‘Fundamentalist Protestant churches had dominated island life for centuries; the power of the Church had seemed medieval to those looking on from the mainland. But it was real enough on the island…’.

On a recent holiday trip my son and I popped in to an airport bookshop to pick up some light reading. It was there that I came across ‘The Black House’, a recently published detective novel set on the Isle of Lewis. There was no question about buying it; it is not often such an entertaining genre is located in such a magnificent setting.

The author, Peter May, was unknown to me; but then again I was never a fan of Machair, which May created and produced. Having left television he has become an acclaimed fictional author, and ‘The Black House’ – subtitled ‘Evil Lies Within’ – is the first in a trilogy of stories. If belonging to the Richard and Judy book club is a symbol of renown, the book has made it into the ivy league.

May has done his research well; it is interesting to read a novel whose descriptions are vivid and easily identifiable by those of us whose destiny it is to live on the island described in the Richard and Judy interview as ‘way off the coast of the UK’. The Chinese restaurant next to the police station and the Park Guest House opposite the former Seaforth Hotel are only two of the locations readily identifiable by Lewis dwellers.

And so are many more, even if the story revolves around a fictional village. The main character is a Lewis born detective who has long escaped the insularity of island life to work on the mainland, but is sent to Lewis because there has been a murder. It is a privilege Taggart never had, but Fin Macleod does; and his return to Lewis opens up many memories of the past, out of which come both solution and dilemma.

More of the plot I shall not give away; this column is not a review of the book, far less is it a recommendation. The language is often unnecessarily vulgar, and the overall impression, explicitly stated by the author in his Richard and Judy interview, is that island life today is exactly the same as it was half a century ago; no wonder, therefore, that people want to get away.

Actually our grandparents would be hard pushed to recognise island life now. There are just as few trees and just as many beaches, but the community spirit that was evident in local villages a generation ago has virtually disappeared with the modernisation of our culture and the computerisation of our age. Local businesses are disappearing, traditional industries have collapsed, and in many places we are hard pushed to know our neighbours. It is a fallacy even to suggest, as I think ‘The Black House’ does, that nothing has changed in Lewis since the Ice Age.

But, as avid readers of this column will know, I am much more concerned with the portrayal of the Lewis church in such popular fiction. It usually depends on caricature and on stereotype to amuse and entertain. I was expecting Peter May’s novel to do the same, and so it does.

A random cropping of stereotypical phrases about Lewis religion is not difficult to find in Peter May’s book. We are told, for example, that ‘Fundamentalist Protestant churches had dominated island life for centuries; the power of the Church had seemed medieval to those looking on from the mainland. But it was real enough on the island…’.

Well – I am not sure what May means by ‘fundamentalist protestant churches’, but it doesn’t sound too good. If he means Bible-believing churches, or perhaps evangelical churches, they have certainly been a feature of island life since the early nineteenth century, but that is only for two hundred years. I am unaware of any fundamentalist churches which have been around for ‘centuries’ in Lewis.

And as for their dominance of island life – such a claim would be very difficult to verify in fact, however much the truth of it may be accepted in popular thinking. The church was only ever a pressure group, even if it was a relatively large one; but its ‘power’ was always challenged and was never absolute. The truth is that fundamentalism was never a feature of Scottish Protestantism, and certainly not of the church in Lewis. But that is a minor detail when it comes to writing a best seller.

So too is the observation that the reason there is nothing to do on Fridays and Saturdays is because young people are ‘strangled by a society still in the grips of a joyless religion’ according to May, so that the compulsion to leave Lewis is as strong today as it was twenty years ago.

That is an interesting observation. As someone who has ministered on Lewis for some sixteen years, I know something about religion and about local Christians. I know some joyless ones, right enough, as I know some pretty dull atheists. But I know plenty Christians too who will tell me they never really laughed until they found something worth living for. And, as it happens, I also know many Christians who are to the fore in providing young people with places to meet and with activities in which to be involved. I can think of one Free Church elder immediately who has hardly a spare moment because of the number of youth activities in which he is involved.

Then, of course, there is the description of the church – ‘no coloured stained glass in this austere Calvinistic culture. No imagery. No crosses. No joy’. Apart from the curious notion that the presence of an instrument of torture is necessary to produce joy, the old cliches are out in force. Calvinism is austere, joyless and colourless. I don’t know if Peter May ever worshipped in the Free Church in Kenneth Street; many of the men and women I remember there were the most colourful Calvinists I have known; and there were plenty panes of coloured glass in the windows flanking the pulpit as I recall.

But the final touch comes in the description of the pulpit, raising the minister to ‘his dominant position of authority over the mere mortals whom he berated each Sunday with threats of eternal damnation’. Maybe; or maybe the central character just forgot the other themes that the pulpit sounded forth.

I could go on; but someone should really do a PhD on the novelist’s portrayal of Lewis religion. I think the thesis can be sustained that there is often more fiction than fact in the way the church is caricatured in such writings.

Well that’s what I think anway. I appreciate that negative publicity is better than no publicity at all, so if my column inspires anyone to go away and purchase the book, so be it. But please bear in mind that evil may lie within a book as within a blackhouse.

Iain Campbell is a native of the Isle of Lewis in northwest Scotland where he serves as pastor of the Free Church of Scotland congregation in Point. He also serves as Adjunct Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary. This article first appeared on his blog, Creideamh (pronounced ‘kray-jif’), Gaelic for ‘Faith’, and is used with his permission.