Winnie-The-Antichrist: Christian Books and the Satanic Imagination
Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 7:00AM | by Otter Someone asked me a year ago at the old Sonlight Forums about good Christian books. Kim just sent me a copy of my reply.
Requests for book recommendations always take me off guard.
I read a lot. But books are like old memories. You look back on them and know they served a purpose at the moment and changed you in important ways.
And they have a habit of cropping up just when you need them. Your best bet is to walk into a book shop with your heart open and see what comes to you. Hard to get more Christian than that. Unless Christianity is more than what you read, but I digress.
Still, for what it's worth, my halting reply to the question, "What are some good Christian books?" was necessarily more about what I was thinking at the time:
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Books that don't simplify human experience or the complexity of human choices. They needn't be boring: but they must not leave us with the feeling that we are some jam-covered grinning god.
A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh books, for instance, are very serious: The Hundred Acre Wood is a place ringed around with sadness, loneliness, the anxiety of living, the uncertain self, the impressionistic nature of childhood. 
Can you imagine Disney's Pooh with this much dumbstruck and casual wonder? You cannot. He hasn't the peace. He hasn't the truthfulness or the innocent mind of a child. Disney's Pooh Bear is Satan, the laughing master of his world, not a citizen in it.
Disney's plundering of them is not remotely serious, and is a huge measure of how much we hate our children as human beings, however much we may love them as offspring. In Disney's hands, Pooh is a winsome lovable greed-machine without the true redeeming innocence of self-discovery. There's all the difference in the world between being a bear of little brain and being downright stupid.
Happiness is not your birthright, American Child. Pooh would teach you this, if you'd stop looking at Disney's damned Anti-Pooh with his big yellow smile and incessant, cloying, lying glee.
Then too, Calvin and Hobbes is a very serious comic strip. It's "light," not "lite." It has things to say about childhood, about the world "as it is" and what about it that's deeply unsatisfying to childhood, and above all things to say about adults and the trade they've made.
Just a few books I've been thinking about, chosen at random from a burlap sack:
Brideshead Revisited is a profoundly Christian book: it's about homosexuality and adultery and alcoholism, and about the difference between holiness and behaving well. If it makes you feel smug about never having committed adultery, you haven't understood it.
Michael Malone's Handling Sin is a very funny, very serious book that demands to know the answer to the question, "If love is the greatest commandment, isn't the greatest sin not to love? And don't all the little things we judge each other for pale in comparison with that easy, pretendedly-virtuous neglect?" I guess that's two questions.
The Beast From Revelation: Could anything be more anti-Christian than to soak children in this idol of consumption and unbridled stupidity? To change innocence for idiocy? I think not. Those who boycott Disney for having a gay pride parade should rather boycott Disney for human sacrifice, because they take the children's imagination and sacrifice it to an idol. And yes, I DO think it's that serious. The imagination matters more than anything. Without it, faith is not faith.
You [the friend who asked about Christian books] mentioned Bede's history... I'd say Pelikan's is more serious, even more "Christian" than Bede's.
Gerhardt Wehr's biography of Jung is almost a religious experience (at least for the first and last quarters or so of the book.... there's a long boring middle section).
A writer I'd rather admire than read, Flannery O'Connor, understands grace very well: life's a meaningless carnival, then you get gored by a bull and die.
Shusaku Endo's Silence and Deep River are early and late novels (respectively) that ask what the real reach of God is towards humankind and what the reach of humankind towards God is worth. They can be troubling to somebody who needs Christianity to be "exclusive," a truth among lies instead of a truth among truths.
G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday is a chilling, haunting allegory for... well, for.... I'll get back to you on that.
Not sure why those all sit in my mind, but that's what I'm thinking of as I wonder how to recommend books, like recommending the best breaths to take.
All of them are serious, in my view, and treat life as something terribly, painfully important, not some prelude to the sweet by and by.
Profoundly Christian: The Man (A.A. Milne) and the boy (Christopher Robin) and the bear (lower left), in descending order of wonder, though perhaps not seriousness. We might think of this as the devolution of faith but not of goodness, for Milne clearly still had faith in his son, who had faith in his bear, who had the faith of a child.
There is nothing more true or more Christian, Pooh Bear, than that you are really alone. That love is an accident or grace, and that the wonder and confusion that the world presents to you is the sound of your soul stirring. Anyone who says differently is selling something. And the price they charge you is your belief that the world might after all be worth living in. Milne wrote you rightly, because when the last pot of honey is gone, you still sit lonely and bewildered as a child in your innocence. I'm sorry Walt Disney ever even read your truths and splashed them in day-glo fantasies that robbed you of all your truth, beauty, and Christian heart.
Otter
Susan R., old friend and guest-blogger, has thrown in her two cents on Disney, much to my delight.
Reader Comments (8)
I remember when you first posted this at Sonlight. I had never read Winnie-the-Pooh, and I was so mad at you. I got over it. But I remember being struck by the idea that something could be Christian that wasn't in the Christian section at Barnes and Noble. I wrote more on my blog.
Amen and amen! I've been saying that for years (well, not the human sacrifice part, exactly). I've never gotten over how they scaled, gutted, and filleted Andersen's mermaid--one of my all-time favorite fairy tales. I'm tempted to say it was literally a desecration. With a very few exceptions, Disney's kids' movies are crrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrap of such a callow sort it almost makes the Christian fiction industry look dignified.
Also Sprach Soozin
Language. We blush for you.(I refer to "Christian fiction industry," of course, that four letter word.)
Thus Rachel:
Very kind comments (and terrific insights) at your blog: thank you so much.
I never saw this on the Sonlight forums and am glad you decided to post it here. Very thought provoking.
Susan: I just read about the original Little Mermaid story over the summer. That shit was depressing. D:
Victoria: Depressing and a completely different story, right?
Most of the fairy tales have been altered to the point where they're virtually unrecognizable. Some attempt was made to make them "bedtime stories" with total disregard to the actual point and soul of the stories.
Victoria: If it depresses you that Andersen doesn’t close with a perky, buxom redhead sailing into the sunset with her toothy lover and his fabulous hair, then, sure, it’s depressing.
But Disney’s “love story” is conventional and shallow and, more to the point, it doesn’t actually have much of love in it. Ariel triumphs when she kills off her romantic rival—who is, rather conveniently, a vicious sea-witch hell-bent on destroying her and everyone in the show—and wins herself a man. You could maybe call it an act of justice if you stretch things a bit, but hardly an act of love. More like self-preservation with undertones of jealous rage.
By contrast, Andersen’s story is about a woman—er, fish—who sacrifices her mortal life rather than destroy an ex-lover who wants to be “just friends,” and she wins her soul. The love there is both triumphant and transcendent.
Now, given the choice, I’d still rather live the Disney version—who wouldn’t want a life where love is always requited and it’s good to kill your enemies? But I’ve gotta point out: that world does not exist. Mermaids and sea-witches notwithstanding, Andersen’s story is set firmly in the real world, where sooner or later you MUST choose between saving your life and saving your soul.