Finding Hate in Narnia

British film critic Polly Toynbee has given us a foretaste of what some people will hate about Disney's forthcoming The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in her review for The Guardian. The review is subtly entitled "Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion."

I read the book, to which this film is quite faithful, according to Toynbee. Yet I do not recognize the Narnia or the America or the Christianity I read about in her description: "Here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America - that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right."

Toynbee is at least open about where she is coming from. "Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to?" Her problem with the doctrine of the atonement is, she explains, that it made her mother feel guilty.

Despite clearly not being a Christian, Toynbee feels free to opine on what Christian doctrine and allegory should look like. "Christ should surely be no lion...He was the lamb, representing the meek of the earth, weak, poor and refusing to fight." Toynbee is right that Christ, in His Incarnation, is called the Lamb of God. But in Christ's resurrection, ascension, and reign in the Kingdom of Heaven, he is the Lion of Judah. But as one who finds the atonement hateful and the resurrection, presumably, laughable, she wouldn't know about that.

Toynbee continues, "Philip Pullman - he of the marvelously secular trilogy His Dark Materials - has called Narnia 'one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read.'" Philip Pullman wrote a charming series of children's books about children who set out to kill God, overthrow Heaven, and destroy the Church.

What Toynbee forgets to do is tell us if the movie is well directed, shot, acted, written, or otherwise well-made at all. She does offer an interesting and sad comment that most British folk today will simply miss the Christian allegory in Narnia for the simple fact that most have no idea what Christianity is. "After all, 43% of people in Britain in a recent poll couldn't say what Easter celebrated...Ask art galleries: they now have to write the story of every religious painting on the label as people no longer know what "agony in the garden", "deposition", "transfiguration" or "ascension" mean. This may be regrettable cultural ignorance, but it means Aslan will stay just a lion to most movie-goers."

Why Toynbee should find this cultural ignorance "regrettable" is not clear. According to her, Christian iconography of the sort found in Narnia "is heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism." If I believed that was the heritage of Christianity, I'd applaud the forgetting of it.

I am at a loss for what to say in response to Toynbee's screed. I have not seen the actual film yet, and cannot say if it indeed is neo-fascist propaganda for a false religion that peddles guilt and sadism. But apparently neither has Toynbee met an actual Christian. I will at least withhold comment in my ignorance.