The Sanitized Gospel

There’s a peculiar genre of fiction that has emerged in recent years called “clean fiction.” The premise sounds noble enough: stories without profanity, without graphic violence, without anything that might make a reader uncomfortable. And yet, I’ve noticed something strange in the way some readers approach such books.

They want stories about courage, but without real danger. They want stories about temptation overcome, but without the temptation itself feeling genuinely tempting. They want spiritual warfare where the demons are cartoon villains, where evil is so obviously evil that no one could possibly be drawn to it.

I’ve received emails from readers troubled when a character in one of my novels faces actual darkness, when sin appears alluring rather than ugly, when the battle for a soul looks like a battle rather than a foregone conclusion. They wanted the victory without the struggle. They wanted the testimony without the trial.

And I’ve come to realize this isn’t just a literary preference. It’s a spiritual one. It is, perhaps, the great temptation of the comfortable Christian: to want a faith without the cross.

Imagine, for a moment, a Bible with the inconvenient parts removed. The Beatitudes would remain (maybe). The parable of the Good Samaritan would stay. Jesus blessing the children, certainly. The miracles, especially the gentle ones, the healings, the feeding of the five thousand. We’d keep the Sermon on the Mount, though perhaps we’d edit out the parts about plucking out eyes and cutting off hands.

But Gethsemane? The sweat like drops of blood? The kiss of betrayal? The thorns pressed into a holy skull? The flesh torn open by Roman scourges? The nails? The cry of dereliction—”My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)?

We’d rather not.

We want, as it were, the Galilean Jesus without the Jerusalem Jesus. We want the Teacher beside the still waters but not the Lamb led to slaughter. We want a faith that fits comfortably in a coffee mug verse, embroidered on a pillow, posted on social media with a sunset filter.

But the Gospel will not be sanitized. The Gospel insists on blood. It insists on agony. It insists that the way to resurrection runs straight through Calvary, and there is no detour, no bypass, no spiritual GPS that will recalculate a cleaner route.

Jesus said it Himself: ”If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). Note the word daily. This is not a one-time inconvenience. This is the shape of the Christian life.

 

What “Clean” Christianity Costs Us

When we demand a sanitized faith, we lose something essential. We lose the very thing that makes Christianity Christianity rather than mere moralism.

A faith without the cross becomes self-improvement. It becomes a list of behaviors to avoid and habits to cultivate. It becomes the kind of religion that teaches us to be polite, well-mannered, and respectable. We can attend such a religion’s gatherings, sing its songs, and leave largely unchanged, because nothing has been demanded of us that costs anything.

But the real Gospel is not a self-improvement program. It is a death and a resurrection. Saint Paul understood this with terrifying clarity: ”I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:19-20).

Crucified. Not merely improved. Not gradually better behaved. Crucified.

This is why some readers, and indeed some Christians, balk when they encounter spiritual writing or fiction that takes evil seriously. To take evil seriously is to acknowledge that we live in a world where sin is genuinely attractive, where temptation actually tempts, where the battle for our souls is not theatrical but real. And if the battle is real, then we cannot stand on the sidelines pretending to be spectators. We are combatants, whether we like it or not.

The desire for “clean” Christianity is, at its root, the desire to remain a spectator. It is the wish to watch the crucifixion from a safe distance, to admire it as theology rather than to be undone by it as reality.

 

The Wound and the Washing

There’s a profound event revealed in the Johannine account of the crucifixion. As Jesus hangs dead upon the cross, a soldier pierces His side, ”and at once blood and water came out” (John 19:34).

The Church Fathers saw in this a great mystery. From the wounded side of the New Adam, as Eve was drawn from the side of the first Adam, the Church is born. The water of baptism. The blood of the Eucharist. The sacraments flow from a wound.

Saint Augustine wrote of this passage: “The evangelist used a significant word, so that he did not say, ‘pierced his side,’ or ‘wounded,’ or anything else, but ‘opened,’ that thereby, in a sense, the gate of life might be thrown open, from whence have flowed forth the sacraments of the Church, without which there is no entering into the life which is true life” (Tractates on the Gospel of John, 120.2).

Did you catch that? The gate of life is opened by a wound.

We cannot have the cleansing without the wound. We cannot have the water without the blood. We cannot have the resurrection without the death. The Christian who insists on tidiness is asking for a closed gate.

