InsaneJournal

The thing about white, male, academics is that they often say stuff that seems perfectly logical to them, and they get confused when nobody else sees it as an issue of purely logical fact. I see pastors do it all the time, standing up there saying stuff that makes their female or minority parishioners upset and not understanding why. “But that’s what it says, any logically thinking person should understand that it doesn’t mean I agreebut I mean to say I either do agree or am not prepared to challenge it in any serious way.”

That being said, give the man a break.

You’re missing the entire point. This isn’t a sex/gender manifesto, or a racial manifesto. This book series is about 1)children coming of age, and 2) religion. You can read it as a simple coming of age story set in a fantasy world, but sooner or later you’ll have to understand the theology behind it or you’ll end up confused or even angry, by what you think is going on. And you’ll have to spend a lot of time manufacturing other theories to explain stuff.

On the subject of Agendas, There's this comment on Twilight

"Breaking Dawn does seem to be promoting a fundamentally conservative ideology. But then so does The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and they will pry that book from my cold, dead, godless fingers"

The thing is, LWW is not “fundamentally conservative”! I’m not saying Lewis was a liberal (even if I will continue to insist that anyone who thinks he's too conservative doesn't know from conservative). What I’m saying is, those books, the Narnia books, are just mainstream Christian thinking. There is a spectrum and merely espousing traditional, mainstream Christian beliefs does not make a story “fundamentally conservative”. “Jesus loves you and died for you” is not a fundies-only belief. Or even a conservatives-only belief. It’s the basic premise of the entire faith. The most fringe liberal Christians I’ve met still agree with that, otherwise they would not be Christians at all. So unless you actually believe that the basic premise of Christianity is always conservative, LWW is not. For pity’s sake, it’s one of the only book series that Christians all across the board agree on and enjoy. I don’t know where people are getting the idea that Narnia is a fundamentalist thing, but stop it.

I wanted to talk about agendas because I did something strange recently. I decided to deliberately write a story with an agenda. And then I had a “what was a I thinking?” moment because I realized that once you declare yourself that way, you will be judged on that even in areas that have nothing to do with it.

Let’s compare Stephenie Meyer and JK Rowling. Now, Rowling is a Christian and intended for Harry Potter to be a sort of Jesus figure. But she didn’t tell anyone this until the end of the series (she may have hinted, but never came right out and said it). So her books became a worldwide phenomenon, for the most part, among people who would never have gone near it, or at least, would have judged it differently, if they’d known that from the start. But she lost the majority of her potential Christian audience by not declaring that, and choosing to use imagery that superficially resembles things that certain types of Christians are uncomfortable with. The best Christianity influenced fantasy series to come along in our generation may have lost the generation of Christians they could have inspired because the author was afraid to tell people the books were Christianity influenced in case she lost her secular audience. Secular readers didn't notice the themes, and Christian fans of the series were/are fans precisely because they didn't need it explained to them. The people who needed to read it never did.

Stephenie Meyer has admitted from the beginning that she is a devout Mormon, and that has caused reviewers to blame her Mormonism for the poor quality of her books. But actually, Twilight has almost no real religious, political or philosophical message at all- the books really are that horribly, disappointingly shallow. They’re sexist and contain an abusive dynamic because she’s trying to imitate old school cheesy romance novels of the “you say no but you really mean yes” kind, not because of some conservative agenda. While I think her beliefs may have limited where she could take the stories (Bella and Edward can’t have sex until they’re married) and the whole thing about Bella becoming a vampire could be seen as symbolic of someone converting to their spouse's rather weird and strict faith, I don’t see any evidence of her beliefs being the point of the story. Twilight sucks because she’s a terrible writer. That's it. If no one knew she was Mormon, people would judge the stories on their own lack of merits rather than on the fact that the author is a member of a religion they don't understand. Being a Mormon has very little to do with that, or Orson Scott Card would also write terrible books. I mean, his politics are kinda scary but no one’s ever accused him of lacking writing talent. But I bet people's perception of his books change once they do know what religion he's a member of.

So, how much do you let on about what you really believe when you're writing?

Back on the subject of Narnia because you know I can’t go two minutes these days without writing achingly long entries about Narnia…

It strikes me as odd that Lewis wrote these books to explain his faith by putting it in settings not normally used, so people could see things from new angles and understand it better, and yet, this only seems to work on people who were already Christians (or who possess such significant knowledge of the faith that the only thing missing is actual belief). I don’t mean in the “Left Behind” sense where the only way the books make sense at all is if you’re drinking a specific kind of Kool Aide and your desire to see your ideologies represented in fiction outweighs your desire for quality. But you do have to be familiar with at least the basics of Christian theology and traditions to truly grasp the extent of what Narnia is really about…the explanation only works if you didn’t need that much explained.

It also only works if you are ready and willing to accept the explanation, even if you’re not ready to believe in it. I have yet to meet a non Christian who finishes the series and goes “Oh, I get it now”. If anything, they tend to get mad when they find out they’ve been reading a Christian allegory all along. As if he concealed this from them in order to trick them into converting, or like he pretended to be cool and then ultimately betrayed them.

So basically, these books were supposed to explain Christianity but they don’t do such a great job of explaining it to outsiders. Insiders end up having to be apologists for an apologist. There’s a whole area of academia and publishing dedicated to explaining C.S Lewis to people.

Already understanding how Christianity works (or in some cases, how religion works, period) answers many questions non Christian (or in some cases, non religious) readers have. But they don’t know that because they’re not part of it, so they just get upset at what they see as the author refusing to address certain things, moments they misinterpret because they either don’t know our world’s version of the mythology or they aren’t familiar enough with it to have their mind make the connection. I mean, it took me years to realize why Susan and Lucy had to be the ones who witnessed Aslan’s death and resurrection and I did not even have the excuse of not being familiar with the Easter story. Good grief, I once played Mary Magdalene in an Easter play and it still didn't click for me until 2006. In fact, most of it, aside from “LWW=Easter Story” and “Jill’s signs from Aslan=importance of listening to God” and “LB=Revelation”, it took me a long time to figure out.

But what’s most important to understanding the books is understanding belief. Why and how, people can believe. You don’t have to believe but you have to be able to fathom belief- how it works, why it works, and what it demands of you. Otherwise, forget it. You’ll be left at the end feeling angry and betrayed because it turned out this was all about belief, all along. Lewis left a lot of room for different *types* of belief but belief is paramount in the stories.