The lion, the witch, and the worldview war
The internet already knows what to do with the news that Meryl Streep will voice Aslan in Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew”: Get angry. It fits the logic of rage-bait: All publicity is good publicity.
There has already been plenty of fury. It is as if the creative team opened its first meeting by asking, “There is a huge built-in Christian audience for Narnia. How can we alienate it as quickly as possible?” But I want to ask the prior question: What exactly is “The Magician’s Nephew” about, and why can’t a radical leftist understand it?
The central problem in Narnia is not that the wrong group has power. It is rebellion against the good Creator.
That question is vital because director Greta Gerwig is not merely illustrating a book. She is interpreting one. And there is no such thing as interpretation without a worldview.
Netflix has scheduled Gerwig’s film for theatrical release on February 12, 2027, and streaming on April 2. Meryl Streep has been confirmed as Aslan’s voice. Gerwig says she wanted someone capable of communicating profundity, gravitas, pathos, joy, and childlike wonder. But neither Gerwig nor Netflix has said that Aslan has been rewritten as a lioness, so the claim that she has created a “translan” gets ahead of the evidence.
The controversy gives us an opportunity to return to Lewis and ask how we find a text’s meaning. The answer applies well beyond Narnia to the current cultural conflict.
“The Magician’s Nephew” begins with Digory and Polly discovering that Digory’s ridiculous Uncle Andrew has developed magical rings that can transport people between worlds. They arrive in the wonderfully strange Wood Between the Worlds, a quiet forest filled with pools. Each pool opens into another world.
Lewis was far ahead of Marvel’s multiverse.
Digory makes a spectacularly bad decision. In the dead world of Charn, he rings a forbidden bell and awakens Queen Jadis. We eventually learn that Jadis destroyed everyone in her world rather than surrender power. She used the “Deplorable Word,” annihilating Charn’s population and leaving herself as its solitary ruler.
That detail is important.
Jadis’ defining characteristic is not that she is a strong woman. Lewis gives us plenty of admirable women in his books. Her defining characteristic is autonomous will. She would rather destroy a world than acknowledge a limit on herself. In modern terms, Lewis wrote a third-wave feminist before the term existed.
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Digory and Polly accidentally bring her to Earth. When they try to remove her, they end up transporting Jadis, Uncle Andrew, a cab driver, and his horse into another world.
They arrive at the beginning of Narnia, as Aslan creates it.
Lewis is hardly being subtle.
And this is where the current controversy becomes interesting.
Aslan is not simply a powerful lion who happens to be the good guy. Lewis explicitly rejected that reduction. He described Narnia as a “supposal”: What might Christ be like if there really were a world like Narnia and Christ entered that world to save it?
Lewis went farther: “The whole Narnian story is about Christ.”
That means an interpreter who approaches Narnia primarily through contemporary categories of gender, power, oppression, and liberation will see a different story from the one Lewis wrote.
This does not require sinister motives. It is simply how worldviews work. Culpability begins when an interpreter treats her worldview as a license to overwrite the text. Gerwig’s film has not yet been released, so its faithfulness to Lewis remains a question, not a verdict.
Show the same story to a Marxist, a Freudian, a Christian, and a postmodernist, and each will notice different things. The Marxist sees class. The Freudian sees repression. The postmodernist sees power. Lewis sees creation, fall, temptation, sin, judgment, grace, and redemption.
The danger comes when the interpreter stops interpreting the author and starts rewriting him. For the radical leftist, words no longer disclose an objective meaning; they become material to rearrange in service of a political goal. On Lewis’ terms, that is sinful autonomy: Reality itself becomes an obstacle to the will.
Apply the same interpretive habit to the Constitution, marriage, or gender. Fixed meaning and objective reality become obstacles to the desired result. As a colleague of mine argues, the impulse is to “burn it down” and impose one’s will on the rest of us.
And “The Magician’s Nephew” may be the worst possible Narnia book in which to make that mistake, because it rebukes autonomous power wielded by the creature against the Creator. It shows the barrenness of Jadis’ feminism: autonomous will severed from the Creator and therefore incapable of creating anything.
Consider Jadis again. A modern interpretation might reduce the conflict to rival forms of power. Here is the imposing lion claiming authority over a new world, and here is the formidable woman who refuses to submit.
But that completely misses Lewis.
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Aslan and Jadis are not rival politicians competing to run Narnia. Aslan creates. Jadis consumes.
Aslan gives creatures their being. Jadis destroys creatures who interfere with her will.
Aslan establishes an order to which creatures belong. Jadis believes reality ought to bend to her desires.
That is why the Christian distinction between Creator and creature matters so much. The central problem in Narnia is not that the wrong group has power. It is rebellion against the good Creator.
Which brings us back to Meryl Streep.
I understand why Christians object to giving the voice of Lewis’ male Christ figure to a woman. Aslan’s identity is not arbitrary. Lewis chose a male lion, called him “he,” and made him a king as his imaginative answer to the question of Christ entering another world.
But I am even more interested in what Aslan will say than in what Aslan will sound like.
The proper test of the adaptation is straightforward: Will Gerwig allow Lewis’ world to remain Lewis’ world?
Every artist interprets through a worldview. Faithfulness does not require pretending to have none. It requires humility: the willingness to enter another writer’s world without claiming the right to recreate its moral order.
I have seen the same conflict as a professor among radical activists. A teacher who denies the basic structure of reality cannot teach students to become wise or find meaning.
The same humility is required of us. We do not enter God’s world as its creators.
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