Ellington

Mark this one on your calendars, folks, because it won't happen often: In the current controversy between Governor Jeb Bush and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, I'm with Bush.

The controversy: Florida public schools are sponsoring a program called Just Read, Florida!, where students from grades 3-12 read a book and then send in artwork, essays, and/or videos in hopes of winning a slew of nifty prizes. Pretty standard stuff for a children's literacy program.

The catch? The book is C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first book in The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of fantasy novels written by Lewis which were intended to double as Christian allegories. The prizes all have to do with the new Wardrobe movie, which is coming out next month. Enter Americans United, who argue that the decision to make Wardrobe the book du jour amounts to a government endorsement of religion.

Well, that probably was what Bush had in mind; knowing his track record on these things, I doubt his intentions are pure. But I read The Chronicles of Narnia as a kid, and I can tell you that near as I can remember there was no mention of Jesus, no mention of Satan, or anything of that nature. Yes, it's a Christian allegory. So is The Lord of the Rings (seriously: Lewis and Tolkien were drinking buddies and saw both series as belonging to the same genre).

And besides, there's no rule of any kind that religious literature can't be on assigned reading lists. If there were such a rule, literature classes would be incredibly dull; try to imagine a world without Milton's Paradise Lost, Dante's Inferno, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the poetry of Donne, and so forth. Try to imagine no classical literature of any kind, because all of the classics--the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Theogony, and so on--were religious in tone. Even in the twentieth century, imagine how much of T.S. Eliot's poetry we'd have to purge to free him of religious allegory.

I donate to Americans United, and I agree with about 90% of what it does--and I'll no doubt continue to do so on both counts, because they're right a lot more often than they're wrong. But this quote is just plain boneheaded:

Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told the Post that the state should not promote religion.

"This whole contest is totally inappropriate," Lynn told the newspaper, because of the religious theme of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. "This would be like asking children to watch the movie 'The Passion of the Christ' and to write an essay with the winner getting a trip to Rome."

No, Brother Lynn, this is absolutely nothing like asking children to watch The Passion of the Christ and offering them a trip to Rome. (Though I fail to see why doing this for, say, a film class would violate separation of church and state.) C.S. Lewis was a literature professor at Oxford. He understood what allegory is. He wasn't some manic street preacher handing out evangelical tracts.

I've seen this kind of ham-handed approach to literature before, but I usually see it from religious conservatives who are concerned about Harry Potter promoting witchcraft and that sort of thing. Art is not just a message; art is art. It is its actual content that matters, not what we believe its "message" to be. I think we need to be much more aggressive in the way we respond to the government when it endorses religion--when it puts the Ten Commandments in publicly-owned buildings, when it puts "In God We Trust" on the coins and "one nation under God" in the Pledge, and so on. If this were Left Behind, then I would grudgingly agree that something should be done. But we do not need to make the Supreme Court the interpreter of allegories, determining whether individual works of art have adequately subtle religious symbolism. That's not healthy.

Previous Comments

ID

103669

Comment

The Supreme Court can't define obscenity. I don't want them (even with the new court) to try their hand at allegory.

Author

Ironghost

Date

2005-11-26T21:08:31-06:00

ID

103670

Comment

Amen, brother. Though I'd replace "even" with "especially"... And a non sequitur: C.S. Lewis would have absolutely loved Harry Potter. Cheers, TH

Author

Tom Head

Date

2005-11-27T00:38:30-06:00

ID

103671

Comment

I thought it was Tolkein that converted Lewis.

