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| Book cover for "When God Made The World." |
I bought the book When God Made The World [affiliate link] for my son, because I'm a Christian and I want him to learn about some Christian things. The difficult thing, though, is I'm ex-evangelical, and a lot of Christian children's books have harmful evangelical ideology. You know, stuff like "you deserve to go to hell." If you wanna say that to my son, you have to fight me first. (I've written about this issue before: Not Sure I Want My Kid Reading the Bible and 2 Wrong Ways to Write Bible Stories For Kids)
So, the question of how to find acceptable Christian children's books is an important issue to me. (Also, I'm in China, and while there are plenty of English books for kids available on Chinese shopping apps like Taobao and Jingdong, they don't always have the specific book I'm looking for, and often there is very limited information about the actual content of the book.)
I'm not trying to find books that 100% agree with what I believe. I'm not like, checking every sentence in every kids' book to see if they're "right." That would be totally the wrong approach. Kids should be aware that different people have different beliefs. (One of the reasons I'm glad my husband is not a Christian! Our son will see that it's fine for people to believe different things, without me even needing to tell him.) I just want to find books that don't have extremely harmful teaching, the sort of extremely harmful teaching which is so normal within evangelical culture that they don't even notice how messed-up it is.Anyway, I'm featuring this one here on my blog because I like it. Yes, in my ex-evangelical queer Christian feminist opinion, this is a good book for kids.
Overall summary
It's about all the beautiful things we see in the world, and it says that God made them. The book has a lot of detail- listing things like:
God made comets that fly
with tails through the sky
and asteroids and meteors that sometimes zoom by.
and
God made tropics and plateaus,
glaciers and meadows,
marshes and tundras,
and erupting volcanos.
and
Swordfish and trout,
fish sleek and fish stout,
and whales that God made to breathe through a spout.
Lots of details describing the things found in nature- from stars, to geographic features, to plants, to animals, to people. Overall, it's really beautiful imagery about how amazing the natural world is.
And, the book encourages kids to enjoy nature:
Run barefoot through grass,
pick a flower or two or a bouquet, perhaps.Find a tree you can climb, or with a seat and some twine,
build your very own swing or a backyard zip line.
It also tells kids to use their unique talents that God gave them to make the world better, and to protect the environment:
Save a whale, hug a tree, protect every bee.
Recycle, repurpose, reject apathy.
So overall, yes, I recommend it. It's a nice story about God and about the mind-blowing beauty of nature.
My son is preschool age. On Amazon, it says this book is for children 3-7 years old, and that sounds right to me.
Other books in this series are: What is God Like?, When God Made You, When God Made Light, and When I Pray For You [affiliate links].
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Okay, the rest of this post is little minutiae that I'm pointing out because it may be relevant to people who are ex-evangelical like me, and are EXTREMELY AWARE of all the evangelical culture wars. I would not mention any of these things to my son while reading the book, because they are very much NOT what the book is about.
Basically, if you just want to give your kid a nice book about God, go ahead and give them this one. You can stop reading the review here. The rest of this post is just little details that may be important to someone who has, um, ex-evangelical PTSD.
Author
The book is written by Matthew Paul Turner. I remember I used to read Matthew Paul Turner's blog way back in the day, when I started blogging. It seems that he has since moved his blogging to substack, and has come out as gay. Good for him!
Inside the front cover, it says, "In memory of Rachel Held Evans. The world is better because of your love, life, and words." There are actually several books in this series, and at least one is co-authored by Turner and Rachel Held Evans. If you know Rachel Held Evans, that should give you an idea of what kind of Christianity this book is about. (Evans died in 2019. She had a huge influence on me, and really on the whole ex-evangelical movement.)
In other words, knowing this book is associated with her, it indicates to me that this is likely to present a Christian view that I can accept.
Days of creation
In the bible, the creation story in Genesis 1 says that God made the world in 6 days, with different themes on each day.
This book does not mention the days of creation at all, but it loosely follows them. (Loosely. Genesis 1 has light made on day 1, and the sun, moon, and stars made on day 4, and I'm not really sure how that works- so this book does not follow that part.) Mainly the thing that sticks out and made me realize that it follows the days of creation is the fact that, when it gets to the part about God creating animals, it has 2 pages exclusively about birds, and then 4 pages about fish and other water creatures, then 2 pages mentioning animals that sorta live between water and land (like frogs), then 4 pages on land animals.
Genesis 1 says God made birds and water animals on day 5, and land animals and people on day 6. The fact that "When God Made The World" divides the animals up like this, feels very "Genesis 1" to me. (This is also an interesting choice because in reality, reptiles evolved before birds.)
