Censoring Out Santa and Satan
One year, our family was enjoying a Christmas party at a friend’s place, when an older woman brought out a story to read the kids about the real meaning of Christmas. When she got to the part about Santa, holding the book upside down, she read, “So now you know that Christmas is not all about Satan,” which brought a riot of laughter from the crowd. We loved the irony of mixing up Santa and Satan, since these two are closely linked in some people’s minds.
When we choose material for read alouds at home, we could really limit our library to only the perfect books that affirm the truth. I believe this would be a shame, since, first of all, you’d have a pretty small selection to work with. But a much greater reason relates to our purpose for homeschooling our kids in the first place.
We are not homeschooling to keep our kids away from lies, we are homeschooling to expose the lies and teach them how to handle lies with the truth. The perfect opportunity to expose lies is as they come up during family read alouds. This is the “Santa” kind of censorship, simply handled by saying “Santa is a fairy tale, but some people think he is real.” “Millions of years is a fairy tale, but some people think it’s real, and here’s why…” It’s good to explain how we know it’s not true (by comparing to God’s word).
What about reading fantasy books? Am I ‘exposing lies’ the whole time I’m reading the Chronicles of Narnia? Except with very young children or the very literal minded ones, we start to make assumptions while we are reading. That’s necessary, but it can be easy to forget as your older ones get used to fairy tales that your littles might not understand what’s real and what’s not. Once in a while, we go back over the old ground: “Some stories are made up and we can tell because they aren’t part of real life and don’t match the truth of the Bible.”
There is another kind of censorship, the editing out of evil. We are also not homeschooling to hide our kids away from evil, we want to protect them from evil by exposing it and equipped them to fight against it. When we read the Bible at home, we read it word for word. When awful things come up, we let the kids ask about it when they are ready to hear the answer. Bad things come up in other readings, too. We sometimes choose not to read these parts of a book to younger kids, to make sure we are dwelling on the good and the pure. But this is the “Satan” kind of censorship, where we say “Satan is real, he is evil, but God is bigger.” “There are bad people who want to hurt children, but God is stronger than them…” and provide specific, positive instructions for their concrete minds to handle. We want to balance the revelation of evil with the corresponding positive truth and practical instruction.
I recently handed my 16-year-old The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking. It is packed full of mind-blowing facts and godless lies. I expect him to be ready to sift through that Gordian knot and discuss it with us as he’s reading. If he hadn’t been exposed to a heavy dose of the absolute truth from the Bible, and a variety of ways to ferret out and deal with lies, I might have concerns with the exercise, but I’m hoping to see a good and interesting result.
If we can make sure our children are exposed to both ‘Santa’ and ‘Satan’ under our supervision and get equipped to recognize and deal with both, we’re preparing them to serve God with grace and truth.
