How to Write a Realistic Conversion Without Being Preachy

By Josiah DeGraaf

Perhaps one of the most difficult things to depict in Christian fiction is a realistic conversion.

You wouldn’t necessarily know that from the number of times they happen in Christian fiction.  But a lot of the time, when a conversion is attempted, I can’t help but be disappointed by the event.  Not because I don’t like to see conversions.  But because I want to see them done well.

A lot of the time, it seems like something ends up missing from the picture.  The decision is made too quickly in a way that seems hasty and out-of-character.  The decision is based on a reason too simple—like one bad thing going wrong, or one mini-sermon from a Christian character suddenly completely changing an atheist who has been strongly believing one thing his whole life.

There’s a tendency to know ahead of time what’s going to be coming when an atheist walks onto the stage of a Christian novel.  And so it becomes kind of bland and uneventful when he actually does convert.

There is, perhaps, a strange sense of irony that one of the best conversions I’ve seen exhibited in fiction was in a work written by a deist.  But Jean Valjean’s conversion at the beginning of Les Miserables wins high marks for me for its ability to show a conversion that is incredibly convincing and incredibly passionate.  And this got me to thinking: what is it about many conversions in Christian fiction that causes them not to work well?  And what can we do as writers to avoid those problems when writing conversion scenes?

Why Stories are Powerful

Before we answer these questions, we’re going to have to take a step back to consider what a novel itself is and how it’s supposed to have a strong theme and message.

Frank Capra once famously said concerning storytelling, that “if you want to send a message, try Western Union.”  But if a story has nothing of actual value to impart—if it embodies no eternal truths in it—what’s the point of the story?

That being said, literature is going to give a message in a different way than a sermon or a speech.  Sermons and speeches rely on the power of carefully-constructed reasons and intellectual arguments to convince someone of a certain point.  But I think we all probably innately recognize the difference between a sermon and a story.

Where a sermon relies on intellectual arguments, stories—and particularly novels—rely on powerful mental images and the inner lives of characters to showcase a point.  The classic writing adage of “show, don’t tell,” should come to mind here.

The role of emotions in storytelling

In a fascinating article entitled The Novel as Protestant Art, Joseph Bottum writes that, “Feelings and internal consciousness become more than important—they become vital—in the modern turn to the self.  This is what the novel as an art form emerged to address, and what the novel as an art form encouraged into ever-greater growth. The inner life, self-consciousness as self-understanding, becomes the manifestation of virtue and the path for grasping salvation.”

The novel as a literary form is built on the ability to get inside a person’s mind and see his emotions and inner struggles as he goes through life, which is why some of the greatest novels—Count of Monte Cristo, Tale of Two Cities, Brothers Karamazov, etc.—are those that heavily emphasize these factors.

Often, these internal changes within a character over the course of a novel are called character arcs—and these character arcs are primarily not intellectual ones.  Rather, they emphasize the emotions and feelings of a character in their internal structures, although intellectual struggles are not abandoned.

Given this, when writing a conversion, it is important to keep in mind that the novel as an art form does not readily lend itself to great intellectual arguments and speeches.  It’s more focused on emotions and the inner life, and a realistic conversion must therefore look at these elements if we are to portray it in a way that befits the genre.  Having a character convert just because he heard a really good speech for why God has to exist probably isn’t going to be convincing because of that.

Using the Character Arc As a Model

In order to portray a conversion in a way which befits the genre, we must look at the character arc as a guide for writing a realistic conversion.

For those who may be less familiar with character arcs, a character arc is basically the process by which a character changes his values and behavior to reflect greater conformity to an all-important truth.  This could be a move from despair to hope, from anger to peace, from fear to courage, from voluptuousness to self-control.

Well-done character arcs are often those that explore these themes to the greatest amounts by pushing the character right up to the brink.  If a character is to learn how to hope, if we want to tell a good story, we can’t just give him an easy ride by giving him little things to despair about.  Rather, if we are to fully explore the importance of hope, we’re going to have to show the character the worst of despair—to bring him to the place where hope couldn’t be any further away—before finally bringing him back to once again see that hope can still exist even in a darkened world.

This then lends us valuable aid in how to craft a realistic conversion.  If we want to show our readers how valuable Christ is, we can’t get away with just having a character believe because God was simply the more rational option, or because it was merely a slightly better option than being an atheist.  No—if we want to truly show it in an impactful way we’re going to have to show the depths of despair that will occur without Christ.

In the case of Les Miserables, this is done by showing the audience Valjean’s absolute confusion about the grace given him by a bishop, a grace that does not—cannot—fit into his own worldview, a grace that blows his previous worldview to smithereens and leads him to fully accept the Gospel.

Of course, this should come as little surprise to us, that such is the way to realistically portray a conversion in fiction.  And why is that?  It is because the Bible already points to this truth.  Look at Ephesians 2 and how Paul describes our conversion process.  He describes us as being dead in our sins, ruled by the prince of darkness, without hope and without God in the world.

To come to Christ, we must acknowledge our need of a Savior.  And we cannot acknowledge our need of a Savior without realizing the depths of our own sinfulness.  Our sin drives us to Christ as the only possible way to relieve us from our sin.

Crafting a Convincing Conversion

How then do we craft a convincing conversion?  We do it by faithfully portraying reality in a way that is consistent with the genre of fiction.  We guide a character’s internal struggles to a point where he can’t solve his own struggles any other way, where he sees the inadequacies of any other route, and where the only viable solution to his struggles is to turn to Christ for an answer.  When done well it works beautifully in fiction.  And it works beautifully because it conforms to reality.

Writing realistic conversions is a difficult process.  Real-life conversions are complex, tend to defy categorization, and are only accomplished through the work of the Holy Spirit.  And so, to the extent that fiction in some way mirrors reality, fictional conversions will therefore have to be carefully crafted, carefully tuned, and carefully developed.  But by following standard writing techniques and using biblical principles, it is possible to write a realistic conversion.

As Christian fiction writers, we have the opportunity to depict an amazing supernatural event in our novels.

Let’s make sure that we take advantage of, rather than squander, this opportunity.