(here’s part 2, here’s part 3)
“"And we’re not alone, you know, children,” came Mrs. Whatsit, the comforter. “All through the universe it’s being fought, all through the cosmos, and my, but it’s a grand and exciting battle. I know it’s hard for you to understand about size, how there’s very little difference in the size of the tiniest microbe and the greatest galaxy. You think about that, and maybe it won’t seem strange to you that some of our very best fighters have come right from your own planet, and it’s a little planet, dears, out on the edge of a little galaxy. You can be proud that it’s done so well.””
A Wrinkle In Time is a novel about the fight between good and evil, and it is not an allegory. It is a fight between capital-g Good, the light itself, and capital-e Evil, represented by The Black Thing, a void of pure absence and emptiness that has already eclipsed multiple planets across the galaxy and threatens to eclipse Earth. The war has continued for aeons.
““Who have our fighters been?” Calvin asked.
“Oh, you must know them, dear,” Mrs. Whasit said.
Mrs. Who’s spectacles shone out at them triumphantly. “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.””
Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which are the three mysterious strangers who lead Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin on their interstellar journey to fight The Black Thing and rescue Meg’s father. They are later revealed to be seraphim, or angels, explicitly referred to as “Messengers of God” later in the novel. In the first sequel to A Wrinkle In Time, Meg is accompanied on another supernatural journey with the aid of a cherub named Proginoskes.
““Jesus!” Charles Wallace said. “Why of course, Jesus!”
“Of course!” Mrs. Whatsit said. “Go on, Charles, love. There were others. All your great artists. They’ve been lights for us to see by.”
“Leonardo da Vinci?” Calvin suggested tentatively. “And Michelangelo?”
“And Shakespeare,” Charles Wallace called out, “and Bach! And Pasteur and Madame Curie and Einstein!”
Now Calvin’s voice rang with confidence. “And Schweitzer and Gandhi and Buddha and Beethoven and Rembrandt and St. Francis!””
When the three strangers reveal themselves to be angels for the first time, and when they first show the three children what it is they’re fighting, they’re on a distant planet called Uriel, where they can see other angels gathering and singing a song in an unknown language. Mrs. Whatsit translates for them: “Sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise from the end of the earth, ye that go down to the sea, and all that is therein.” They’re singing a canticle from the book of Isaiah, and Mrs. Who was quoting John's Gospel in the passage above. Later in the book, Meg’s father helps plan a rescue mission, believing that “we were sent here for something. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose.”
Madeleine L’Engle wrote about explicitly Christian ideas throughout her career. She had clergy in her family. She wrote nonfiction memoirs about her own interior theological journey. Her main two sets of novels - the Wrinkle series about the Murry family and the Meet The Austins series about the Austin family - all wrestled with questions about death and redemption and sin and absolution and evil and the afterlife and the sacred appearing in the everyday. Her books would never be shelved in “Christian fiction”, but she was absolutely a Christian who expressed and explored her faith through her writing. Now let’s talk about all of the Christians who tried to ban her books.
Wrinkle "glorified witchcraft and reduced Jesus to the status of simply one of many great figures of Western civilization." Wrinkle contains “alleged New Age content.” Wrinkle celebrates “occult powers like mental telepathy, tessering, scrying, and psychic healing; occult symbols like runes, unicorns, rainbows, and crystal balls; occult characters like witches, demons, and mediums; New Age concepts like cosmic oneness, unity of all truth, and potential of human powers.” Wrinkle proposes “that Jesus was one of the great men along with da Vinci, Shakespeare, Schweitzer, Buddah, Beethoven, and others. Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, I had seen enough. For that is what Satan would have us and our precious children believe.”
It’s the exact scene I have outlined above, the scene I just used as an example of just how Christian Wrinkle is in its themes and values, that has led to so many challenges against the novel. The book that affirms Jesus Christ as the primary great fighter against the darkness and evil of the universe gets knocked because it had the audacity to mention that other people have also been fighters against the darkness as well. And the parents who can get past that still can’t get past the three witches in the book, which makes the book about witchcraft, even though the witches aren’t witches and are actually angels. The parents who can get past that still can’t get past the fact that the book has a minor character who is a medium, even though the medium is an alien on another planet. You really just can’t win with these people.
In the 1990s - the first decade that the ALA started keeping track - Wrinkle was the 23rd most challenged book in America. In the 2000s, it dropped to number 90 in the rankings. In the 2010s, it had dropped out of the top 100 entirely. A lot of this is just a function of the passage of time, with more recent releases crowding out the top spots as time goes on; the Harry Potter series roared to the top of the list in the 2000s, and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian topped the list in the 2010s. It's obviously too early to predict what the most challenged book of the 2020s will be, but based on current trends my money is on Letter From A Birmingham Jail. But even three decades after its release, Wrinkle had plenty of challenges. The quotes above are all from the October 1993 issue of Christian Educators Journal. There’s a lot going on in this issue - it includes, of all things, an interview with esteemed character actor John Turturro - but multiple articles and op-ed pieces are dedicated to the idea of teaching fantasy and science fiction novels in Christian schools, with a special focus on Wrinkle’s impact on Christian educators.
