Reformed theology – with its doctrines of Man’s total depravity, God’s covenant, His sovereignty, and costly grace – gives fantasy writers what most Christian fantasy lacks: the theological architecture for honest stories that train readers to face darkness rather than sanitize it. Most Christian fantasy is propaganda with a plot: safe, sanitized, morally tidy. The hero wins, evil loses, and everyone learns a lesson by the last page. It checks all the boxes for concerned parents and none of the boxes for honest storytelling.

I write as the author of a middle-grade/YA fantasy series, The Brytewood Chronicles, and I’ve become convinced that the best Christian fantasy doesn’t preach – it shows. It doesn’t protect young readers from darkness – it trains them to face it with clear eyes and steady faith.

The models are already there. Tolkien and Lewis understood that sub-creation is worship, that story disciples as powerfully as sermon, and that good fantasy makes us more human, not less. They built worlds where Reformed truths weren’t abstractions to affirm but realities to encounter. Where covenant, corruption, and grace governed the physics of existence itself.

We’ve forgotten how to do that. And our kids are paying the price.

The “should be” problem

Walk into most Christian bookstores. You’ll find fantasy that obeys an unwritten formula. Safely inspirational, cleanly resolved, neatly moral. The hero defeats the dark lord. Gets the girl. Rides into an uncomplicated sunset.

The theology might be orthodox on paper, but the world feels Disneyfied. Grace arrives on cue. Suffering is brief. Faithfulness costs little.

Reformed theology should make us suspicious of this. Allergic to it, even. If we truly believe in total depravity, God’s exhaustive sovereignty, and grace as our only answer, then our stories should reflect worlds where those truths actually cost something. Where they’re tested under pressure. Where they shape not just the moral lessons but the metaphysical structure of reality itself.

The young readers we’re writing for already know war, divorce, church hurt, anxiety, doubt. They know it from the inside. A fantasy that pretends otherwise doesn’t protect them. It abandons them to face real darkness with imaginations trained only on false light.

Sub-creation as theological act

Tolkien insisted that fantasy isn’t about escaping reality but entering it more deeply. His concept of “sub-creation” is explicitly theological: humans, made in God’s image, are called to fashion coherent secondary worlds that reflect His order, beauty, and moral grain. Middle-earth isn’t a neutral playground where anything goes. It has a created “rightness” that makes certain choices fitting and others disastrous.

This is profoundly Reformed. The universe is covenantal, not chaotic. History unfolds under a sovereign Author whose providence works through ordinary means and long, often painful, processes. Reality isn’t held together by impersonal forces but by the personal faithfulness of the God who spoke it into being and sustains it by the word of His power.

Consider how divine sovereignty operates in The Lord of the Rings. Providence is present but almost entirely offstage. Never announced in speeches. Rarely explained. Yet unmistakably governing the flow of events.

Gandalf’s return at Helm’s Deep. Gollum’s role in the quest’s completion. Even Bilbo’s “chance” discovery of the Ring sixty years earlier. All of it points toward a deeper pattern, a eucatastrophe – Tolkien’s term for the sudden joyous turn – that arrives not through the heroes’ strength but through grace working in and through their weakness.

But that grace comes at staggering cost. Frodo cannot remain in the Shire. Middle-earth itself cannot heal his wounds. Aragorn wins his throne only after decades of wilderness exile and war. The elves must abandon the home they’ve loved for millennia. Victory is real. But it passes through genuine loss, and not all wounds close before the final sailing.

Lewis works similar terrain in The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy. In Perelandra, the cosmic conflict hinges on whether the Green Lady will obey a command she doesn’t understand. Not because she grasps its wisdom but because she trusts the Giver. The entire book is a meditation on divine decree and human responsibility. On whether God’s “no” can be good even when we can’t see why.

In Narnia, Aslan is “not a tame lion” – the most succinct summary of Reformed theology’s insistence that God’s sovereignty and goodness coexist even when His ways confound our categories of fairness.

Discipleship through narrative

Jesus taught doctrine through parables that lodged in the imagination before they could be reduced to propositions. The Prodigal Son isn’t an essay on repentance. It’s the smell of pig slop. The humiliation of the long walk home. The shock of the Father running with his robes hiked up – undignified, overwhelming, scandalous grace made flesh.

This is discipleship through narrative. Truth that shapes us not primarily through systematic instruction but through imaginative participation. Tolkien and Lewis both understood this instinctively.

In The Lord of the Rings, the doctrines of human weakness, divine providence, and self-giving love are never delivered as talking points. They are lived. Through Frodo’s breaking under the Ring’s weight. Through Gandalf’s refusal of illegitimate power when Frodo offers him the Ring in Bag End. Through Boromir’s grasping and tearful repentance. Through Sam’s stubborn fidelity that looks almost foolish until the moment it becomes salvation.

Readers don’t learn about these things. They walk through them. And the walking changes how they see their own world when they return to it.

Lewis does something similar in The Horse and His Boy. Shasta’s suffering is neither dismissed (“it wasn’t really that bad”) nor celebrated (“suffering makes you strong”), but revealed at story’s end to have been woven into something larger than his pain. The Lion who was with him in every terrifying moment, even when Shasta couldn’t see or understand.

Reformed theology has always insisted that grace must be experienced, not just affirmed. Conversion involves not just intellectual assent but a renovation of the affections, a reorienting of loves. Fantasy is uniquely positioned to assist that work. Not by preaching at readers, but by giving them worlds to inhabit where Reformed truths are not doctrines to defend but realities to encounter.

