Andrew Klavan is an award-winning crime novelist, screenwriter, and media commentator. A two-time Edgar Award winner, he also hosts The Andrew Klavan Show, a popular podcast on DailyWire.com. His film work includes A Shock to the System (starring Michael Caine), True Crime (starring and directed by Clint Eastwood), Don’t Say a Word (starring Michael Douglas), and Gosnell (starring Dean Cain and Earl Billings). This last film, which tells the gruesome true story of a detective (Cain) investigating the infamous abortionist Kermit Gosnell (Billings), is reflective of the conservative worldview that has pretty much caused the once-sought-after author to be virtually written out of Hollywood.
On the nonfiction side, Klavan’s works include The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ and The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England’s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus. His latest book, The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness, is an exploration of how he believes a writer’s imaginative engagement with darkness can illuminate the way to living beautifully in the midst of a tragic and broken world.
JWK: Tell me about the title of your book The Kingdom of Cain. We know who Cain was, but what is his kingdom?
Andrew Klavan: The Kingdom of Cain is the kingdom of the world that belongs to our enemy and, ever since the Fall, has belonged to a pattern that Cain expresses when he murders Abel. It’s a book about murder and what we learn from the evil of murder by seeing murder repeated in the arts. Basically, it’s a study of three famous murderers and how they keep appearing in the arts and how the arts transform them into wisdom and, in fact, a kind of light.
I guess I feel that every Christian comes to a point when he realizes that the world really is what Jesus said it was—a troubled and broken place. When you realize that, you still are called upon to rejoice. So this is a book about how art helps us rejoice in a world full of evil, which is the Kingdom of Cain.
One of the murderers, of course, is Cain, who killed his brother Abel. Who are the other two murderers?
The other two murderers are a guy named Ed Gein on whom the movie Psycho was based [as well as] The Silence of the Lambs and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. A lot of the slasher movies came out of the murders that Ed Gein committed in the 1950s in Wisconsin. The other murderer is a guy named Lacenaire who became a very famous man in France because he made the argument that, yes, he had committed murder but he had done it because the world was a socially unjust place and he was getting back at the world. That murder kind of plays into what happens to people when they lose their faith in God and they begin to think that they can perfect the world.
It kind of reminds me of the recent story of Luigi Mangione, who apparently justifies the murder he’s accused of committing as a form of social justice.
Absolutely. A philosopher said, “When people begin to believe that they can perfect the world, it’s going to lead them naturally to murder.” That happened with Lacenaire. You’re absolutely right. It happened recently with the killing of the insurance guy and it happened with another famous murder that the book also touches on, which is the murder by Leopold and Loeb, who decided that, because there was no God, they were supermen. They were perfect people. They could commit the perfect murder and get away with it. They didn’t. That also has inspired a lot of art and a lot of movies.
I believe you also talk about a rejection of the immortality of the human spirit, which also plays against the idea of a higher morality.
Yeah because, look, everybody notices that when you’re trying to walk a moral path, it’s going to cost you, right? You’re gonna to do things that maybe cost you money. They might cost you popularity. You might say things that offend people because you’re trying to speak the truth. You’re gonna not do things that could make you a lot of money. When I worked in Hollywood, there were some times I just had to say, “You’re offering me a lot of money to do that, but I’m not gonna write about that because it’s ugly and it’s wrong.”
So if you don’t believe in the eternal, if you don’t believe that there’s something more than the world, then why not just do what gives you pleasure in the world even if it hurts other people? Even if it degrades you, why not do that? So, yeah, if you lose your faith in the Eternal Plan, if you lose your faith that there’s a bigger design than the one we witness every day in this world, which is so full of wickedness and trouble, you start to behave in a different way. I think that we see that a lot in the world. That was true in Jesus’s time and I think it’s true today. I think it’s kind of on the rise in a way because people have lost their faith—although I hope that that trend is now turning around.
How can stories that focus on the dark side of human nature illuminate the presence of God in the world? And what is the difference between stories that do that and stories that are, maybe, just gory and desensitize us to the evil in the world?
I think that’s a really good question. I mean, one of my complaints about modern Christian art is it’s not at all like the great Christian art which was full of bloodshed in the lives of the saints and the evil that people do—and yet was still beautiful Christian art.
One of my problems with modern Christian art is it only shows you happy endings. It will only show you pleasant scenarios and family entertainment. All of which I have no problem with, but if that’s the only thing you do, you’re going to give Christians the idea that they are going to win out on Earth, that if they just follow the Christian rules, everything’s gonna go great. We all know that’s not true. When it turns out to not be true—when you face true hardship and face true evil—it becomes very easy to lose your faith. I believe a writer who is a Christian should deal with everything, should deal with the world as it really is.
