From Bible storybooks to Narnia: Children’s literature as a tool for religious literacy in plural classrooms

Children’s literature has long mediated encounters with religious narratives, values, and moral imagination. This article examines children’s literature as a resource for religious literacy in secular and religiously plural classrooms. It asks under what pedagogical conditions children’s Bible storybooks and selected episodes from C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia can support religious literacy in non-confessional educational settings. The article defines religious socialisation, religious literacy, and plural classrooms, and relates them to multiliteracies and culturally situated reader-response approaches to religious texts. It then analyses two literary strategies: direct concretisation in children’s Bible storybooks and imaginative transposition in Narnia. The article’s original contribution is to shift discussion of Christian children’s literature from confessional transmission or virtue formation alone towards a culturally situated reader-response model of religious literacy, distinguishing two pedagogical pathways: direct concretisation and imaginative transposition. Attention is given to the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, Edmund’s betrayal and restoration, and the Stone Table episode in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It argues that these texts can contribute to religious literacy only when taught through explicit contextualisation, close textual and visual reading, dialogic discussion, and a clear distinction between understanding a religious claim and assenting to it.