Fiona Veitch Smith

Children’s books are often the battle ground of religious zealots with many Christians boycotting the likes of JK Rowling and Philip Pullman. In this article I argue that spiritual themes can be found in the most unlikely of places.

Once upon a time there was a father with many, many children. He had so many children that if you counted every grain of sand on every beach in every country in every century throughout time, you might, just might, remember them all. But unlike what you or I might do, this father did not forget his children’s names. He didn’t think Billy was Brian or Carolyn Kate; he knew them all by name. But more than that, he knew their secret names, the names that they should have been and perhaps might still hope to be. So he wrote these names on pretty white stones and kept them in a jar beside his bed, hoping for the day when each of his children would come and ask for theirs.

The Fairy Tale Gospel

This is the gospel. Maybe not the whole Gospel, but part of it, a version of it – a little made-up story telling a very big Truth. It is a fairy tale, a children’s story, but if you are wise, you will not dismiss it, because in it is a secret you’ve waited your whole life to find out. Who am I? Where did I come from? Does anybody love me? Is there any hope in my future?

It is in children’s stories, or the stories that we like to think are only for children, that the secrets of the human heart are laid bare. And what is more human than the quest for the divine? Every generation has its fairy tales – the Cinderellas, the Sleeping Beauties, the Rapunzels and Snow Whites – perhaps not with these names, but we recognise them nonetheless. In them we see lost and rejected children being saved by some kind of divine intervention – call it magic, if you will. In them the Prince frees us from servitude, releases us from prison and kisses us back to life. In these stories we see patterns of death and resurrection and lives transformed through another’s sacrifice. And if you read the Bible you’ll find the same stories there.

Fairy tales can be psychoanalysed and shown to reveal humanity’s darkest fears and most sinful desires. But they also reveal our profoundest dreams and hopes. In the words of Frederick Buechner:

But if the world of the fairy tale and our glimpses of it here and there are only a dream, they are one of the most haunting and powerful dreams that the world has ever dreamed … Why do we spend vast sums of money to go to the moon and Mars? You hear all kinds of solemn talk about learning this and that from it, about beating the Russians to the draw, about establishing colonies for one purpose or another; but anybody who knows anything, any child, at least the child in any of us, knows that we go shooting off into space because just possibly, impossibly, the Wizard of Oz is there.[1]

Allegory or Blasphemy?

And what of other children’s literature? Books written in the 20^th and 21^st Centuries still reflect these dreams. Some authors set out to deliberately draw parallels between the Gospel and fairy tales. Take for example CS Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. Published between 1950 – 1956, these seven books tell the interwoven stories of a group of children who enter a fantastical world where they help save the inhabitants from the forces of evil. Even the most secular reader has to acknowledge that the great lion Aslan is meant to be an analogy of Christ. And although some of the stories are less obviously allegorical than others, no one can doubt Lewis’ overall intention when he concludes the final book, when the children have died, with these words:

All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Much has been written and said about the other great fantasy series of the 20^th Century: The Lord of the Rings. Some overly enthusiastic Christian fans have claimed that nearly everything in Tolkien’s fantastical world points to the Bible, a view which non-Christian fans hotly contest. Then again, there are other Christians who would consider it blasphemy to suggest that a work of fiction that revels in magic and sorcery can have anything to teach us about God. I imagine we too shall be hearing from a few of them after this article is published! In my opinion Tolkien, although a Christian, did not write the Ring trilogy as a point-by-point allegory of the Gospel. Yet it is hard to deny there are many ‘Christian’ elements in the stories. Any preacher would be hard put to come up with a better illustration of the seductive and corrupting power of evil than the pathetic Gollum and his Precious. Like any fairy tale, the adventures of Frodo and his friends in their battle to save the world, bring into focus the age-old dream that good will one day conquer evil and that God is still in control.

Modern Trends

Obviously allegorical Christian fiction is no longer in fashion. Some campaigning secularists would go as far to say that it is tantamount to brainwashing children. Which is why it was so surprising that a secular publishing house chose to release the overtly Christian Shadowmancer by ex-vicar G.P. Taylor. This tale of an African Christian boy who comes to Yorkshire to confront an evil clergyman, was originally self-published and privately distributed. It proved to be so popular that Faber & Faber offered to republish it. Millions of copies have now been sold and a Hollywood film is currently in the making.

I certainly wouldn’t rate Shadowmancer as the literary equivalent of Narnia or Lord of the Rings. But what its huge sales have proven is that in this apparently secular society there is still a yearning for the divine. Taylor is uncompromising in his presentation of the Christian faith, yet he uses the reading public’s love of fairy tale and magic to repackage the Gospel in an acceptable form.

Christian themes in non-Christian literature

Then there are other authors who set out to usurp the Gospel and yet, in their telling, cannot get away from it. Take JK Rowling for example. The much villified Ms Rowling, who created the iconic Harry Potter has been accused of promoting witchcraft and seducing children towards the dark arts. Her rollicking tales of an apprentice wizard and his school pals owe much to traditional fairy tales. The age-old themes are there: a lost child in search of his parents, a god-father in Professor Dumbledore, the battle between good and evil, a child born into obscurity who will save the world … Now I’m not contending that Harry Potter is a true reflection of the Christian Gospel. Far from it. But in it we can still see the quest for the divine, the human desire to know that there is a good force in charge of the universe and that there is hope for the most wretched of us to be transformed.

As a Christian I believe that that transformation can only come through being reconciled with God. And this can only happen by accepting that Jesus sacrificed himself as payment for that reconciliation. Some would call that a fairy tale. Philip Pullman certainly would. This exquisite writer is an evangelistic atheist whose first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy won the Carnegie Medal for Literature in 1995. The books are widely prescribed as school set works and frequently top the list of children’s favourite books of all time. And yet in them, Pullman infamously ‘kills’ God. Why then do I cite them as an example of children’s literature that points towards God? In His Dark Materials, just like in the Harry Potter series, there is an abandoned child, living in obscurity, who grows up to save the world. And despite Pullman killing God, or who he believes God to be, he cannot get away from the need to present a good, loving father figure (the polar bear Iorek Byrnison) who also takes on a messianic role in his willing self-sacrifice. Once again this story gives voice to the heart-cry of us all: who will save us from evil? While damning in its critique of traditional Christianity, it highlights the fact that no matter how many times we try to kill our image of God, we still cannot quench the desire for something divine to take its place.

And that’s what all fairy tales do. To quote Buecher once more:

That is the Gospel, this meeting of darkness and light and the final victory of light. That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, the one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still … and the ones who are to live happily ever after are … all who labor and are heavy laden, the poor naked wretches wheresoever they be.

For more on children’s books visit my other blog – The Crafty Writer.

First published in Plain Truth, May 2007

[1] Buechner, Frederick Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale, Harper Collins, 1977, p85