The articles on Wrinkle are very good, and all argue the same thing: of course Wrinkle is a good book with a good message, of course it works in the context of Christian education. L’Engle was very unambiguous about what she believed and what she liked to write about. The anecdotes that teachers and librarians share about the challenges to Wrinkle over the years seem to stem from the same problem: the parents doing the challenges don’t know how to read.
I don’t mean that exactly literally; if you showed these parents a sequence of letters, they could tell you what words were being formed and the denotative meaning of those words. But they, as one teacher put it, “simply lose sight of the fact that it is fiction. The adventures in it are imaginary. This is a piece of art that must be judged on the basis of literary criteria; it is not a New Age handbook, nor is it a handbook on Christianity for that matter, either.” The parents in question do not understand how to process literature, to process the non-literal and fictional, to understand that the words on the page can possibly hold more than one meaning. You can do this. If someone shows you a map of the world and says “this is the world”, you understand that the world is not actually flat, and the world is physically bigger than that map in reality. If you read The Lord Of The Rings, you understand that the One Ring is at the center of the story not because it is a shiny ring, but because it represents the tempting and corrupting nature of power. If you watch Breaking Bad, you understand that Walter White is not to be understood as the unambiguous hero whose actions are to be celebrated and modeled1. Your ability to process any work of art depends on your ability to understand that one thing could potentially mean another thing.
This has been described by others - notably comparative religion writer Karen Armstrong - as the collapse between ‘mythos’ and ‘logos’. Aisling McCrea once described this in detail in a piece for Current Affairs on the 1980s Satanic Panic:
"Logos is, roughly speaking, knowledge gained through the world of science, reason and observation, through which we can understand the material world and the things in it, the laws of cause and effect in our environment, and how to navigate the more literal aspects of our world. We know, for example, that if we are feeling hungry, it is because of certain chemical processes in our brain and our digestive system, signalling that our bodies are in need of physical sustenance, and that if we eat, the chemical processes will stop and the hungry feeling will go away. We know that if we drop some of the food while eating, gravity will cause it to fall into our laps. On the other hand, mythos has been described by Armstrong as having to do with “the more elusive aspects of human experience”: all of that which cannot quite be explained in terms of the literal, mundane, or rational. It covers stories of supernatural events and experiences—the actions of a god or gods, if you like—which are not literally true by the standards of logos, but are meaningfully true in some other sense: psychologically, emotionally, spiritually.
So how did mythos and logos explain evangelical Christians’ hatred of spooky monster games? According to Armstrong, fundamentalist forms of religion—such as the schools of Christianity that dominated the Reagan years—collapsed these two worlds of understanding into one. One might think that mythos was the preferred realm of evangelicals, since they believe so strongly in God. But no—it’s logos that they love, and mythos they have no use for. For example, other schools of Christianity could understand Genesis as truth without it being literally true; God could have handed down to mortals a story about the Earth’s creation that imparted some kind of divine meaning, without negating everything logos told us about evolution and cosmology. But to fundamentalists, the Bible being true meant the Earth must have been made in seven days, because the Bible is the Word of God and every word of it is true, and true means materially and logically and scientifically true. The laws of our mundane world had to be the laws through which God was seen, too. Every piece of proof that the Earth was older than 6,000 years old which had been found through logos had to be “debunked” in the world of logos, or at least an imitation of it; hence the building of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, the arguments about whether or not dinosaurs were in the Garden of Eden, the attempts to explain the dimensions of Noah’s Ark and exactly how a pair of every animal on Earth managed to fit in there. (This also goes some way towards explaining the prosperity gospel, the belief that material wealth is proof of God’s favor and flows towards the righteous—after all, money is how we value things in the material world, so why not in the next world, too? What other measure of value could there be?)"
When you don’t understand the distinction between mythos and logos, a book promotes witchcraft automatically because the word ‘witch’ is in it, no matter what the content or message of the book may be. It means that if God is not explicitly worshipped by the characters in your book, using the same prayers that you do, your book cannot be considered Christian.
The problem is that your ability to survive as a human depends on understanding the distinction between mythos and logos. To cite an image I used in an earlier Newburied essay, you don’t want to just assume that someone is doing a good thing because they’re holding a Bible when they’re doing it. You have to recognize when the person saying nice things about you is not acting in your interest. If you don’t understand non-literal meanings, you can’t detect irony, or sarcasm, or deceit, or groupthink. You can be taken advantage of and misled and lied to. You have to learn that things can mean other things. The way you learn that, as a child, is by reading stories. The story you read that teaches this lesson most movingly and memorably is A Wrinkle In Time, the story where a witch is also an angel and the black void is also evil and the roast turkey dinner is also sand and the glasses are also virtue and the pissy twelve-year-old girl is also a hero and the moments of peril are also moments of grace. That is Wrinkle's enduring legacy in children’s literature, that is why it still endures today, decades after its publication, decades after challenges from parents that never kept it out of schools or libraries. It is the book that teaches children that the world is not really flat, because we can pick it up and wrinkle it.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. This is the first of four installments on Madeleine L’Engle's 1963 medalist, A Wrinkle In Time.
The most interesting part of Breaking Bad to me, of course, is that the major character with the best-developed moral compass is unquestionably Hank, the character who is also unquestionably the series’ biggest wang.