Forbid Them Not: A New Review Series!

Forbid Them Not

And here we are! A new review series! Exciting!

I thought we’d start with the blurb on the back of the book, and I turned to Amazon thinking I might find the text there rather than needing to type it in myself. Instead I found this short review by Publishers Weekly:

While there’s nothing wrong with fiction that hammers home a message, this inspirational novel for the Christian market buries a story line in so much extraneous material that the message loses its punch. It’s an ultra-conservative message, even by CBA [Christian Booksellers Association] standards. The year is 2005, and Cooper Stone has just taken the most challenging case of his legal career: defending two families who may have their children taken away from them by the government. The Committee on the Rights of the Child has worked for 30 years to begin “bold action” to overturn the death penalty, bar parental consent for abortions, ban spanking and do away with religious teaching that says the only way to God is through Christianity. The committee chooses two families as its first test cases, and the resulting battle ends up in the Supreme Court. As the story unfolds, Stone and Sunday School teacher Laura Frasier fall in love, which the author uses as an opportunity to sermonize on the problem of dating before people are ready to marry. The book is far, far too long at 480 pages. To follow the plot in one section, readers must wade through as many as seven consecutive pages of e-mail transcripts from a Crosswalk.com chat room. These are immediately followed by almost eight pages of undiluted dialogue between Cooper and his friend Peter Barron. Somewhere along the line, good storytelling got confused with propagandizing and proselytizing, and the result is a drawn-out, disappointing read.

Along these lines, I want to outline a few problems I saw in the book before going any further. Cooper Stone, the book’s protagonist, is a clone of Peter Barron, from the first book. There are no differences between them that I could see. Both are Bible Believing Christians. Both are lawyers willing to take a case they believe in even if they won’t get paid. Both are single and lonely. Both fall for women they believe are already taken. Both are jaw-dropping hunks who turn heads everywhere they go.

In fact, at one point on character describes Cooper as “Billy Graham in the body of a thirty-year-old Matt Damon.” When Cooper goes on the Christian chat room mentioned above, every woman on there is drooling over him (because they’ve seen him on TV). When he goes to a pizza place to meet a hot, hot expert in the opposition, the middle school kids literally stake the couple out—because they’re both that drop-dead gorgeous and sexy. It’s simply too much.

Adding to the fact that it’s too much is the obvious—like Peter Barron, Cooper is Farris’ stand-in, his author avatar. That Cooper is Farris’ way of inserting himself into the book makes the fact that every woman in this book falls all over (and can’t stop talking about) how hot Cooper is seem in particularly bad taste. It reads like wish fulfillment.

Another observation—I don’t remember Anonymous Tip having any sermonizing about the importance of not dating before a person is ready to marry. I don’t remember it having anything about giving hearts away. I don’t remember it having anything about “emotional purity.” Indeed, in that book the author avatar marries a divorced woman (once her husband conveniently dies) and I don’t remember reading anything about her prior relationship having sullied her.

This book has all of those things. Emotional purity and the whole nine yards—with, yes, a lot of sermonizing. I checked the date this book and Anonymous Tip were published to confirm my suspicions. The first book was published in 1996, the year before Josh Farris published I Kissed Dating Goodbye and inserted “emotional purity” into the Chrsitian homeschool community’s lexicon. This book was published in 2002, five years after Harris’ book came out, perhaps at the height of the craze.

It looks like Farris’ views evolved along with those of a Christian homeschool community besotted with Harris’ book. The result is severely disquieting—the characters in this book put themselves through an awful lot of unnecessary pain.

With that, let’s look at the back cover of the book:

Washington, D.C.—January 27, 2005. After a landslide election that swept a Democratic majority into the United States Senate, today the Senate voted 69-31 to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Following a liberal shift of power in the government, two families find themselves on the brink of the unimaginable—removal of their children from their care. This new legislation limits parents’ ability to teach fundamental Christianity, spank their children, or make educational decisions, such as electing to homeschool. Laura Frasier, a public school teacher, finds herself in the middle of a philosophical maelstrom. As an ideological battle in the United States Supreme Court ensues, Cooper Stone must defend these families’ right to raise their children according to their own values. Attorney Michael Farris delivers another entertaining and substantive legal thriller on a very important social issue. Although the law in this book is completely accurate, this story is fiction—for now.

The back of the book does not clarify why Laura Fraiser finds herself caught up in the midst of this fight. About that…

According to Farris, if the U.S. signed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, adults would be immediately banned from teaching children that any religion is the “only” way to God, and that other religions are false. In addition to being a public school teacher, Laura also teaches Sunday school—and she teaches her third grade class that anyone who does not believe in Jesus is going to hell. This leads to a lawsuit.

Here’s the thing—as Farris notes in the book, every country but the U.S. and Somalia has already signed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. Most of these countries have not banned spanking. Many of these countries allow homeschooling (under varying rules). None of these countries, to my knowledge, has banned parents or religious officials from teaching children that their religion is the only true religion.

There’s a character on the Christian chat room who keeps popping and and saying she’ll pray for the case “even though I’m from Canada.” And all I can say is—address that. Canada signed the CRC ages ago. Shouldn’t she be telling horror stories of all the restrictions on parents in her country? Of how parents can no longer spank, or send their children to Sunday school? But no. This is never addressed. And Canada, by the way, still allows spanking.

Farris would probably respond that in the U.S., treaties become the highest law of the land. Unlike in other countries, no laws are necessary to implement the treaty—or so he claims. He states this throughout Forbid Them Not, arguing, in essence, that if the treaty were ratified, parents in the U.S. would find themselves under the direct authority and control of the UN.

I will address this claim over the course of this review series. But I will say right now that Farris completely bungles several sections of the CRC to the extent that I was astounded at what they actually said when I finally looked them up.

One last note for this week (we’ll dive into the book next week): the book’s title. Forbid Them Not, of course, refers to Matthew 19:14.

But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

The problem is that this is never actually explained in the book, and as a result of this and the book’s actual content, it rather feels like the phrase applies to the parents. Farris never talks about the freedoms or rights of children. The book is all about the freedoms and rights of parents. Forbid them not … from spanking their children. Forbid them not … from homeschooling or taking their kids out of sex ed. Forbid them not … from teaching their children that people in other religions go to hell.

What would an ethic based on “forbid them not” that actually applied to children look like? I don’t know, but certainly not this. Children are not agents anywhere in this book. They are objects who are acted upon. The only time one child displays agency—nine-year-old Layton—his mother violates a court order and spanks him with a ruler, rendering him once again submissive.

Forbid them not indeed.

I have a Patreon! Please support my writing!