Reading: A Storytelling Renaissance

A Storytelling Renaissance

By Adam Navis

If you were looking for a new podcast in the summer of 2014, you probably heard about Serial. The series told the story of Syed Adnan, who was convicted of the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee while they were both still in high school. It was such a phenomena that you didn't need to go to iTunes' "most popular” podcast list to find it. You could just as easily hear about it on Facebook, Twitter, or directly from a zealous friend.

What set Serial apart from other story-based programs was that the producers wanted to attempt long-form storytelling. They wanted to serialize a single story. This was counter to perceived wisdom: listeners wouldn't (or couldn't) pay attention to something so demanding. Where a radio show like This American Life (which perennially sits atop the "most popular” list and which supported Serial) might tell three to five stories around a single theme each week, Serial wanted to test if it was possible to do the opposite: to tell a single story spread out over twelve weeks.

One strength of Serial was Sarah Koening, the host and co-executive producer. She was an experienced and skilled journalist, having worked for The New York Times, ABC News, and as a producer on This American Life. But while her experience accounts for the quality of the show, it doesn't account for its unprecedented popularity. Koening hoped that the twelve episode run might generate 300,000 downloads, but by December of 2014, Serial had been downloaded over 78 million times.^[1] It would also go on to win a 2014 Peabody Award.[2]

Could anyone have predicted Serial's success? Well, if you knew where to look, there were hints that people were ready for a show like Serial. For example, millions of people already listened to storytelling-based radio shows like The Moth Radio Hour, Snap Judgment, Story Corp and the aforementioned This American Life, so storytelling was alive and well on the radio. But not only on the radio was storytelling going through a bit of a revival. It was happening all across popular culture.

For instance, television has been moving away from sitcoms, a form that has dominated the last thirty years, and toward long-arch narrative shows like Lost, The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Battlestar Galactica, Breaking Bad, and Parenthood.[3] On-demand services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu, have given producers room to take risks with form and subject matter. Shows like Orange is the New Black, Transparent, or Girls might have been canceled on traditional channels, if they had even been given the green light. Current television programming is so good at creating intriguing and complex characters and inserting them into emotionally fraught situations that John Landgraf, the CEO of the FX channel claimed America is at "peak television” and is now facing the problem of shows that are merely good stealing audiences from shows that are truly great.[4]

Yet, even if you don't watch much television, if you follow sports, you'll find strong narrative framing. There have always been the conventional sports stories like, "David vs. Goliath,” "The Comeback,” and "The Second-String Stepping Up.” But in 1979, a start-up cable channel called ESPN gave people the ability to know everything about a player's life both on and off the field. Now, because of the Internet, when college or professional athletes appear in front of live and television audiences--on stages of grass, wood, or ice--we often know as much about their personal lives as their previous performances.^[5] The drama over rivalries, personal scandals, potential trades, and statistical predictions can make it hard to tell the difference between Monday Night Football and Friday Night Lights.

Video games were once seen as the antithesis to sports and were dismissed as childish and anti-social. They are now serious business: massively popular and incredibly profitable. But while there is a great diversity in the kinds of games, many are narratively driven.[6] Where a puzzle game like Tetris (popular in the late '80s and early '90s) consisted merely of a series of falling blocks, now a similarly popular puzzle game, Candy Crush (released 2012), places each puzzle within a series of train stops through various candy-themed lands. Even massively popular first-person shooters like Call of Duty and Halo, or action-adventure games like Assassin's Creed, are woven into a narrative framework, spinning out their own mythologies, texts,[7] and movies.[8]

Not to forget traditional book publishing, which remains strong in spite of its struggles to respond to the rise of digital publishing.^[9] While independent books stores are shutting down, self-publishing--including e-books, blogs, and interactive stories--has thrown open the gate to anyone with a good story to tell. And like video games, forms that were once viewed as lowbrow, childish, or hard to categorize (like the graphic novel), are setting records in popularity, sales, and critical attention.[10] And yet, there are still plenty of traditional books like Harry Potter, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Hunger Games, or Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman that create cultural touch points across class, geography, and generation.

Which still doesn't answer the question, "Could anyone have predicted the success of Serial?” And truthfully, the answer is less important than recognizing that Serial wouldn't have been successful if the audience hadn't been ready for it. Stories and storytelling have always been part of life, but they were often dismissed as merely entertaining, occasionally illustrative, but solidly childish--a thing to be left behind as we grow into adulthood. They are rarely taken seriously as a form of public discourse. But even a cursory survey reveals that storytelling is being taken seriously in conversations about education, science, marketing, politics, art, and psychology. People are recognizing that storytelling has rhetorical power, transformative impact, and is a fundamental part of the human experience.

