C.S. Lewis in the Dock

by Joe Sobran

*Note: this column was originally released in November 2005.
Forthcoming next month* is a film of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first of C.S. Lewis’s popular children’s stories of the land of Narnia. Lewis, of course, was a noted Christian apologist, and these books are informed by religious allegory that drives liberals nuts.

So it’s about time for a new attack on the man, and sure enough, it comes in The New Yorker, where Adam Gopnik, often an interesting and intelligent writer, belittles Lewis’s work in a way I can describe only as catty.

C.S.Lewis Gopnik concedes that the Narnia stories are “classics in the only sense that matters – books that are read a full generation after their author has gone” – but he dislikes the author’s overtly religious books. So he harps on what he chooses to call Lewis’s “religiosity,” with its overtones of aggressive sanctimony.

C.S. Lewis

In just his first four paragraphs, Gopnik writes of Lewis’s “conservative religiosity,” his “bullying brand of religiosity,” and his “narrow-hearted religiosity.” Would someone please send this man a thesaurus?

I’m not sure how a book can be “bullying,” but I’m sure the term hardly does justice to Lewis’s gently persuasive defense of Christianity in The Problem of Pain, Miracles, Mere Christianity, and other books. These are classics by Gopnik’s own standard: they sell millions of copies a full generation after Lewis’s death on November 22, 1963. If Lewis’s readers felt they were being “bullied,” why would they read him so eagerly?

It gets worse. Gopnik can’t stand Lewis’s “racism,” finds him “nasty,” a “prig,” a “very odd kind of Christian,” and so on. He speaks of his “weird and complicated sex life” with a “sadomasochistic tinge.” Lewis’s school days, Gopnik suggests, made him a “warped, morbid, stammering sexual pervert.” (In liberal discourse, only a heterosexual Christian can incur the charge of a sexual perversion. Ask Mel Gibson.)

Lewis conceives God as a “dispenser of vacuous bromides,” and Gopnik assures us that “believing cut Lewis off from writing well about belief,” for “a belief that needs this much work to believe in isn’t really a belief but a very strong desire to believe.” At bottom, Lewis had a “bad conscience” and an “uncertain personal faith.” The Narnia stories, “in many ways,” are actually “anti-Christian”; Lewis didn’t realize this, but Gopnik does.

I’m afraid Gopnik hasn’t read the C.S. Lewis millions of other readers have treasured. He has missed Lewis’s point – not a very difficult one, really – about the virtue of faith. Belief is something you have or don’t have; but faith is an act of will and fortitude, which is why we speak of “keeping” or “breaking” faith.