C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity: A Biography

CHAPTER FIVE

Mere Christianity emerged as a single volume with no trumpets and fanfare. Because it was a collection and a print version of Lewis’s well-known radio broadcasts, it received virtually no reviews. It steadily sold well in its early years and seems to have gained momentum, as indicated by its new printings more or less every year in both Great Britain and the United States and by its going into paperback editions.1 Still, despite its always strong sales, Mere Christianity remained unobtrusive among the author’s many works. Lewis was still typically presented as “The Author of The Screwtape Letters.”

In England Lewis remained a controversial figure. Novelist and critic Kathleen Nott, for instance, published The Emperor’s Clothes in 1953, in which she sharply attacked the idea that Western civilization might be saved by a return to the “dogmatic orthodoxy” of writers such as T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and Dorothy Sayers. The strength of Western civilization, Nott argued to the contrary, was to be found in humanism, which cultivated individual freedom, the arts, and scientific inquiry. Nott preferred the sophisticated Eliot to Lewis and Sayers because she thought the latter were too ready to argue about any theological issue and did so with “a certain vulgarity, like the Salvation Army.” These writers, she opined, “could be described, not too metaphorically, as fundamentalists” in the sense that they held that all the answers humans need could be found in Christian revelation and church teachings.2

Although Lewis, especially when he moved in academic circles, often encountered such disparagements of his popular apologetics, he was also reaching the pinnacle of his scholarly reputation. Enemies at Oxford had blocked his appointment to a chair there, but Cambridge University recognized his eminence as a literary critic in 1954 by appointing him to a new professorship in Medieval and Renaissance studies.

Even so, Lewis was still best known as a popular Christian apologist. In the spring of 1955, Tom Driberg, a prominent journalist and left-wing Labour member of Parliament who was also a High-Church Anglican, wrote of Lewis’s role in connection with the much-heralded revival of religion, or at least of “interest in religion” in England. Billy Graham had conducted a remarkably successful three-month revival campaign in London early in 1954, preaching to some huge crowds, and he was to return in 1955. The vogue of Graham’s conversionist message may have had something to do with the Collins company’s issuing a Fontana Books mass-market paperback edition of Mere Christianity in 1955. In any case, citing Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters, Driberg described Lewis in the New Statesman and Nation as “the most popular theologian of the day.” He recognized that Lewis was “not a fundamentalist” in the biblical literalist sense, as Graham was. Nonetheless, he saw the two as similar in that they largely ignored the “social gospel” in favor of an individualistic message of salvation of souls for eternal life. Driberg pointed out that Lewis had said in Mere Christianity, “‘A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it; and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian.’” And Driberg saw that as a “comfortable excuse for doing nothing to change society.”3

In the United States Lewis was looked upon as a more mainstream religious figure and had drawn far less public criticism than he had received in England ever since his controversial wartime broadcasts. Lewis sustained his popularity in America despite making no secret of his disdain for the superficialities of American culture and religion. Many Americans, perhaps sensing that same superficiality, found his historically grounded depth refreshing and became his most ardent admirers. Americans, including a number of American women, were among his most thoughtful correspondents, and eventually, in 1956, he married one of these, Joy Davidman.

Another American admirer, Chad Walsh, as the author of the first book on Lewis, spent lots of time with Lewis’s followers during the early 1950s and later identified several types of people attracted to Lewis’s centrist style of traditional Christianity. Among these were those who were discontent with various kinds of theological liberalism and so found Lewis helpful as they were groping their way to, or perhaps back to, Christian orthodoxy. Then there were those who were reacting against the “super-orthodox” or “obscurantist fundamentalist” churches they had been brought up in and were looking for an intellectually viable faith in the “main Christian tradition.” Walsh noted that Lewis’s works “were particularly popular with clergy on the intellectual firing line—for example, college and university chaplains.” These, he said, sometimes bought Lewis’s books “by the gross in order to give them to eager young intellectuals who were disturbed by religious questions.” There were also those who remained “outright ‘Fundamentalists’” and “welcomed Lewis as an ally,” although “many regretted that he was not specific enough about the inerrancy of the Scriptures.” Finally, Walsh found, “surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly,” that Lewis had “a large following among Roman Catholics.” He observed that “though many Roman Catholics would wish that Lewis had gone farther at a number of points they seem to find little to criticize in what he said as far as he went.” Catholic admirers liked his “fresh and vital restatements of the doctrines they learned more drily in Catechism.”4

By the later 1950s, especially due to the influence of Billy Graham, it was apparent that evangelical Protestants were making a comeback in American Protestantism. Ever since the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925, mainstream Protestants and other cultural leaders had often dismissed them as “fundamentalists,” but Graham was helping to lead revivalist Christianity back into the cultural mainstream. He and his allies were now calling themselves “new evangelicals” and seeking influence in the halls of power, cooperation with mainline Protestantism, and intellectual respectability. For them, Lewis could be a useful ally. Recognizing that, Billy Graham himself had consulted Lewis in 1955 in connection with a campaign Graham was conducting at Cambridge University. Lewis later said that he had been impressed with Graham as “a very modest and a very sensible man and I liked him very much indeed.”5 Nonetheless, he kept his distance from public identification with American-style revivalism.