Which is fine, I'm not saying this is a bad thing. But I used to be a young-earth creationist, and I think this is information that former creationists would want to know before buying this book.
Detailed scientifically-accurate descriptions vs the creation-myth feel of the book
This book lists lots and lots of natural phenomena that the writer of Genesis 1 knew nothing about. For example: galaxies, planets, north and south pole, glaciers, geysers, grapefruits, limes, eels, flying fish, otters, kangaroos, giraffes, rhinos, and so on. It even says God made the earth and "designed it to orbit the sun once a year."
So... is this book basically Genesis 1? Or is it a modern-science-based description of cool things that exist in nature? Does it feel a bit weird to take a creation myth as the overall structure and tone of the book (I say the "tone" is like a creation myth because it just says God made this, God made that, but gives no details about *how* God made things), and then fill it in with things that we know about now but people in the ancient Near East would not have known about?
If you're trying to figure out how "literally" you're supposed to take this story, this makes it difficult.
Personally, I don't think this is a problem at all. Personally, I think it's pretty cool that they took a "creation myth" sort of style, and then put in a lot of really interesting details (that we only know about thanks to modern science). I like that.
But I'm just mentioning it here because I can understand if someone used to be a creationist, they may be very very sensitive about what's intended to be taken "literally" and what's not.
Little kids definitely don't care about that- kids' books are full of talking cars and such, and the kid doesn't actually believe cars can talk. So I don't think this is an issue.
God's pronouns
This book does not use any pronouns for God. Hooray! I love that!
It just says "God" over and over. For example, there's one line that says, "give thanks to God for all that God made." No pronoun for God. I love it!!!! God is not a man!
Diverse kids
The illustrations in the book show a group of kids experiencing the wonders of nature on almost every page. It's basically the same group of kids all throughout the book. And it's a diverse group- I love that. Different races, and one kid is in a wheelchair.
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| Image from "When God Made The World", showing a diverse bunch of kids. |
Interestingly, though, in the part of the book about how God made people, it describes the range of human diversity like this:
Each of our faces, bodies, and traits,
our skin tones, our features-- God did create.God made some people shy and some people loud
and some who thrive in the midst of a crowd.Some make music, and some like math,
and some are prone to blaze their own path.
So it's mostly about different personality types, rather than "identity politics" sorts of things. ("Skin tones" are mentioned 1 time. It doesn't even mention gender- even though Genesis 1 in the bible mentions humans were created "male and female.") Personally I think that's good- the pictures show a racially diverse group of kids, a mix of boys and girls, one is in a wheelchair, but the text doesn't call attention to that sort of diversity. Like it's just normal and doesn't need to be remarked on. The actual text of the book is about personality types, which is probably more practical and useful for little kids learning to interact with people.
"Evolve"
So, there are a few lines of the book that may or may not be interpreted as taking a position on the creationism/ intelligent design/ evolution debate:
[bold emphasis added by me]
all kinds of trees with leaves God designed
and
So God filled the sky, perhaps over time,
with birds and more birds, and most learned how to fly.
and
Yes, all living creatures from whales to snails,
from those covered with feathers to those covered with scales,
each God designed with a home in mind,
to develop and evolve if needed over time.
Luckily for me, I'm far enough removed from the creation/evolution debate that I don't really care about what position this cute children's book is taking. It's just a cute story. Let's not overanalyze it to figure out if this book is telling us the earth is 6000 years old or whatever.
But also, I do recognize that the author put the word "evolve" in there, which is very likely to get this book banned from evangelical-land. Good for him! That feels very bold to me, as an ex-evangelical. (This is the kind of thing that evangelicals would make a big huge deal about, even though the kids in the target audience won't notice or care.)
God made you for a purpose?
But always remember, 'cause this much is true,
God had a purpose for making you YOU.
I do not believe that, myself. But, it's fine, I don't need every book I read to my son to agree with me 100%. That would be ridiculous. It's good to let him learn about different ideas. I just draw a line at harmful ideas like "Jesus died because of you" etc.
Seeing god in people and nature
In the last few pages of the book, it says "With nature, God gives us a glimpse of divine" and "how we live, how we love, tells God's story too." I LOVE that. That is one of the key things I believe in now. God is alive, everywhere, in the world, in nature, and in human beings.
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In summary: I'm really glad I bought this book for my son. It's positive, it's about God, and it doesn't have any problematic evangelical ideology. (Though everyone's definition of "problematic evangelical ideology" will be different- that's why I went into details in this post.)
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Related:
Not Sure I Want My Kid Reading the Bible
If God Metaphorically Made the World in 6 Days, What Does That Even Mean?
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