I know exactly what you’re talking about. I know exactly the kind of movies you go to where you can tell that the moviemakers took pleasure in showing you evil and disgusting things. You know they sat around thinking about how they could make the murders fun and exciting and all that stuff. I’m a mystery writer. I’ve written about murder all my life. One of the things I’ve always tried to do is make sure that you see that someone is actually dying, that there’s grief, that this is a truly sad thing—because I believe there is a God. I don’t believe that it’s just a fantasy. I believe that that is an essential part of reality. I believe that, if you write the world truthfully, God will be revealed.
So if you take a story like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which shows you a man killing his way to the throne to become king, it’s filled with horror and blood and evil and yet, when you walk out in the end, you realize that there is a moral order, that the death has transgressed against God. It really is revelatory. It shows you what happens to you inside when you [commit murder], what happens to your heart. It’s not necessarily that things go bad for you in the world. It’s that your soul becomes empty. The difference is really whether you tell the truth or not. If artists tell the truth and deal with life honestly, even if they don’t believe—even if they are stone-cold atheists—God will be revealed in their work because God is the truth.
Can you give another example of another literary or cinematic work that reveals God through a darker story?
Yeah, sure. When I was 19 years old—and I was not a believer at all—I read a book called Crime and Punishment. Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky is one the great novels of all time. It’s about an axe murderer. It’s about a guy who kills two women with an axe, and then a woman in the neighborhood who is a prostitute slowly leads him to Christ, leads him to redemption. The book changed my heart because it made me realize that there are some things that are evil even if you convince yourself they’re not evil. Evil is not relative. There are some things that are absolutely evil. Even if everybody on Earth says they’re good, they’re still bad. It took decades, but that, over the years, led me to Christ.
Now today I often joke if I walked into a Christian bookstore and I said, “Excuse me, sir, can I have that book about the axe murderer who gets saved by a prostitute?” they would probably throw me out onto the street because the idea now is that Christianity can only deal with the happy and the bright and the good. So Crime and Punishment is a really dark, dark novel but [also] a great uplifting novel that leads you to the truth and makes it easier when you meet difficult arguments to maintain your faith. This is my problem with a lot of Christianity that teaches us such happy talk that, when you deal with arguments about reality, people lose their faith.
There’s that famous saying, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Would you agree that over the long haul, even on Earth, that God’s justice wins out?
You know, I don’t believe that on Earth God’s justice wins out in every case. No.
Not even over the long haul?
All things tend to the good to those who love God. That’s all things. That is the whole story. That does not mean if you just wait a hundred years everything’s gonna come out good because, look, when people are murdered, for instance, they never see justice in this world. That’s a very hard thing to realize. But we do believe that there is another world. We believe that this is only a fragment of eternity. We believe that those people will find beauty, justice, and truth in the long run—but not here. This is a place where God Himself came to Earth and people crucified Him.
I’ve always made the argument that we have to really face the fact that Christianity is a religion about the tragedy of the world, and it gives you faith in something beyond the world that changes everything. So I don’t believe that justice comes to each person in this life. I do believe that all things tend to the good for those who love God, because all things takes in a much greater scope than just the world.
Do you think it’s necessary to go through suffering to understand the goodness of God?
That’s a really interesting question. There’s an old joke where people say, “Everybody wants to go to Heaven but nobody wants to die.” I think that it goes along with “Everybody wants to become wise but nobody wants to suffer.” In fact, Christianity tells us that suffering is part of the design of God. It’s part of the travel that we go through to kind of forge our souls.
So I think that, in this world, understanding evil, facing evil, knowing evil, knowing suffering is an unavoidable part of becoming complete, of becoming a complete soul. I don’t like to say that because, just like everybody else, I avoid suffering just as much as I possibly can. But I also have seen people who have just suffered terribly and have magically become transformed into something deeper, richer, more compassionate, and beautiful than they were.
So it’s not for me to say. Look, if it were up to me, the world would be a carnival—but it’s not up to me. It is something fallen and broken, and that is part of a design that is, I trust, more beautiful than I can even understand in this moment. It think that’s what great artists are all trying to get at.
In the opening of your book, you cite Proverbs 8:36, which reads “All they that hate me love death.” What does that mean?