As in England, Graham’s popular successes led to a perceived link between his conversionist message and Lewis’s, and so to some outright attacks on Lewis. Graham reached a new peak with his New York Crusade of 1957 and was cooperating with local mainline Protestant churches. Around the same time, the Christian Century, guardian of progressive Protestantism, offered a series of attacks on Graham as representing the old fundamentalism in disguise.⁶ Norman Pittenger, a professor of apologetics at General Theological Seminary in New York, had already linked Lewis to Graham, proclaiming that Lewis’s popularity was “one of the danger signs of our time” in “presenting the Christian religion in its most incredible form with glibness and a specious appeal.”7 In 1958 the Christian Century, which had until then been largely positive regarding Lewis, published Pittenger’s detailed indictment of the British “defender of the faith.”⁸

Pittenger began by noting that Lewis was “the best known and most admired” apologist of the day and that Mere Christianity had “had an enormous sale” in both Great Britain and America and “had tremendous influence.” He also conceded that Lewis was a master storyteller and that the Narnia tales were “altogether charming.” But he deplored the fact that Lewis was being taken seriously as a contemporary theologian. He had “even seen” Lewis’s works “cited in scholarly tomes as authoritative discussions.” Moreover, due to Lewis’s cleverness and brilliance as a writer, “it seems to be fashion nowadays to quote Mr. Lewis as if he were one of the church fathers.” Even though Lewis’s broadcast talks had doubtless helped many “as their first introduction to Christian faith as a live option for intelligent people today,” these people needed to be warned that he was an “amateur theologian” who misunderstood even the orthodoxy he claimed to defend and was woefully disregardful of modern standards of biblical interpretation.⁹

Pittenger’s condescending polemic awakened Lewis from his apologetic slumbers. He had earlier said that it was almost always a mistake to answer criticisms, but within weeks he sent the Christian Century an article in rebuttal in which he pulled out the stops in his display of debating skills. After conceding a few technical points, Lewis went on the counterattack. Pittenger’s style of biblical interpretation and his resulting theological claims had a confusing ambiguity about them. As for defending Lewis’s own theology in his broadcasts, Lewis pointed out that Pittenger failed to interpret them in their own context, as being directed to popular, not academic, audiences. Perhaps Lewis’s use of geometry to illustrate the Holy Trinity had been vulgar and offensive. “I could have understood the Doctor’s being shocked,” wrote Lewis with ironical flourish, “if I had compared God to an unjust judge or Christ to a thief in the night; but mathematical objects seem to me as free from sordid associations as any the mind can entertain.”11

Lewis explained that prior to his broadcasts, “Christianity came before the great mass of my unbelieving fellow-countrymen either in the highly emotional form offered by revivalists or in the unintelligible language of highly cultured clergy.” Neither of these reached most people, so he had undertaken the task of being a “translator,” putting Christian doctrine into the vernacular. For such a purpose a more nuanced style, “more rich in fruitful ambiguities—in fact, a style more like Dr. Pittenger’s own—would have been worse than useless.” The reader “would have thought, poor soul, that I was facing both ways, sitting on the fence, offering at one moment what I withdrew the next, and generally trying to trick him.”¹²

The exchange with Pittenger marked a turning point in Lewis’s public reputation as an apologist, especially among American evangelicals with fundamentalist backgrounds. Ever since The Screwtape Letters, many such conservative evangelicals had been discovering Lewis. Already in 1943, in a significant example, Clyde Kilby, on the English faculty of Wheaton College in Illinois, had picked up The Case for Christianity in the college bookstore and thrilled to its refreshing tone. Wheaton College, Billy Graham’s alma mater, was at the time the leading fundamentalist college. It was also an academic center that was shaping what would soon become the “new evangelical” movement. Lewis did not fit with this fundamentalistic heritage in a number of ways: he smoked and drank, did not hold to biblical “inerrancy,” and was open to theistic evolution. Yet new evangelicals welcomed his unabashed affirmations of the supernatural and his nonsectarianism, which connected the faith to teachings of the church through the ages.13

