Pastor Seth Hedman.

Last fall, I wrote several articles about fairy tales as an essential part of our cultural inheritance from Christian medieval Europe, stories that teach us about the real world of good and evil described in the Bible by shaping a child’s imagination.

But so what? Stories are fine and interesting, if that’s your thing. But does it really matter? Yes, it matters deeply for ourselves and our children here and now. A few examples come to mind.

I spent some time substituting at the local high school, in part to assess what the school is really like from the inside. Most classes had their share of obvious problems, but one classroom stood out in a shocking way. This teacher’s classroom was covered by pictures of the darkest, most disturbing drawings and paintings I’ve ever seen. Dark, sinister, demonic characters crawled out from the shadows. A lonely, dark character muses, “I was afraid of the darkness until I made friends with it.” A beautiful girl sinks into the water, stretching upwards towards the light, while a massive sea monster waits to devour her from below. A beautiful girl poses for a wedding photo with a zombie. The school allowed it, I suppose, because the classroom is a venue for the teacher’s “self-expression.”

Now, I don’t know this woman’s story. It’s not hard to imagine some great difficulty or trauma in her past and I do not shame her for that. But her response seems to be the exact message, the fruit, of the reverse fairy tales. They were as if this woman’s soul, deeply shaped by the upside-down Shrek imagination, exploded all over the walls: “There is no real darkness, only misunderstandings. The solution is not repentance or redemption or deliverance, but acceptance. Make friends with the monsters. Allow yourself to get swallowed up.”

In the Biblical story, we are all sinking down in our sin, ready to be swallowed by the monster of death. But Jesus dives down, gets swallowed by the beast himself, slays it from the inside, and pulls us back up to the light. This is the answer for this woman’s darkness. Instead, in the world of the relativistic, empathetic swamp, she has made friends with the darkness. There are real, spiritual darknesses happy to oblige. Not only does this peril her own soul, but she has made it her mission to invite young people into the swamp as well. Is it any wonder she is the leading LBGTQ advocate at the school and regularly gets into spats with Christian students? I felt actively oppressed by the spiritual climate in that classroom and couldn’t help but intercede throughout the day. How are the students being impacted who are in there daily? There used to be a name for a woman who partners with the darkness to lure children into destruction. Just ask Hansel and Gretel.

It gets worse. Witchcraft and the occult is clearly on the rise in our cultural moment. “WitchTok” trends online. Spells for sale on Etsy. Crystals for sale in Farmer’s Markets. The witchcraft section of Barnes and Nobles isn’t just playful tongue-in-cheek. They mean what they say. Is it any wonder that the top movie of 2025 was about a witch that is just a misunderstood good guy? No, the God-Man-King Patriarchy (Oz) is actually the bad guy, you see. Wicked is squarely in the genre of deconstructed fairy tales. That the success of this movie will result in more actual witches is undoubtable. I remember well the culture wars over Harry Potter in the 90’s. Can we acknowledge by now that the fundamentalists were right? Here’s a good rule of thumb: not everyone who read Harry Potter became a witch. But everyone who became a witch read Harry Potter.

Parents, you must be vigilant. But more, we must become “reconstructionists,” rebuilders of the good, true, and beautiful in the stories that feed our souls.