'Narnia' naysayers
LAST WEEK'S long-anticipated opening of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," the first film adaptation of C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia," has brought a torrent of anti-Lewis commentary from the left. Narnia is sexist (threatened by evil witches who are always women), racist and religiously intolerant (its enemies are swarthy, turban-wearing idol worshipers) and offensively Christian (the magical land is ruled by a Christ-like lion deity named Aslan).
These criticisms seem nonsensical and deeply unfair. Lewis, an Oxford don whose theological writing for adults made him one of the 20th century's great Christian apologists, has always struck me as a nonsecular humanist. He has long been a hero of the right -- thus the renewed antipathy, in the wake of the movie, from the left.
I was surprised to discover recently, though, that Narnia also has enemies on the right -- and their complaints are even wackier than those from the left. Recently, I was wondering what the religious fanatics who dislike the "evil" magic in the Harry Potter books think of Lewis, considering that Narnia also features magic, even though it is clearly Christian. So a reader pointed me to an astonishing website run by a Tennessee piano tuner named Steve Van Natten and his daughter, Mary.
Unlike typical anti-Harry Potter fundamentalists, who often haven't even read the books that so infuriate them, the Van Nattens have studied Lewis very, very closely, and their site is loaded with citations and footnotes. They think, among other things, that Lewis was actually a pagan sun god worshipper and occultist, not a Christian, although they suspect that the famous Anglican was also a secret Catholic, which in their view is just as bad as being a pagan. I've never been able to understand that whole anti-Catholic thing -- nor how you swear allegiance to the sun as well as to Rome.
But I did learn an interesting new term meandering around Van Natten-land: "King James Only-ist." This is a person who thinks anyone who reads a version of the Bible other than the King James one is a heretic headed straight for hell. The Van Nattens, apparently, are King James Only-ists. They think people such as Pat Robertson are dangerously progressive.
And the Van Nattens are, I'm sorry to say, very far from alone in their opinions. Reportedly, there are more than 500 websites devoted to attacking Lewis for exposing children to dangerous "occult" ideas through Narnia, as well as for being too accepting of other religions.
