Christian fantasy: Embrace the Gargoyles

When I converted to Christianity, I didn't come from a the meadows of piety. I came out of the world of sports, art, entertainment, from a culture that fills it with the things that live on the edges: the grotesques, the goblins, the gargoyles.

So imagine the whiplash when, newly baptized and hungry for beauty and the rich symbolic heritage of the faith, I dove into modern Christian fantasy... only to find that a lot of it has the texture of mass-produced white bread. Soft, clean, uniform, and terrified of anything from the edges.

And look, I like white bread. Toasted with butter, it's fine, I guess... But it isn't memorable. It isn't the crusty loaf shaped by human hands, scored with cracks, air pockets, and caramelized ridges. It isn't real nourishment.

The great Christian art once had that texture. Medieval churches carved with saints and gargoyles because they understood a fundamental truth that modern Christian fantasy often forgets: darkness serves the light at the whim of the father, one, and two by framing the light. Jonathan Pageau puts this well when he discusses medieval symbolism. Transitional spaces (thresholds) are where ambiguity, awe, and even dread operate to reveal God's order. Gothic art understood this. It knew that beauty without the grotesque looses something very important. 

As a convert, I feel that absence more sharply than many lifelong Christians. I came looking for the cathedral… but I found the gift shop of "Oh snap and fiddlesticks and men, you really should be nicer."

This article is my attempt to explore why modern Christian art needs its gargoyles back. While it may not be for everyone, it certainly is for some, and for some it is an important part of their walk to holiness.

Gothic Themes in Christian Storytelling

1. Darkness as the Frame for Meaning

Gothic literature has always leaned into the "dualistic struggle with morality, mortality, and meaning," as one critic puts it. It interrogates the human heart with raw honesty: even saints are capable of monstrosity, and monsters are haunted by grace.

Gothic stories use darkness not to glorify it, but in part to expose it. They accomplish what medieval crucifixion art did with unsettling, unfiltered imagery. 

By contrast, modern Christian fantasies often refuse to touch darkness at all. They treat it like a contaminant. As one analysis puts it, "darkness is excluded from Christian fiction... for fear of blurring good and evil." But the result is that good itself loses definition.

This is why gargoyles perch on cathedrals. They are the reminder of chaos at the edges. They snarl and prod from the periphery so that the sanctuary may remain the sanctuary. Remove them, and you haven't made the church holier. You've made it sterile.

2. Ugliness and Ambiguity as Theological Teachers

One of Pageau's most potent insights is that ambiguity lives at thresholds, the spiritual spaces where heaven meets earth, flesh meets spirit, order encounters the wild. Gothic art dwells in that threshold. It does not sanitize ambiguity but makes it a symbolic teacher.

In Pageau's words (adapted from his discussions of relational symbolism): "We are bound to each other in very deep ways that contain both light and darkness."

That's Christianity. That's the Incarnation. That's our human story.

But modern Christian fiction has largely traded this symbolic depth for moral tidiness. Its refusal to engage the grotesque has consequences. Hegel's critique of symbolic art speaks to this directly: "[Morally tidied] art by contrast, falls short of genuine beauty altogether."

Because symbolic art without incarnation and without embodied struggle becomes mere idea, and that is not the fullness of truth.

Much of today's Christian storytelling isn't incarnational. It's ideological, not Christian.

3. Suffering as the Path to Redemptive Beauty

In medieval cathedrals, light often pierces stained glass windows that depict immense suffering. The brilliance exists because it shines through this. Beauty arises not by ignoring violence, decay, or human frailty, but by transfiguring them.

"Gothic art represents not a view into heaven but a view from heaven."

That is an astonishing inversion, one modern Christian writers rarely dare. Instead of letting their worlds ache and bleed many sanitize every depiction of suffering. Their stories offer upliftment without cost and redemption without depth.

But real Christianity is cruciform.

4. Monsters, Grotesques, and the Edges of the Sacred

Gargoyles are not decorations. They are guardians. They occupy the liminal space where sacred order meets chaotic threat. Pageau notes that in medieval symbolism, such creatures embody "transitional uneasiness," the necessary boundary between light and shadow.

Modern Christian fiction often removes such boundaries entirely. No monsters at the edges, or grotesques to guard the gates, or wild symbolism to remind us that creation is a battleground between meaning and chaos.

In many Christian books, including Christian fantasy, evil is often a vague cloud. Look; this isn't the case for all books, but let's be real... its because of Christian art like, God's Not Dead and Christian fears of cursing, or violence, that our art is often mocked and ignored by the very people who might stand to benefit from it the most.

And the true Christian story is full of monsters, literal and symbolic. Leviathan, the serpent, beasts rising from the sea, demons haunting the margins of deserts and cities. To this day exorcisms are still required to cast out the demonic.

A Christianity without monsters is not Christianity - just some very nice branding.

Why I Believe Converts Feel This Absence So Sharply

For many lifelong Christians, the sanitized art feels normal. Maybe comforting. Maybe safe.

But converts (especially those of us who came from artistic or secular worlds where tragedy, ambiguity, and existential tension are taken seriously) feel the absence keenly. We came looking for the church that built gargoyles, illuminated manuscripts with twisted marginalia, and stained glass blazing with crimson and gold. We came looking for crucifixions that didn't shy away from horror. We came looking for the faith that can stare the abyss down and declare resurrection.

Instead, we find that much modern Christian fantasy has cleaned the edges. And I can't help but think: if we remove all the gargoyles from our art, we will forget they live in our souls.

The darkness doesn't go away because you hide it or become a believer.

I don't write dark fantasy to celebrate the dark. I write it because the light means nothing if you never show what it dispels.

Christianity is the only faith where God looks like a corpse before He looks like a king.

If our stories forget that, we're not protecting readers. We're starving them.

So Bring Back the Gargoyles

Christian art doesn't need to become cynical or edgy. It just needs to be true. We need stories with the same theological weight as medieval stained glass and stone grotesques.

We need art that acknowledges what Pageau articulates: the world is patterned, and that pattern contains both light and shadow in meaningful harmony.

If you're a Christian reader who wants that texture, who isn't afraid of stories with depth, darkness, grit, and the holy tension of good wrestling with evil, then you're the person I write for.

And I wrote a book for you.

Christian fantasy that embrace the gargoyles 

If you want a Christian fantasy book to Embrace the Gargoyles at the edge, one shaped by pick up: Aithos – Book 1 of the Dragonsfall Cycle.

For the Christian who wants more than white bread. For the believer who knows that darkness only makes the light blaze brighter.