In 1956 Graham and others helped launch a new thought journal, Christianity Today, designed to rival the Christian Century. Already in 1955, Carl F. H. Henry, editor of the new magazine, had asked Lewis if he might be a contributor. Lewis politely replied, “I wish your project heartily well but can’t write you articles.” He went on to explain that he had turned to fiction and symbol as his modes of Christian expression. “I do not think I am at all likely to write more directly theological pieces.” He added, “I have done what I could in the way of frontal attacks, but I now feel quite sure those days are over.”¹⁴ This was the sort of reply that one writes if one not only is turning down a request but also does not wish to leave the door open for the future solicitations. Lewis was exaggerating a bit his resolve not to write directly Christian prose reflections for general audiences. He had often expressed his suspicions of revivalist Americans, and apparently he still wanted to keep them at a bit of a distance.

The Pittenger review had the unintended consequence of pushing Lewis closer toward this American evangelical orbit. Clyde Kilby sent Lewis a copy of the Pittenger article, along with a rebuttal that Kilby had sent to the Christian Century as a possible reply. Lewis answered that the Christian Century had already sent him the Pittenger piece and had offered to print his response. Lewis said he hoped they might publish both responses but added that “alas, we may merely be putting up the sales of what seems a pretty nasty periodical!”15 Kilby then sent his article to Christianity Today. Carl Henry promptly published it and also sent Lewis a copy to see if Lewis would also like to provide a rejoinder to Pittenger for Christianity Today. Lewis told Henry that if the Christian Century should turn down his response, he would be happy to have Christianity Today publish it.¹⁶

Kilby’s strong and unreserved defense of Lewis in Christianity Today sent up a flag that American evangelicals were claiming Lewis versus mainline Protestant theologians, whom evangelicals saw as undermining the historic faith. Even if Lewis remained reluctant to be pulled into such circles, evangelical leaders recognized that his combination of academic credentials and orthodoxy fit their purposes of reestablishing intellectual credibility for conservative Protestantism.

Thanks in part to the efforts of Graham and Christianity Today, American evangelicals, along with some crucial British allies, were building an international network in which Lewis the apologist was to play a significant role. One key figure was the British theologian J. I. Packer, for whom Lewis’s published radio talks had been important in shaping his faith in the 1940s. Packer was a prominent contributor to Christianity Today, and his Fundamentalism and the Word of God was a widely read defense of traditional Christianity affirming the inerrancy of Scripture. Similarly influential in building a British-American evangelical network with intellectual credibility was John R. Stott, the rector of All Souls Church in London from 1950 to 1975. During his university days, Stott had been a leader in the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, and as an organizer of Billy Graham’s campaign there in 1955, he had personally brought Graham and Lewis together in their meeting that year. In subsequent decades, Stott became the preeminent figure working with Graham in building immense worldwide networks of evangelical Christians. Stott also authored Basic Christianity (1958), a popular apologetic volume that might be seen as complementing Mere Christianity. Stott’s approach was more straightforward and conventional, presenting a basic primer of Christian teaching, starting with Scripture’s claims regarding the divinity of Christ and then moving on to the implications of Christ’s saving work. Basic Christianity long has rivaled Mere Christianity in popularity, having sold more than two million copies and been translated into more than sixty languages.17 In it Stott puts Mere Christianity first among “good Christian books” that he urges his audience to read.¹⁸

In his later years Lewis was convinced that his works would soon be forgotten. Shortly before his death in 1963, he told his friend Owen Barfield he expected that his fame would quickly pass and that within five years no one would be reading his books. Lewis made that pessimistic prediction despite the fact that up to that time his books had sold about a million copies in paperback alone. Mere Christianity was very prominent among these, accounting for about a quarter of that total, just slightly ahead of The Screwtape Letters. At the time, the Narnia books, although highly regarded and selling well, were not Lewis’s best-known works, let alone iconic (the New York Times obituary misspelled them as the “Chronicles of Narvia”).19 And Lewis had continued to write, in addition to his fiction and literary criticism, other books for Christian audiences, such as Reflections on the Psalms (1958), The Four Loves (1960), and Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964), though none had the impact of his works of the 1940s.