Author

Ironghost

Date

2005-11-27T14:13:23-06:00

ID

103672

Comment

He definitely had a hand in it, though my vague recollection is that Charles Williams (a quasi-Gnostic religious novelist who also hung out with Lewis and Tolkien at the Bird & Baby) was the major instigator. Accounts seem to vary, and because Lewis' conversion took place in a very Anglican way (it wasn't really very sudden--remember the "hound of heaven" metaphor and his anecdote about being a theist and having to choose between Christianity and Hinduism), and he and the folks who converted him were all hanging out at the bar together on a regular basis, this might be an unanswerable question. But Tolkien was certainly formative in Lewis' religious life, and in fact his influence on the Ulster ex-Protestant was so profound that, during his final months, Lewis almost converted to Tolkien's faith of Roman Catholicism. Tolkien was an amazing figure, BTW. I once began to compile an anthology of his interviews for the UPMS Conversations series, but we were unable to obtain permission to reprint enough articles to make an anthology (Tolkien hated interviews, so we had a tiny pool to draw from to begin with). We went with Sagan as a plan B. One of my favorite quotes from Tolkien: "Please don't be nervous about asking me to repeat what I've said, because my friends tell me that I talk in shorthand and then smudge it." Both would have been pretty good guys to know. I haven't had a theology that Lewis would have recognized as Christian since he was 14, but I have always had the sense that we would have been dear friends. My dream one day is to be a mix of C.S. Lewis and Alan Watts--to bring Lewis' kindness, honesty, and humor into whatever I do as a religion/spirituality writer, no matter how far to the left I might swing. Cheers, TH

Author

Tom Head

Date

2005-11-27T18:10:26-06:00

ID

103673

Comment

"I haven't had a theology that Lewis would have recognized as Christian since he was 14..." This may in fact be true, but I mean to say I haven't had a theology that Lewis would have recognized as Christian since I was 14... Cheers, TH

Author

Tom Head

Date

2005-11-27T18:11:50-06:00

ID

103674

Comment

I recall those days. :D They had quite a group that hung out together.

Author

Ironghost

Date

2005-11-27T21:17:40-06:00

ID

103675

Comment

Wow, I find myself agreeing with you agreeing with Jeb Bush - a first for me too. I also agree with your comment that CS Lewis would have loved Harry Potter. JK Rowling has said that she intended it to be a Christian allegory as well...interesting that it's some Christians who object to it the most!

Author

Christine

Date

2005-11-28T12:35:58-06:00

ID

103676

Comment

Another surprising case where I disagree with Americans United: http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/01/11/evolution.debate.calif.ap/index.html Excerpt: Frazier Mountain High in Lebec violated the separation of church and state while attempting to legitimize the theory of "intelligent design" by introducing it as a philosophy class, according to the federal lawsuit filed by parents of 13 students. The teacher is also a minister's wife. "The course was designed to advance religious theories on the origins of life, including creationism and its offshoot, 'intelligent design,"' the lawsuit said. "Because the teacher has no scientific training, students are not provided with any critical analysis of this presentation." The suit was filed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which successfully blocked Dover, Pa., schools last month from using science courses to advance the theory that living things are so complex they must have been designed by a higher being. Design (including arguments put forth by the ID movement) is a very traditional, and entirely appropriate, topic for an elective philosophy class. Not appropriate for biology, because it isn't science, but entirely appropriate for philosophy. Cheers, TH

Author

Tom Head

Date

2006-01-12T02:40:50-06:00

ID

103677

Comment

The Truth about Allegory in The Lord of the Rings: If you want to see The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) as an allegory, go ahead - but you'd be doing so against the expressed intentions (or non-intentions, as it may be) of the author; Tolkien, in fact, disliked allegory entirely and wrote about LOTR: “It is not 'about' anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular, or topical, moral, religious,or political” (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p 220). If you read H. Carpenter's wonderful biography of Tolkien, you find out that allegory was actually a contentious issue between Tolkien and Lewis, to the point where Tolkien was actually put off by the overtly allegorical representation in The Chronicles of Narnia. Lewiss, for his part, was a huge fan of The Lord of the Rings. Just be careful how much overt symbolism you read into it… Anthony G.

Author

Anthony G.

Date

2006-08-02T20:02:05-06:00