The Danger of Moralistic Christian Fiction in Christian Parenting
“In children’s books, people say, ‘What’s the lesson?’ I don’t know adult writers who get asked that,” children’s author Kate DiCamillo said. “And I always say, if I was trying to teach somebody something, I would fail miserably. And it’s the same thing here; if I sit down and think, ‘OK, now I gotta tell a story that’s gonna make a kid be able to live in the world,’ I wouldn’t be able to do it. You can’t think about it.”
We have made finding the moral in children’s books far too important—to the point of ruining books and the whole reading experience for our children.
Heavy-Handed Moralistic Books Might Not Be As Bad As Swear Words in Books
There was a series of books every girl in my youth group gushed over. It was about a Christian teenager and her everyday life, with a strong focus on her growing relationship with a cute Christian boy. All the girls at my youth group had matching shirts that said, “Waiting for my [insert name of boy character].” Eventually, with much pestering, I caved and read the books.
As a kid who read a lot, these books lacked something I couldn’t put my finger on. While the boy was definitely dreamy and I longed to one day fall in love like the main character, that was the only thing that kept my attention. Every character was as flat as the paper I read from, and it felt like every single one was preaching a sermon to me. No one gravely sinned either—just minor mistakes that were made out to be much worse than they really were (like giving away your first kiss so flippantly). At times, it read more like the purity culture books on my shelf than an actual novel. One character was converted to Christianity by a song at a concert that said, “Jesus is better than a shopping mall.”
I soon realized this book wasn’t an anomaly—it was part of a whole genre called ‘Christian fiction.’ I stopped buying books from that section because I didn’t want characters who told me the lesson I was supposed to learn; I wanted to find it through the storytelling, through scenes that gripped me, and through characters who broke my heart. But often, these books had little of that.
That’s why, now as a mom, I’d rather my kids read a well-written book with a few swear words than a morally didactic Christian novel. I’ve come to learn that good children’s authors don’t start with a moral to teach but a story to tell. Teaching isn’t the storyteller’s first goal, but if they have good character, it often comes through by the end naturally—and those are the lessons a child will take hold of.
The Dumbing Down of Moralistic Books for Children
Much of children’s literature comes with a moral in hand, then reshapes that moral so it’s dumbed down to a child’s level, and presents the moral within the casing of a story. The real purpose of the book is to pass along the moral or agenda of the author to the child in a way they believe is entertaining and accessible to their tiny minds.
C. S. Lewis chaffed at this idea. “I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story.” He believed we should write stories for children as if they were our equals—because they are. Children, he declared, are just as wise as we are in the moral sphere.As believers, we know this to be true: Each of us, being made in the image of God, has both a conscience that declares his moral law to us and is given all of creation to behold where his power and goodness are declared (Rom. 1).
Charlotte Mason, a revolutionary children’s educator from the later half of the nineteenth century, believed that children are born persons and must be treated as such. Or, as Lewis so aptly put it, children are not a lump of raw material for us to shape and handle.Her model of education was built on the principle that children need to be taught with respect to their personality, which means no use of manipulation or the spoon-feeding of facts, but by placing them in the right environment under good habits and presenting them with living ideas from which they draw their conclusions.
She believed that education only works if the child first draws the connections between all the living ideas they are presented with, and that too often mothers, nurses, and educators get in the way of their children’s learning. “Everything is directed, expected, suggested. No other personality out of book, picture, or song, no, not even that of Nature herself, can get at the child without the mediation of the teacher. No room is left for the spontaneity or personal initiation on [the child’s] part.”
Rather, she believed that parents and teachers must sow opportunities and leave the rest to the child. “Now, Nature is her own mediator, undertakes, herself, to find work for eyes and ears, taste and touch; she will prick the brain with problems and the heart with feelings; and the part of mother or teacher in the early years (and, all through life) is to sow opportunities, and then to keep in the background, ready with a guiding or restraining hand only when these are badly wanted.”
Authors, through heavily moralistic and agenda-driven stories, get in the way of a child’s education too. But the authors that leave children filled with wonder, virtue, and character are the ones who began with simply a story. Lewis reminded authors that they should let the pictures that come to our minds tell us their own morals; virtue will naturally arise from our storytelling when we are striving towards right living, and those are the only morals that should find themselves in an author’s work.
