Melissa and I recently watched the first season of The Baxters. It’s a TV-style series on Amazon Prime based on Karen Kingsbury’s Redemption Christian book series.

There’s a lot of good to be said about The Baxters and the reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly positive. However, the story fell short when trying to incorporate one “gritty” element.

I try to pay attention to what’s happening in Christian media, and I try to celebrate what’s good. Even when things are not as good as they need to be, I try to see where we’re making progress.

If we want to make progress, we need to subject Christian media to critique. Usually, secular media blows Christian media away in terms of quality (sorry, it’s just true). Secular media is subjected to a culture of critique. If you produce a film, show, movie or book in a secular environment, you expect that critics will talk about it. This process identifies areas of improvement. Then the next thing is often better.

Christian media largely doesn’t get talked about at all, and when we do talk about it, we’re way too easy on it.

A few years ago, I published a thoughtful, fair critique of The Chosen, and it was legitimately the first time I ever received hate mail. Apparently, critique was off-limits. You can read my article here and decide for yourself if you think it’s fair: https://bradpauquette.com/2021/07/is-the-chosen-a-failure/

There are some things that The Baxters did really well. It has a mainstream feel to the production quality, there’s a clear set of driving values, and it’s not afraid to explore the messiness of real human relationships.

Now, the actors smile way too much, not all of the performances were great, and there were some timeline and clarity issues to the story. At times it felt really cheesy and the title sequence is straight out of the CW network circa 2001.

But I think it’s a safe show, and there’s a market for that. I think they nailed their audience (which admittedly is not me). The overwhelmingly positive reviews on Amazon confirm this.

My chief complaint is how they handled one “gritty” aspect of the story.

One character is supposed to be slipping into alcoholism. The portrayal falls flat in every way. I don’t think the writer or the actor has ever seen a drunk person in real life. There’s no evidence they have any experience with alcoholics beyond what they’ve seen in books and movies. 

This particular storyline is unbelievable, unengaging, and it’s borderline disrespectful to people who have lived, or love those who have lived, that experience.

There’s a lot of pressure on Christian writers to be “gritty”—to write more than just surface level, sweet stories.

At The Company, we work with a lot of authors who want to do grit really well and want to break the box of Christian fiction. We fully support them in that. If that’s your calling, let’s do gritty better than ever before.

In Ephesians 5:11, Paul told us, “Take no part in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead expose them.” For those who are called to expose the darkness, I want to help them develop the maturity and wisdom to do it well.

But let’s also acknowledge that’s not everyone’s calling.

There’s an old adage in writing, “Write what you know.”

Let me update that: “Write what you know, or what you’re willing to learn.”

If you’re not willing (or ready) to learn about a particular grit in the world, then don’t write about it. Don’t bow to that temptation to be gritty for gritty’s sake.

When we don’t do the hard work to really learn about a darkness we want to expose, what we write just becomes a copy of a copy. It becomes a caricature of the real thing, like those cartoon portraits of yourself you can buy at the beach.

Readers can tell, especially readers who have any experience with the real thing. When it falls flat, it can even be counterproductive. It can come off as just another pandering, judgmental, fake Christian attempt to be relevant.

In our example from The Baxters, how would you really learn about drunkenness and alcoholism?

• You could go to a real AA meeting. You can walk past all the smokers outside the front door, sit in that rickety folding chair in some concrete block basement, and observe the people around you. You can watch how they group together and how they talk to one another. You can observe the sights, sounds, and smells of people on that journey.
• You can go to a bar, order a soda, hang out all night and observe how drunk people move, talk, and interact with each other. You can keep coming back until you can tell the difference, by mannerism alone, between the people who are there to get drunk and the people who are just lonely or bored.
• You can make friends with an alcoholic and spend enough time together that you get to hear their real experience.

And you may not be ready for any of that. And that’s OK. Don’t let anybody push you into that if you can’t do it in a way that will be morally and physically safe for you.

But then don’t write about it either.

It is absolutely OK, good even, to write about experiences that you haven’t personally lived. Being able to empathize with someone who has a different life than you is one of the core assets of the written word. Books can provide that empathetic experience in a way that movies cannot.

But we have to do the work to be fair to the experience we’re describing.

Write what you know, or what you’re willing to learn. Don’t be gritty just to be gritty. “Expose the darkness” only when God has given you courage, opportunity, and insight to speak in a way that is real about that darkness.

-Brad Pauquette
Writing Mentor & Publishing Expert

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