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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Photo by Walt Disney Pictures
Aslan in "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."
The religious right is hyping "The Chronicles of Narnia." But just how Christian is C.S. Lewis' masterpiece?
Dec 7, 2005 | These are antsy days for anyone who has loved C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia." Even people with unambivalent memories of the series have reason to be apprehensive about the new big-budget film of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." How often has the screen version of a magical world you passionately entered into as a child lived up to your own imaginings? But those of us who fell for Narnia without realizing the books' Christian subtext have particular reason to be unsettled. The movie is poised to flush us out: Can we still cherish the books without believing in their most obvious message? Will we still enjoy them after critics remind us of their flaws and unsavory organizations embrace them as pious family fare? Will we still feel like reading them to our own kids?
Before the age of Harry Potter, favorite books were an intensely private preserve for children. Movies, TV and comic books were things lots of kids talked about at school, but by the time you were old enough to have graduated from picture books, chances were most of your friends hadn't read or liked the same titles. At best, you shared a favorite book with one other friend, and it was something you conferred about quietly, if intensely, at the playground's edge.
Perhaps that's why so many children have remained blissfully ignorant of the Christian subtext to Narnia for so long; if no one notices your bubble, they won't be tempted to burst it. Santa Claus has lots of eager, pint-size debunkers because his doings are the talk of the under-8 set for at least four weeks out of the year. I can't recall who first spoiled my intoxicating fantasies of escape to Narnia by explaining to me that Lewis was peddling the same stuff as dreary old Sunday school, but I suspect I read it somewhere -- and I know it didn't happen until I was about 13.
I avoided Lewis' books for years after discovering this "betrayal," but eventually I returned to them. Learning to appreciate a literary work's qualities when you disagree with it -- reveling in Milton's majestic verse even if you find his views on gender roles dismal, letting Dante carry you to the ragged fringes of human emotion even if you don't believe in his Hell -- that's a skill you learn only as an adult. Although I'm not a Christian, I still find Lewis' storytelling a fluent, silvery delight, his imagery potent, and the ethical struggles of his child characters eminently sympathetic and believable.
But it's a lot easier to finesse this kind of conflict on the sleepy, serpentine back roads of literature. Multimillion-dollar Hollywood productions feel a lot more like screaming interstate highways; you better know where you're going and exactly where you intend to get off.
It's easy to see why "The Chronicles of Narnia" would appeal to Hollywood right now -- they look like a can't-lose cross between Harry Potter and "The Lord of the Rings." But it's the added dash of another, more polarizing blockbuster -- Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" -- that makes the films troubling for those who'd rather not see their childhood dreams become another pawn in the war between red and blue America. In addition to the usual TV and newspaper ads and theatrical trailers, "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" is being promoted by the Barna Group, a marketing firm that specializes in generating buzz on the Christian scene, by making advanced screenings, study guides and block ticket sales available to churches. Right-wing groups like Focus on the Family have endorsed the film.
Just how Christian are "The Chronicles of Narnia"? The question might seem absurd; the books' author, after all, was a famous Christian apologist who intended them to teach a form of the gospels. But one critic, at least, has challenged the legitimacy of Lewis' claim (voiced by the lion god Aslan, Lewis' Jesus surrogate) that "you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may better know me there." John Goldthwaite, a Christian himself and a scholar of children's literature, wrote an extended critique of the purported Christian underpinnings of the "Chronicles" in his intelligent, fiery and occasionally injudicious 1996 study of the field, "A Natural History of Make-Believe."
