Posted on 11/11/2005 2:33:01 AM PST by rhema
Many public schools already use The Chronicles of Narnia in their reading curriculum. But after Florida governor Jeb Bush started promoting The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in a statewide reading contest called "Just Read, Florida," the critics are wanting to ban that book.
C.S. Lewis' classic, set to premiere as a major motion picture Dec. 9, has a clear Christian message, culminating in the Christ-figure, Aslan the Lion, giving himself to the devil figure, the White Witch, to die in the place of the rotten little kid, Edmund. Then Aslan rises from the dead, which brings salvation to Narnia.
Such a clear gospel message, according to some civil libertarians, has no place in the public schools. Barry Lynn, director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, says, "This whole contest is just totally inappropriate because of the themes of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It is simply a retelling of the story of Christ."
Ironically, those comments came out a week after Banned Books Week, celebrating books people have tried to censor. (According to the Banned Books Resource Guide from the American Library Association, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is on the list. So is the Bible.)
And Mr. Lynn earlier denounced an Alabama school board for choosing not to use certain textbooks because of their anti-Christian bias, considering that to be "censorship," which at that time for those books, he opposed: "We are very much concerned that this will unleash a tidal wave of new censorship efforts by a variety of religious groups seeking to impose their sectarian viewpoints on all of the students in America's public schools."
If it should be unlawful to have students read books that have a Christian theme, the problem is even worse than civil libertarians realize. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is not the only book with a Christ figure who gives his life to save others.
We'll also need to ban Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Herman Melville's Billy Budd, and William Faulkner's Light in August.
And we can't stop there. Nearly everything written before the 18th century has a strong Christian content. Shakespeare's comedies have some bawdy stuff that we might permit, but their plots tend to involve some sin, discord, and a death sentence resolved only with some sort of death, resurrection, and forgiveness. In the tragedies, Hamlet worries about hell, Macbeth yearns to be cleansed of guilt, and Lear—evoking the Christian Right conspiracy—resolves to be "God's spy."
In the second tier of the greatest English authors, we have Milton, with his epic poem on Adam, Eve, and the Fall (explicitly biblical and creationist); Spenser, with his combination of fantasy and Christian allegory (that influenced the banned Lewis); and Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales include some dirty ones we could use, but what if students read the tales of the Pardoner, the Franklin, or the Parson?
We'll need to ban metaphysical poetry, in which John Donne, George Herbert, and the others write explicitly about their relationship with Christ. Even post-Enlightenment, we've got problems. Jonathan Swift was a minister, whose Gulliver's Travels ridicules human depravity. Hawthorne too writes about original sin, a Christian belief that might interfere with children's self-esteem.
We could do as the colleges are doing, change the canon of books considered great. But when we replace the white males with women writers, it gets even worse! Anne Bradstreet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Christina Rossetti, and Flannery O'Connor are even more explicitly Christian. So are many of the classic black authors, such as Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass.
Erasing Christianity from the culture that it shaped will leave nothing left. We had better ban all literature, along with our whole contaminated culture.
Oh, never mind. We are already doing that.
My mother is a second- grade teacher, and reads "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" to her class every year. It's a wonderful book, and I can't believe that these hypocritical fascists want to ban it just because it has a Christian message.
Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.
"Intelligent, but totally without wisdom."
I think it's possible to be verbally facile without having any significant degree of intelligence.
If you talk smart, people will often presume you are smart (until you contradict them), but it ain't necessarily so.
"Frankly, I think it's long overdue for Barry Lynn to leave America and go find someplace comfortable."
Like, say, the hottest regions of Hades.
Yup. Notice how the ACLU wants to get all Christianity out the public life, but doesn't say 'boo' about Ramadan observance on public lands.
Some of Lewis's later children's books will make them froth at the mouth even more: The Silver Chair contains an eloquent critique of secularism, and The Last Battle portrays the Narnian Antichrist as a fake supported by secularists and the Calormenes (thinly disguised Muslims).
I call them pseudo-intellectuals.
But Barry has no problem with a variety of left wing athiest groups "seeking to impose their rsectarian viewpoints on all of the students in America's public schools." In fact, if you read again what Barry said you will realize that he is saying people whose beliefs are informed by their religious convictions have no place in the democratic process.
Amen.
No king but Christ.
"When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again. "That's my Middle West — not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life...""One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o'clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that's and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: "Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?" and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.
I love the wording... on ITS ass.
Lynn said, "We are very much concerned that this will unleash a tidal wave of new censorship efforts by a variety of religious groups seeking to impose their sectarian viewpoints on all of the students in America's public schools." but doesn't mind imposing censorship on anything remotely Christian. The hypocrisy is overwhelming.
It's a darned shame Barry missed out on the "tidal wave" at Aceh City.
Barry Lynn has become the Salem witch hunter he so regularly claims he's against.
My mother is a second- grade teacher, and reads "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" to her class every year. It's a wonderful book, and I can't believe that these hypocritical fascists want to ban it just because it has a Christian message.
Several groups want to ban books that are offensive to them.
those guys are totally out in the ozone ..
Dang it! I thought I was alone out here:).
I wonder who would be against having a Watchtower Bible in the library.
There is a book 'ya know? Did you not know that Anakin was going to become Vader before seeing Sith?
Ever run into a person who seems to drain all the life out of something?
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