That’s Wisdom speaking in Proverbs. She says that “all those that hate me love death.” I think when we look around at the world, doesn’t that seem to you to be true? When you find the people who have lost their faith, you find people who are suddenly very comfortable with abortion, very comfortable with euthanasia, very worried about bringing children into the world. We can’t bring children into this horrible world—as if the world was ever anything else than what it is today. Ultimately, if you hate God’s Wisdom—Wisdom is the daughter of God—you will end up in love with death because life will be meaningless to you. So, yeah, I think that is one of the truly wise statements in the Proverbs, which, of course, is full of wisdom.
In a way you would think they would want to avoid death, but you’re saying, because they don’t find much meaning in this life, they’re drawn to death.
Yeah. I think that faith is a great source of meaning. A really good example of this is that religious people have more children. One of the reasons, I believe, for that is because when you’re a mom and you’re dealing with little children, they can be terrible pests. They can be terrible pains in the neck. You have to do a lot of kind of basic work to be with them. You have to change diapers. You have to feed them. You have to go through all the things that mothers do. If they’re good mothers, they understand that to make a meal for somebody is an act of love. You are communicating love. To sit down and put dinner in front of your family is an act of love and that love radiates throughout their lives. So you understand that the things you’re doing—the actions you’re doing—are more than just those actions.
Just to put food in front of people is more than putting food in front of people. It is actually putting love in front of people and letting them see your love. I think when you see children raised by mothers who understand that, they are happy, sturdy people. That’s a gift of faith—to understand that we are not just doing what we are doing. We are doing something with great meaning at another level altogether. So if you lose your faith, you lose that meaning. And if you lose that meaning, yeah, nothing is worthwhile.
Changing the subject a bit, in the past you’ve written about how conservatives have long proceeded as if political arguments could be won in op-eds and through the citing of history, whereas the left has realized that they can rewrite history via novels, TV shows, and movies, and people exposed only to those will end up having a leftist view of history. Those rewritten versions of history can be pretty direct in presenting actual conservative people as evil, while conservative storytellers usually have to mask their points in fantasies like The Lord of the Rings or The Dark Knight trilogy. Is that true? And if so, why?
I think it’s true in part because the left has managed to take over the businesses in which those works of art are created and have set the terms by which they’re created. So, for instance, if you were to write a story that went against the leftist idea, say, that a boy can become a girl—if you want to say, “No, you can’t do that”—then people would condemn you because they have so monopolized those businesses.
I was a working screenwriter in Hollywood when I began to speak out on certain conservative and Christian themes. My work dried up almost instantaneously. I went from making a very, very good living to making no living at all almost in a moment. We’ve been shut out of those venues for quite a long time. So that’s part of it. Part of it, too, is because conservatives, just by nature, think that logical arguments are important. Leftists, by nature, believe that feelings are important.
In fact, both those things are important. But if you don’t touch people’s hearts, you’re not gonna get anywhere. I don’t mean that in terms of propaganda. I mean it in terms of opening their minds and their hearts to the reality of life, which includes the reality of evil but it also includes the reality of faith, beauty, and all of those things. I think that if you’re not going to deal in that world—and you’re just gonna deal in arguments, charts, and philosophy—you’re going to lose most people because that’s not where most people live. It isn’t where they should live. We should all live in our hearts and our minds at the same time.
Art appeals to both the heart and the mind. Politics doesn’t. So a lot of conservatives just don’t go into the arts because they don’t understand the point of them. They don’t understand why they’re good or why they should waste their time telling stories that didn’t really happen.
You’ve also called for the creation of a conservative infrastructure that would support conservative storytelling, such as financing, production, and distribution companies, as well conservative-leaning reviews, grants, and awards. I actually think the entertainment industry is the most overly awarded business on Earth, but the award shows are certainly good at encouraging a leftist message. Do you think there should be something similar on the conservative side?
Absolutely. I cannot emphasize this enough. The reason there are so many awards in the arts is because artists live to be loved. That is what we want. I’ve given my whole life to the arts. I make stuff and I want you to love the stuff that I make. I create something. I want you to love it. I want it to move you. I want it to touch you. If I had wanted to just make money, I would have gone into another field, like investments or being a banker or something like that.
People always think Hollywood is just about the money. That’s just not true. Hollywood is also about love and prestige. We have no system by which somebody who breaks the rules of the left and makes a work of art can win praise and awards from people who know about the arts. We only have the political people who will sometimes say, “I like that movie because it sent a political message that I agree with.” It’s not the same thing.
So I think that if you want the arts, you have to build the [conservative] infrastructure where people that love the arts review them, that people who love the arts award them, where people are interviewed, talked to, and their ideas are solicited. Then you will have people show up.
