All our labels need air quotes

A very limited discussion about choosing good books for kids

“Christian art? Art is art; painting is painting; music is music; a story is a story. If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.” ~ Madeleine L’Engle, Waking on Water

Is this a good book for my child? a friend texts me.

“Good” is  subjective and dependent on taste, but I know what she is really asking. Is this book christian? Approved? Appropriate? She doesn’t want to hand her child something that is dangerous or heretical. She needs a label for this book and the shortest way to know, without reading the book first, is to find out if “christian” can be an adjective describing it.

If it is christian, it is obviously safe.¹

I understand her question but the answer needs more than a text message. So much of what is christian is nothing more than safe stories with happy endings², and there is nothing safe about filling my mind or a child’s mind with the idea that life is a formula, that safety is guaranteed, or that God’s best always looks like our American idea of blessing and always comes by way of our carefully calculated choices. I fear I’ve sold this way of thinking to my own kids through my parenting style, which was sometimes nothing more than the fear tactics I used to get a child to obey or avoid danger or make me look good.

I know my friend’s struggle. I want the labels, too. I have always wanted to know the names of things so I can make the right choices.

What I want to answer is that there are no christian books, that Jesus did not die to redeem a bad book which chose a wayward path. I want to get high and mighty and tell her that all the good Christians who write bad, boring, safe books are dangerous; that bad Christians who write beautiful works are honest; that unbelievers who write true books are good.

This conversation is too complex for a text and I can’t reduce the book to a label, or make my friend feel dumb for asking the question I’ve asked myself so many times. I tell my friend I don’t know, because I haven’t read the book in question. I have absolved myself from the responsibility.

Years ago I regularly received a catalog of homeschool books and curriculum from a particular publishing company that specialized in reprinting old, forgotten, out of print books. This publisher covered their catalog with children clothed in victorian era dresses and knickers, moms in aprons, and dads with bountiful beards.

I didn’t care to dress my family like the folks in that catalog, but I was attracted to the labels it sold. Conservative. Family first. Christian values. Traditional. Counter cultural. Safe. For $19.99, we could own a rung on the ladder to godly children. If we had these books we would be inviting peace into our home and God’s approval on our life, and I was a sucker for peace and approval.

Of course no one ever said those things outright, but the pervading idea was that we, as parents and educators of our children, had manifold responsibility for our children’s souls, and you would recognize godly parenting by its fruit of godly offspring. It was an implied formula. All I had to do was plug in the right teaching, which came from the right books, and out would pop the godly responses.

My first purchase was a series of audio cassettes that narrated the story of the most pious little girl who ever has fictitiously lived, Elsie Dinsmore. The first Elsie story was written in 1867, and little motherless Elsie is faced with decisions between her faith in God and her loyalty to family and friends. Throughout the series she is tempted and tormented by her own father and mocked by all around her. Again and again our saccharine heroine chooses her scruples, and again and again we see her suffer righteously for it, with her chin up and her little heart more melded to Christ and His suffering. Her constant plea is for the salvation of those around her, especially her father, and her prayers for herself are only that she could be better and more faithful.

Flannery O’Connor, who wrote fiction that was anything but saccharine, referred to this kind of literature as “pious trash”. I dug through piles of pious trash in my early years of homeschooling and it took some time for me to grow in my own discernment. It took maturity to learn to separate the essence of a thing from its easy label.

I bought other books from this catalog that I am not embarrassed to have given my children, but I still feel foolish that I fell for the low-hanging fruit of a label. I was easy prey for anything that promised to be a shelter from sin or trouble or grief, and each $19.99 was a premium I paid for guarantees.

I didn’t know I couldn’t have those guarantees. I didn’t understand how much each of us gets to choose for ourselves, and how the freedom to make choices can be an aid to our wisdom. I thought it was my duty to provide the labels for my children so they could know—without thinking, without making mistakes—which books and movies and music were “approved and safe”.

I didn’t know how limiting the labels could be to our own thought process and discernment; not that I wish I would have given my children garbage to read. Don’t hear me say we should give our children unrestrained access to everything under the sun, for the sake of their discernment. Heck no. But I had tiptoed into a worldview that used labels to divide the world into two categories, and it took some time for me to crawl out of it. I wanted the guarantees so much.

We are such imperfections of Christ’s goodness, but He—love, Himself—covers a multitude of sins. That is a sure guaranty. I want to put a lot more footnotes and quotation marks in this post to assure you that I do believe in parental responsibility and good, biblical teaching, but there is no end to the caveats of any parenting advice. There is no guaranty but Christ’s goodness.

Thankfully I was never committed enough to hyper-vigilance and ultra-conservatism to stick with it. What a lot of work. Thankfully my husband abounded with grace and wisdom, and often thwarted my strict plans with root beer floats before dinner and the earthy humor of hunting stories or grizzled loggers. Had he been as scared of screwing up as I was, as bound by rules and rightness, our children may have turned into a frayed bundle of nerves and doubt. Thanks be to God. And maybe thanks be to Martha Finley, who wrote a character so absurdly righteous that we easily saw the folly of that kind of piety.

1. This essay would require a lot of quotation marks to correctly imply my tone, but please just read air quotes around the labels from here on out.

2. I could go off about the story of Noah’s ark that decorates our nurseries and Sunday school rooms…