I admit it—I’ve cried during a movie. And it’s hard to say that. I grew up proud of being unemotional; in fact, I would say I’m still pretty restrained. Yet, a few years back as a 30-year-old man, I actually shed a few tears while watching a film. No, it’s worse than that: it was during a documentary—and not the kind you would first imagine.

My wife, Andrea, and I were watching BBC’s Planet Earth II. Yeah, you read that right: Planet Earth. It was towards the end of the first episode, Islands. It wasn’t about cuddly dogs or majestic eagles; it was penguins. Let me explain.

Have you ever read a story—whether a novel or a children’s book—where you rolled your eyes at the unbelievable? In fantasy and fairy tales, we expect to encounter extraordinary or even absurd characters, people, and settings. That expectation allows you to continue on and enjoy the story despite the fiction. But if we experience a contrived plot or unfactual statement, no matter the genre, we feel cheated and deflated.

I would say the genre of Heretics of Piedmont, historical fiction, has a similar but deeper challenge. Very little has been written about fifteenth century Waldensians. What accounts exist are described in, at most, a few vague paragraphs. I admit, I was deliberate in choosing that century versus the later ones; we have many more vivid accounts in the 16th and 17th centuries. Historical details of men such as Joshua Janavel or events like the Piedmontese Easter are easy to find. The preceding periods of Waldensian history are spotty and mostly from their papal enemies.

We are in an age of endless information—one might even argue too much information. Not only can we find a diagram illustrating the Pythagorean theorem in seconds by reaching into our pocket and tapping a glass pane a few times, but we also know minute life details of our friends, acquaintances, and strangers around the earth. For most of us, information is both easy to access and readily available.

I decided to write Heretics of Piedmont in the fall of 2020. This was a time when the United States, after a lull in restrictions during the summer, began to lock down again. However, to write the novel, I needed information—lots of it.

Romans 12:3-8

In December 1958, (a few months before Mt. Zion Baptist Church of Brogue, Pennsylvania was founded), Leonard Read published a short essay in a magazine called The Freeman that made this assertion: no single person on the face of the earth knows how to make a pencil. He wrote the essay, I Pencil, to illustrate the futility of a planned economy and the power of a free market. Though this is not about economics, I see an interesting parallel with a letter written almost 2,000 years before I, Pencil.

Modern society, perhaps more than ever, drives us to consume. We consume products then dispose of them when they become outdated. We absorb all that our phones, computers, Alexa’s, and streaming service demands. Though some of us may spend less time consuming than others, we still devour food, media, and words daily.

And what of our relationship with God? We can sit under preaching three times per week. We read and prayerfully consider the Bible, which of course is all good. But I argue that just as we consume, we also ought to create.

With a story set in the fifteenth century featuring oppressed Christians, it is impossible to avoid talking about the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, they were the ones doing the oppressing. In a sense, it would be easy for me to paint the Catholic Church as pure evil—the persecutors of God’s people, the Mary-worshipers, the harlot of Babylon.

But Heretics of Piedmont would be very edgy, boring, and frankly, a bad novel if I went down that road. I certainly wouldn’t want to read a book like that. Representing the Roman Church with a straw man might seem like the way to travel, but I would be doing my readers a great disservice. I could have used scare quotes around the word church when speaking about Catholics, leaned into conspiracy theories about Jesuits (even though they didn’t exist yet), and resorted to a cheap caricature of what the medieval Catholic Church was.