> In my very religious upbringing I wasn't allowed to read fairy tales. The danger being not able to classify which stories truly happened and which ones didn't.
Thanks for sharing. You might be interested: JRR Tolkien, 'fairy tale' author, was also a/the leading scholar of Old English (Anglo-Saxon), related languages, and the culture and myth around them - including 'fairy tales'; and he was a devout Catholic.
How could he write (and study) such ungodly material? He wrestles with the question multiple times, but if you are interested, I strongly recommend On Fairy-stories, an essay based on a lecture. It covers far more ground than this question, but it's worth reading anyway. I'll append a spoiler below.
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[SPOILER]
There's more to it than this, but it's a wonderful vision:
"The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels - peculiarly artistic,[1] beautiful, and moving: 'mythical' in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world .... The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the 'inner consistency of reality'. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. ..."
[1] "The Art is here in the story itself rather than in the telling; for the Author of the story was not the evangelists."