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Sadly, Mathewes-Green, like the other three columnists and almost everyone else who's written on this subject, has neglected one more thing we know about HarperCollins's plans for Lewis. The company—both through HarperSanFrancisco and Zondervan—is also republishing and promoting the writer's nonfiction, explicitly Christian works. Any criticism of what the company might do in the future must be tempered with praise for that it has done. Does anyone—except for perhaps Carol Hatcher—really have a complaint about how HarperCollins has treated Lewis's works thus far?

It is also worth remembering that Lewis himself, according to biographer George Sayer, did not intend for The Chronicles of Narnia to be his most evangelistic books. He saw them as pre-evangelistic.

"The author almost certainly did not want his readers to notice the resemblance of the Narnian theology to the Christian story," Sayer writes in Jack. "His idea, as he once explained to me, was to make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life. He hoped that they would be vaguely reminded of the somewhat similar stories that they had read and enjoyed years before. 'I am aiming at a sort of pre-baptism of the child's imagination.'"

Thus it would be indeed lamentable for any new Narnia books to leave behind Christian sensitivities. (It's lamentable for any new Narnia books to be commissioned at all, in Weblog's opinion.) But Christians upset about making "no attempt will be made to correlate the stories to Christian imagery/theology" in the marketing of Narnia must ask if that's really what Lewis intended in the first place.

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June (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45