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Last year at this time, Lorehaven went all-digital: new articles every month, podcasts on Tuesdays, reviews on Fridays, plus news updates and other resources to help Christian fans explore fantastical stories for God’s glory. Today, we’re exploring which stories made the biggest impact on you, and catch up with the story creators who react to your reactions.

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Top Ten Lorehaven Stories in 2021

10. Christians Can’t Consistently Blame Leftist Fiction While Pushing Our Own Propaganda, Josiah DeGraaf

You can hear these complaints cross the Christian Interwebs:

“So-and-so author has ruined his stories by becoming too woke!”

“The LGBTQ+ Lobby is ruining stories.”

“Why can’t people just focus on good stories without politics—like they used to?”

We’ve heard complaints about secular storytelling before. Just look at the Disney boycotts back in the 1990s. Today, some particular controversies and language are different. For example, we say “cancelling” instead of “boycotting.” The underlying question is the same: should we read or watch stories with secular themes?

A new wave of Christian or Christian-adjacent pundits are answering no. They may not all demand to cancel shows, but they do prefer keeping them out of their lives.

Josiah’s update:

Apart from reiterating that I’m not talking to authors nor am I dealing with explicit elements, one thought I have as I reflect on that article and its responses is that this is likely going to become more and more of a challenge for Christians to deal with as Christian influences continue to wane in the West. Unless we just retreat into enclaves a la the Benedict Option, we’re going to have to deal with fiction containing hostile messages and have a realistic game plan for how much of it we should be consuming and–more importantly–how we are consuming it (and encouraging others to do so). One might argue that mimicking a certain Duke Leto by being noble and yet cunning in our consumption and response to pop culture can give us a path forward.

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