Don't Ruin Rainbows For Your Kids

CS Lewis and The Objective Room

Welcome new subscribers! I hope you like my piece in The Federalist this morning; if so, please post it/share it/etc.

Here’s the intro:

As I write, our children’s schoolroom is festooned with rainbows. Christina Rossetti’s poem is on one shelf, Frederic Edwin Church’s painting on another. Hand-painted rainbows — colored with enthusiasm if not with Church’s skill — by our 5- and 3-year-olds hang on the walls.

Are we taking a cue from the president, professional sports, and all the nation’s most powerful corporations and doing our part to celebrate pride in our little homeschooling way? No. Our lessons follow the seasons, and because it is spring, we have a week or so of rainbow-themed learning. The kids love it, and — rookie homeschoolers though we are — we are having a blast too.

Should we toss out the lot — poems, paintings, coloring pages, songs — and live in a colorless world because a bunch of twisted adults use this month to mock God?

Please click over for the stirring conclusion.

The answer involves lots of quotations from CS Lewis, because, man, did he see it all coming. I focus on The Abolition of Man, but longtime readers know how important I believe That Hideous Strength is to our times (it’s the concluding part of his Ransom trilogy, and a novelization of sorts of his argument in The Abolition of Man). I wasted years debating whether Orwell or Huxley was the most prescient prophet of the last century, when it was Lewis all along!

 If you’d like to get a sense of one of the creepiest scenes in That Hideous Strength, here is a great piece in World by Pastor Joe Rigney about Lewis’s “objective room”:

As Mark surveys the room, he realizes its purpose is to eliminate all specifically human reactions in him so that he might become fit society for the dark forces. In other words, exposure to the seemingly innocent, yet profoundly disturbing paintings, the lopsided architecture, and the other irregularities is designed to detach him from his natural human responses to the world, to kill the nerve of his normal and instinctive preferences, and thereby separate him from his humanity.

As I argue regarding rainbows today, do not let these sinister forces win and separate your kids from their humanity, from their normal response to the beauty of God’s creation. I learned from my wonderful editor while writing my piece that the Pride rainbow would have fit nicely in the Objective Room – it is not quite a real rainbow, it’s one color short. Fitting symbol of the difference between God’s truth and man-made lies…

Rigney continues:

As Christians, we must not be naive about the strategy, nor about its potential success. It is possible to sear the conscience and the imagination. Wicked custom can smother the light of natural understanding. We can choose madness. And tragically, we can foist such madness upon children, the most vulnerable and impressionable among us.

We most certainly can. Yet there is always a way out of the madness:

But Lewis doesn’t merely show us the smothering, searing, and severing effect of the Objective Room on our humanity. He also shows how the Objective Room can awaken us to Reality, as it did for Mark. […] By the mercy of God, may we do the same.

Go ahead and boycott Bud Light, but don’t boycott the rainbow, the beautiful sign of God’s Covenant. If you missed it in the article, here are some good places to get your family rainbow shirts without having to support the groomers Targeting (see what I did there?) your kids: Allie Beth Stuckey has a store with stylish options, and Sola Gratia is another theologically faithful source of rainbow merch. Oh, and if you like CS Lewis as much as I do, please go and support The Fellowship of Performing Arts, check out their CS Lewis movie and their top notch theatrical productions.

Hope this helps y’all this month! Thank you for reading and sharing.