Introduction: Children's Literature and Religion

Little round planet

In a big universe

Sometimes it looks blessed

Sometimes it looks cursed

Depends on what you look at obviously

But even more it depends on the way that you see.

—Bruce Cockburn

Religion in children's literature functions as a mechanism of social ordering, of setting up hermeneutic categories with which to view the world. As such it is both ideological and imaginative: narratives are constructed to support an ideological understanding of the world and human behavior and also to reflect the categories of cosmic organization defined by the particular religion or worldview that informs them. At the same time, because religion determines the shape and texture of narratives, it can be seen as a source of all creative activity—the source of fiction-making itself. "In the beginning was the Word," the gospel of John tells us, and J.R.R. Tolkien affirms in his classic essay on fairy tales that "we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker" (145). The creative process rivals the authority and power of the gods and the cosmos, yet it also pays homage to them.

Ever since the Puritans codified the doctrine that children, no less than adults, need to read the Bible and understand what it says, religion and religious issues have been part of children's literature. Indeed, it could be argued that children's literature as we know it here in the West grew out of the Puritan revolution. The effort to influence children's worldviews and psyches, to teach them what is considered essential to their well-being in this world or in the hereafter through appeals to their love of narrative and drama, has always characterized much if not all children's literature. In the nineteenth century, authors as disparate as Charlotte Yonge, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Kingsley, and George MacDonald all deployed story to innoculate readers with religious faith. By following the trials and triumphs of narrated children, readers might learn to "[draw] nearer to the Friend who welcomes every child with a love stronger than that of any father, tenderer than that of any mother" (Alcott 80). From the Romantic movement on, however, overt and even covert advocacy of religion (particularly Christianity) in secular children's literature has become increasingly suspect and subject to censorship. Even writers with strong religious convictions, such as Katherine Paterson or Madeleine L'Engle, write covertly about religious faith; reluctance to proselytize and awareness of a diverse readership may contribute to this reticence. At the same time, general societal interest in the world of the imagination, imaginative connections with the past, and spiritual exploration has, if anything, increased. Readers consume with equal avidity C. S. Lewis's translation of the Christian story into the Chronicles of Narnia, Philip Pullman's reaction against the thesis of Paradise Lost in his Dark Materials trilogy, and Sheri Tepper's ironic celebration of human ills in Plague of Angels. Such speculative fiction lets us explore the moral and theological questions that humans have posed for millennia, offering new mythologies to imagine old moral dilemmas. Many contemporary works of fiction for children also demonstrate the ways religious belief as expressed through folkways connects children with the past, their heritage, and thus their identity. Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm and Virginia Hamilton's Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl are just two examples. All of L'Engle's speculative fiction attempts to establish connections between scientific truth and spirituality: from A Wrinkle in Time onward, L'Engle reads science through the lens of spiritual understanding.

Ten years ago Craig Werner and Frank Riga argued in their introduction to ChLAQ's previous theme issue on children's literature and religion that "religion is what provides the necessary mental and spiritual security to bring order out of the chaos that modern writers are concerned with" (2). This strong ordering mechanism, as the following essays will show, has its positive and negative aspects. That earlier issue on children's literature and religion featured contemporary...