Faith-Friendly Family Read-Alouds

"Faith-friendly" is close to useless as a label, so this page doesn't use it as one. These seven books get filed together and they are wildly different products: one of them is a story bible, one is the Christian gospel told as a road trip with a monster in it, one is an allegory most children never notice is an allegory, two are adventures by Christian authors with no religion in them at all, and one is a comedy about a church that is gently rude about the people in it. You are owed the specifics before you spend six weeks of bedtimes on any of them, so every entry here says which faith, how much of it, and where exactly it sits: on the page, in the ending, in the publisher's colophon, or nowhere. Read them at whatever level the child in front of you is reading at, and take one and leave six if that's what fits.

The useful way to sort these is by where the faith actually sits, so here it is, book by book. Fully explicit, faith is the content: The Jesus Storybook Bible is the Bible, and Little Pilgrim's Progress is the gospel as an allegory with the King and the Prince barely disguised. Explicit but arriving late: The Tale of Three Trees reads as a plain folktale until the last few pages turn out to be the nativity and the crucifixion, which is the whole design. Allegory a child probably won't clock: in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe nobody says God, nobody prays, no scripture appears anywhere, and Aslan's death and return echo Easter without Lewis ever saying so — plenty of children read it as a talking-lion adventure and nothing else, and it comes from a mainstream publisher. Christian house, no religion in the book: On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness has characters who pray and a Maker who made the world, but no sermon and nothing standing in for a Bible story in book one. The Green Ember goes further — it's here because it has no magic and runs on honour and loyalty, and it contains no religious content whatsoever, despite the Christian author and imprint. And then the outlier: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is a secular Harper comedy set in a church, which retells the nativity properly and spends the rest of its time laughing at the congregation. Two of these — The Green Ember and, for most children, Narnia — ask a child to believe nothing at all.