I suppose it was Ellen O’Hara leading her family in an evening Rosary in Gone With the Wind. (Scarlett’s mind was elsewhere during prayers.)
My family was nominally Catholic, and my grandmother very much so, and I’d never seen or heard of anyone doing this.
Wow, I think everyone here was more sensitive than I was as a kid. Even though I was raised Milquetoast Protestant, I don’t recall reading (or even thinking) anything spiritual until maybe high school age. I’ll bet I read/saw plenty of stuff where the deeper meanings went right over my head…
… and I LIKED it that way, dammit! [/danacarvey oldefarte]
The Kiddush Cup Who Hated Wine- It’s a kid’s book filled with talking (presumably Jewish) objects.
As mentioned
Narnia- We read the book in public school. I was quite pissed when Aslan came back to life and I realized the whole thing was a Christian parable.
X Men- For a long time, it was known that Magneto’s family died at Auschwitz. But the writers would not just come out and say Magneto was a Jew. I only learned Kitty was a Jew when she tried (and failed) to ward off Dracula with a large cross. He grabs her throat and burns his hand on her star of David. Nightcrawler looks like a demon but is a devout Catholic. Under some writers, it really worked.
Not sure which I read first:
Already mentioned: Tom Sawyer (His Aunts were always trying to teach him Christianity), All of a Kind Family
Not yet mentioned: A Secret Garden (Dickon sings the Doxology at some point) Jane Eyre, almost everything by Jane Austen, Anne of Green Gables, To Kill a Mockingbird*
Things I’m sure I read later: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and Gone With the Wind
*“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)… There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Oh yeah! He was a Catholic, right?
Sounds like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
The whole thing is a Christian allegory. And the “real” characters (by which I guess you mean the Pevensie children) are absolutely Christian, specifically Church of England.
The book was written, after all, by a prolific Christian apologist.
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Allegory, not parable. But why would that piss you off?
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First grade. I went to Catholic school. Instead of Dick and Jane, our readers featured David and Ann, their Catholic counterparts. Outside of school, it was probably when my mother read me a book about Kateri Tekakwitha, who was canonized a few years ago.
A year or two later, I read the
series, about a Jewish family in turn-of-the-century New York.
Also a product of Catholic schools, although our primers had John, Jean, and Judy. And scenes in school had them being taught by nuns.
I’m yet another, whose probable first encounter with “religious stuff in fiction” was Tom Sawyer: our family were unbelievers, Dad particularly so; I remember him relishing Twain’s – gentle-ish – mockery of some of the odder antics of the church which Tom’s family attend.
The same goes for me. I’ve mentioned this elsewhere on the Dope; but as a kid, I found Tom Sawyer rather boring, trite, and not very funny. It was about another ten years before I thought “I suppose I’d better try Huckleberry Finn” – expecting more of the somewhat dreary same. To my surprise and delight, it was for me a very different animal — including (in parallel with the serious message) being often hilariously funny.
Another childhood encounter with fiction-type “things religious” – later than my reading Tom Sawyer, but not a great deal later – was Rosemary Sutcliffe’s 1950s YA novel Simon. Set in the English Civil War: the eponymous hero, a gentle lad, feels that he must enlist in the Parliamentarian army; his best friend is an equally convinced Royalist – poignant stuff, in consequence. The hero encounters fellow-soldiers of a wide variety of types, including one guy, a “red-hot hell-fire militant Anabaptist” in contrast to Simon’s moderate low-church position. “Mr. Red-Hot Hell-Fire” (who later goes disastrously to the bad) is named Zeal-For-The-Lord Relf – my first encounter with the historical thing of the Puritans’ liking long, cumbersome descriptive first names. A ripping yarn in the very best sense; I’d happily re-read it.
Rabbi Small books written by Harry Kemelman
First book in the 12 book series is Friday the Rabbi Slept Late.
The Rabbi is an amateur slueth…
I started reading them in high school
This gets me wondering whether anyone is in a similar case re G.K. Chesterton’s – numerous – Father Brown short stories (his Fr. Brown is, likewise, an amateur sleuth). Not true of me: I first tried them late in life and, I’m afraid, found them boring. Nothing to do with the Catholic content – just, boring.
The first of these that I read was the Little House books. The idea of sitting still all Sabbath in your itchy woolens horrified me as a 7 year old, and still makes me itch if I think about it too much.
The Illiad is the first one i remember, from when I was around 8-10 or so.
The Rabbi books were slow paced. Similar to Agatha Christie’s characters.
I didn’t read the entire Rabbi series. I bought used paperbacks when I saw them at the store. I probably read six or seven of the 12 written.
It’s been a long time since high school. I remember some of the books were better than others.
The Three Musketeers. Richelieu, Mazarin Milady’s jailkeeper and Aramis all were deeply of the Catholic faith.
I grew up both going to church and reading, so “first” is probably too far back to remember. I do remember reading several Arch Books in church (picture books for children that retold stories from the Bible); I don’t know whether or not they’d qualify under the OP’s prohibition of “scriptures.”
I do remember encountering religious elements in books by Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle In Time; A Swiftly Tilting Planet) and Elizabeth George Speare (The Bronze Bow; The Witch of Blackbird Pond). I read Tom Sawyer. I read Narnia.
Except it’s arguable whether the characters of the Narnia books can really be said to have “had religion” within the context of their own stories.
I was a Jewish kid in a very Christian area. Despite having a few Jewish students, my elementary school only put some Hanukah decorations up after my older sister noted there were Christmas decorations up and my parents complained. I was used to being fed Christianity by those who either didn’t realize just how Christian something was, or didn’t care. So after enjoying a nice fantasy story with a witch and a talking lion and Turkish Delight, I was upset to realize that the story was all about Jesus.
ETA
In college, a friend gave me a copy of The Screwtape Letters. I’ve read it many times and HIGHLY recommend it. But, said friend presented it to me as a Christian book. In (I forget which grade it was. It couldn’t have been more than fourth grade.) The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe was presented to us only as a fantasy book.
Me too, I wouldn’t have thought religion in a book to be anything unusual.
My grandmother had a set of red-bound Christian childrens’ books called Bedtime Stories, which had belonged to my mother and uncles before me. I read the shit out of those things, even though they were chock-full of Bible verses. (I was a story-lovin’ fool). So those might be first; The Secret Garden seems a good candidate for second.
I still have some of those Bedtime Story books too. They’re of such sentimental value that I can’t throw them out.