Should a Christian read Romantasy?

I’ve seen these commercials, memes, and Instareels making fun of romantasy recently. To be honest, I am a sucker for a great fantasy fiction story. Most recently, I just rewatched the Divergent series. Yes, I have read the books numerous times as well.

However, I’ve become concerned recently with the contents of the jokes around romantasy. It’s the Instagram reel where the husband is putting a picture of himself on the tv to remind his wife he’s better than the dragon she’s dating in a book. The tv commercial that jokes about when a woman’s audiobook starts playing in front of the man nearby and his eyes widen in shock at the sexually explicit content. There are all these memes about “who are you dating in the book world”? 

I’ll admit, I wasn’t that shocked by any of these things until recently. I’m on the state human trafficking task force in the state I’m living in. We were talking about pornography and how it leads to trafficking. All of the women and men were talking about how much they disliked and looked down on men, specifically, who view pornography. My brain automatically shifted into the commercials around romantasy.

In that moment, I saw a lot of hypocrisy. We were judging men for visually viewing explicit content. While simultaneously becoming a society who jokes about the explicit content that women are reading on a daily basis. All over television and internet, we are seeing jokes about the content of books that women are consuming all the time.

This felt even more hypocritical when I was listening to a radio station the next morning and a woman broke up with her boyfriend because he was watching pornography. She stated she wouldn’t want a man who is cheating on her with women he’ll never meet. My next thought was, but is she reading romantasy? How much money is there currently in the romantasy industry?

These aren’t all questions I have answers to, but thoughts I’ve been considering as a Christian woman. Part of my own testimony, as a teenage Christian girl was falling into the wrong online book crowd as a teenager. Through that I became a promoter for what is know known as “edgy Christian fiction”. This is something I sincerely regret and know as an adult was something I should not have even been promoting alongside an adult woman. Through this, I have become even more passionate about this topic.

I’m also still passionate about my Christian romance series - without the sex scenes. Romance isn’t bad and neither are love stories. However, we should have limits and boundaries on what we consume. My take - away from these experiences in recent months has been to place a new filter on what your watching/listening to. If we want to be women who condemn men viewing pornography, we should put that same filter on what we read.

The next time you are picking out a book, think of this: would I want the men in my life viewing the contents of this book? Chances are 99% of the time, you would not want someone viewing the book you're reading if it’s romantasy. Let’s be a group of women who think of what is pure, holy, and right - not things we wouldn’t want others to be seeing or hearing.