How to Better Reach Our Children With Good Virtues Through Stories
Faith-based books can be especially terrible for this kind of force-feeding of moralism. Just as we adults cringe and roll our eyes at it, children do too. This is why Lewis said that if adults don’t enjoy a book neither should it be considered good literature for a child. This is why Mason was so opposed to “twaddle” literature that talked down to children or bathered on and on before finally getting to the point. Children neither want nor need these kinds of books; it only hinders them.
This is why Lewis said, in a lecture on Christian apologetics, that “What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.”We needs books that don’t shove faith and goodness in our children’s faces but books that are naturally filled with it. It should be the music in the background they wish to discover rather than obnoxious blaring that makes them cover their ears.
Charlotte Mason said that when we are constantly trying to squeeze in teachings about God or create heavy routines of spiritual teaching that we “smother the fire of the sacred life” in our children. “Spiritual teaching, like the wafted odour of flowers, should depend on which way the wind blows . . . Few words need be said, no exhortation at all; just the flash of conviction from the soul of the mother to the soul of the child.” She went on to write,
I think we make a mistake in burying the text under our endless comments and applications. Also, I doubt if the picking out of individual verses, and grinding these into the child until they cease to have any meaning for him, is anything but a hindrance to the spiritual life. The Word is full of vital force, capable of applying itself. A seed, light as thistledown, wafted into the child’s soul, will take root downwards and bear fruit upwards. What is required of us is, that we should implant a love of the Word; that the most delightful moments of the child’s day should be those in which his mother reads for him, with sweet sympathy and holy gladness in voice and eyes, the beautiful stories of the Bible; and now and then in the reading will occur one of those convictions, passing from the soul of the mother to the soul of the child, in which is the life of the Spirit.
As believing parents, sometimes we hyper-fixate on protecting our children from content like swear words, witchcraft, romantic relationships, portrayal of sins, and other issues that we forbid them from reading good books that could provoke deep thoughts and conversations—meanwhile, the preachy, moralistic stories we’re putting in their hands are doing just the opposite. They’re halting discussion, lessons, and discernment because they’re telling our children what they should think and do rather than prompting them to think for themselves. The authors are too busy getting in the way of our children’s learning than actually telling a good story they could learn from. These books likewise stomp out the smolder wick that is our children’s faith by trying to shove it down their throats.
Lewis said it well on the role of the author to the child: “We must of course try to do them no harm: we may, under the Omnipotence, sometimes dare to hope that we may do them good. But only such good as involves treating them with respect. We must not imagine that we are Providence or Destiny.”Neither we as parents nor authors can form our children’s future; we cannot make them into the people we want them to be. Books won’t do this work either. We may have influence, but we and the books we give them will never play the role of destiny.
Evil as the Backdrop for Light
We want to protect our children from the vileness of this world and fill their minds with goodness. Of course we do; we’re good parents. But what if in this desire to protect them, we’re actually keeping them from discerning for themselves what goodness is? What if we’re keeping them from taking Scripture and applying it themselves without the help of a character spouting off Bible verses unnaturally in their dialogue? One day they’ll be faced with their own moral choices, and they might not have a Sunday school graduate as a sidekick to preach a sermon to them.
If we’ve raised our children on the truths of Scripture, we don’t need to worry that the books we give them will corrupt them or darken the light inside. Instead, they will use their own light to dissolve the shadows. That’s the purpose of all beautiful books. We can trust them to recognize good from evil. And when they struggle, we can also trust them to come to us with their questions.
There are stories in Scripture that if we found them in our kids’ books, we’d waste no time tossing it in the garbage. But we’re okay with those stories in Scripture because we know their darkness is meant to be the backdrop for the brightness of Christ. As we read the stories to our children of the moral failings of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and David, we use those stories to not only tell them what the right thing to do would have been, but to demonstrate how much this world needs a Saviour—and how much greater that Saviour is than even the best of heroes.
Why can’t we let their books do the same?
