Why You Don’t Need to Marry Augustus Waters

Augustus Waters’ name was spoken so many times by the middle school girls in my Sunday School class that you would have thought he was a boy in our youth group rather than a character in a #1 New York Times Bestseller book. Naturally, I was curious as to what drew such attention to this book, especially since it lacked zombies and werewolves (perhaps this is the end of that trend – I do hope so).

I borrowed The Fault in Our Stars and found that I read the book in its entirety that Sunday afternoon. From an initial cultural standpoint, I was excited to realize that the author is John Green, vlogger of Mental Floss. As an English Major with an emphasis in Creative Writing, I was fascinated that this male author had chosen to narrate the book from the point of view of the female character.

The first line of the book drew me in,

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.

Our coming of age love story sums up like this: Hazel, miraculously recovering from thyroid cancer that moved to her lungs, meets Augustus “Gus” Waters, osteosarcoma survivor (who lost a leg to it), and the two fall in love.

What kept me glued to the couch that day (other than a 100 degree fever), was the heads on approach that John Green took to the issue of religion and belief in these two characters who had both faced their own potential death as teenagers.

Characters can struggle with beliefs. In fact, Kate Weiss recently wrote a guest blog on this very subject. After all, if a novel is based on reality, don’t we all struggle occasionally? And I would even say that I do not have a problem with characters who have not fully formed their beliefs before the novel is over. But I do think that in order for me to endorse a book, I need to see glimpses of the truths found in Scripture.

But my middle school girls didn’t chatter about the truths of the book, they fantasized marrying Gus.

Christianity’s goal isn’t to shelter our children from society. Rather, following Christ involves a change in worldview. We view the world through His eyes and learn to combat injustice and lies with the truth of God’s word.

So the question is not, would you let your child read this book? But rather, at what age?

How to use this nonChristian book as a guide to romance, dating, and the Gospel:

I. Romance: Gus is bringing sexy back to cancer.

Cancer is prevalent in our society and is a disease that will touch all of us to differing degrees. When most of us think about cancer, we see images of chemotherapy, hair loss, and stays in the hospital.

But John Green intertwines cancer with the budding love of Gus and Hazel. Their relationship progresses, and, though written in generalities, Hazel and Gus lose their virginity to each other.

Biblical romance does not lead to sexual intercourse in dating but rather the man pursuing the woman and appreciating the way God designed her.

II. Dating: Gus cannot be your boyfriend.

We date people we like. We marry people we date. And we want to marry a Christian. All three of these statements were confirmed by my middle school girls. But this is where it hit home: We want to marry a Christian, and we’ll marry someone we date, which means the people we date need to be Christians. This logic may come naturally to you, but trust me, we need to be teaching it regularly to our youth.

Other than the fact that Gus is a fictional character, we can’t date Gus because he doesn’t fulfill our above requirements.

III. The Gospel: Gus’ truth may be profound, but it doesn’t point to God.

What worries me is a narrator who is comfortable allowing their character to struggle with belief from book jacket to book jacket.

We get statements that are quite common to nonbelievers such as:

I’d always associated belief in heaven with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement. But Gus wasn’t dumb.

And also

I thought being an adult meant knowing what you believe, but that has not been my experience.

I did, however, find one statement that most gloriously leads to a discussion on the Gospel:

Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.

 

But we quickly return to the worrisome sentiments that are the thread that keeps the narrative together:

SPOILER ALERT

A minister walked up and stood behind the coffin, almost like the coffin was a pulpit or something, and talked a little bit about how Augustus had a courageous battle and how his heroism in the face of illness was an inspiration to us all, and I was already starting to get pissed off at the minister when he said, “In heaven, Augustus will finally be healed and whole,” implying that he had been less whole than other people due to his leglessness, and I kind of could not repress my sigh of disgust.

And I will conclude with this one last quote taken from the main character:

…I was thinking about way back in the very beginning in the Literal Heart of Jesus when Gus told us that he feared oblivion, and I told him that he was fearing something universal and inevitable, and how really, the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.

Before running to the box office to buy those tickets, ask yourself – am I going to view these characters through the eyes of society and get lost in a cancer kid love story or will I view them through the eyes of God – as hopelessly lost in their sins and in need of His grace?