Lewis himself explicitly disavowed universalism, but inclusivism, like Limbo, invites the kind of technical scrutiny that can itself lead to skepticism. Presumably someone who lives and dies in a place where Christianity is entirely unknown would be covered by this dispensation, but what about someone who heard a little bit about it, or who once came across a Bible at some point, but who didn’t know any other Christians and never bothered to investigate further? What about someone whose only exposure to Christianity came from people who misrepresented it? What about someone who believed that Jesus Christ was the son of God, but chose to belong to some irregular faith instead of one of the approved churches — a Catholic, say, or a Greek Orthodox communicant? What about someone who believes but refuses to belong to any church at all, and dies unbaptized?
Many Christian churches seem to be torn between their own claims for legitimacy as the one true way and Christianity’s general protestations of love for all mankind. These are complicated theological questions. Individual congregants, however, often don’t make subtle distinctions between concepts like universalism and inclusivism. The people in Tiffany’s church leaned toward exclusion, and this spelled trouble once her Christian education progressed beyond felt-board fairy tales and colored cards.
“If you had such a positive experience with Jesus,” I asked, “how did you wind up leaving the Church?”
“We got to the part where they explain that you have to be practicing Christianity in this particular way or you’re going to hell,” she replied. Tiffany had a Catholic friend. Was she going to hell? Yes. She liked to read her father’s copies of National Geographic, full of photographs of people who’d never heard of Jesus. Were they going to hell, too? Yes. “Someone in the fundamentalist camp, my mom or somebody at the church, was coming down on the side of, well, tough. If you worship some idol, some false god, you are going to hell. And one of the first things that I thought of was the people who live in Narnia. They couldn’t be going to hell. They’re in Narnia. And they have Aslan. And it would be evil for them to not believe in Aslan.”
“This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia,” Aslan said, “that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.” But the inversion of Aslan’s statement works, too: knowing him there also enables us to see where he isn’t in this world. Tiffany wasn’t seeing the spirit of Aslan in her church. “That was how I started understanding the idea of other cultures and other religions,” she said. “Because [Narnia] was so real to me. And possibly really real. I believed [Narnians] existed somewhere out there. And if my religion was going to say that all of those guys are doomed, then I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”
Evangelicals have tried to make a patron saint out of Lewis, but the fit is an uneasy one. Fundamentalism is literalism, and Lewis was a profoundly metaphorical novelist. In real-world conversation, and in his theological writings, even he admitted that he could sometimes be dogmatic. Yet dogmatism was not his only, or even his primary trait. “The imaginative man in me,” he wrote in 1954, not long after finishing the Chronicles, “is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic than either the religious writer or the critic.” The fact that Lewis thought he could retell the story of Jesus with a lion god, talking animals, and semihuman creatures from classical myths set in an imaginary country where the Bible doesn’t exist — all this militates against strict interpretation. If the Bible is word-for-word true, as fundamentalists insist, instead of a truth conveyed via poetry and legend, as more liberal-minded Christians view it, then it can’t be retold in any other way without being corrupted, lessened, defiled.
Introduce metaphor, symbol, and all the other indirect, eloquent tools of art, and you introduce uncertainty, wiggle room, differences of interpretation. Fundamentalism is like an allergic response to a world where what God really said and meant can be argued this way and that, and where the rules aren’t absolutely clear. Tiffany had no interest in making that sort of retreat from the world, and it was inevitable that she’d fall away from her church eventually. But what precipitated that departure was the power — and, depending on your point of view, the treachery — of Lewis’s art. Novels that were intended to bolster her faith wound up undercutting it. This happened partly because of a mistake — that is, Tiffany’s own childish literalism, which insisted on seeing the Narnians’ belief in Aslan as different from her fellow congregants’ belief in Jesus. Yet Tiffany was also correct, because the Christianity that Lewis seemed to espouse (and he is by no means consistent, even within the Chronicles) told her that what matters is the virtue of someone’s thoughts and actions, not the god he or she professes to serve.
I was tempted to see Tiffany’s story as a lot like my own; we both objected to the exclusiveness of our churches, and we both eventually left them. But unlike me, Tiffany has always had an affinity for mysticism and an intimate relationship with the spiritual; she is a believer by constitution, even if what she believes in has changed over the years. Her quarrel with her childhood religion was considered and principled (amazingly so, given her youth); mine was reflexive, like a kid thrashing her way out of an itchy sweater. Though we both detected the hypocrisy in churches that professed love on the one hand and on the other responded to any infraction with threats of eternal torment, for Tiffany this led to a lot of painful soul-searching. She would spend her teenage years “bopping in and out of Christianity and hating Christianity and then giving it another chance.” For me, the Church’s flaws just offered more reasons to get out of something I never really wanted to be part of in the first place.
Perhaps that’s why Tiffany — even in her twenties, when she’d come to see the religious symbolism in the Chronicles as “jarringly” obvious — never rejected them as vehemently as I did. Like Pam, she saw deeper, and she could detect the better side of Christian belief, the one that I refused to acknowledge in my determination to detach myself from my church. “I always thought of Narnia as being this benign thing,” Tiffany told me after she’d heard my story. “I don’t recall ever feeling that sense of betrayal. It was more like, ‘Oh, well, thanks for hooking me up with this kind, sweet metaphor for Christianity. Wouldn’t it be great if all Christians were like this?’”
Chapter Ten
Required Reading
C.S. Lewis lost his own faith sometime during what he calls, in Surprised by Joy, the “dark ages” of boyhood, between childhood and adolescence, when all seemed “greedy, cruel, noisy and prosaic.” He lists several causes. First, he had somehow gotten hung up on the idea that he had to “really think” about every prayer he said, which made praying a daily ordeal he became increasingly eager to jettison. Then there was what he describes as his “deeply ingrained pessimism.” This attitude was not, Lewis insists, a result of his mother’s early death, but rather a by-product of his thwarted and frustrating relationship to the physical world. He was hopelessly clumsy and had come to expect every object “to do what you did not want it to do.” He was no good at the sports that matter so much at school. And even though he’d learned to regard his father’s financial panics as overblown, the often gloomy mood at home completed the picture of a world too miserable and misbegotten to be the work of any respectable god.
At school, a kindly matron introduced him to “Occultism,” a hodgepodge of esoteric beliefs comprising Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, and Spiritualism — precursors to today’s New Age movement — then all the rage in England and Ireland. There was also a dandified, theater-loving young teacher, worshipped by Lewis and his schoolmates, who contributed to his atheism in some unspecified way; perhaps he made piety seem uncool. Above all, Lewis studied the classics; his schoolwork consisted predominantly of reading and translating Greek and Latin texts. This curriculum, typical for boys of the time, introduced him to the pagan religions of the ancients. However much his teachers revered the classical authors, they made it clear that they regarded Greek and Latin religious beliefs as a “farrago of nonsense.” Lewis was not the first nor would he be the last young person to find this scorn disconcerting; no one bothered to satisfactorily explain to him why his own religion should be exempt from the same scrutiny.