Literature for Training Saints

The July/August 2009 feature in Touchstone Magazine, written by David Mills is entitled “Bad Books for Kids: A Guide to the World of Youth Literature & What You Can Do About It.” This article is a welcome voice in this culture of death, and serves as an effective wake up call to parents and teachers to start questioning what their children or students are reading.

David points out in this article that most books written for teenagers sell in huge numbers to girls. This seems to be the target audience for these bad books, and bad they are.

“You could find something to enjoy and some lesson of value in almost all of them, but also something that undermines moral clarity and promotes one or more of several popular sins.”

-David Mills

Subversive Themes

One of the most prominent messages these books deliver to their unsuspecting and vulnerable readers is one of distrust for authority. Families are a trial to be endured, they don’t understand the main character and thus the child’s friends become her family (the main character is almost always a girl.) Ultimately these books isolate our girls, teach them not to trust those who care about them and love them in order to feed them this spirit of rebellion and individuality.

Sexuality is not related in anyway to morality, sexual activity is mainly recreational, with it being treated as a currency, the girls ‘spending’ their bodies for gain. The loss of virginity is still treated in a somewhat special way, with this given to someone who the main character has some kind of affection for. This is the morally relativistic meter stick that young girls are encouraged to use to make their decisions regarding this important part of their lives. Often, the loss of virginity is seen as a ‘coming of age.’

This ‘mainstream morality’ as David puts it in his article, follows the ‘mainstream piety’ of our day. One of the most prominent thoughts is that moral judgements of any kind are not to be made, something professor Peter Kreeft from Boston college sums up as how, in our culture, there is ‘nothing to judge but judgementalism.’

What’s the Point?

“These books provide an alternative story to the one by which a girl (or boy) is supposed to live, and gives authoritative approval, a kind of imprimatur, to her desire to rebel and do what she pleases. In other words, they appeal to the child’s vanity and pride, and except for the rare saint, even the most moral of children is vain and prideful and thus vulnerable to being twisted.”

- David Mills

These books ultimately are not worth it, they cost too much. Some important lessons are taught, however, to get there the reader needs to tip-toe through a minefield and flirt with the culture of death.

Read Classics

Classic literature does not run this risk. Although the problems are just as real, just as serious, the books do not graphically discuss the dangerous experiences that modern day books do. These books also contain a transcendent component which gets the story to move past the whole ‘woe is me’ self obsession that is evident in these problem stories of our day. They reach above and beyond the main character and encourage the readers to reach beyond themselves as well. The best part about the classics is that they are better stories, they share a message that satisfies on a level that cannot be achieved in these modern dreary books.

What we need are books to train disciples. We need to share stories that mirror the Story. We need to tell stories that allow the Word to speak through them. We need to immerse our Children in the Gospel message. We need to tell a better story, and in fact, the only story.