Last summer, one of my older kids came to me asking for permission to read a book that had been recommended by friends from an online educational platform with a Christian foundation and missional intention. Recognizing that my oldest ones were a year away from college, I understood it was time to begin to have more adult conversations about discernment and about handing off the responsibility of gatekeeping. I have been accused by some of being overprotective in sheltering my kids, but I don’t believe that is true. I have never shied away from difficult topics and issues- whether it was a book discussion on Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto; explaining a news story about abortion; having a candid, compassionate conversation regarding mental disorders and illness; or having a preparatory briefing before going out to dinner with Danny’s homosexual co-worker and his significant other. I would rather they hear it from Danny and me, where we can point them to Scripture for answers rather than the world give them a humanistic, relativistic, or atheistic point of view of these encounters.
Proverbs 4:19 warns, “The way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know over what they stumble.” How can a mother stand by with indifference while her children wander off behind the godless, leaving them to trip over stones and pits, to crush their wrists and twist their ankles, and mar their hands and knees with the scars of their missteps? I would rather tackle these difficult conversations with the light of Scripture, which illuminates their path “like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day” and teach them to do the same. So besides the usual pre-authorized library haul, the aforementioned child also brought home the aforementioned book and a few others like it-- Maze Runner, Hunger Games, Divergent, Six of Crows-- books of which I had no knowledge and nothing to commend them except for the opinion of some unknown youth from a home with what I hoped would have similar standards of guardianship. Some of these books were read, and my child was usually disappointed or unimpressed—shallow characters, childish syntax, disappointing story lines. And so it began, this sort of expectation that my oldest two were advancing another rung in the ladder of self-governance and independence, and that they were walking on the narrow but clear, well-lit paths we mapped out for them. And when we left the U.S. to come to Israel, the loss of library access made the question somewhat irrelevant. Until we made friends. Friends with books.
All things work together for good…
At home we started dealing with the tension of a new dynamic— we now had two high school seniors, and a high school freshman who began to regularly challenge the liberties given to his older siblings but still denied to him.
How come they can stay up until 3 am?
Because even though they didn’t manage their time well, we’re paying for these college classes and their GPAs can make or break their scholarship eligibility.
How come they can have their own social media accounts? Their own phone?
Because they have proven themselves to be faithful in the little things and this big thing is required for them to be independent on the streets of Jerusalem.
I’m responsible. When can I search for memes at my leisure? Create my own Pandora station? Why can’t I… ?
How come? Why? Porque? Porquoi? Lama?
Last summer, Six of Crows had been returned to the library unfinished because time did not allow for it to be finished. So when the book was discovered in a reading pile at a friend’s house, the book came home with us. One child read it. The next child read it and then picked up its sequel. Then the third child said, “I want to read it!” After all, his siblings had read it, and his friends had read it, and he was tired of feeling left out. But the response from the other two was an emphatic no. [Insert raised eyebrows here].
And why not?
He needs a few years, they both said.
Hm.
I had a candid conversation with one of the older ones and asked to very clearly have his concerns explained to me. Ok, the main characters are criminals and some of them are prostitutes. “This better be redeemed…” I said. I was assured that this was more or less the case, at the end- their livelihoods were essential to the plot, not gratuitous, and the good guys win in the end. I thought about how the heroes in Les Miserables match these descriptions and Les Mis is one of my favorite books ever so I said I would trust his judgement and I let it go. Well the younger child was dismayed and pleaded with me.
Ok, Younger Child, I trust you. You are responsible, and you are a high schooler. Go ahead. About 100 pages in, Older Children came to me and repeated with much concern, no, Younger Child cannot read it.
FINE. I’ll read it.
