When Aslan Had My Mother’s Voice: Christianity, Gatekeeping, and Greta Gerwig’s Narnia
Just over two weeks ago, we got our first glimpse of Greta Gerwig’s Narnia with the first trailer for The Magician’s Nephew. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Christian YouTube quickly became saturated with angry reactions and hot takes trying to catastrophize the new Netflix Narnia movie. The blowback had already started back in September, of course, in response to images of an Aslan whose look was partly inspired by David Bowie, and the news that Gerwig had cast Meryl Streep as the voice of Aslan. And now there is a Change.org petition signed by “thousands of Narnia fans” demanding to have Gerwig removed as director for the film.
Let’s all take a breath. I understand that people feel protective over a story and characters that they love. But Greta Gerwig loves it too. Gerwig’s approach to Narnia is based in her deep research into Lewis and his world, her lifelong devotion to the books—which would rival any fans’—and her creative considerations in adapting source material that she clearly respects and admires. She has the full support of the Lewis family, who have praised her “sincere passion” for the series. Narnia fans have wonderful movies and a BBC adaptation of Narnia. She’s not replacing any one vision with her own—rather, she’s adding her movie to the bounty, the feast of the imagination already spread out before us, and which only continues to grow.
For my part, I thought the trailer was magnificent and I’m glad we’re going to see Narnia’s creation as well as the development of Jadis, the White Witch. Led Zeppelin felt like a perfect choice (a woman is trying to buy her way into heaven, into power—sounds like Jadis to me). I’ve seen the trailer again and again. Each time, it stirs my heart.
I’m a Christian too. I grew up with Narnia too. Aslan is a fantasy character who represents an unknowable God in the form of a lion, with a voice described as being beyond human, a voice of power. This is Gerwig’s vision of Aslan, and I think Meryl Streep is perfect for the role, even if her voice never reaches some impossible ultra-masculine ideal some people hold for men and gods and lions.
Critics of Gerwig’s casting of Streep forget that many of us heard tales of Narnia first in our mother’s voice—at least, those of us who were lucky enough to have Narnia read to us by our moms. A fine voice. A wonderful voice. This powerful, unknowable god first spoke to us in a loving voice which guided and comforted us, even when we might be afraid.
For me, Aslan has always had my mother’s voice.
If I think back to a time before my dad was a Southern Baptist minister, long before our lives were so completely controlled by what the Bible said or what the Church thought was right, back when my brothers and sister and I were still young enough to have stories read to us, I go back to a time of portals.
Rich, magical, fantastical portals would open in our house. Portals between our bedrooms and other worlds. Between what was and what could be.
We all clambered into the hallway between our rooms, wrapped in blankets and snuggled up around my mom as she read, listening to the sound of the voice we seemed to ignore all morning and afternoon—but now, this moment was sacred. We hung on every word.
We leaned against her body as she read, curling our necks to see the words or pictures on the page sometimes. Ours was a nighttime lit by portals that my mom would open for us, starting with fairy tales of adventuring children who encountered goblins, elves, fairies, even bears, and (most) everyone came out at the end happier. At least, I think, we did.
Moving on from fairy tales, my mother took up the seven volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. If you’re of an age, and if you grew up in an evangelical Christian family, you know that these books in the ’70s and ’80s were, much like today, sanctioned by the Church above all other books for kids, almost adjacent to the Bible in their importance for young minds. It’s what churchgoing moms and dads referred to when they talked about fantasy at all, or if they talked about good books for kids: Narnia. Sort of like when Christians talked of contemporary pop music in the ’80s, their frame of reference ended at Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith. You know, Decisions Had Been Made. Narnia was deemed safe for a Christian Kid Audience with the expectation that the books would affirm and reinforce the core messages of the Bible in young readers. At least that’s what we were told.
Doctrine wasn’t what I remember from the stories. We were saturated with Jesus and Christian doctrine several days a week, so those aspects seemed dull or unremarkable compared to all the new things, the wonders that Lewis wove into Narnia: Talking beasts! Magic is real! Many Worlds exist beyond ours! Other mythologies are true! Greek gods are real! These other gods stand and speak to the “Jesus” figure in the books, the books the Church encouraged us to read. So many satyrs and minotaurs slipped into my life through those pages! When my mom read those books to us, we were able to imagine ourselves in Narnia. Every kid got to go to Narnia. If Edmund can get in, if Eustace can get in, by golly, there’s room for all of us.