As the postwar era gave way to the 1960s, there was reason to think that a book such as Mere Christianity would not last. Whatever Lewis had thought of the subject, that was the opinion of Chad Walsh in 1965. Lewis, he believed, “is entering into a period of relative obscurity.” Even as Walsh recounted Lewis’s wide popularity in America, he thought that was largely a phenomenon that had reached its peak in the early 1950s and wrote that “it is simply that he is less talked about than ten or fifteen years ago.” The period from World War II into the later 1950s had been a time of Christian renewal throughout the English-speaking world, but now that was fading. Furthermore, by 1964 or 1965 a revolution in public culture was looming. Walsh, who taught at Beloit College in Wisconsin, found that “among college students I hear much less talk about religion than ten years ago.” If students were religious, they were not so much concerned with questions of truth or falsity as with relevance. So they might be interested in the Peace Corps or promoting interracial justice. “To such young people Lewis seems much too theoretical and abstract,” he wrote. Walsh believed that a mood of “diffused existentialism” characterized most young people in the America of the 1960s. So they found Lewis “too much a rationalist and Thomist for their tastes.” Therefore, even though Walsh was confident that Lewis’s fiction would last, his “own prediction for what it is worth” was that “his straightforward books, such as Broadcast Talks, will not last forever. They were splendid religious journalism, but each age should produce its own journalists.”20

Lewis was at least out of the limelight during the turbulent years of the later 1960s, when political causes, cultural upheaval, sexual revolutions, indulgent individualism, new-age spirituality, and just about everything but his unobtrusive “mere Christianity” came to the fore in public culture. Nonetheless, his literary executor, Walter Hooper, a devoted American admirer who had served briefly as Lewis’s secretary in 1963, worked assiduously to keep Lewis’s works in print and to bring out previously unpublished writings. According to Hooper, “I made clear that Collins [the publisher] would get a new Lewis book on the condition they reprinted two books that had gone out of print. It was tough going at first, but eventually they understood that Lewis would be around for a long time.”21 Peter Kreeft, who became an influential Roman Catholic promoter of Lewis, similarly reported that in the later 1960s, when he first proposed a book on Lewis, his publisher said, “‘We think Lewis’ star has risen and is about to set. His day is over. No one will be reading C. S. Lewis twenty years from now.’”²² In 1970, in The Christian Century, in a brief unsigned notice of God in the Dock, a collection of Lewis essays edited by Hooper, the reviewer observed, “It is too early for a C. S. Lewis revival and too late to capitalize on the C. S. Lewis fad.”²³

Yale theologian Paul Holmer’s volume C. S. Lewis: The Shape of His Faith and Thought represented a late flowering of mainline Protestant interest in Lewis.²⁴ Not published until 1976, it had the feel of a retrospective tribute to a figure from the past who was still worth looking at. “Lewis,” wrote Holmer, “was from the early years of World War II through the mid-fifties the most widely read Christian apologist in English.” Holmer explained that his own book was “written partly to discharge a debt incurred during the early days of World War II.” As a young man Holmer had been struggling as a fundamentalist, and Lewis’s correspondence with him had helped him untangle his life and broaden his faith. Holmer’s volume has the feel of having been drafted in the earlier era. For instance, when he refers to Lewis’s most popular books he lists The Case for Christianity rather than Mere Christianity and cites the latter as such only in a couple of notes instructing the reader to “see” its “new Preface.”25

Although Holmer’s tribute may have been long in the making, that also meant that the Yale professor had had years of reflection and teaching to hone his insights, so his volume remains a classic for understanding Lewis’s strengths as a popular defender of Christianity. Holmer considered Lewis’s fiction and literary criticism as integrally related to his ability to speak to broad audiences. He also noted how deeply Lewis’s thought was shaped not only by perennial Christianity but also by the whole span of Western civilization and by his lifelong attention to understanding perennial human nature. Those perspectives gave him “a rare wisdom about people” so that “his writings have a way of fitting every reader.”²⁶ Few writers, Holmer observed, combined the objective and the subjective so well as Lewis had done, so that readers come to realize that they are not just learning about the faith but also learning something about themselves. Lewis wrote with the authority of someone who had discovered something and could convey an artful simplicity that fit with the experiences of many others who find it a way of making sense of their lives.²⁷

If by the time Holmer’s book appeared in 1976 Lewis’s popularity as an apologist seemed to have faded in American mainline Protestant circles, just the opposite had happened among American evangelicals. In fact, the most dramatic trend in the story of the reception Mere Christianity is that of its rise from being just well liked to iconic status during that relatively brief span of time.