And so I read it. And boy was I angry. The story is about human traffickers exploiting human traffickers in a metaphorical river of human trafficking in an ocean of human trafficking in a world of human trafficking… sex trafficking, slave trafficking, drug trafficking… it’s dark. Most of those being trafficked are children and teens. And all sexuality is glossed over in an endless array of euphemisms so that when these children “make their livings on their backs” or are “bedded” and so on, the effect is numbing. We aren’t actually talking about sexual violence, right? It’s just a “sweaty romp” here and a tantalizing peep show there. It's not a dirty brothel, no, it’s is a “pleasure house.” When two of the main character (who spend half the book lusting after each other) find themselves freezing, it only makes sense that they should spoon naked together to stay warm. Naturally. Putting the gore aside (like the incident where the hero carves out the eye of a rival gang member with an oyster shucking knife); and the trope of the religious leaders being the cruelest of the villains; ignoring the elements of witchcraft and the hinted homosexuality of two main characters; even putting aside the scenes inciting prurient interest, the sanitization of child sex work was perhaps the most vile undercurrent of this book. And I was mad. Why did my older children not see this for what it was? I started to think about that question and that led me to thoughts concerning discernment. Discernment is a spiritual gift— it comes with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to all who give their lives to Jesus Christ. But as a spiritual gift, it is also given in greater measure to some than others. Perhaps this is a gift my kids are still working to develop. Another realization that I had is that Danny and I have had years of training to recognize grooming and child predation. And further, I studied marketing in college and have that extra edge in recognizing subliminal messaging. But most importantly, discernment is one of my gifts.
Guard your heart with all vigilance,
for from it flow the springs of life.
Coincidentally, the day I finished the book, I also read a newspaper article about Elon Musk’s role in stirring up some controversy in the UK. (He’s always stirring it up somewhere.) He had been badgering UK’s leadership over a failure to administer justice to the more than 1,400 girls who were sexually exploited in the town of Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. In these cases, girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators, with the majority of known perpetrators being of Pakistani heritage. Musk used his platform to highlight the failures of the British judiciary, constabulary, social services and politicians, alleging that these colluded in downplaying and/or dismissing the cases for fear being seen as racist or of upsetting the illusion of the peaceful assimilation of their immigrant communities. The article went on to describe some of the accusations in blunt, concrete, legal language, using terms like “gang rape” and assault. Now contrast these harsh words with the world created for Six of Crows where child sexual exploitation is sanitized to the point that one doesn’t shudder, but accepts it as par for the course… it is normalized. The difference is as stark as night and day. Why? Why would an author do this? I started to look into the author a little more. Her portrait on the back cover of her book is innocent enough but her website has a more updated image of a goth girl with black lipstick and bondage-style accessories… or is this a subtle allusion to sadomasochistic eroticism? Her next books are titled Hell Bent and Demon in the Wood. I sensed a theme. Satan is after our kids' minds.
I sat down with my kids and read passages to them from the text. One squirmed. The other argued.
“The characters had to sleep naked like that! What else could they do to keep from freezing?”
“This is a work of fiction! The entire scene was a creation of the author’s imagination!” Sometimes the blinders get stuck. (Consider Common Sense Media’s positive ratings to see just how stuck they can get.)
It was a good conversation. A constructive conversation. There’s a sort of complacency home-schooled Christian kids can develop where a lack of ideological friction keeps them from exercising their critical thinking skills and from sharpening their tools of defense. They casually drop their magnifying glasses when they should be taking a closer look into the spiritual realities that are coursing through the petri dishes of our culture wars. We are in a spiritual war. We aren’t to forget that.
So we interrupt our (infrequent, sporadic) coverage of Israeli adventures and geopolitical wartime correspondence to discuss a work of “young adult fiction,” except as you see, it’s not really an interruption at all because a worldview that denies divine order and moral absolutes and universal truths does not stay in its neat little box of YA reading options but seeps into the unsuspecting guileless minds of the next generation-- minds that will someday create policies that advance human trafficking, child exploitation, and racism in the name of good. Satan knows this. The leaders at the UN know this. The author of the Six of Crows knows this. Do we parents know this? And are we on guard?
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