Halloween gives us monsters everywhere. Even though these fictional creatures are usually ugly and frightening, people seem irresistibly attracted to them. But the popularity of monsters goes well beyond Halloween. Surprisingly, monsters often appear in some of the most beloved children’s stories. Lewis’s Narnia teems with dragons, giants, and sea serpents. Tolkien’s Middle-earth holds many scary creatures — orcs, trolls, goblins, wargs, and balrogs (to name just a few). And this phenomenon is nothing new. Monsters have appeared in some of the most well-beloved stories of all time, from Scylla and Charybdis in Homer’s Odyssey to Grendel and his monstrous mother in Beowulf.

Given that Christians should think about what is honorable, just, true, and lovely (Philippians 4:8), should we avoid books and other media that contain monsters? Or, at the very least, should we shield our children from such imaginative ugliness and terror?

Without doubt, even as adults, Christians should avoid some ungodly and gruesome monster stories. But putting extremes to one side, I want to offer a brief apologetic for the role of monsters in the imaginative life of Christians, especially for children. When used well, imaginative monsters helpfully represent what we should avoid, or clarify what we should oppose. In essence, fictional monsters can play a good role in shaping our moral and spiritual outlook according to God’s design.

Hungry for Story

The Bible instructs parents to “train up a child in the way he should go” so that “even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). No doubt, this imperative includes teaching the Bible to children. But given that the Bible contains many stories and is itself one grand archetypal story, then surely part of training children well involves engaging their imaginations. And their imaginations (and ours) are shaped not only by biblical and historical stories but also by good imaginative stories.

The best imaginative stories engage us on a deeply formative level because we all have, as my colleague Betsy Howard argues, a God-given “narrative hunger,” a deep sense that the world moves along a narrative arc, a sense that nothing happens in the world apart from playing some role in God’s ongoing story of creation and redemption. This God-given narrative hunger, this intuitive longing, pushes us to see how things fit within God’s grand story.

Theologian Vigen Guroian makes an observation that reveals the God-givenness of narrative hunger: “Every parent who has read a fairy tale to a young son or daughter is familiar with what I venture to say is a universal refrain of childhood. ‘But is he a good person or a bad one?’ Or, ‘Is she a good fairy or an evil fairy?’” (Tending the Heart of Virtue, 4). Guroian believes these questions show that children have an intuitive sense that the characters within stories — even non-human creatures — are either morally good or morally bad in some way. Why? Because, says Guroian, “God and nature have endowed human beings with a moral constitution that needs to be nurtured and cultivated” (4).

Upon encountering a new character, children naturally seek to triangulate where this character fits within the moral makeup of the narrative. Is this a good character (a hero) and thus someone we should want to root for and try to emulate? Or is this a bad character (a villain) and thus someone we should turn from or even hope is defeated later in the story? When children ask these sorts of questions, they are seeking guidance in thinking about the moral makeup or moral trajectory of characters. If done artfully, this guidance can have a long-lasting effect on a child’s moral and spiritual outlook by shaping imagination.

Portraits of a Villain

When I was a child in Sunday School, we had “readers” — small, inexpensively printed books containing weekly Bible lessons. These readers were often accompanied by cartoonlike artwork for children. At one point, I distinctly remember seeing an illustration of the twelve disciples in their robes, sandals, and curly beards. But one particular disciple had a devious look on his face, twisting his mustache in Snidely Whiplash fashion (the stereotypical villain from the old Dudley Do-Right cartoon). Clearly, the artist was communicating that this was a disciple we children should be suspicious about. Even at my young age, I knew this was a representation of Judas Iscariot, the disciple who would betray Jesus.

However, remember that the New Testament portrays Judas Iscariot as appearing just like the other disciples. When Jesus predicted that one of the disciples would betray him, the other eleven seemed perplexed as to who this could be (Matthew 26:23; Luke 22:23). Thus, the artistic rendering in our reader fell short of historical accuracy. Yet the artist was not being deceitful. Rather, his cartoon depiction helpfully communicated in a picture what the Gospel writers present in words when introducing Judas (Matthew 10:4; Mark 3:19; John 6:70). The artist appealed to my imagination in a way I still remember to this day.

What does this have to do with monsters? As noted earlier, monsters appear in many of our favorite stories, especially children’s stories. In most of these, monsters are presented as morally compromised or obviously bad characters; they are often the villain, a clear threat the protagonists must avoid or oppose. From orcs to dragons, the external “monstrousness” of these creatures communicates an inner moral disharmony that the story’s protagonists must avoid or defeat.

