, you call yourself a Christian, there is an

(08:20) uncomfortableness which we touched on a few minutes ago in many religious circles with the evilness of evil. They it’s almost like they want uh they they only want sunny stories. They don’t want stories that go to this depth. And it seems to me if your view of evil is that shallow or if you can’t deal with evil, you’re probably worshiping a god that didn’t defeat evil.

(08:47) In other words, you’re not really worshiping the god of the scripture, but a kind of Thomas Kinkade version of of God. And by the way, if there’s any fans of King Kaid here, let me say get out. Uh, you know, I think that’s absolutely true and it reminds me of a a minister, I think it was, who who watched Game of Thrones, which I thought was really good for m much of its run, but was about the fact that in in a Game of Thrones, people who don’t worship power get killed.

(09:22) The people who don’t look for power get killed. That was the the theme of the show. And everybody you thought was going to be a good guy got killed because he didn’t worship power. And he said, “This show is written as if Jesus never lived.” And I thought, “No, wait. It looks just like real life to me.

(09:36) ” You know, it’s like obviously the defeat of evil that that Jesus did accomplish didn’t have that effect on the world as it is. As he tells us, as he told us before he left, in the world you will have trouble in the world is something that is conquered, but not here. And so I feel I feel the the bad effect of this, a bad effect of bad Christian art, of Christian art that just is relentlessly cheerful or faithful in the sense that it believes that all will be well in this life is that it sets you up for disillusionment.

(10:08) Yes. When you find that that’s not true, when you meet an atheist who’s not an idiot, who’s not spouting stupid things, but actually has a good argument for what he believes, your faith crumbles because it’s built on a lie. And so I really actually believe that in the same way that that suffering can deepen faith, simple realism I think is required to uh to keep your faith alive and and my faith because I was baptized so late in life. I was almost 50.

(10:34) I had understood before I believed that you as I wrote in a a novel once a character says you have to believe in a god of the sad world because the world is a sad place. And that’s that’s I think is is something that literature prepares you for. As CS Lewis had that wonderful line like you don’t have to be afraid of introducing children to dragons.

(10:54) They already know they’re are dragons. What you’re telling them is that they can be slain. You know, and I think that that’s that is what fiction does. It shows you that there’s meaning even in a in a play like Macbeth which seems like where at the end Macbeth says there is no meaning. He’s saying that because he has detached himself from the moral order.

(11:12) And I think that that’s a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful play about very dark ugly things. Well, I think the point has to be made or should be made that there are uh many works of art particularly within the last century and change that glorify evil and that revel in darkness in a way that glorifies darkness.

(11:34) I think some of the film I wrote an essay some years ago about some of Scorsese’s films and uh how I was physically sick watching one of them and it struck me that he he’s crossed the line into reveling somehow in this there was no there is no redemption and that’s possible and so I think that you know there there there’s a place let’s say for a haze code or where people say listen we we don’t want to promote lawlessness and so There are all kinds of ways you can get this right and get this wrong. And I think that the nealism

(12:08) that you find in a lot of, you know, more more modern uh works of art, fiction, film, um can can mislead people. But what we’re talking about really is this rare beautiful idea that we can go into a dark place. I think frankly uh Mel Gibson did this in the film The Passion. Yes. and he’s done and in Apocalypto. Yeah.

(12:33) And in other films where he goes to a very dark place, but has the artistic talent and power to find redemption and it makes it so powerful, but that’s very rare. Yeah. And there’s even a difference there’s a difference between say an Agatha Christie who is using murder as a as a sort of plot device and and this thing that happened in Hollywood while I was there. Uh because I love ghost stories.

(13:00) I’ve always loved ghost stories and ghost stories became quite popular when I arrived in Hollywood. So I was making this great living churning out these ghost story scripts. And what happens in Hollywood is everything circles the drain. Everything is drawn down by greed and the need to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

(13:17) And so they call you in, they find out, oh, you’re a good ghost story writer. And they’ll call you in and they’ll say, well, we have a story we want you to write. This literally happened to me. One of the many jobs I lost in Hollywood was the guy said to me, “We have this great idea.

(13:32) A guy kidnaps a woman and tortures her.” And I said, “Yeah.” And he that’s the idea. And I said like a dope. What did you pay for that idea? I said I said, “You know, when when I see a woman being chased by a killer across the screen, I’m rooting for the woman.” And like the next thing I knew, I was out in the parking lot, you know, cuz that was not what they were looking for.

(13:54) But that was actually a genre is people being basically in the first act that women would take off their clothes and in the second act they’d cut them to pieces and that that is a real thing that I think evolves out of materialism and out of the sort of out of greed and and is totally different than what I’m talking about although I do mention some book some stories like that that are really interesting but but I think that what I’m talking about are things that somehow spoke to actual artists. Yeah.

(14:22) uh and and made them bring something out of them that actually is beautiful. If you think these conversations are valuable, would you do us a favor and please like this video and subscribe to this channel? When you do that, you help us get these conversations out to a wider audience by telling YouTube uh that people are interested in this.

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