There is a lot of talk going around about using these films for Christians to share their faith. While I love the zeal behind this idea, in a way it somewhat cheapens what Lewis was trying to do when he wrote the books.

Lewis scholars have continually pointed out that he did not set out to write a Christian allegory. He began writing a children’s story that captured his own imagination and wonder, and then much of his Christian worldview bled through the words. He did not write it to explain Christian imagery or theology.

Lewis did not believe we needed more people writing Christian books as much as we needed more Christians writing good books. Bruce Edwards, a Lewis scholar and a professor of English at Bowling Green State University (my alma mater), says, “With Lewis, the story is the thing. You ought to read the lines first. Then you can read between them.”

Lewis wrote an article that appeared in the New York Times Book Review called “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said.” In it he denounced as “moonshine” the idea that he wrote the Narnian chronicles to proselytize the young. The lion Aslan, he wrote, bounded into his imagination from his experience as a Christian, coming to him naturally as should all good writing.

What was his motivation? He writes:

“I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past certain inhibitions which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ?

“I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices, almost as if it were something medical.

“But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.”

It is best, I think, to let the story speak for itself, and then share how the story has captivated our own imaginations, how it has captured our own hearts, and how it has deepened our own faiths.