What Reformed theology offers fantasy

What does a Reformed imagination bring to fantasy that other frameworks miss?

First, total depravity makes for honest characters. If the doctrine is true, then even our heroes will be deeply mixed. Capable of treachery, self-deception, cowardice, and lasting damage despite their good intentions.

In The Lord of the Rings, Denethor’s despair is rooted in genuine love for Gondor twisted by pride. Saruman begins with reasonable concerns – Sauron is dangerous, we need strength to resist – and follows that logic into corruption. Even Boromir, brave and loyal and genuinely devoted to his people, reaches for the Ring because he loves Gondor too much and trusts grace too little.

These characters aren’t cartoons. They’re comprehensible. That’s what makes them terrifying. They show us that great evil often begins with small compromises. That corruption works by bending good desires toward wrong ends. That’s a Reformed understanding of sin – not a monster invading from outside, but the twisting of created goods into idols.

This same pattern appears when young rulers follow seemingly wise counsel that makes life easier and outwardly better. Until “strength” curdles into cruelty justified as leadership. Or when protagonists wrestle with “When is it my turn to live my life?” while callings compete with loves, neither releasing its claim. Or when the question haunts them: “Why do things corrupt so easily but restore so hard?”

That asymmetry – total depravity made personal – is the exhausting reality Reformed theology refuses to sanitize.

Second, covenant theology gives fantasy a structural backbone. In a Reformed worldview, reality isn’t held together by impersonal forces but by personal promises. God’s covenant faithfulness running through creation like roots through soil. Fantasy built on this foundation doesn’t need to allegorize every detail, but it will tend toward worlds where oaths matter, where generational blessing and curse are real, where the choices of fathers and mothers shape the inheritance their children receive.

Tolkien builds this into his world’s architecture. The oath of Fëanor echoes through ages, destroying those who swore it and those who inherit it. Aragorn’s kingship depends on ancient covenant. He’s not just the strongest warrior but the rightful heir of promises made millennia ago. Even the Ents’ slow deliberation over whether to march on Isengard reflects a covenantal understanding of stewardship. They are shepherds of the forest, and that calling matters more than immediate tactical advantage.

Third, divine sovereignty creates space for eucatastrophe without undermining genuine agency. One of fantasy’s chronic problems is preserving both real stakes and ultimate hope. If the heroes can truly lose, readers despair. If they can’t, the story feels hollow. But Reformed theology has spent centuries wrestling with how God’s absolute sovereignty and human responsibility coexist without collapsing into determinism or Pelagianism.

Fantasy shaped by that tension can offer genuine danger – characters making choices that truly matter, suffering consequences that aren’t quickly reversed – while still leaning the story toward a hope that doesn’t depend on the heroes’ competence. Frodo fails at Mount Doom. The quest succeeds anyway. Not through the hero’s strength but through mercy shown to Gollum months earlier, through Gandalf’s hidden wisdom, through providence working in ways no one planned. The victory is real, earned through real sacrifice. Yet also utterly gift.

Fourth, a theology of grace makes room for wounds that don’t heal in this age. Frodo doesn’t get his old life back. The Shire is saved, but not for him. He must sail West, carrying scars Middle-earth cannot mend. This isn’t narrative failure. It’s honesty about the cost of bearing burdens in a fallen world, coupled with the promise that healing exists even when it’s deferred to the life to come.

Susan’s story in Narnia operates similarly. Lewis refuses to tie up her thread with a neat bow. She’s “no longer a friend of Narnia,” interested only in “nylons and lipstick and invitations.” Many readers find this troubling. Even cruel. But it’s profoundly realistic about how people can walk away from grace. About how the same freedom that makes love possible also makes apostasy possible.

Reformed eschatology teaches that not everything is made right on this side of the resurrection. Fantasy can reflect that without falling into despair, because the story’s arc bends toward a redemption that is both certain and costly.

Where do we go from here?

Tolkien and Lewis weren’t Reformed themselves, but what they got right shows us what Reformed fantasy can be. Rich, risky, deeply human stories that disciple the imagination by letting readers inhabit worlds where covenant, corruption, and grace aren’t abstractions but the governing laws of reality.

So what should Reformed writers do?

• Build worlds governed by covenant, not just populated by Christians. Don’t add prayer scenes to otherwise generic fantasy. Let Reformed truths shape your world’s metaphysical structure – how power works, what promises cost, why some wounds don’t heal.
• Write honest characters who reflect total depravity. Give your heroes virtues twisted by sin. Show corruption working through good desires bent toward wrong ends. Let your villains begin with reasonable concerns that curdle into tyranny.
• Trust providence more than plot armor. Don’t rescue your characters with convenient escapes. Let them fail, suffer real consequences, and still find grace working through their weakness in ways they couldn’t predict.
• Resist tidy endings. Not every wound closes before the final page. Not every character gets their Shire back. Hope is certain, but costly. Redemption is real, but often deferred to the life to come.

When young readers close such books, they shouldn’t have merely “learned a lesson.” They should have lived through something that makes it easier to believe the God of Scripture is not a tame mascot for our wishes, but the holy, sovereign, gracious Lord who holds burning cities and frightened children in the same scarred hands that hold the stars.

That’s the tradition Tolkien and Lewis exemplified. That’s what Reformed theology demands and enables. And that’s what fantasy has always been trying to do: send us back into the real world with eyes trained to see the King.

Aaron Reyburn is the author of “The Brytewood Chronicles,” a seven-book Christian fantasy series. He also operates Reyburn Press, a small publishing house focused on Christian literature.