There are earnest people who recommend realistic reading for everyone because, they say, it prepares us for real life, and who would, if they could, forbid fairy-tales for children and romances for adults because they ‘give a false picture of life’—in other words, deceive their readers.

I trust that what has already been said about egoistic castle-building [i.e. the reader lives vicariously as the hero of the story] forearms us against this error. Those who wish to be deceived always demand in what they read at least a superficial or apparent realism of content. To be sure, the show of such realism which deceives the mere castle-builder would not deceive a literary reader. If he is to be deceived, a much subtler and closer resemblance to real life will be required. But without some degree of realism in content—a degree proportional to the reader’s intelligence—no deception will occur at all. No one can deceive you unless he makes you think he is telling the truth. The unblushingly romantic has far less power to deceive than the apparently realistic. Admitted fantasy is precisely the kind of literature which never deceives at all. Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science fiction; they can be deceived by the stories in the women’s magazines. None of us are deceived by the Odyssey, the Kalevala, Beowulf, or Malory. the real danger lurks in sober-faced novels where all appears to be very probable but all is in fact contrived to put across some social or ethical or religious or anti-religious ‘comment on life’. For some at least of such comments must be false. To be sure, no novel will deceive the best type of reader. He never mistakes art either for life or for philosophy. He can enter, while he reads, into each author’s point of view without either accepting or rejecting it, suspending when necessary his disbelief and (what is harder) his belief.

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism 67-8

The last part makes it clear that he does think some literature is dangerous; but it’s dangerous in ways different from how many people imagine.

What, I ask, were her first impressions of him? “Oh, I loved him. Loved him, of course I did. I was in the kitchen helping Mrs Moore with the hen food when I first met him. I turned round and knew this was something momentous. Jack was naturally very gregarious, he liked exchanging ideas. He enjoyed the pub, and walking.

“I had read the Screwtape Letters and, being a good little Catholic at that time, his famous book Christian Behaviour, but I didn’t know then that Jack Lewis was CS Lewis. I had no idea. Two weeks later I saw his books on the shelf, then I made the connection. I realised that this man I was staying with was my literary hero.

“I didn’t know where to put myself. I couldn’t look at him or speak to him for about a week because I knew from reading his books that he understood human nature horribly well and I just thought, ‘He will know all my faults, all my nasty little foibles’. I felt completely exposed. I got over it, of course.”

Curiously, C.S. Lewis wasn’t Freud’s only connection with the famous. Through C.S. Lewis she met J.R.R. Tolkien and Alexander Fleming, “about the time he was developing penicillin.” Her son married Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, and her husband is the grandson of Sigmund Freud.

When approached in 1954 about a possible animated film of The Chronicles of Narnia , C. S. Lewis replied, “I am sure you understand that Aslan is a divine figure, and anything remotely approaching the comic (above all anything in the Disney line) would be to me simple blasphemy.”

. . .

And what about the crucial figure of Aslan? Suffice it to say that neither the digitalized image nor the voice of Liam Neeson allows the character to veer toward the comic. Indeed, the awesome clarity of his redemptive role makes the efforts of Disney, working with a Christian marketing firm, to recruit evangelicals to see the film seem unnecessary. Lewis would probably have agreed with the prophet Isaiah: “And the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and the ears of them that hear shall hearken.”

Meanwhile, C.S. Lewis’s stepson and the movie’s actors don’t seem to see the “awesome clarity”:

Douglas Gresham, stepson of the late C.S. Lewis — the Oxford professor who authored the top-rated children’s book — called the religious emphasis “an American disease.”

“The Brits don’t give two figs about that aspect,” Mr. Gresham said in an interview from his home near Dublin.

. . .

Lead actress Tilda Swinton, who plays the White Witch, archenemy of the Christlike lion, Aslan, said of the film’s overtly Christian symbolism: “Faith is in the eye of the beholder.”

“You can make a religious allegory out of anything if that’s what you’re interested in,” she said.

Then again, Guardian reviewer Polly Toynbee finds enough religious imagery in the movie to make her puke:

[H]ere in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America – that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right. I once heard the famous preacher Norman Vincent Peel in New York expound a sermon that reassured his wealthy congregation that they were made rich by God because they deserved it. The godly will reap earthly reward because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be CS Lewis’s view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for no particular reason. Intellectually, the poor do not inherit Lewis’s earth.

Does any of this matter? Not really. Most children will never notice. But adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a sickbag handy for the most religiose scenes. The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw gives the film five stars and says, “There is no need for anyone to get into a PC huff about its Christian allegory.” Well, here’s my huff.

Lewis said he hoped the book would soften-up religious reflexes and “make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life”. Holiness drenches the Chronicles. When, in the book, the children first hear someone say, mysteriously, “Aslan is on the move”, he writes: “Now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it had enormous meaning …” So Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children’s minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy – but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism.

Children are supposed to fall in love with the hypnotic Aslan, though he is not a character: he is pure, raw, awesome power. He is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging and there is no other place yet to come. Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can. We need no holy guide books, only a very human moral compass. Everyone needs ghosts, spirits, marvels and poetic imaginings, but we can do well without an Aslan.

Any movie that elicits two-bit denunciations of Christianity must be doing something right.