Regarding the review by J.R. Jones of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe [“Good Is Good,” December 16]:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
What is at issue here, right now in the U.S., is not whether the film or Lewis’s original stories (or for that matter Christianity) present valid “conventional morality” from which everyone could learn. Forgiveness, redemption, and other themes in Lewis’s tales are certainly nothing from which to run. The issue here is whether those themes, those conventional moralities, have been hijacked for other purposes. The Christianity of the current conservative Christian movement is not even the Christianity of Christ, much less of Lewis.
The argument is also less concerned with Christian messages of sin, redemption, and forgiveness coated in lion’s fur. The argument here instead is that this new Christianity itself has little to do with these ideals.
W. Armitage