I finished reading Neil Gaiman's Marvel 1602 which re-imagines the Marvel Universe characters beginning in the 17th century as opposed to the 20th and reimagines most of the characters from the Marvel universe.

It's a very good book, however Gaiman is also a agnostic and his anti-Christian views come into play in 1602. In Neil Gaiman's world, the Protestant and Catholic Churches existed mainly to kill people. And their adherents are universally portrayed as either murderous or superstitious. In fact, you get the idea that the typical Christian ceremony is to go commit a murder after Communion.

Gaiman does briefly acknowledge that Protestants and Catholics were at odds at the era, but he portrays them as coming together around the common goal of persecuting the X-men who the church misidentifies as witches. Magneto has managed to worm his way into being head of the Inquisition and ends up aiding in the assassination of Queen Elizabeth in a plot with Doctor Doom. The Vatican does send a messenger to find out what the heck is going on and Magneto kills him. Then Catholic forces finally seize Magneto and prepare to execute him and even though Magneto is a major supervillain, Gaiman still turns it into another vilification of the the Catholics. At the end of the story, our mostly Godless or Agnostic characters make it to the New World safe from religious zealots.

Of course, in the real world, the fact of the matter is that the people who fled to the new World did so more or less because of religious faith because didn't quite fit the Church of England mold: Puritans, Seperatists, Quakers, and Catholics, not Atheist mutants were the type of people who relocated to the New World. Of course, it can be claimed, this is an alternate history, but the way that one was written shows a very strong anti-Christian bias.

The book wasn't very subtle and it contained no warning label that we were going to be exposed to anti-Christian content. The label is something that atheist reviewers will demand that books with Christian content will contain. Subtlety is something that many Christian fiction experts say is a must. Any Christian content has to be subtle, wrapped within an allegory while covered in similie, and as cleverly disguised as a Trojan horse.

Yet, it's not hard to notice that no one ever thinks that atheist and humanist works have to be more subtle.

Take the legendary Robert Heinlein who wrote Job: A Comedy of Justice a sacrilegious re-imagining of the book of Job that presents a Hell where everyone is nice and a Heaven controlled by upstart Angels.

Even when the hits are less direct, they are often quite obvious. Take for example , the first season finale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in which Vedek Winn comes on to Deep Space Nine to protest Keiko O'Brien's school teaching about the science of the wormhole and not about the Prophets (the aliens who are worshiped by the Bajorans and inhabit the wormhole.)

Keiko is incensed and refuses a compromise which would allow her just to not address the whole wormhole thing. She stands firm demanding what will happen when other topics might come up including the origins of life. I wonder what that's all about? Hmmm. At least, Star Trek's writers didn't waste the "The line must be drawn here" line on Keiko, but that was the general idea.

However, Pat Robertson-I mean Vedek Winn continues her crusade even pushing one follower towards violence in the name of religion as she uses her fundamentalism as tool to power.

The whole episode was a slam on religious conservatives, pretty blatant actually.

To be fair, after the death of Gene Roddenberry, DS9 did began to change, taking religion in some form more seriously, as the Prophets got played as more than aliens which many Christian critics view as a positive portrayal of faith. And rather than being really sincere about anything, Winn becomes much more a politician willing to do anything for power.

But DS9 wasn't done slamming religion. In the Season 5 episode, He Who is Without Sin, a fundamentalist group of Christian like folks is portrayed attacking innocent people on the Risa pleasure planet and then attempting to cause real damage with Earthquakes.

Yes, given the chance, orthodox Christians will cause Earthquakes.

And what about all those signs of intelligent design in nature or even the fact that humanoid life dominates in the Star Trek universe? Star Trek: The Next Generation explains that it was all seeded by ancient humanoids, the last ditch theory for anyone who can't see everything happening randomly but don't want there to be any God.

And all of this was published or produced for television. If the opposite point of these works was made in the same manner by Christian writers, it would have many Christian editors and fellow writers upset and pointing out the need for subtlety, the need not to portray people you disagree with as caricatures, and the need to avoid so obviously and blatantly preaching.

None of this constrains secular authors. If you can do it well (and oftentimes even if you can't), you can use your stories to teach atheism, paganism, universalism, or satanism, just as long as it's not Christianity. That needs a warning label.

I can get why secularists like this sort of double standard. What I can't get is why so many Christian writing experts are going along with it.

When every other philosophy and belief can be proclaimed as blatantly as you like, a Christian message in books has to be harder to find than Waldo at a convention of people who wear red and white striped shirts.

This isn't to say every book a Christian author writes ought to have a very blatant Christian message. Indeed, the story as well as the author's style often dictates another approach. But Christian authors and editors who are demanding every story be subtle are helping to establish a double standard of self-censorship for Christian fiction.

Why should they do it?