prixmium | (Reply)

I think that this backfires more often than not, and while my parents did occasionally create a content restriction when I was growing up, for the most part they didn't try to Brand My Life with the Christian Lifestyle Brand and I hated hanging around families/kids who had that going on-- Oh yeah, I remember that whole subculture thing. You saw it a lot in the South. I remember as a teen performing a Rent song (...giggle) for a Christian academy, and when I peeked at their library it was all conservative Christian-branded books, DVDs, etc. One book that makes me really sad in retrospect was an "answers to common objections to the faith" manual that tried to logically explain how the earth was created in six thousand days, or where the other people came from during Cain and Abel. I mean it's an interesting thought experiment to propose how all that stuff could have been literal, but there was just no room for the "the Bible was not intended to be a scientific manual" explanation, and I imagine it caused a lot of pain and confusion when those kids went out into the wider world and encountered robust objections/evidence that, on their face, would seem to disprove what they believed. 'Cause that's what I went through, and I wasn't even particularly raised that way. (Even in my own middle school, my science teacher had to tell kids raised by those types of parents that "evolution is just a theory" before she could start teaching that chapter in our books.)

I also think parents like Narnia because they associate Lewis with "mere" Christianity and think of him as like the representative of nondenominational Protestantism. Which I guess he sort of was, with Mere Christianity ("[Christianity] is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms [denominations]. If I can bring anyone into that hall, I have done what I attempted"), but that didn't mean there wasn't also some subversive stuff in Narnia, or that his own personal beliefs weren't largely Anglican (rather than proto-evangelical) in character.

I forget that I've watched/read certain things all the time. Bizarrely, I'll remember other, pedantic little things that it makes no sense for me to retain -- even years and years later!