Yesterday in my sermon I mentioned in passing some of the problems with Christians allowing their kids to “get into” the Twilight series. Since this is an outrageous eruption of inexplicable legalism on my part, I thought I ought to defend it. Here is a brief four point discussion starter, and perhaps there will be more to follow:
1. This is part of our culture’s ongoing literary attempts at metaphor-morphing, trying to overturn the meaning of symbols that have served our people well for centuries. This practice is not yet calling evil good and good evil (Is. 5:20), but it most certainly is moving the ancient landmarks (Dt. 19:14). In this fallen world, I don’t want good orcs, good dragons, good ogres, or good vampires. Is there any particular reason why we should want them?
2. Horror fiction is a distinctively modern genre, and anybody who can read it without seeing the subtext of the unresolved (and unresolvable) guilt of our age ought not to be reading books of any kind anyway.
3. Vampire fiction in particular is all about syphilis, the great public health fiasco of Europe, spanning three centuries. You remember how whipped up we got over a decade of AIDs? Try to imagine how deep this older panic would have gone, and think of our panic as a square root of that. The guilty “infected one” would bring the curse to innocent wives, just like a vampire. Bram Stoker died of syphilis, by the by. The sexual tension throughout is a fundamentally polluted tension. Sexual tension of the kind God gave us is not like that.
4. And last, for the time being, and related to #3, you may relegate this whole thing to soft S&M, the kind that gullible Christians might buy into, largely because they cannot find “soft S&M” in their abridged concordances.