Many young adult books use the theme of religion as a way to help explore the confusion and uncertainty that is adolescence. Such books delve into topics such as fanaticism, questioning the faith of one’s parents, and the struggle to find faith in a higher power. The following three books portray different young adults exploring faith, belief, and uncertainty as they look for direction in their own lives.
Armageddon Summer
Marina is a young girl who watches her mother’s fanatical religion push her father away and drive a wedge into the family. Marina clings to the idea that if she believes in her mother’s religion hard enough, her father will not leave. But when the cult leader calls the congregation to the top of a mountain to wait out the end of the world, it is the family that leaves Marina’s father behind. Marina begins to question her mother’s religion, but it takes a crisis that nearly tears her world apart for her to realize that she can believe in God without fanaticism.
Send Me Down a Miracle
Charity lives in the south with her preacher father, and he lives the gospel down to the letter. Conflict arises because she is torn between obeying her father and getting to know Adrienne, an artist from New York whose ideas about God and faith are quite shocking and different from her father’s.
Charity learns during the course of the summer that Adrienne—and all her progressive ideas about God—may be just as human and fallible as everyone else. And Charity’s father, despite all his rules, is someone she can count on. When tragedy strikes the town, Charity’s father faces hard facts: that his ironclad rules may have led his wife to leave him and caused a good man to commit suicide. It is Charity who teaches her father that religion is not so much about rules as it is about love.
Godless
Jason's parents both belong to the Catholic Church, but Jason is an atheist, though at times he wishes he were a believer. As he says, "Being Catholic is hard. Being ex-Catholic is even harder." Jason desires to have something to believe in, so he invents a religion. He recruits his friends to believe in his new cult: the worship of water, in the form of the town's water tower.
Jason invents his cult mostly as a joke, but his friend Shin takes it seriously, which eventually causes a near tragedy. In the midst of it all, Jason doubts. He wonders whether it matters what a person believes in at all. Jason never finds a sure answer to all his doubt and questioning about religion, but in the end, he finds hope that someday he will find answers.
In each of these books, religion plays a part in helping the main characters come to realizations about themselves, about their families, and about the world they live in. The topics these books explore are universal. Almost everyone relates to the themes of confusion, doubt, of not relating to parents, and of wanting to have belief. Religion as a plot vehicle provides ample supply of these themes in young adult literature.
Hautman, Pete. Godless. Simon Pulse. 2005 ISBN-10: 1416908161. ISBN-13: 978-1416908166
Nolan, Han. Send Me Down A Miracle. Harcourt Paperbacks. 2003. ISBN-10: 0152046801. ISBN-13: 978-0152046804
Yolen, Jane and Bruce Coville. Armageddon Summer. Harcourt Press. 1999. ISBN-10: 0152022686. ISBN-13: 978-0152022686
Holli Jo Ronquillo - Holli Jo Ronquillo is a freelance writer and editor who has been writing professionally for several years. Her work has appeared in The ...
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