by Christine Sunderland @Chrisunderland
Today is the National Day of Prayer, a day signed into law in 1952. This year’s theme is “Glorify God among the nations, seeking Him in all generations” (I Chronicles 16:24 NASB). In this year, 2026, when we celebrate America’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we celebrate America and the faith of our fathers. We recall George Washington and his prayer at Valley Forge, here depicted in the painting by Arnold Friberg.
Christian authors of fiction seek to glorify God with their words, creating characters that understand the place of faith in their lives or simply seek to understand. They yearn to know the meaning of existence, why we are here, who we are and are meant to be, and where we must travel to find answers.
For faith is a part of the “Golden Triangle of Freedom,” the interdependence of freedom, virtue, and faith (Os Guinness, A Free People’s Suicide). Our characters come to understand the relationship between the sacred and the secular, that without faith informing the culture, freedom cannot survive. For freedom must be buttressed by the laws of a higher authority, Almighty God.
Without the authority of faith requiring private and public virtue, other authorities usurp freedom, so that power – Nietzsche’s strong man – dictates the culture through tyranny and despotism.
Christian novelists understand that they must author faith in their work, for we portray our God of eternity and eternal life. We are the news-bearers in this sense, the criers of “good news,” the “gospel.” We can do this subtly, creating a backdrop to the theater of our chapters that acknowledges our God of love, peace, and virtue. Or we can be more direct, where characters and plot ask the tough questions of right and wrong, light and dark, life and death.
In so doing, we present the answers to who we are and who we are meant to be. We answer how we came to be this way, and how we can be healed. As our Creator brought order out of the chaos of the universe, we mirror that ordering of chaos in our stories. And through that ordering, we bring peace.
In my novel, Angel Mountain (Wipf & Stock, 2020), a world of chaos is set against a world of order, as the hermit Abram preaches repentance and baptism from the mountainside, and hecklers threaten the gathering crowd. Abram has descended from his cave above the cliff, to right the wrongs of the heart, to author peace by authoring faith, to create order by praying to our God of love. He knows this is the only way to peace, the only way to freedom, to clean the conscience so that virtue may seed the heart.
Christian novelists author faith with their civic prayers. Words and sentences embody prayer just as they embody stories. When we invite the reader into our world, we invite them into prayer through the pages. Like prayer, the action of language bridges us – the writer with the reader, just as words bridge heaven and earth in prayer, connecting the person who prays and the Lord God who listens, seeding the heart. And as the reader follows the path laid out by the writer, so the reader senses that they too can bridge heaven and earth with prayer. This is no small thing.
Faith in the Christian God of love forms and informs all creation, and as we create, as we write, as we author, we reach out to our readers just as we reach up to our God in prayer.
On this National Day of Prayer, we become part of the triangle of freedom, embodying faith and virtue in character and plot to glorify God among the nations, seeking him in all generations. We are blessed to live in this sacred triangle as authors of faith reaching for glory. For more information about the National Day of Prayer, visit www.nationaldayofprayer.org.
Christine Sunderland has authored seven award-winning novels: Pilgrimage, set in Italy, Offerings, set in France, Inheritance, set in England, Hana-lani, set in Hawaii, The Magdalene Mystery, set in Rome and Provence (all Oaktara), The Fire Trail (Histria/Simon & Schuster), set at UC Berkeley, and Angel Mountain (Wipf and Stock), set on Mount Diablo, east of Berkeley. She is currently submitting The Music of the Mountain, about life and death and life again, book burning and secret libraries. She is a member of the Anglican Province of Christ the King (www.anglicanpck.org). Visit Christine at www.ChristineSunderland.com (website and blog).