And yet, too few Christians are participating in these conversations. Too few are embracing storytelling with passion and intellectual rigor. One of the goals of this work is to move the conversation about story from the margins toward the center. Another goal is to provide a basic vocabulary for those people who feel the value of stories but can't articulate why. Failure in either of these two areas risks widening the divide between Christians and the world they want to reach. Sadly, this is too often the case. The world speaks the language of storytelling and is labeled "postmodern,” while Christians speak about moral absolutes and are labeled "out of touch.” Which leads us to ask: "Why are some Christians hesitant to embrace storytelling?”

After all, stories are as old as time and all around us. They are part of the Bible and often used by Jesus to tell people about the Kingdom of God. They are simple and powerful. And in a moment we will see that some Christians and institutions do, in fact, see storytelling as an essential part of Christianity. Yet, fiction ranks third in sales at Christian bookstores nationally, behind Bibles and non-fiction, and is quickly losing ground to candles, tote bags, and lotion.[11] The fiction this billon-dollar-per-year industry does produce are often a type of storytelling that writer Ron Hansen explains this way, "There's a kind of fiction, that kind that, unfortunately, some Christian bookstores prefer, which is evangelization and testimony. This is how my life was saved, where I found Jesus as my Lord and Savior. But that's not how Jesus himself would have told the story.”[12] Popular fiction titles in Christian publishing lean toward conspiracy theory, Amish romance, historical thriller, or post-apocalyptic survival tale.

There is a reason that some Christians living in the United States might prefer nonfiction to fiction, but to understand this reason, we need to place ourselves along a specific trajectory of time--one that starts slowly with the early church, picks up momentum with the Protestant Reformation, gains speed with the American Revolution, and reaches full tilt around the turn of the century with the invention of the Internet. Be warned: not all stops on this journey are pleasant.

The early church did not have what could be considered an art scene. According to church historian Justo L. Gonzalez, early Christians were simple people who were filled with joy at being chosen and loved by Christ the Lord. But because most were poor, their lives "took place in the drab routine in which the poor in all societies must live.”[13] Any art they produced was based around their worship and life together. This included illustrations of biblical stories, icons of Christ, or decorative catacombs.

However, after Constantine converted to Christianity and made it the state religion, Christianity began to take on some of the features common to "imperial protocol.”[14] Church buildings became much more elaborate, marked by majestic basilicas and intricate mosaics. Ministers donned vestments that heightened their station. Worship services often began with a processional, including a choir and incense--which were customs borrowed from the imperial court, which themselves drew on Jewish temple practices. Still, the subject of art was unchanged; mosaics remained mostly biblical scenes or images of people from Christian tradition (or wealthy patrons of the church). The only change was that the setting became more opulent, the materials of better quality, and the art more ornate.

For the next thousand years, the Church and the nobility were the only significant social structures that supported art, because they were the only ones that could afford to. Most people did not have time for leisure or recreation. They were too busy trying to survive. This situation does not mean that significant works of art were not created. Some of the greatest works of western art are based on Christian tradition and were commissioned by the church. Though there were many, just the two most recognizable artists illustrate this point. Michelangelo gave us David, the Sistine Chapel, Pieta, and The Last Judgment. DaVinci created The Last Supper, the Annunciation, and The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.

During this time, while works like Dante's The Divine Comedy were being written, there wasn't a literary tradition that could rival the visual arts. There was simply no means to mass-produce books. There were local, oral, storytelling traditions, and even traveling theater, but it wasn't until the Gutenberg Press that it was possible to have books as we know them: uniform, portable, and relatively cheap compared to the hand-drawn labor-intensive volumes that came before. Which does not mean they were so cheap that just anyone could print them. It was still only the Church, the aristocracy, and the growing merchant class who could afford to print tracts and pamphlets as well as knew how to read them. And while mass literacy was still a long way off, the printing press began a paradigmatic shift in storytelling--away from being primarily a corporate, theatrical event and toward being an individual, mobile, and timeless artifact that would eventually become the novel.

Around this same time, and aided by Gutenberg's movable type, the Protestant Reformation was shattering the Catholic Church. For the purposes of this work, the reasons for this division are less important than the fact that the Protestant Reformation spun out a number of subgroups within Christianity, including Baptists, Anabaptists, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans and various other groups that bloomed and faded over the next two hundred years. Furthermore, the implications of the Reformation were as political as they were religious, and many of these groups found themselves persecuted by, or even at war with, dominant political powers. These groups yearned for a place where they could escape persecution, live free, and practice their faith without fear of being run through with a pike. They turned their eyes to America.

This is the basis of what America celebrates every Thanksgiving. The people we call "pilgrims” were really a Puritan group fleeing persecution in England. But they were not the only group to flee to the "New World.” In fact, refugee communities popped up all along the east coast of what we now call the United States, but were at the time, colonies of Britain.[15] However, if there remained any allegiance to the Church of England or to their European homelands, it was broken by American independence.