 

The Honest Darkness of Scripture

The Bible itself, if we read it honestly, is not a “clean” book. It contains the most appalling violence, the most intimate betrayals, the most graphic accounts of human depravity. David sees Bathsheba bathing and arranges to murder her husband. Tamar is raped by her brother. Judges ends with the words ”In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes” (Judges 21:25), and the chapters preceding that verse contain horrors I will not catalog here.

 

I had to wonder, receiving an e-mail from a reader who thought a scene that described (in veiled, relatively tame terms, with no unnecessary graphic descriptions) the goings on at a fraternity party as “inappropriate for a Christian book,” if the same reader would think that the Bible itself was appropriate as a Christian book.

Why are these stories in our sacred text? Because the Bible refuses to lie about who we are. It refuses to pretend that human beings, left to ourselves, are basically nice. It refuses to airbrush the human condition into something prettier than it is.

And precisely because the Bible is honest about darkness, its proclamation of light is meaningful. ”The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5). This declaration only matters if the darkness is real. If the darkness is merely a shadow, a slight dimming, a minor inconvenience, then the light is no great triumph. But if the darkness is what Scripture says it is—deep, real, hungry, relentless—then the light shining in it is the very salvation of the world.

 

When Faith Gets Uncomfortable

Here is a question worth sitting with: when was the last time your faith made you uncomfortable?

Not inconvenienced—we’re all inconvenienced by Sunday mornings or the offering plate. But genuinely uncomfortable. When did your faith last require something of you that hurt? When did it last ask you to face a sin in yourself that you’d rather not see? When did it last demand you forgive someone you’d rather not forgive, or love someone you’d rather not love, or speak a truth you’d rather not speak?

If we cannot remember, we should be concerned. Not because suffering is the goal, but because the absence of any cross suggests we may have crafted a counterfeit faith—one that affirms us where we are rather than calling us to where Christ is.

The author of Hebrews puts it plainly: ”In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood” (Hebrews 12:4). The Christian life is described as a struggle, an athletic contest, a warfare. Not a leisurely stroll.

 

Practical Steps for Embracing the Whole Gospel

How, then, do we live this in our daily lives?

First, read Scripture in its fullness. Don’t skip the hard parts. Don’t fast-forward through Holy Week to Easter. Sit in Gethsemane. Stand at the foot of the cross. Let the Passion narratives do their work in you. Try, this Lent or this week, reading slowly through the suffering of Christ in one of the Gospels, asking the Lord to let you feel the weight of what He bore.

Second, examine your spiritual diet. What books do you read? What podcasts do you listen to? What sermons feed your soul? If everything is comfortable, encouraging, and never challenges you, the diet is incomplete. Seek out voices that take sin seriously and grace seriously, that acknowledge darkness and proclaim light.

Third, make an honest examination of conscience. Not the cursory kind. The kind where you sit before the crucifix and ask the Lord to show you what He sees. This is uncomfortable work. It is also the work that leads to real freedom. ”If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:8-9). The cleansing comes after the confession, not before.

Fourth, do not fear the dark valleys. When suffering comes—and it will—do not assume God has abandoned you or that you have done something wrong. The cross is not a sign of God’s absence; it is the very place where God is most present. ”Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me” (Psalm 23:4).

Fifth, accompany others in their darkness. It is easy to offer platitudes to the suffering. It is harder, and far more Christlike, to sit with them in silence, to weep with those who weep, to enter their darkness without trying to immediately illuminate it. Christ did not avoid our suffering; He entered it. We are called to do the same for one another.

 

Finally, don't e-mail me saying my books aren't clean enough. JK, sort of. 🤣

 

The Light We Cannot Know Without the Dark

We cannot know the light without first knowing the darkness. Not because darkness is good—it is not—but because the eye accustomed only to dim things cannot perceive true brightness. We must be stripped of our illusions, including the illusion that faith is comfortable, before we can receive what God actually offers.

What He offers is not a clean fiction. It is a true story, with real wounds and real blood and real death and real, astonishing resurrection. It is messy. It is costly. It is the only story that can save us.

The cross was not pretty. The tomb was not tidy. But on the third day, the stone rolled away, and the universe itself was made new.

This is the faith we have been given. Let us not settle for less.

 

God Bless,

Judah

 

P.S. My books are pretty "clean" in the sense that they do not use foul language, or describe any explicit/inappropriate situations in detail. However, they do present real temptations, and real evil in the world. In that respect I do not, and cannot, cut corners. To minimize that would be to rob the books of their force, and it would diminish the Gospel message I'm hoping to communicate within.