It is hard to find a group today more puritanical than the anti-Christian, anti-Narnia brigade. They have unleashed an entirely disproportionate assault on the film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which opened in Melbourne at the weekend.
Britain’s Observer newspaper called it “holy war”, while Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee wrote that “adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a sickbag handy”. Of the idea of Christ dying to save sinners, she sneers like a petulant adolescent, “did we ask him to?”
Such critics are appalled that the film may smuggle in some form of subliminal Christian proselytising of unwary children.
First, that’s very unlikely. Second, even if it were true, so what? It’s a practice hallowed throughout the history of film that moral messages seethe below the surface. And third, some of the fuss rests on a long-standing secular prejudice that religion presents a coloured (and egregious) worldview, whereas their own is neutral, value-free and corresponds to reality.
It is not surprising that Andrew Adamson’s long and lovely adaption of C. S. Lewis’ children’s tale has evoked such wrath. In fidelity to the book, he does not shy away from the allegorical aspects (though he doesn’t highlight them either). More offensive to the cultural guardians, though, is that the film was backed by a fundamentalist Christian (Philip Anschutz of Walden Media) and that it was heavily promoted, following Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, to organized Christianity in the United States.
And the film certainly has specific Christian allusions, not least the way the “passion” of Aslan on the stone table mirrors that of Christ, with brutality, humiliation and death. Afterwards Aslan quotes Christ on the cross: “It is finished.”
However, you have to understand something of Christianity already to get the allusions. Otherwise these are buried among a plethora of influences, which Age reviewer Philippa Hawker yesterday identified as E. E. Nesbit, Enid Blyton, The Wind in the Willows, Greek and Norse mythology, Hans Christian Andersen and schoolboy chivalry.
