Brookmyre's Bias

Christopher Brookmyre is one of my favourite authors and I have read his books many times. I am currently re-reading them all again and thoroughly enjoying them! He writes with biting wit, creative violence and true humanity. Some of his characters are truly memorable, in particular Angelique de Xavia and Jack Parlabane. He hits many themes and takes no prisoners in his satirical plots: politicians, the Catholic church, the arms trade and many other targets. 

It is clear from many of his characters' utterances that Brookmyre has a catholic background but has since rejected the teachings of the church and come to be very anti-religion. There is quite a theme of this running through his books, in particular Not The End of The World and Attack of The Unsinkable Rubber Ducks. 

My views on Christianity are very different to Brookmyre's. Or indeed to many authors and I am certainly not one of those christians who only reads christian books or listens to christian music.  However, I do find some of Brookmyre's descriptions of christians oddly misinformed.

When his plots include what might be termed Bible-believing christians, he tends to have them behave and speak in a way more suited to someone from the Westboro Baptist Church than any of the christians I know... Extremely hateful about gay people, judgmental of everyone who doesn't share their views and not really able to participate in normal society. Louis Theroux did a couple of documentaries about this group - I call myself a christian but would no more relate to anyone from the Westboro Baptist Church than I would to a Nazi.

In Unsinkable Rubber Ducks he really gets it wrong and links being pro christianity to also being well disposed to the occult - to communicating with the dead and 'woo' generally. It's truly bizarre to think of Bible-believing christians (a clunky term, but I can't think of a better one...) engaging with anything of that kind. There are of course people who believe in God who do also believe in angels communicating with them, communications from beyond the grave and who would visit fortune tellers.  But I would call them people who are interested in spirituality as opposed to people who follow Jesus as christians and believe that the Bible is God's word. It is very clear in the Bible that anything in the area of magic, witchcraft and divination is absolutely not of God and on no account is a christian to get mixed up with any of these things.  I certainly don't know any christians who would be into any of this stuff. 

So I found it a very odd connection that Brookmyre made.
He is also very anti homeopathy so my best guess is that Brookmyre simply lumps christianity, homeopathy and spiritualism together as unscientific and therefore more or less the same thing. (NB: I have no particular opinion on homeopathy.) I admire him for grappling with some of these issues and will continue to read and enjoy his books as they are original, funny and gripping, every time.  But he really does have a blind spot on this and I have considered writing to him.  But I am not sure what I would say! To give him credit, I am not suggesting that he is ignorant, merely that his own experiences have left their marks and he has come to his own conclusions about the merits of christianity without, I would suggest, an encounter with the truth of the gospel.