A few days ago, I received an email from a teacher at a Christian school requesting a donation of books for their library. The message closed with what was meant to be a compliment: “Thank you for writing such wonderful literature that is safe for students.”
My grandmother, the author Madeleine L’Engle, would have uttered a choice Anglo-Saxon expletive—something she did only in the most extreme circumstances—and whipped off a blistering response. I almost felt sorry for the teacher as I imagined her receiving it.
I do understand what this teacher meant. The world can be frightening, and there is an instinct—especially among those who guide and educate children—to protect them, to keep them from harm. I have no doubt this teacher cares deeply about their students and wants to offer them books that uplift, inspire, and reassure.
But as much as I appreciate their intentions, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that sentence.
Because literature is not meant to make children—or their parents or teachers—feel safe. It is meant to prepare them for the world.
Faith and Fiction Are Not Meant to Be Comfortable
Childhood is not a time of simplicity and ease. It is a time of deep questions, raw emotions, and the first encounters with life’s great mysteries. Children already know fear, grief, and uncertainty; they don’t need to be shielded from these realities. They need stories that help them navigate them.
Books should not be written, chosen, or banned based on whether they comfort adults.
Madeleine herself recognized this. As she wrote in her book Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, “But I was frightened, and I tried to heal my fear with stories, stories which gave me courage, stories which affirmed that ultimately love is stronger than hate. If love is stronger than hate, then war is not all there is….Story was in no way an evasion of life, but a way of living life creatively instead of fearfully.”
Books should not be written, chosen, or banned based on whether they comfort adults. Madeleine’s own book, A Wrinkle in Time, has continually been banned or challenged, usually on religious grounds, since it was published in 1962. It also remains one of the most beloved pieces of fiction for young people.
The best literature does not exist to reinforce easy answers, but to push, prod, and unsettle—so that young readers learn to think for themselves. It shows children that love is stronger than control, that courage is possible even in the face of overwhelming darkness, that asking questions is a necessity.
Stories do not exist to wrap children in cotton wool. They exist to equip them.
The Danger of Sanitized Literature
Across the country, we are seeing a resurgence of book challenges and bans, often framed in the language of protection. Books that address race, gender, grief, oppression, and resilience are being pulled from shelves on the grounds that they are too difficult, too upsetting, too much for young readers.
But books are not meant to be safe. As Madeleine wrote in A Circle of Quiet, “We’ve come to the point where it’s irresponsible to try to protect [children] from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up….Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don’t look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.”
A belief system that cannot withstand questions, that must silence difficult stories rather than engage with them, is a belief system built on fear.
It’s often the stories that challenge, unsettle, or even disturb us that shape us the most. They teach us to think critically, to build empathy, to understand the perspectives of people whose lives look nothing like our own. They give young readers the tools to name injustice, to process loss, and to imagine a world different from the one they’ve inherited.
When we strip literature of discomfort, when we demand that stories be “safe,” we are not protecting children—we are limiting them.
I get it—the instinct to shield kids from painful subjects is natural, but it is also misguided. A child who never encounters hardship or challenge or discomfort in a book will still encounter it in life. The question is: Will they be prepared?
Faith, Literature, and the Fear of Questions
Many of today’s book challenges come from religious objections, with groups arguing that certain stories threaten moral values, introduce “dangerous” ideas, or challenge “traditional” beliefs. But censorship in the name of faith does not strengthen faith—it weakens it.
A belief system that cannot withstand questions, that must silence difficult stories rather than engage with them, is a belief system built on fear. If faith is real—if it is strong—then it should be able to hold its own in conversation with literature. It should be able to sit alongside stories of doubt, struggle, and discovery without crumbling.
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Madeleine understood this well. She was a person of deep faith, but she never let her faith become a rigid, unquestioning certainty. She once wrote, “I do not think I will ever reach a stage when I will say, this is what I believe. Finished. What I believe is alive…and open to growth.”
That is what both faith and literature should be: alive, growing, and willing to be challenged.
The push to ban books on religious grounds doesn’t just erase stories from shelves, it sends a message that faith is too fragile to be tested. That doubt is too dangerous to confront. That the best way to preserve belief is to shut out everything that might complicate it.
But faith—real faith—is not about avoiding questions. It’s about having the courage to ask them. And that is exactly what the best books teach us to do.
Personal Taste Versus Imposing Personal Beliefs
Madeleine understood the difference between choosing what one reads and deciding what others are allowed to read. She personally refused to allow comic books in the house, much to my mother’s dismay, who had to sneak them at a friend’s home. My grandmother never wavered on this rule, but she also understood the difference between personal taste and censorship.
“The exercise of personal taste is not the same thing as imposing personal opinion,” she wrote in Dare to Be Creative!
We do not raise strong, resilient, brave leaders by limiting what they are allowed to think about.
She believed that while individuals naturally curate their environments based on their own preferences, it becomes dangerous when those preferences become laws, policies, or broad restrictions. Choosing not to read something yourself is one thing—deciding that no one else should be allowed to read it is another.
Banning books is not an exercise of personal taste. When a book is removed from a library or classroom, it doesn’t just disappear from a single shelf—it disappears from the conversation. It cuts off access to ideas, perspectives, and histories that someone has deemed too disruptive, too unsettling, or too dangerous. It sends a message that certain stories—and by extension, certain people—do not belong.
It is one thing to decide, as an individual, that a book is not for you. It is another thing entirely to declare that no one else should be allowed to read it. That is not personal preference—that is gatekeeping thought itself.
A Call to Keep Stories Dangerous
As Madeleine wrote, “Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning.”
That’s what stories should do. They should challenge, unsettle, transform. They should equip young readers with courage, curiosity, and the understanding that darkness exists—but that it can be faced and fought and foiled.
If a book is truly “safe,” it’s not doing its job.
But that doesn’t mean children should navigate difficult stories alone. Instead of removing books from shelves, we should be reading with our children. We should be asking our children questions, encouraging them to think critically, helping them process what they read.
We do not raise strong, resilient, brave leaders by limiting what they are allowed to think about. We do it by giving them the tools—the stories—to wrestle with the hard questions and the courage to face the world as it is—not to escape reality, but to step into it fully. After all, as Madeleine L’Engle wrote, “Such stories are preparation for living in the real world with courage and expectancy.”
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