Religion as Child’s Play: The Persistent Myth of Christianity

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. ~C.S. Lewis

One of the regular criticisms against religion is that it has all the ear marks of myth. As though this is supposed to be a bad thing. Folks say “Religion is nothing more than fanciful fiction. It’s child’s play. Why don’t you people just get real?”

The thoughtful Christian might well reply, “Of course religion is like a fairy tale. Of course it is child’s play! That’s the whole point!” Unless one becomes as a little child, one can’t begin to understand such deep mysteries.

Skepticism demands that we “get real.”  Well, that is precisely what we are getting. The whole point of fairy tales, fantasy stories, and myths is to get to the heart of reality.

We tell the Great Myth of the one who rode out to tilt at windmills, slay the dragon, and rescue the fair maiden. Lives are stories, part of the Greatest story, each one complete with its own dungeons and dragons. Don’t you see?

This is exactly what unbelief cannot do: it cannot see. It cannot see the invisible, yet this is precisely what it must see. Skeptics wonder what on earth we are talking about. But what we are talking about didn’t come to us by way of earth.

We are talking about something otherworldly, something heavenly. And there is nothing more concrete and tangible than the heavenly. Everything that we know as permanent is only a shadow of the true. This world is the Shadowlands.

But one day the shadows will dissipate. All things will be made new. All things will be made real. This will happen because the invisible Lord from heaven took on flesh, died, and rose again in order to raise the world out of the shadows. Any child can see that.

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