Interestingly, the people who have done this most are Christians. They’ve made movies that have been big hits but, with the exception of Mel Gibson, who made that beautiful movie The Passion of the Christ and a beautiful movie called Apocalypto, which deal with some really, really dark things, [they tend to be feel-good films]. I mean the torture of Christ in The Passion of the Christ is almost unbearable to watch. The sacrifices in Apocalypto are really tough to watch. Yet [Gibson] deals with those things because he knows what the world is. He is a true artist. He knows what the world is and he doesn’t want to lie about it. With the exception of Mel Gibson, most of the art [Christians] make is very fluffy and sweet. Again, I have no problem with that. I just think you need more for people who have a deeper, more insightful view of life. You need to convince them that they, too, can have faith. They, too, can see the world—even with all its evil—as being God’s place.
What do you think of President Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center? Even Bill Maher has admitted that the Kennedy Center has pretty much exclusively honored people on the left side of the political argument or at least aren’t openly conservative in their views.
Yeah, there’s no question about it. I mean I don’t know if Trump is going to make it what it should be, which is a place for everybody, but I’d rather [almost anyone] in charge than the people who have been in charge of it. I love the theater, but it is just completely barred to anybody who is not full-on leftist. If you create a play praising religion, you just couldn’t have it put on. It wouldn’t be put on anywhere. I think the most important thing that Trump does is he exposes the people that are doing this. In other words, by kicking them out, people start to say, “Well, what were they doing that you would kick them out?” Then you look and you think, “Oh, now I understand why he’s doing this.” So I’m very much in favor of what Trump is doing. Trump, because he was in television so long and because he’s a bit of a showman, I think that he understands this more than most politicians.
Speaking of the theater, you reminded me of the playwright David Mamet, whose work seemed to be much more popular with the media and critics before he came out as a conservative.
Mamet told me he wrote this article for The Village Voice which didn’t say he was a conservative. He just said he was no longer a brain-dead liberal, basically. He told me that after that, his next play The New York Times—which is the most important theater review you can get—didn’t just pan it once. They reviewed it twice—badly. They actually came back and attacked it again. So, yes, he has paid a price for what he said, but he seems like a much happier guy being able to speak the truth.
You do a podcast for The Daily Wire that puts out a lot of conservative media content. One of its co-founders, Jeremy Boreing, recently left the company to concentrate on making movies. Could this be the start of that conservative infrastructure you talk about?
I think this is a moment of great opportunity. I’m not ready to say that we’re gonna take advantage of that opportunity, but I really, really am hopeful that we will. I think that Trump’s victory in the election was not just a victory for him. It was a complete defeat for the media which had gone out in every possible way to stop him. This showed that the people had rejected the media, rejected their narrative, and they were willing to do what they felt was right.
So this is a moment when artists on the right can bravely create things and shouldn’t be going to Hollywood or New York with their hands out. They should be making stuff in small venues and putting it up anywhere they can until it starts to collect an audience. I think that this is a moment for creativity, for experimentation, for risk. As strange as it is to say, we’re the cool kids now. So we can set the tone of a new culture—and I hope we do.
Do you think this is an opportunity for some wealthy conservative person or group to buy a major TV network or streamer to really gain wide distribution? Like you said, it doesn’t all have to be explicitly conservative or religious content.
Yeah. I would love to see a billionaire do that, but I’m not convinced that’s the whole answer. I think that what we need are artists who have good values. C.S. Lewis said, “We don’t need more books about Christianity. We need more book written by Christians.” I think that that is essentially what we’re looking for. We’re looking for people who have talent who are ready to dedicate themselves to creating. Those people, I think, will bring in the audience, and the audience will create the business.
A billionaire coming in to buy a streamer would be great. A billionaire buying a publishing house would be great. It would be really wonderful, but until you have the artists who make stuff that’s just good art—it doesn’t have to be about Jesus, it doesn’t have to be about conservatism—you’re never going to dominate the culture, because that’s who wins the culture.
Finally, what do you hope people take from your book and what’s next for you?
What I hope people take from this book is that Christians should not be afraid of the world. You can rejoice in the world as it is. The arts teach you to do that. The arts transform darkness into light. They actually take dark things that people do and they show you what they mean. They show you how people get [on] these paths of darkness and, really, how to avoid them. The second part of the book is really [about] what each of us can do to increase our joy living in this world, because Jesus came to put the joy that is in Him in you. I think that that’s kind of what the book is ultimately about.
At the same time I’ve been writing this, I’ve been writing a series of mysteries about a guy named Cameron Winter that begins with a Christmas mystery called When Christmas Comes. That’ll be out later on in the year.
(This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
