DUIN: Treat kids to tales with moral lessons

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By Julia Duin

You are probably reading this column on All Saints' Day, the Christian holiday that commemorates individuals who led extraordinarily godly lives during the past two millennia. The masses, however, are much more taken with Halloween, celebrated the night before with harvest symbols mixed with sorcery and witchcraft.

How does one convey to children stories that make good seem just as attractive? I looked up Bob Hartman, a Churches of Christ pastor who penned "The Lion Storyteller Bible," "The Lion Storyteller Bedtime Book" and "The Wolf Who Cried Boy," the latter a twist on the popular Aesop's fable.

Although based in Pittsburgh, he has spent extensive time in Great Britain, a country known for terrific storytellers such as J.K. Rowling, C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Mr. Hartman developed his storytelling style while assigned to a church in Wigston, a suburb of Leicester, which is in the Midlands.

"It was an older congregation that knew a lot of the Bible stories," he said. "If I retold the Bible in a straightforward way, they'd say they'd been there and done that. But if you played with the text, by the time they were halfway in, they were hooked."

Which is how he got the idea of writing "Best Mates," a retelling of the Gospels from the eyes of three of Jesus' lesser disciples. By the time young readers figure out the story is about religion, they're hooked on the antics of the three buddies who goof around on the side, make fun of the Roman soldiers and try to figure out what Jesus is up to.

"The number one rule is not to be obvious as to what you're doing," the author told me. "Don't sacrifice the story for a moral lesson. To convey a powerful moral lesson, the story itself has to be good. For J.K. Rowling, the story [in the Harry Potter books] came first.

"The fact that her characters do brave things was inherent to who they were. if you want to encourage good traits in kids, read them stories where the kids have those sorts of traits. But don't be preachy about it.

"Then you have to have characters children can relate to. They can't be goody-goody. Many characters are quite flawed as were the hobbits. But when confronted with evil, they made the decision to sacrifice their own safety for a greater end.

"And if you are going to tell strong moral stories, humor is quite important. I think people are more open to truth when they are smiling. Most people like humor. It makes the message easier to swallow."

I noted that several of his books have originated with British publishers, such as Lion Children's Books. The existence of a state church in England helped greatly with sales of his storyteller Bible, he said.

"Every school I've walked into in the U.K. has had one," he said. "Because the Church of England is the state church, they are required to have Christian assemblies every week. They need resource literature for that."

Also, an "Open the Book" program, which gets retired people to read the Bible out loud at these school assemblies, means that 70,000 children a week listen to his stories.

That would never happen in American public schools, where religion is either left out entirely or watered down to become tales of Easter bunnies and Christmas trees, I noted. The result: people who don't know the tales at the base of western culture such as David and Goliath, Jonah and the whale or Daniel in the lions' den.

"You don't have to press very hard to find people who don't know the stories," he said. "It's a matter of getting Bible stories back into the public consciousness again."

• Julia Duin's Stairway to Heaven column runs Sundays and Thursdays. Contact her at jduin@washingtontimes.com.