The War for Narnia Continues
"Charles Colson, Andrew Greeley, Frederica Mathewes-Green, and Lauren Winner join the battle—and Doug Gresham comes out to reply."
Ted Olsen | posted 6/01/2001 12:00AM
"If our words are ambiguous our meaning will escape [the reader]," wrote C.S. Lewis. "I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right, the readers will most certainly go into it." Pity that HarperSanFrancisco exec Steve Hanselman didn't take the advice when writing his ill-fated memo about Carol Hatcher's documentary, or that HarperCollins didn't consider it when writing its statement about its plans for Lewis-oriented material (which didn't mention a word about the new Narnia books or answer any questions about downplaying Lewis's Christianity). As a result of such unclear statements, and a gag order on HarperCollins employees, confusion about what's happening to Lewis's works is running rampant throughout the media. New news stories are hard to come by, but the commentators are out in force.
Still, as cloudy as the statements by Hanselman and HarperCollins are, one thing is clear: "The works of C.S. Lewis will continue to be published by HarperCollins and Zondervan as written by the author, with no alteration." That has been publicized elsewhere, but it didn't stop novelist, sociologist, and priest Andrew Greeley from beginning his commentary, "Plans are afoot to purge Christian content from the seven Narnia stories." The rest of his commentary isn't really worth noting, since it all proceeds from the same false premise. "Harper intends to censor out of C.S. Lewis's masterpiece that which is most essential to it—its Christian imagery—because that imagery would be offensive to mostly imaginary secularists," he writes. "Such a plan is not only vile, it is also stupid." Such a plan would be vile if it were true, but it's not HarperCollins that comes off sounding stupid after this column.
Greeley's column, published in the Chicago Sun-Times, MSNBC, and presumably elsewhere, was bad enough to coax Douglas Gresham, one of Lewis's stepsons, from out of his self-imposed silence on the matter ("This is to be my first and last post on this matter," he wrote earlier). "This is an evil lie," he tells the readers of the MereLewis e-mail list (which he takes pains to say he's not reading at the moment). "There are no such plans and there never have been any such plans." Indeed.
Charles Colson, a Christianity Todaycolumnist and ubiquitous pundit, also gets tripped up by such "evil lies" in his commentary on the subject, expanding on The New York Times' assertion that HarperCollins "want[s] to de-Christianize the stories." "If HarperCollins and the Lewis Company get their way," he asserts, "millions more young readers may read Lewis, but it won't do them any good. They'll not only miss out on the true meaning of the stories, they won't … really be experiencing Lewis at all." Wrong again. HarperChildrens isn't just publishing Lewis's original Narnia books, it is promoting them like crazy. Readers will be able to "experience Lewis" all they want. Granted, it doesn't seem like HarperCollins is going to want to bundle Kathryn Lindskoog's allegory guide, The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land, with Lewis's originals, but is that really what Colson wants? He's actually calling for a boycott of HarperCollins, but commends Zondervan (owned by HarperCollins, in turn owned by Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp) for its plans "to continue publishing the Narnia books in their original form and [having] nothing to do with any version that attempts to remove the Christian imagery." That's exactly what HarperCollins clarifying statement says!
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