By the time the dust settled on the Revolutionary War, religious communities throughout the eastern United States would be marked by a tension between a desire to isolate themselves in order to protect their group's independence and a wish to participate in the American experiment of freedom, progress, and representative government--in several cases this participation was so strong that a person's standing in the religious community determined whether one could vote, hold office, or testify in court.[16] It was a tension between isolation and participation that continues to mark social, political, and religious conversations in America to this day.

During this time there was still not a large Christian literary scene. Many of the immigrant communities, in rejecting the churches of Europe, also rejected lavish, ornate art and baroque architecture. There were those Lutheran and Anglican churches who followed their European forbears by embracing art of a certain piety, but many churches in the Reformed, Puritan, and Presbyterian tradition designed churches that were simple, white, and unadorned. Clothing was black, functional, and modest. People read the Bible, but often avoided dancing and were suspicious of the theater--which they viewed as inherently duplicitous. Christian art remained biblical, literal, and patriotic.

However, because religious freedom was woven into the fabric of the United States, as time went on the threat of religious persecution began to lessen. Christian groups flourished and began to integrate into society in ways that brought them both political and economic influence. They started schools and colleges, established newspapers, composed music, held conventions, formed publishing houses, and held public office. Ironically, as these Christians began to prosper, many of them began to use their influence to persecute others.

Part of the reason for this was that many Christians saw their flourishing as a sign of God's blessing--not only to them as individuals, but to America in general. This belief justified a theology called Manifest Destiny. This was the belief that God wanted America to spread from the east coast across the country to the west coast. And, if God wanted it, the thinking went, it was justified to kill and displace native people, go to war with Mexico, and kidnap and enslave people from Africa. After all, if God had handpicked America as his chosen people, who were we to let a little thing like the humanity of people with darker skin get in the way? This view continues to be part of our campaign rhetoric, foreign policy stances, and the basic tenant of conservative talk radio shows like The Rush Limbaugh Show.

Intolerances and indifferences arose among Christians because in order to maintain the belief in American exceptionalism, Christian society has had to ignore the stories and experiences that did not fit this narrative. This has included invalidating the stories of native peoples, slaves, Mexicans, child labor, women, LGBTQ people, African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Arab-Americans, people in poverty, victims of rape, victims of domestic violence, victims of gun crime, victims of hate crimes, and prisoners--anyone whose narrative does not fit the arch of personal agency, individual responsibility, and hard work that automatically yields financial blessing. For hundreds of years, white, protestant men have been able to do this. They have controlled the money, votes, and means of communication. They've told the story they wanted to tell and ignored or attacked any outlier narratives. The tension between participation and isolation did not go away once Christians had power; instead, it transformed into a question of letting others participate in society or forcing them to remain isolated.[17]

But this single social narrative became increasingly more difficult to maintain. There was a steady knocking at the door of people who were crying out that, "Your America is not my America.” Writers like Fredrick Douglas, W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Cornel West, and Ta-Nahesi Coates represent the tradition of writers who had tried to rewrite the American narrative to include the stories of people of color. Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan, Alice Walker, and Gloria Steinem and others tried to expand the American narrative to include women's experiences, pain, and struggles. And while the stories of people of color and women have been the most visible, there are writers working to expand the American narrative to include the stories of Americans of various ethnicities, sexualities, and life circumstances.

However, these marginalized voices were a relative trickle in comparison to the class-five rapids roaring about how great and wonderful and blessed America was. In 1984 Ronald Regan accepted the Republican nomination for President with a speech that referred to America as "a shining city on a hill.” This image is found in Matthew 5:14 but also references a Puritan sermon of 1630 capturing the common notion held by the people of New England that the newly founded city of Boston would be both literally and figuratively a beacon in the darkness. This thread of American exceptionalism is woven throughout the first 200 years of American history. It is more visible at some times than others, but it never disappears. Even as minority groups celebrated the American Dream from which they were being excluded, they continued to push to tell their stories of struggle and injustice. And in 2001, two things happened that started to speed up the unraveling of this narrative of American exceptionalism: the attacks of September 11 and the Internet reaching a critical mass of people.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 catalyzed a shift in the American public consciousness. Many Americans reacted by being suspicious of people who looked vaguely Arabic, accepted the suspension of some basic rights though the Patriot Act, and measured the patriotism of their politicians by whether they wore a flag pin in their lapel. However, others started to ask critical questions about what role American foreign policy had played in creating a situation where people were desperate enough to radicalize and die for their beliefs. There was a social conversation about the collateral damage of economic polices that put America's need for oil above the needs of any other country--and even of other countries' sovereignty.

