I love “This Little Light of Mine,” but I don’t like the verse that says, “Won’t let Satan blow it out.”

The 5 year olds in my class already know this verse, of course, and they get a little confused when I share a different version. “Don’t let anyone blow it out,” we sing (or, I sing, and hope they join in). I’m the teacher, and I am trying to teach them something here.

To an outside observer I suppose it might look as if I am hesitant to talk about Satan — about evil, personified. It might appear as if I am distancing myself from the conversation about demons, spirits, all that complicated “woo woo” stuff that nice, educated, liberal Christians like me tend to avoid. I promise that is not my reason for choosing an alternate verse, though. My thoughts on angels and demons, Satan as an entity, and so on, are complicated and half-formed — I’m simply not ready to go there, so that much is true. But that isn’t my reason for trying to teach the kids a different song.

My worry is that singing, “Won’t let Satan blow it out” forms a humorous caricature in their minds. Satan, as a concept, is one their little imaginations can run with, and I am not so much worried about that scaring them as I am about it putting them on a trajectory of theological development in which evil is compartmentalized into one cartoonish Devil.

Evil, unfortunately, is a bit more overreaching and amorphous than that. Satan is a convenient focus, a bit of a distraction, a scapegoat even. Of course, with 5 year olds I don’t dwell on evil — my fellow teachers and I tend to focus on Bible stories and lessons that talk about things like love, kindness and the ways that the church is our family. But even at age 5, children’s theological imaginations are already developing — it shocks me again and again how much they remember from previous weeks of class. Their minds are story sponges. And so, when we talk about bad things that happen in the world, this caricatured form of evil is not the story I want to tell.

The simple fact of the matter is that as these children learn and grow, their lights are not going to be threatened by some cartoonish character called Satan. Their ability to grow up and become faithful people will be threatened in ways more complicated than that, by evil more difficult to pin down, by broken systems and power structures, and yes, by other people.

“Won’t let anyone blow it out” is a theological statement of its own, one which I think we all need to hear from time to time.

Meghan Florian is a graduate of Duke Divinity School and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. She is a member of Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship, and lives and writes in Durham, N.C. She blogs at femmonite.com.