The Last Battle pt 6


It’s do or die, hey, I’ve died twice…

Here’s the thing. It’s a thing evangelicals and people whose major experiences with Christianity have mostly been with evangelicals really seem to have a lot of trouble grasping.

C.S Lewis was not an evangelical. No, really. Wacky, huh? Even having a “saved” experience does not make you an evangelical. Evangelicalism is a culture, a theology and often an inter-church political stance as well-and that doesn’t mean in the liberal/conservative sense- because I am far more liberal than C.S Lewis and yet I am still an evangelical and he still was not.

Yes, I know evangelicals really, really love him. But the truth is, what they think is in these stories is not necessarily what he actually meant for them to see (in a few instances, he is actually criticizing and/or making fun of them). They like him for a few reasons. First, because they honestly think he’s agreeing with everything they believe and many have only read Narnia. Second, because they’ve always had such a narrow list of things they’re allowed to enjoy (especially prior to the seventies when the vast alternative world of Christian pop culture as we know it today didn’t exist) so they tend to be overenthusiastic about the things they’re allowed. And third, because these are great books and even people who aren’t Christians tend to agree.

TLB is probably one of the most controversial when it comes to evangelical/non evangelical belief debates. And with the exception of Genesis, no where is the evangelical/non evangelical line drawn more explicitly than Revelation (both these issues are also cultural ones).

Were they, or were they not, Raptured? I’m going to say no.

This isn’t a Rapture. It’s more like a Reverse Rapture. They’re ripped out of their own world, where things have finally started to calm down and maybe the world won’t end after all, and they’re dropped into a world where things are worse than ever. Where a real Apocalypse is under way, and in this other world, they don’t get miraculously rescued in time. That’s not the peaceful, oblivious rest people think of when they think of being “Raptured”. Most people look on The Rapture as a free pass out of The Tribulation for True Christians and never wonder where the Raptured people actually go. In TLB, they haven’t been pulled out of the war, they’ve been drafted.

The characters haven’t really been Raptured. Because they’re dead. And not just in the “they are no longer on this earth” sense, they were in a train wreck. Edmund and Peter got hit full on by a freaking train. Edmund can even describe what it felt like to die. The Rapture is something evangelicals made up to avoid dealing with the concept of death, “you don’t have to worry so much about the End Times, if you’re a True Christian, you won’t be there for them. You won’t die and it won’t hurt, you’ll just disappear.” Anglicans (the author’s denomination) do not embrace this concept much-at all, really, as far as I know. It’s basically an evangelical thing, and especially a North American evangelical thing. Even to Methodists and Nazarenes, who aren’t supposed to believe in Raptures either-they always forget. Americans have this thing about avoiding death and aging (and guilt, and consequences, which is why American evangelicals traditionally don’t do Lent). You have to be perfect and you have to be perfect *forever*, this Rapture thing is just another way of not dealing. “I’m not gonna die, Jesus will come back and take me away with no pain or suffering, and let’s hope it happens before I start getting wrinkles.” It also makes it easier to hope that other people die horrific deaths, because well, you have to break a few eggs to…

There is a journal I stalk, because the owner comes from a similar religious background to mine. She posted once, about having come home to find no one home, unexpectedly and she panicked for a brief moment because they might have been Raptured. This was used as an example of what her upbringing had done to her. I bookmarked that entry because there are just some things you can only understand if you grow up conservative evangelical. And that is one of them. Even if Nazarenes aren’t supposed to embrace the Rapture concept, far too many still do and therefore, you can’t escape attempts at indoctrination into this particular belief. I don’t think C.S Lewis would have ever come home to find his family not there and think for panicked second “OMG the Rapture came and I got left behind!” (especially not, I’m assuming, with accompanying girly hand flailing). Just…try to imagine that your religious beliefs include the fear that someday, you don’t know when, every Christian you know will disappear at once, no matter where they were or what they were doing.

Not believing in The Rapture and yet still living in a culture with an obsession with the End Times is just as bad though. Because now, you’ve got these incredibly scary stories and yet no comfort of believing that you’re going to be long gone before it starts.


“It’ll be rum for Peter and the others if they saw me waving out of the window and then when the train comes in we’re nowhere to be found! Or if they found two-I mean, if we’re dead over there in England.”

“Ugh!” said Jill. “What a horrid idea.”

“It wouldn’t be horrid for us,”said Eustace. “We shouldn’t be there.”

Jill and Eustace speculated on what would happen if they died in Narnia, and then on what would happen if their train reached the station and they weren’t on it, but that was before they understood that there really was a train crash. And really, it was just a last minute hope that they might make it through this alive.

Of course he doesn’t say they’re dead. He doesn’t want to upset the children too much (HAH, that backfired). But it’s pretty clear that they’re dead. He chose a train accident for a reason. If he wanted them to just disappear, they would have just disappeared.