Narnia was a place for everyone because it already contained multitudes, far beyond what you might expect or imagine.
I don’t know if my parents (or any “Christian” parent who read these books to their kids) knew what they were giving us in Narnia—but to my mind, Narnia has always been a wardrobe that takes us beyond Christianity and into a much larger world. It is not insular. It doesn’t simply reflect or rehash the Bible. It does not insist on doctrine, or point back to itself.
It points outward.
Lewis certainly included Christian concepts in his work, but he also buried them in some truly lush fantasy worldbuilding. It’s pure Turkish Delight for readers: Gimme more, White Witch Queen. He incorporated fairy tales, myths, Greek monsters and fabulous creatures, epic poetry, folklore and a belief in magic—everything he’d found in world literature, mythologies, and fairy tales that had fired his imagination long before he ever wrote the Narnia books.
He even said that he started Narnia with images, not Christian doctrine:
Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument, then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group I’d write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out ‘allegories’ to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way. It all began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.
—C.S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said” The New York Times (18 November 1956)
Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia have never been free of controversy since he first published them. There have always been outcries from Christians insisting that the books were too pagan. According to Catherine Seipp, writing for the L.A. Times in 2005, at that time, “Reportedly, there are more than 500 websites devoted to attacking Lewis for exposing children to dangerous ‘occult’ ideas through Narnia, as well as for being too accepting of other religions.” Others, of course, thought the books were too Christian.
Narnia has always straddled the line between heresy and devotion. There will always be people who seek to push one interpretation over all others, like the fans currently petitioning for the removal of Gerwig as director. Perhaps these fans are upset that this movie isn’t a marketing vehicle for their chosen religion like the Disney adaptations were. There is no faithful adaptation of Narnia in this political climate that won’t be boycotted by some Christians. And where have we heard that before?
In the early ‘70s and ‘80s, magic seemed like it was under threat of being outlawed… especially positive, fun, good magic in literature. This was a time when fantastical and supernatural themes were hugely popular in movies, and L’Engle and Cooper and Le Guin were redefining children’s and young adult fantasy as whimsical, dark, and wondrous. At the same time, a conservative backlash was rising: Dungeons & Dragons was seen as “evil,” and witchcraft and the Devil could be seen everywhere, from immorality in the streets and easy access to sex and drugs to the “dangerous music” on the radio. Growing up during those years, it seemed that churches and parents hoped to protect the imaginative minds of children by turning to Narnia.
But Narnia isn’t about shields and protective bubbles. The first book sends four war orphans from a protected haven in the country straight into a battle between the forces of good and evil. It’s about risk, but also about wonder and joy and possibility and fantasy, with a choir of mythological creatures singing right beside Aslan and other talking beasts. It’s a portal into a realm of creativity, challenging our perceptions and inviting readers to imagine something different than the mainstream version of Christianity they’d been given. Lewis was a believer, but his faith wasn’t an ivory tower or a sterile tomb, cut off from the rest of the world, far from the power of imagination and fantasy.
By allowing minotaurs, satyrs, and talking animals to coexist with God-figures and Jesus-surrogates, it was as if some endless banquet, a true feast of the imagination, had been lowered from heaven in a dream. “Take and eat. All of this is good,” Aslan told us.
The Bible is already brimming with fantasy tropes: a pillar of fire that walks beside refugees, a god that interacts with people, angels, a talking donkey, magicians, witches, demons, miracles, giants. Narnia just expanded those fantasy elements. But I remember thinking, “Wait a minute! We get fauns and Greek gods?” Were we allowed that? Until that point, I didn’t know that we could dare to dream so freely, to throw open the gates of imagination, but Aslan showed us that way.
After Narnia, I didn’t go directly back to the Bible for more. Nope. I went outward, to Greek and Roman mythology, to The Wind in the Willows, animal folk tales, Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, Edward Eager novels like Half Magic and Seven-Day Magic, Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time series, Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. The fantasy Lewis gave us opened up all of Fantasy for kids who’d grown up restricted to Bible stories and Scripture.
The Chronicles of Narniaset me free of dogma, in many ways. It gave me encouragement to expand my horizons, to sample new ideas and enjoy the wild abundance of fantasy that had been revealed. It allowed me to imagine life outside of the Bible, and it did it with the church’s blessing.
