No more “fat,” “ugly,” or “small men.” According to reports, Roald Dahl’s classic children’s books, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, are set to be “rewritten [with] . . . extensive changes” by the publisher’s “sensitivity writers” so they “can continue to be enjoyed by all today.” What kind of changes are these writers making?
Well, the article I linked above highlighted some of these changes and noted there are “hundreds” of others (including whole new passages). Here are a few examples they give:
The word “fat” has been cut from every new edition of relevant books, while the word “ugly” has also been culled.
Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now described as “enormous”. In The Twits, Mrs. Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”.
In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
References to “female” characters have disappeared. Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a “most formidable female”, is now a “most formidable woman”.
Gender-neutral terms have been added in places – where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas were “small men”, they are now “small people”. The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People.
People get upset (and understandably so) at the increasing number of classic books being changed or even rewritten to accommodate the man-centered “woke” culture of today. But many Christians and Christian leaders have been doing basically the same thing—but with the very words of God!
You see, for years many Christians have been guilty of changing or even rewriting God’s clear infallible Word in Genesis to accommodate fallible man’s beliefs about the big bang, evolution, and millions of years—and many in the church and in Christian institutions applaud this!
And unsurprisingly, as such compromise always leads to more compromise, we’re increasingly seeing church leaders trying to change or rewrite God’s Word (or liturgy based on God’s Word) in regard to marriage and gender (or even attempting to make God “gender neutral”) as they embrace the LGBTQ worldview.
Many are aghast at this rewriting of secular books to accommodate man’s beliefs—so how much more aghast should we be when we see this happening in the church in regard to the very words of almighty God! No wonder much of the church is lukewarm! Christians need to stop accommodating the world’s religion by rewriting and changing God’s Word in Genesis and throughout the Bible. Such contamination undermines the authority of God’s Word and leads so many away from the church and onto the road to destruction!
Proverbs 30:6 KJV – “Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.”
