The Christian Research Journal has an article in the current issue  (35/02) suggesting believers discuss The Hunger Games with non-Christian friends.

The article author, Holly Ordway, argues that the dystopian genre of The Hunger Games serves as a critique of our culture.  Not only is The Hunger games critiquing our culture’s fascination with violence, videogames, and reality TV, but maybe also its lurching toward godlessness.

Nowhere in the trilogy of books, or the movie, is there any mention of God or an afterlife, although so many of the characters die. It’s an atheist’s dream. Or nightmare.

“What’s missing in this fictional world is transcendence: the characters have no sense of a supernatural reality over and above the physical, no grounding for moral judgments, and no firm basis for happiness,” writes Ordway. In the third book, Mockingjay, the heroine Katniss sees the tactics of her rebel friends crossing a moral line, “yet she is unable to articulate any argument against them.”

Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins depects a world were God seems absent. What is it like? Is that how the world really is? Discussing literature can be a safe place for a discussion that non-Christians perceive as safe.

Source:  http://blog.equip.org/?p=485