Should this culture’s storytellers have access to our children? 

Stories are perhaps one of the most powerful methods of creating emotional responses and transmitting beliefs. How should parents regulate the consumption of stories by their children? This question can be answered by answering this one: What storytellers do you want telling stories to your children?  

It is interesting, the way conservatives and Christians often interact with the entertainment industry. For some reason, we seem to believe that we can consume the creations of post-modernists, relativists, and hedonists without imbibing any of those worldviews—and without getting indigestion. Many church-going parents allow their children to be raised on a diet of film, television, and music created by storytellers who despise Christianity and create narratives that run directly in opposition to it. They foment rebellion and celebrate lifestyles that run directly contrary to biblical beliefs—but often do so in tenderly-rendered tales that have more power to persuade than a dozen philosophical treatises or political speeches. Meanwhile, Christians in film and television are generally portrayed as stupid, mean, closeminded, and bumbling. Mockery is a powerful tool. 

It’s just a story, Christians will say when defending some empty, time-wasting TV show they’ve decided to watch. But that is not the case. There is no such thing as “just a story.” Stories have storytellers. If we want to know what the story is telling us, we simply have to look at what the storyteller wants to tell us. Storytellers come with their own worldviews, biases, and beliefs. These beliefs will come through in the stories they tell—especially in the extraordinarily powerful mediums of film and television—whether they are attempting propaganda intentionally or not. 

Compare this to the literature children used to be raised on and the storytellers parents used to invite into their homes, books like the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, the chronicles of the March family by Louisa May Alcott, the tales of Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, and so many others. These books celebrate what I call the high drama of ordinary living, and this has been one of the key secrets to the longevity of their popularity. Long after the frontier days passed into history, more than a century after the American Civil War, and many decades since the occupants of Prince Edward Island lived like Anne and her friends, the stories of friendship, puppy love, courtship, and the tiny trials and tragedies that make up childhood arch over the years to remain as real today as they were then. Children still relate to Laura Ingalls and Jo March and Anne Shirley because their childhoods, despite sometimes extraordinary circumstances, were innocent and beautiful. Even stories that focused on adventure contained familiar elements that everyone could relate with to ground them. Johan Wyss’s wonderful book The Swiss Family Robinson emphasized the essential nature of family while the parents and their children created a new life for themselves on a tropical island where they’d been shipwrecked. 

These master storytellers created a canon of literature that is often, unfortunately, only known to the rising generation through their retellings by other storytellers of distinctly different worldviews, utilizing television and film instead of the written word. I’m not trying to conflate or compare cinematography to literature—the art forms are too fundamentally different—but something essential is lost in translation. When post-modern artists create their own interpretations of great literature, the stories are often robbed of much of the beauty that made them so beloved in the first place. 

The question parents must answer when they are considering the question of today’s entertainment industry is whether they want to permit our culture’s current storytellers to have access to their children. What is the worldview of these storytellers? What do they want to impart in their stories? Is any of it good, or consistent with the Christian worldview? Do these storytellers have any values at all, or do their stories promote relativism at best and overt wickedness at worst? And this doesn’t even approach the fact that exposure to the medium of film and television at an early age often has the potential to rob children of the ability to create their own imagination and discover early the worlds contained between the two covers of a book. 

The good news is that parents do not have to invite these smut-peddlers and storytellers into their homes. The greatest works of literature ever produced are cheaper and more widely available than at any other time in human history. Skilled storytellers of the highest calibre simply await an introduction. A host of men and women who defined eras and captivated entire generations with the tales and the characters they conjured up in their imaginations and breathed into life with their pens stand ready to usher a new generation on fantastic journeys of wonder, whimsy and imagination, needing only a simple invitation. Their stories capture the great moral truths, the essential principles, and the high drama of ordinary living. Give them a try. I promise you won’t regret it.