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>> 155 Conclusion The Abrahamic Bargain The vision of the universal child, the same the world over, refuses to acknowledge difficulties and contradictions in relation to childhood , offering in their place a glorification of the child, cast in the role of innocent saviour of mankind. . . . Children’s literature conceived in this spirit serves as a site on which adult difficulties are addressed and often placated; it is about promises which the adults’ generations could not keep, amongst them international understanding and world peace. (emphasis mine) Emer O’Sullivan, 2005 Perhaps children’s literature, like the queer child, is conceivable only (or mostly?) after childhood, is another kind of hauntology and not necessarily an adultist exercise in bad faith (a bad sort of fiction or impossibility). Can we believe in children’s literature, including queer children’s literature, as a necessary and enabling fiction, a ghostly presence that nevertheless sustains us? (emphasis mine) Kenneth Kidd, 2011 There is no complexity in a Disney fairy-tale film, no exploration of character or the causes that create obstacles for the protagonists in the narratives. The emphasis is on purification, preparing oneself to become chosen, a member of the elite, and this American cleansing process based on meritocracy replaces the old schemata of the European fairy tale while at the same time it restores notions of hierarchy and elitism, reinforces a kind of redundant behavior controlled by a master builder such as Disney, and leads to a static dystopian vision of the world, that is, a degeneration of utopia. (emphasis mine) Jack Zipes, 2006 156 > 157 Holocaust and lynching, of war and slavery, suggest that it is not. It’s true, of course, that neither Anne Frank nor Emmett Till was literally sacrificed. They were murdered. None of the children portrayed in these books die on actual altars. Yet dead children are such a forceful image, one so often intended to shut down discourse, that we must take their symbolism seriously . Dead children demand agreement: they demand that we condemn their horrific deaths. They demand assent: we must conform to the identities they are used to shape. They demand redemption: we must make meaning from their deaths, or else face a nihilistic sense of loss so great that we cannot keep ourselves or our civilization going. As Virginia Hamilton put it, if we fail to push for empathy and a better world in the face of such atrocities, then we are doomed: “If we should decide that persuasion is too time-consuming and that, indeed, individual life is not worth the effort, then we might as well get on with the business of killing one another on a grand scale.”3 Dead children are so very not okay that our sacrificial renderings of their deaths inevitably lead to a perpetuation of minority identities built on the Protestant-inflected Abrahamic myth: on the willingness to give up our children, as long as they are reborn in narrative. The cost to those represented by such stories is that dead African Americans and Jews still dominate living ones, and criticisms of systemic racism and anti-Semitism are neglected in favor of stories of individual suffering as a cautionary tale and individual heroics that shine as proverbial lights in the darkness. Neoliberalism, an ideology of individualistic striving in an evermore -privatized democratic republic that is theoretically open and saving to all (a promise that is not always fulfilled), reigns as the dominant model of civil religions.4 These children’s stories matter, too, for how we understand religion and the ways it is told and taught in America. The central themes of crossing, dwelling, sacrifice, and fantasy took us through a popular story of American religious history: we came to a new Israel or Promised Land (one that was not really so new); we made homes that were explicitly supposed to be Christian (occluding the presence of others); we joined together as Protestants , Catholics, and Jews (ignoring other others) to fight and sacrifice in the mid-twentieth century; and then we entered a period of diversity in both literature and religion, a pluralism of ideas, cultures, and other worlds—but a period in which majority Protestant cultures still dominated. Attending to these submerged and explicit themes in popular children’s literature shows us how the grand narratives of American religious history are still with us. We cannot magically wish them away (unless perhaps there is a fairy godmother 158 > 159 of Aninku, Pepicek, and Mommy. In the opening scene...

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