Fairy Tales Against the Machine of Modernity

How to fill the aching void left by pragmatism.

Photo credit: Zoltan Tasi

As moderns, we often live our lives according to an unconscious standard of expediency. We are ruthless utilitarians, applying ledgers to our relationships, decisions, and spiritual lives. 

Pastimes, books, and even Bible passages are, at intervals, calculated, judged, discarded. Fairy tales, myths, and legends don’t stand a chance. When atheists call the Bible a book of “fairy stories,” it barely even qualifies as an insult. 

Fairy tales, with their unabashed emphasis on sacramentalism above progress and symbolism over symmetry, their lack of human psychoanalysis or hyperrealism, of self-help, problem-solving, how-to’s, and life hacks, are summarily dismissed. 

Are We Reaping the Benefits? 

Has pragmatism created richly endowed souls and sturdy moral characters? Or are we, instead, even with good intentions, training generations to habitually view the world as a machine, their lives, transactions? 

What if what we need is not what we think we need?

We yearn to raise children who fight for what’s right and who grow up to be the sort of people who mow their lawns. But the Bible resists our drive for practical takeaways. We open the Word hoping for “six easy steps for killing our anxiety;” what we get is the book of Judges. We get the Garden of Eden, David and Goliath, a talking donkey, and legions of angels fighting demons in an epic battle. 

What we get is a fairy tale.

Perhaps, when atheists dismiss the Bible as a fairy tale, they are on to something.

The biblical story is what C. S. Lewis called a “True Myth,” and the Garden of Eden “A Hebrew folk tale.”

Does that make it less true? Not in the least. But if that is our instinctive reaction, our concept of “truth” may hale from a post-enlightenment hangover. We may be assuming that truth generally looks like the hard, wooden back of a wardrobe, tangible and measurable. 

Why did Lewis feel so strongly about fairy tales that he eventually abandoned scholarly works in favor of stories seemingly lacking in freight, complexity, and sophistication?

C. S. Lewis “[W]as aware that straining the nerves to understand a medieval poem… or studying the regional idiosyncrasies of a fairy romance… seemed absurdly escapist in an age of electricity and mechanized warfare. Can morally serious adults, in an age whose very survival is threatened by economic crises, mechanized warfare, social violence, propaganda, fear, political distrust, and disease, really afford to devote sustained attention to reading the Roman de la Rose? What we need are engineers, medical researchers, virologists, and programmers, right?” [1] 

What Should You Expect?

You might say that we tend to regard our lives like a skyscraper. We think, upon entrance, that the best course is to figure out what we need to do, where we need to go, locate the restrooms, and bonus if we find a vending machine. 

But instead of clean, rectangle hallways unfolding symmetrically, we get labyrinths, cellulite, traffic, and … other people. And still no bathroom.  

The truth is, life is much less like the square, sensible back of a wardrobe and more like Narnia than we think. When Edmund first crossed through the wardrobe to the other side in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he was given no helpful pamphlets. Aslan didn’t welcome him, wearing a wide-eyed grin and man-pris. 

Instead, something else lurked. Something for which he was entirely unprepared.

After stumbling upon the White Witch and accepting a free snack, Edmund’s problems were just getting started. Enough of them to flood Instagram. He was depressed, misunderstood, and anxious. He faced interpersonal conflicts, rivalries, and suppressed dreams and ambitions. 

What did Edmund need? Medication? Therapy? Conflict management? Some practical takeaways? A sex change? A relevant social media curriculum? 

With all of these approaches, we become the arbiters of our own sanctification. While not all are bad, they uphold a similar pattern - life is necessarily a transaction, a machine. You have a problem, you fix it. You use instead of being used, “removing the organ and demanding the function.” [2]

What Edmund needed was Aslan, of course. But some wariness about free candy offered in a lonely forest might have helped. Edmund never knew not to eat bad magical food. He couldn’t trace the darkness already at work within his soul until it was too late. 

Harry Potter the Fairy Tale

When J. K. Rowling first sent around her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, no one wanted it. Why? Harry Potter books are written in the Lewis and Tolkien tradition of myths, Arthurian legends, and classic fairy tales.

In the nineties, publishers wanted practical, hyperrealistic, problem stories like Sweet Valley High. When her books exploded on the tired literary landscape like stiff whisky, the world didn’t understand what ache they filled. The fairy tales embedded within the structure of Rowling’s stories transcend and subvert our prim utilitarianism. 

We didn’t know we were starving.

Yet, sadly, even in the Church today, our children’s educational curriculums and stories keep circling the same cliches, stuck in Sweet Valley High, imminently practical and changing nothing. 

But there is a growing void within our culture. Modern education, with its feeble feast of watered-down facts, has left our world “haunted by a sense of loss… This is what we sense, and often regret the passing of when we contemplate the medieval cathedral. God-forsakenness is an experience of those whose ancestral culture has been transformed and repressed by a relentless process of disenchantment… The result is that the sacred is felt to have withdrawn from the physical, visible world…” [2]

There is a deeper kind of knowing, and we are literally dying for it. 

We need sanctuaries, not skyscrapers. 

1. Jason Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, (IVP Academic, March 15, 2022).

2. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, (HarperOne, April 7, 2015).