Narnia is a portal for kids raised in religious homes, a fantastical way out, or at least a way beyond the confining narratives of what was “acceptable” and “sanctioned” to read or experience. That’s why I’m looking forward to Greta Gerwig showing us what Narnia can be when it isn’t tied down on a big slab of stone, bound so tightly that it cannot move.
For Christian kids, retellings of Jesus’ story are everywhere. We already have various cinematic visions of Narnia books that dutifully reinforce Christian messages. We’ve been fully steeped in resurrection and sacrifice. We know that story. Lewis’ reinterpretation of religious ideas in a fantasy setting was an invitation to see both faith and fantasy literature as part of some great, joyful, playful narrative of existence. Put satyrs, talking beasts, and magic in a shiny, sanctioned Narnia-shaped package and it all got through the censors. Folklore got through the censors. Fairy tales got through the censors. All because they had Aslan by their side.
My parents, whether they meant to or not, helped to shape me into a person who loves fantasy and science fiction and mythology—and I’m sure part of this was because the groundwork for believing in God is the same groundwork for believing in magic and fantasy. We all want to believe. And my parents never completely fit into the strict rules of evangelicalism. Even as a Southern Baptist Minister, my dad loved Halloween and helped the church host a haunted house full of good old-fashioned monsters. He became Santa at Christmas. He bought me my first subscription to comic books (Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man) and we watched Star Trek together. I think Mom and Dad secretly wanted more in their enjoyment of life than what the church offered, or what their job descriptions would allow them to have.
My dad challenged the limits for Southern Baptist preachers. He fought racism in his country church, seeking out Black churches to swap Sundays with, so their churches and congregations could get to know each other. But he underestimated the deeply held, generations-thick racism in his own congregation. Eventually we had to leave that community behind.
In fact, I watched my family get hurt by the church over and over again, though my parents never lost their faith. They are not alone. Many people have been hurt by the exclusionary practices of modern evangelicalism. It doesn’t reflect the Jesus we read about.
Kindness and compassion are missing in many conservative denominations. Perhaps, as with Narnia, there’s a fundamental disconnect in how we view the IP of Christianity—I’ve watched as the loudest, most aggressive and regressive proponents of the current version of the church have reinterpreted Jesus and his teachings into something cold and punishing. And if that reinterpretation is how they now see Aslan, I want no part of a Narnia that looks like that.
Narnia (and the Christianity some say it claims to represent) should be allowed to become the inclusive place it was always intended to be, where people who had nothing could come and find love and hope, a place where all kids can stretch their imaginations and experience wonder. That portal can easily be opened again—through the eyes, perhaps, of a director like Gerwig.
Narnia is a big place. As kids, we were the directors of Narnia adventures; we told our own stories, creating fanfiction in the margins of the Chronicles. For me, it was a place where I could be tested and grow as a person while surrounded by compassion and love. Narnia, as an idea, has always been bigger than just the books and movies. On fanfiction.net, Narnia has over 12,888 stories, and more on other fanfiction sites. People have already begun opening new portals to Narnia and widening its borders. There has always been room for interpretation and play.
There’s a loving, baked-in religious and cultural pluralism at the very core of the Chronicles, infused into the very essence of Narnia. It was made to hold a lot of mythologies, a lot of beliefs. It was made for experimentation. Anyone reducing Narnia through exclusionary restrictions on interpretations, constraining who Aslan can be, limiting how the books can and should be interpreted—those attempting to exert control over this fictional world could only hope to succeed by keeping it frozen and bloodless… and we all know which character wanted that.
I hope Narnia remains wide open—a place for people of all faiths and beliefs to gather, a place where queer kids can feel welcome and find joy, one that’s there for all the kids, all the people who need something pure and good to believe in, to fight for and to preserve. I’m excited for February and The Magician’s Nephew, and I look forward to seeing Gerwig’s version of the story and the newness it brings into the world.
I wish I could somehow give more of Narnia to my parents, share more of what it promises to be, especially given how often they were betrayed by individuals and institutions who claimed to be following Jesus. Maybe they already saw that Narnia was the same kind of place they created for us as parents—a home that mixed fantasy, science fiction, faith, kindness, compassion, equality, inclusivity. Maybe they gave us more of the things they didn’t believe they could have themselves as adults. As the years have hardened Evangelical Christianity into something cold and frozen, I wish they could see how life-changing it was for them to have given us Narnia as children, a place to learn, to love, to play and imagine, to be fully alive and open to possibility. A good, safe place to send us to escape the war.