Clyde Kilby had emerged in the late 1950s as the chief evangelical advocate for Lewis, and in 1964 he consolidated that status with his defense of Lewis, The Christian World of C. S. Lewis. Kilby, who was a literary scholar, offered an overview of and introduction to the whole corpus of Lewis’s work. What he said directly in summarizing Mere Christianity was probably less significant for the future life of that book than who was saying it—a respected professor at the most elite college in the evangelical orbit. Moreover, Kilby’s personal influence among Wheaton students was sufficient to ensure that, in the 1960s, whatever was happening at other colleges, such as Beloit or Berkeley, the future leaders of American evangelicalism, including many of its intellectual leaders, were going to have a high regard for Lewis. Wheaton was also a leading institution in defining the boundaries of evangelical orthodoxy. So it mattered that a Wheaton professor was pointing out that, even if Lewis did not hold to the “inerrancy” of Scripture, a doctrine that was often used as a test of fellowship by conservative evangelicals, he had a high view of the historicity of the New Testament and had little time for modern biblical criticism. Furthermore, even though Lewis stood “somewhat to the left” of many orthodox Christians on that and some other matters, he stood firmly against liberal theologies and in defense of essential traditional doctrines and of the miraculous versus modern naturalistic skepticism.28

Kilby cemented the relationship between evangelicalism’s leading college and Lewis by establishing there in 1965 a “C. S. Lewis Collection.” By the time of Kilby’s retirement in 1981, that had grown into a well-funded major research archive, the Marion E. Wade Center. Located on Wheaton’s campus, the Center signaled the American evangelical embrace not only of Lewis but also of Lewis’s kindred British literary allies from diverse Christian traditions, including Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, Dorothy Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. The Center has also gathered some artifacts, including the original Lewis wardrobe that was the inspiration for that in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Standing across the campus from the architecturally dominant Billy Graham Center, the Wade Center helped make Wheaton a destination where evangelicals might honor Lewis in its hierarchy of saints.

Even more influential, although difficult to measure, was Lewis’s influence on evangelical leaders who had discovered him, usually during their student years. At any gathering of prominent evangelicals, some will have such stories. Particularly important in promoting Lewis on campuses was InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. InterVarsity had close ties to counterparts in British universities where Lewis’s apologetic works were often used in evangelism. As early as the 1940s, Gene Thomas, who became a highly influential leader of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in Colorado, discovered The Case for Christianity through a recommendation in that organization’s His magazine.29 Another typical story is that of Terry Morrison, who was long the director of Inter-Varsity faculty ministries. Morrison was introduced to Lewis as a student in Pittsburgh in the early 1950s from reading an early edition of Mere Christianity. Soon he was reading everything by Lewis that he could find and promoting him with others. According to Morrison, “A good many of our staff, at least through the 1970s, were brought to the Lord after reading Lewis.” He said that many of the staff counted Lewis as “extremely important for our work,” and “a good many students were nourished on Lewis.” Lewis became standard fare in dorm discussions, and over the years InterVarsity Press has offered a steady diet of books about him. The press’s publisher, Bob Fryling, remarks, “Outside of the Scriptures themselves, Lewis is probably the greatest authority and example of a thoughtful Christian faith. In a university environment, Lewis has stellar academic credentials that command intellectual respect, while his journey from atheism to Christian faith describes a personal and spiritual authority that is attractive and not easily dismissed.”³⁰

Such influences had many ripple effects, and by at least the end of the 1960s Lewis had become established as a champion among American evangelicals. Even stricter fundamentalists who normally disparaged the intellectual mainstream nonetheless cited Lewis’s academic prestige as evidence of the credibility of the faith. In 1969 Chad Walsh, speaking as a mainline Protestant with broader theological sensibilities, expressed chagrin at “the unabashed delight that some extreme fundamentalists took in his work; though he was certainly never a formal member of their fellowship, they seemed to issue him guest-privilege cards on an astonishing scale.”31

One bit of evidence that Lewis had become fully accepted among mainstream evangelicals was that in 1969 the flagship magazine Christianity Today was offering to subscribers a volume titled C. S. Lewis: Five Best Books in One Volume.³² Christianity Today editor Harold Lindsell provided a brief introduction. Lindsell was known for his insistence on the “inerrancy” of Scripture as an essential gatekeeping doctrine. With that issue no doubt in mind, he remarked that “Lewis is not infallible” and added that “if he were alive today he would probably admit to having changed some of his ideas for he was willing to learn.”³³

By this time Lewis’s reputation seems to have transcended intraevangelical debates. Furthermore, there is little evidence that rank-and-file enthusiasm was much shaped one way or another by what by the end of the 1970s could be described as “the growing flood of secondary literature” on Lewis.³⁴ In fact, the influence was largely the other way around. Lewis’s grassroots popularity, which accelerated conspicuously in that decade, helped generate more books and studies. Even though the story of the reception of Mere Christianity has to be told largely through what has been published, it is more truly a myriad of stories, mostly unrecorded, of how the book was used and shared locally.