c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) After more than decade spent hosting a daily three-hour talk show, I confess it sometimes seems like there are few subjects that I have not discussed and few opinions or questions that I have not heard.

So imagine my surprise at hearing one the other day while I’m waiting for my to-go burger at a local pub: “So is it true C.S. Lewis lost his Christian faith when he wrote `Chronicles of Narnia’?”

Since Lewis is considered one of the 20th century’s great Christian apologists, you can imagine my befuddlement. How often is a talk show host left speechless?

I finally asked where he heard such a thing.

“Well, I just heard he couldn’t be a Christian because he wrote about witches,” the man said. “You know, `The Lion, THE WITCH and the Wardrobe.”’

I’ve heard this argument against J.K. Rowling of “Harry Potter” fame, but somehow didn’t get the memo applying the same to Lewis.

Being a highly correlative guy, my mind immediately raced to the news I heard earlier in the day. Madeleine L’Engle, author of more than 60 books, had died in New York at the age of 88. The obituaries rolled off the presses and some included comments that illuminate the question about Lewis.

Douglas Martin of The New York Times observed the perpetual concern of religious conservatives about theology packaged in fantasy literature. “The St. James Guide to Children’s Writers called Ms. L’Engle `one of the truly important writers of juvenile fiction in recent decades.’ Such accolades did not come from pulling punches. `Wrinkle’ has been one of the most banned books in the United States, accused by religious conservatives of offering an inaccurate portrayal of God and nurturing in the young an unholy belief in myth and fantasy,” he wrote.

Monica Hesse of The Washington Post added this: “`A Wrinkle in Time’ was not the sort of book you were assigned in school; with its New Testament quotations and witchy supporting characters, it was at once too Christian and too blasphemous.”

L’Engle, Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (“The Hobbit”) each embraced the Christian faith and found in their imaginative fantasy a way to explore and understand it. Lewis once said that “reason is the organ of truth, and imagination is the organ of meaning.”

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with neurologist Oliver Sachs who, in his book “Uncle Tungsten,” writes of his father’s devotion to the Jewish faith. Sachs saw his father retreat to study, pray and read after a long day’s work as a physician. It was obvious that faith was central in his father’s life, but then Sachs blurted out, “But he never told me what his faith means!”

Fantasy literature is truth applied in an invented world in ways that help us understand the meaning of truth in our world. That realization prompted L’Engle to describe children’s literature as “literature too difficult for adults to understand.”

For fantasy to perform this function, it needs to have a cohesive underlying basis, a connection to what Lewis and Tolkien referred to as “the one true myth.”

L’Engle believed this, and it was the basis of her critique of the one Harry Potter book she had read. In a 2006 Newsweek piece, she said, “It’s a nice story, but there’s nothing underneath it. I don’t want to be bothered with stuff where there’s nothing underneath.”

Back to the question at the pub. The question is not whether one can be Christian and write fantasy fiction that includes witches. The question is what is the underlying truth and meaning that brings cohesiveness, authenticity and meaning to the work.

Lewis would have agreed with L’Engle, who said in “Walking on Water,” her classic book on faith and art, that “to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life. … It is what makes me respond to the death of an apple tree, the birth of a puppy, northern lights shaking the sky, by writing stories.”

(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)

KRE/RB END STAUB

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