Monstrous Deeds Monsters Make

The late Russell Kirk rightly argued that the God-given moral order of the universe can be detected in “norms” or objective moral truths. He held that we become truly human, as God designed, only when we live in accordance with such norms. In contrast, the unrepentant defiance of norms, whether for a person or a society, always results in some sort of abnormality, which, “in its Latin root, means monstrosity, defying the norm, the nature of things” (Enemies of the Permanent Things, 16). In other words, for Kirk, a person or a society that continues in unrepentant sin becomes monstrous, morally speaking. The apostle Paul makes a similar point in Romans 1:26–32.

Both Guroian and Kirk believe that whether children or adults adhere to God’s norms or not depends significantly upon the shaping of their imaginations. This “moral imagination,” as Kirk called it, is crucial to our understanding of good and evil. Thus, Kirk championed the importance of good literature, believing it plays a major role in shaping the imagination rightly.

“When used well, imaginative monsters can helpfully represent what we should avoid, or clarify what we should oppose.”

We see the Bible itself affirm the role of imagination for our moral and spiritual well-being. Jesus relies heavily upon parables in his teaching, and God repeatedly emphasizes to Israel the need to rehearse and remember the history of the exodus — complete with a monstrous Pharaoh and his hordes. Surely a major part of this command concerned the need to shape the Israelites’ imaginations. They needed God’s covenant blessings and curses embodied concretely in the form of a story to remind them of the great significance of being God’s people.

So, since the imagination is highly important in directing and shaping our moral and spiritual outlook, our imaginations must be shaped well — both by historical and imaginative stories. And here fictional monsters can serve a significant role in molding our imagination to fit God’s created moral order. For monsters in the best stories (like Narnia and Lord of the Rings) usually represent evils to be repented of or enemies to overcome or destroy. Historically, imaginative monsters have usually represented a divergence from God’s good order. The impressions such creatures make upon us, and our children, shape our moral and spiritual outlook — for good or for ill.

Plastic Monsters

At the same time, contemporary monster theorists (yes, there is such a thing) view monsters as simply “a socially constructed category reflecting culturally specific anxieties and desires, and often deployed — wittingly or not — to achieve particular sociopolitical objectives” (The Monster Theory Reader, 25). In other words, these academicians see monsters as morally and conceptually neutral tools used to communicate all sorts of messages — including that monsters are good. We often see this monster plasticity in popular culture today: vampires can be alluring heroes (as in movies like Twilight and Interview with a Vampire) and ogres misunderstood victims (as in the Shrek franchise).

What’s wrong with this modern approach to monsters? To a point, nothing. Surely storytellers can make all sorts of creative moves with monsters in their stories — some interesting and even morally praiseworthy. For example, the main character in Dr. Seuss’s beloved How the Grinch Stole Christmas! ends up repenting and, thus, becoming less of a monster. Similarly, Mike Wazowski and James P. Sullivan, the main monster characters in the movie Monsters, Inc., also end up being the lovable heroes of their story because they protect children from the more monstrous monsters Randall Boggs and Henry J. Waternoose III.

But the more a story normalizes monsters, the more it may also normalize the monstrous. As the annual Halloween season makes plain, monsters can be used and even celebrated in ways that confuse, deceive, and, at worst, tempt morally and spiritually immature minds and hearts.

To See or Not to See

These possibilities thus obligate Christians, and parents in particular, to discern between books or movies that treat monsters in the traditional sense of defying good, God-given norms and ones that treat monsters as normal or even good. How can we tell the difference? Here are some questions that I suggest we ask of any given monster story:

• Does the story present the monster as something to avoid or overcome?
• Do the other characters recognize the danger the monster represents?
• Does the story present the monster as something readers (or viewers) should clearly be opposed to and, if possible, something that should be defeated?
• Does the story present the monster in a morally unambiguous way?
• If the monster is portrayed sympathetically, does the story move us to oppose his monstrousness?

It seems to me that a story with monsters that merits a negative answer to any of the above questions is not one that spiritually and morally immature people should experience. Such stories can be engaged with critically, and even sometimes with profit, but only for those who have grown in discernment and wisdom. And even then, mature Christian adults would be wise not to make such stories a regular diet. It would be far better for Christians to nourish their faith and virtue with classic (so-called “children’s”) stories, like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, those stories that portray monsters as creatures we should avoid or oppose and defeat.

One of my former colleagues used to sign his emails, “Kill the Dragon. Get the Girl.” This is not just a snappy summary of Christ’s redemptive plan (Jesus defeated Satan and sin, and now the church is his holy bride). It also represents an imaginative way of seeing how monsters need to be opposed and ultimately overcome. Christians can nourish and shape our imagination rightly on those kinds of stories, because even monsters can serve God’s glorious ends (Romans 8:28; Proverbs 16:4).