It was also around this time that the Internet reached a critical mass of people. Facebook and iPhones were still a number of years away, but according to the US Census Bureau, 2001 was when over half of the homes in the United Stand had computers in them and 42% had access to the Internet.[18] While media corporations still had a stranglehold on information, an open-source revolution had begun. As more and more people began to get their news online, minority narratives began to find strength in numbers. People were able to respond to one another in something called a "comments section”--a thing that had once been restricted to the dinner table and an occasional "letter to the editor.” Social media would soon widen this highway of interpersonal interaction, and not only about news, but about all aspects of life. Now, not only would people have direct access to information, but they would also have an easy and direct connection to the people making the news and to other readers. Reaching a mass audience was no longer limited to those who had control over a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television program.

Of course, the Internet did not immediately provide the necessary agency to affect change, either on a personal or societal level, but it did offer an unprecedented ability to share the story of people who fell outside the dominant narrative. Which means that, over the last fifteen years, the narrative that God has specially chosen America as a "city on a hill” has been publically deconstructed over issues of race, gender, economics, sexuality, religion, media representations of people groups, housing, gentrification, capitalism, food ethics, urban planning, church abuse cover-ups, political corruption, the role of various lobbies, gun control, prison over-crowding, dependence on oil, and access to health care and education--to name a few.

Because the mainstream Christian narrative had been so woven into the American narrative, this deconstruction of American exceptionalism via the introduction of outlier narratives was seen as threatening. This pushed some Christian industries, institutions, and significant individuals to become further suspicious of storytelling and more ensconced in the language of tradition, dogma, creeds, and confessions--even as they risked deepening the disconnection between themselves and the culture they confess to want to reach. Christians resisted storytelling because they had so much to lose.

In a 2015 article in The Atlantic, Julie Beck wrote that American culture believes in, "American optimism--things will get better!--and American exceptionalism--I can make things better!--and it's in the water, in the air, and in our heads.” She notes how much of the time this is a helpful attribute, but that, "The trouble comes when redemption isn't possible. The redemptive American tale is one of privilege, and for those who can't control their circumstances, and have little reason to believe things will get better, it can be an illogical and unattainable choice.”[19]

This is the privilege of white American males (like myself): we've been telling a story, but we think we were describing reality. Since our story was the social narrative, we didn't have to understand systemic economic poverty, institutional racism, or the subtlety of gender identity. Now, white, American males are being presented with the stories of people they could not have conceived of ever hearing about just twenty years ago. These stories are complex, specific, and tragic. And white, American males are coming to grips with the fact that their basic assumptions about the world are wrong. Instead of being divinely blessed and standing on the mountaintop, they've actually been standing on someone's neck.

This realization is evoking two primary responses among white Christians. Either they rush to accept responsibility in order to avoid dwelling in the wound, or they deny that they have anything to do with the troubles of marginalized people. Each response reinforces the narrative of the particular subculture from which it came (example: conservative/liberal). But this is the selective exposure of the privileged. Both postures deny the full story: the former by not fully listening and the later by denial. This is a double injustice because people pushed to the margins of society often lack money, political influence, or social support; all they have is their stories.

And yet, there are those Christians who have chosen participation over isolation. These are writers who have tried to look at life in all its brokenness. They are confessing Christians and writers at the highest levels of literature. Flannery O'Connor (Wise Blood, Mystery and Manners), Madeline L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art), Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), John Updike (Rabbit Run), Joyce Carol Oates (The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, and Art), Fredrick Buechner (Speak What We Feel, Not What We Ought to Say: Reflections on Literature and Faith), and Toni Morrison (Beloved) are a sampling. There are also some social locations where conversations of faith and story are happening, including Calvin College's Festival of Faith & Writing, Seattle Pacific University's MFA degree and its associated IMAGE Journal, as well as The Collegeville Institute.

If Christians want to be able to interact with a dramatically changing world, isolation is no longer an option. Christians need to be willing to take the time to listen to the stories of people who do not look like, sound like, or believe like they do. Even if, historically, isolation served to protect a persecuted people, and even if it were still possible to maintain a single, dominant narrative, doing so would require violence--violence we have seen evidenced throughout American history. What is required is what Barbara Brown Taylor calls the language of "beholding.” As a preacher and teacher she recognizes the role of understanding what should be happening,[20] but she wonders if we aren't too eager to rush away from seeing what is. She writes that, "I have no idea where I am going either as a writer or a preacher, but I mean to stay in the beholding business as long as I can, following the same good advice that God seems to use on me: show, don't tell.” We live in a world of stories. If we can't speak the language of story--if we are obsessed with telling rather that showing--then all that is left is tribalism, self-justification, and irrelevant orthodoxy.