“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" may seem like a Christian morality tale, but as I thought about it more and more, the story actually takes its positive view of human nature from a more Rousseauvian worldview, a perspective that envisions children as beginning life in a state of inner purity that is oftentimes corrupted by society.
Charlie is such an endearing character. However, the source of his goodness is not that he was saved from his sins. It’s actually the opposite: he was protected by the love of his family from ever wanting to sin. He was sheltered in purity of heart merely because he never had the unfortunate access the other children had to various childhood vices. By this view, author Roald Dahl seems to be a direct inheritor of Rousseau's ideas of the purity of man’s nature at birth. Dahl has absorbed the Rousseauian view that society is what corrupts the heart. The only reason that Charlie was so pure was that he was sheltered from society itself through the love of his family and his lack of access to society’s vices.
Charlie follows in the wake of a long list of literary characters before him, going all the way back to Wordsworth’s pure-minded protagonists that he thought grew naturally in the beauty and seclusion of the remote Lake District. Even C.S. Lewis, although he paints Edmund as in need of salvation, somehow forgets to portray any real failings in Lucy, Susan, or Peter (possibly the reason I never resonated with these characters).
I actually wonder if, because of the belief in the sheltering effect of family within Christian culture, many underestimated the power of sin by teaching that an early start in a family with Christmas traditions and the bonding power of vacations could shelter a child enough to protect it from the corruptions of society.
I don’t argue that Christians should discount the importance of raising children in loving homes. But we do need to understand our sins too, not just the sins of society, of our non-Christian neighbor, with his obvious in-your-face sins (or even a very annoying child!). Let’s stop comparing ourselves to the Charlies or Lucys of literature, and let’s stop trying to attain a state of perfection on our own. Ultimately, we must realize that, no matter how pure we think we are, we have as much of the corrupting power of sin as Mike Teevee or Violet Beauregarde!
Charlie and dear Grandpa Joe, were they written in alignment with the truth of Scripture, when they looked into their own hearts, would find, not purity, but the human and broken motives that everyone through time struggles with. In order to face that brokenness, they’d recognize their deep need for the only salvation: Jesus Christ. This shows how far Dahl’s vision of essential moral goodness is from the sin and brokenness of the Christian view of human nature. But if we listen to the darkness of our own hearts, we’ll know who’s right: and we’ll know to whom to turn to be saved. As Paul explains in Romans 7:22-25:
"For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh, I serve the law of sin."
The part of us that resonates and desires to follow the Law of God is a bit like an inner Charlie, but we have to recognize the way sin not only complicates but actually even counteracts all of our good intentions, no matter how much we shelter ourselves from the world. Our only hope is the glorious truth of Romans 8:1-4!
"There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit."
This neatly sums up the way that the Augustus Gloops and the Grandpa Joes of the world, all of us, need the saving work of God. This work came about when Christ lived out the only pure life that’s ever been lived, uncorrupted, but not Rousseau’s vision of a life sheltered or distant from society. He entered society, faced its every ill and vice without himself becoming immoral or sullied. On the cross, he took on every sin of his people, becoming sin in the view of God, but yet without sinning! He took every sin, small and large, and when he died, He broke sin’s power.
Thanks be to God that, although Rousseau and Dahl’s promise for human goodness does not hold, in entering into salvation through belief in Christ, we can access that freedom from the burden of sin, the burden of our shame.
