At the request of a friend I am revisiting this subject. In fact, I had intended to revisit this subject and unfortunately it had fallen of the edge of my task list.

The email I received asked for clarification as to what I meant by stating my disagreement with Doug Phillips in his three posts dealing with Narnia. He also asked the question, “Was I defending paganism?, Or CS Lewis’ theology over Doug Phillips.?” To both questions the answer is no. I am sorry to have been so neglectful as to leave my readers to any such speculation on the subject.

I will not have time today to address all the issues in this post, and hopefully a couple more posts on the subject won’t slide off the edge of my plate and become forgotten again.

Here I will deal with Doug Philips post called, Hollywood Elites Use and Abuse Lewis; Use and Abuse Christians

My first point is that it is quite natural to expect Disney and Walden media to try and market this to anybody they can. Their final goal is to make money off of the film. And while the film company I work for is Christian, we do also intend to make money off of the films we produce in order to provide for our families. But since we are Christian, our motives, and our other goals are going to be much different. The point I am making here however is that we can expect as much from “Hollywood.” This does not mean that the film is bad.

Secondly, in one article Doug Phillips linked to by the Washington Times, they quote Douglas Gresham, stepson of the late C.S. Lewis as saying that the religious emphasis was an American disease. But this does not change the fact the they did not remove the religious aspect from the movie. To quote another part of the Washington Times article,

“There are powerful themes that resonate with the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, but it’s a book with universal appeal,” Mr. Mattson said.

Here they admit that the themes resonate with Christianity. And yet they made the movie anyway. Another quote from the article,

“The problem now is that when Christians do great work, they hide their Christianity out of a sense of embarrassment to avoid the inappropriate stereotype.”
To counteract stereotypes, Disney is going the inclusive route, he said.

Disney is going the inclusive route… what does that mean? It means they are not dropping the Christian themes from the movie, for which we should commend them. It’s not enough to condemn, we also need to commend. There is plenty of evil to condemn in Hollywood, I mean lots and lots. Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, as the common phrase goes.

We should also be thankful that Christianity is now being seen as a big enough market to require their attention. Let’s keep up the trend. I believe God may yet send a badly needed reformation.