Would Jesus write crime fiction?

Cartoon by Ellis Rosen

After announcing the upcoming publication of my first book—a novella titled Body in a Barrel about a washed up Las Vegas mobster and, you guessed it, a body in a barrel—one of my most faithful readers stopped me at church and said, "Mob fiction? Really?"

This reader knows I write about Christianity and that I’ve written a novel about slavery in the early church (publishing in 2026). I take my faith seriously. Behind his question, I hear him wondering what a Christian is doing writing fiction about the Las Vegas mob.

Would Jesus write crime fiction?

Years ago, one of my favorite professors—an Anabaptist pacifist at Fuller Theological Seminary—had a bumper sticker stuck to her office door that read, “When Jesus told us to love our enemies, I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean kill them.” If we belong to a movement that centrally values love for all people, we shouldn’t enact or endorse violence. But, of course, there’s violence in crime fiction, and my book is no exception.

If you’ve ever watched a mob flick, you’ll also know that mobster characters often use foul language. Sometimes every second word from their mouths is ****. And I’ll admit my book has some of this too. How can I square this with Paul’s claim that obscene and vulgar talk is “entirely out of place” (Ephesians 5:4)?

There's a live question, here, about what counts as "vulgar" for Paul, and I'm not convinced he'd proscribe every use of every four-letter English word. After all, this is the man who said (in Philippians 3:8) his past achievements as a zealous Pharisee were "σκύβαλον", which may be translated as "crap," "excrement," or "****". Nevertheless, for the sake of my argument here, I'll just assume that Paul wouldn't approve of mobster talk.

So, restating the question plainly, given the violence and vulgarity in typical crime fiction, would Jesus write it? Should serious Christians write it?

Fiction: True Lies

My answer begins from Mr. Hemingway’s principle, which I cling to like a life raft: “A writer’s job is to tell the truth.” Of course, as a fiction writer, Hemingway didn't mean all writers should be journalists or non-fictionists, pumping out mere facts. But explaining how his principle applies to the falsehoods of fiction is tricky.

Whether intentionally or not, the best fiction communicates truths about the human condition. Even as it lies to you, with its pretend plots and contrived characters speaking made-up lines, fiction helps you see humanity more clearly, embrace its joys, and grapple with its problems.

And, at its best, fiction's special privilege is to do so with feeling. Emotion propels the truth of good fiction like a bowstring propels an arrow. Good fiction moves us, thereby wedging its truths deeper into our souls than non-fiction generally can.

How does fiction deliver that feeling? Through the vivid portrayal of human life. Good fiction gives us characters with believable histories and relatable desires, characters we identify with, in part, because they feel real, even if the story is set in a fantasy sci-fi world.

When we're swept up in a story like that, we're open to the larger thematic truths it suggests. In contrast, when some element of a story strikes us as in-credible or false to our experience, it tends to break the fictional spell, and our openness to truth dissipates alongside our emotional engagement.

So, on a granular level, fiction must tell with believable particularity the truth about the events and psychology of human life. If a story does this, it can also communicate broader thematic truths about what it is to be human. You might say good fiction is a set of true lies.

Writing Sin

Now, returning to my question about crime fiction, whether or not we like it, the truth is that a lot of bad stuff goes on in our world. Being human means exposure to violence and vulgarity. People kill. People cuss.

Indeed, it's a core theological claim of the Christian faith that the world is broken and everyone is sinful. In chapter II of his book, Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton famously said that sin is an empirical fact, one we "can see in the street," a fact "as practical as potatoes." Assuming we understand "sin" in its less theologically loaded sense—as "missing the mark," rather than "disobeying God"—I tend to agree with him.

Suppose someone rejects most of the ethical norms society urges on them, biblical or otherwise. Even that person likely has a minimal set of personal ethical standards, on evidence when someone steals their wallet (stealing is wrong!) or cuts them off in traffic (fairness!). I'd wager that even such moral minimalists violate their own standards from time to time.

And if we broaden out and judge by the most intuitive norms of social justice, the wickedness and exploitation built into modern society virtually forces us to violate those standards every day, if not every hour (think: structural racism, sweat shops, and petroleum-based economies).

For the Christian, of course, sin is more than mere fact: it's woven into the fabric of the good news—the gospel—which is that God is restoring this broken world, not least the sinful people who endeavor to follow Jesus. Forgiveness and redemption are central to Christian faith, but those concepts are tightly bound up with sin: without it, what is there to forgive or redeem? Without a broken, evil, sinful world, the good news story of Christian faith makes no sense.

The deeper argument lurking here is that the Bible, the source of our gospel story, is, itself, a dark book. Cain kills Able. David steals Bathsheba. Herod beheads John. Pilate crucifies Jesus. And those stories barely gesture at the wickedness within its pages. If the Bible—the Christian's rule of faith and practice—portrays the depths of human sin, I see no reason the Christian writer shouldn't do the same. And for the writer of fiction, that sometimes means portraying acts of violence and vulgarity.

In his little book, Art and the Bible (which I do not endorse in its entirety), Francis A. Schaeffer calls the fact of sin the "minor theme" of the Christian story, and its redemptive aspects the "major theme" (p. 83). Fiction that leaves out the minor theme comes off as romantic, Pollyannaish, and unrealistic. Because it doesn't meet us in our sinful world, it carries the whiff of falsehood and rarely moves us.

Limits: Sin as Spectacle

Suppose we grant that fiction writers who are Christian should include violence and vulgarity in their work from time to time. We might still wonder whether we should portray such features vividly. What if we just refer to them or imply them?

There are times when reference and implication will do. Our stories don't need to spell out every bad thing that happens in literal gory detail. But, in my view, there are also times when reference and implication aren't enough. Because the the truths of fiction land best when we feel them, sometimes a reader needs to feel the badness or wrongness of an event, especially if it's central to the story. When done well, the vivid portrayal of sin can be part of what makes a story linger and provoke thought.

Nevertheless, there are limits. Much modern fiction—whether in TV, movies, or books—uses sin as spectacle, to titillate. Such stories have no profound truth about humanity to offer; their end is external to the story, mere eyeballs and money. That kind of fiction is little different from the ancient entertainment of the Roman colosseum where people and animals were slaughtered for amusement.

But when a writer has nothing more to say than, "Look at this violence, isn't it cool?" she effectively holds up the sin as something good, something to be sought as an end. And to hold up sin as good strikes me as tantamount to endorsing it, which is a creative boundary I think no Christian writer should cross.

Jesus and Crime Fiction

While Jesus did tell some pretty dark parables (e.g., the parable of the wicked tenants in Matthew 21:33-41), I don't know whether he would write crime fiction. But if a Christian writer is stirred to write it—or to write fiction in any genre that portrays sin vividly—I think she should write it and write it well. As the Bible illustrates, merely portraying sin does not entail endorsing it.

Sin-filled fiction may be dark, but we can think of it as presenting the first part of the gospel—the minor theme—with emotional power. When fiction prods us to feel that reality of sin deeply, the desire for the redemptive major theme won't be far behind.

This is my hope for Body in a Barrel. While the story portrays violence and vulgarity like any crime fiction, I hope those elements communicate troubling truth about the human condition and leave us longing for redemption. Alongside the darkness, I hope readers gain a glimpse of the kingdom, the major theme—the transformation, justice, and love that will one day swallow darkness in its glorious light.