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Like Princess-Foo said, there’s many different definitions of cleanliness. Would you classify Lord of the Rings as perfectly clean? Sure, there’s no sex scenes, swearing, or super excessive violence, but it still tackles very dark themes at times and it also has characters like Gollum or Orcs that can be quite scary or even demonic at times. But do we every classify Lord of the Rings as an unclean book? No, because there’s a difference between cleanliness and reality. Cleanliness, to me, means that I’m not going to stumble across a sex scene or some weird cult, or have to sit through 400 pages of swearing. Cleanliness does not mean that we can’t handle things like mental illnesses, abuse, injuries, war, etc. It shouldn’t mean that we can’t handle these things.

The whole purpose of “clean” fiction is to offer us something to read that we don’t have to worry about worldly things being portrayed in a positive light that isn’t the character’s perspectives. In clean fiction, a character may think, for example, sex before marriage is okay–but their opinion should be clearly defined as their own and not the author’s, or be pushed on the reader. I may have a character say he’s done drugs before, and that they’re great–but does that mean I support them? Absolutely not. It’s the meaning behind the portrayal that really matter, the purpose. In non-Christian fiction, a lot of times sex/drugs/alcohol is portrayed as normal, cool, and maybe even good. Now, I could put those topics all into a Christian novel–but even if the characters thought they were fun and cool, I would be clear to show the negative effects as well and show why we know it’s bad.

To be honest, most of the Christian fiction I’ve read is very bland, boring, and white-washed to the point that even saying the word “drugs” might get you called out for sacrilege, it seems. The few books I’ve read that don’t whitewash some things were amazing, but still had some sense of the “clean” appearance too them. Not that that’s bad–but I think that we should portray the world as it is in it’s fallen state, not glorify it to be better than it is. Showing the world as an okay, alright place isn’t write because that’s not how it is. It just isn’t. Things might be good about it, but it itself is not good. We’re not good. Whitewashing that does nothing except make yourself and your writing seem insincere and cheesy, in my opinion.

Does this mean I think that books with more mature content should be labeled “clean” and allowed to be read by not mature enough kids(and adults)? No. I just think that we should realize that whitewashing the world into something it’s not isn’t doing us any benefits. You can write a world that’s simpler and easier than ours, but don’t try to fit ours into the simple and easy box. It doesn’t work that way.