Holy war looms over Disney's Narnia epic

The Narnia story is about to appear on cinema screens and there is a right battle going on over it already. Progressive Christians might want to listen carefully. I really quite enjoyed the stories as a kid and later was delighted to realise that Aslan was a type of Christ. However, I have to say that I do think that atheist children's author Philip Pullman has some points when he says;

Pullman believes that Lewis's books portray a version of Christianity that relies on martial combat, outdated fears of sexuality and women, and also portrays a religion that looks a lot like Islam in unashamedly racist terms.
'It's not the presence of Christian doctrine I object to so much as the absence of Christian virtue. The highest virtue, we have on the authority of the New Testament itself, is love, and yet you find not a trace of that in the books,' he said.

It's good to see him being a bit more rounded and less tetchy in his assessment of Christian faith than he was in the Third Way interview. Pullman is having his own books cinematised and they have had a bit altered to not offend the evangelical market in the USA, so he has some cause to be tetchy if he was so minded. He at least calls Christians to the brighter view of our faith than the rather dark view that seeps out of the corners of some varieties on offer today and unfortunately Lewis was also a man of his time and culture and much as I may admire his apologetics and storytelling, I have to agree with Pullman to some degree: there are bits of the stories I would edit now because they do indeed seem to be more about an early mid 20th century English [I know Lewis was from Ireland, but to be honest he seems to have become to all intents and purposes English] middle-class prejudices at the end of Empire than thought-through Christian faith. However, we are all on a road and we all have more to learn and consistencies to grow into. I even suspect that were he alive now, Lewis might agree with some of Philip Pullman's criticisms and cooperate with ironing them out for film. But that's me being charitable, I hope that I would be right to be so.

I can't help feeling that Lewis might be distressed or at least concerned by this, too.

Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said that the film was an ideal way for a Christian message to be brought to people who would not otherwise go near a church. 'Here is yet another tool that many may find to be effective in communicating the message of Jesus to those who may not respond to other presentations,' he said.

. I get the impression that Lewis thought that the stories should stand on their own and not be drawn out and made into something else, and so the evangelical mania for explaining everything and not letting the story form do its own work, I think, would have earned a sound riposte from him. It's an interesting issue between emergers and trad evos. I suspect emergers would be happy to let the story be itself without trying to make it into a text for a sermon, while the trad evo instinct is to turn it into the four spiritual laws; "ten thousand, thousand are their texts but all their sermons one". Needless to say, the latter instinct is likely to be counter productive by making loads of people suspect that what they are going to see is a thinly veiled sermon. Disney may be wondering which way things are going to go: will the pulling power of the Evo subculture offset the potential losses of the more regular cinema-going public?



You may also be interested in the comments that Rowan Williams made about Pullman's work.
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