Guardian Unlimited pulls no punches. Some excerpts:
It was JRR Tolkien who converted CS Lewis to Christianity during one long all-night walk that ended in dawn and revelation.
Disney is deliberately promoting this film to the religious - it has appointed Outreach, an evangelical publisher, to promote the Christian message behind the movie in British churches. The Christian radio station Premier is urging churches to hold services on the theme of The Gospel According to Narnia. Even the Methodists have written a special Narnia-themed service. And a Kent parish is giving away £10,000 worth of film tickets to single-parent families. (Are the children of single mothers in special need of the word?)
US born-agains are using the movie. The Mission America Coalition is “inviting church leaders around the country to consider the fantastic ministry opportunity presented by the release of this film”. The president’s brother, Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, is organising a scheme for every child in his state to read the book. Walden Media, co-producer of the movie, offers a “17-week Narnia Bible study for children”. The owner of Walden Media is both a big Republican donor and a donor to the Florida governor’s book promotion - a neat synergy of politics, religion and product placement. It has aroused protests from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which complains that “a governmental endorsement of the book’s religious message is in violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution”.
…43% of people in Britain in a recent poll couldn’t say what Easter celebrated. Among the young - apart from those in faith schools - that number must be considerably higher. Ask art galleries: they now have to write the story of every religious painting on the label as people no longer know what “agony in the garden”, “deposition”, “transfiguration” or “ascension” mean.
This Christ-lion willingly lays down his life, submitting himself to be bound, thrashed and humiliated by the white witch, allowing his golden mane to be cut and himself to be slaughtered on the sacrificial stone table: it cracks in sympathetic agony and his body goes missing. …
But so far, so good. The story makes sense. The lion exchanging his life for Edmund’s is the sort of thing Arthurian legends are made of. Parfait knights and heroes in prisoner-of-war camps do it all the time. But what’s this? After a long, dark night of the soul and women’s weeping, the lion is suddenly alive again. Why? How?, my children used to ask. Well, it is hard to say why. It does not make any more sense in CS Lewis’s tale than in the gospels. Ah, Aslan explains, it is the “deep magic”, where pure sacrifice alone vanquishes death.
Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict, with a twisted knife to the heart. Every one of those thorns, the nuns used to tell my mother, is hammered into Jesus’s holy head every day that you don’t eat your greens or say your prayers when you are told.
Tolkien hated Narnia: the two dons may have shared the same love of unquestioning feudal power, with worlds of obedient plebs and inferior folk eager to bend at the knee to any passing superior white persons - even children; both their fantasy worlds and their Christianity assumes that rigid hierarchy of power - lord of lords, king of kings, prince of peace to be worshipped and adored. But Tolkien disliked Lewis’s bully-pulpit.
Over the years, others have had uneasy doubts about the Narnian brand of Christianity. Christ should surely be no lion … He was the lamb, representing the meek of the earth, weak, poor and refusing to fight. Philip Pullman - he of the marvellously secular trilogy His Dark Materials - has called Narnia “one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read”.
Why? Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America - that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right.
Lewis said he hoped the book would soften-up religious reflexes and “make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life”. … Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children’s minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy - but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism.
How people justify training children to accept Christianity is beyond me. It’s straight-forward brain-washing. Drives me nuts what people do to kids these days and then scorn anyone who calls them on it. Yet look what they say when someone shows the kids a Moonies video.
The main problem I had to resolve when I first learned about the religious themes of the book was how to keep believing in talking animals without becoming a Christian in the process. I was eight, though, and that problem has since resolved itself in a fanfare of blood.
What people believe is entirely up to them, but in the end someone will be right or someone will be wrong. Might does not necessarily equal right, but do you side with the White Witch? After all, it is by her might that Narnia was covered in an eternal winter. If God is indeed the Lord of this universe what right have we to challenge his wisdom or decisions. Tragically, many people are making the same mistake as Lucifer did: belief that they knew better.
Let me ask you, if all that power were placed in your hands what would you do? It easy for those who are powerless to criticize those with power, because power was not given to us. As to the charge of brain washing, I would offer an alternative: eye opening. You do not believe because you lie in darkness and no argument in the world will allow the Truth to come through. You believe Christians brain wash because you cannot understand why we believe what we believe. Our children are free to think, and many of them choose to leave, that is out of our hands. Teaching children about Christianity and the true gospel is not crime, no more than teaching children about evolution.
The bottom line is you make not like the message of Christianity, but neither have millions of people from the day of its conception. If you do not agree fine, but you will not elminate God by telling people not to speak about Him or not to educate people about Him. The gospel will triumph, over every enemy of the Lord and in the end He will reign.
Your fate is uncertain, your destiny is yet to be told…
I pray that God will break through your resistance.
I read the book when I was young and the Christianity aspect was over my head. I enjoyed the book - period.
As for my children, when they ask about religion tell them of my beliefs, but will let them decide for themselves. My son has asked me if God and Jesus are real, and I ask him what he thinks. He hears both sides and has the option to decide for himself. Children are not stupid, but can be easily persuaded - so I choose not to pursuade either way. My daughter is still too young, but she will have the same options. I believe that every person is good, just needs to choose the path that is right for them.