To obliterate the distinction between the sexes is to rebel against nature and nature’s God.
To obliterate the distinction between the sexes is to rebel against nature and nature’s God.
D irector Greta Gerwig’s announcement that a woman — Meryl Streep — will voice the role of Aslan, “the Great Lion” in Narnia, in her adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew is not merely another scuffle in the culture wars.
At its core, it is a deliberate, primal revolt against the religious beliefs that laid the foundation for Western civilization: an understanding of the nature of God and the created order that stretches back nearly 3,500 years. The glaring irony here is that the outlook animating Gerwig’s progressive vision of sexuality is precisely what Lewis excoriates throughout The Magician’s Nephew: namely, the impulse to use the tools of science (or magic) to manipulate nature in the selfish pursuit of power.
If that assessment sounds hyperbolic, it’s because we have failed to grasp the debt that our civilization owes to the biblical narrative of man’s origins. We must start at the beginning.
“So God created man in his own image,” writes the author of the book of Genesis, “in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Here is an anthropology that has proven to be the strongest basis for human dignity ever conceived. Indeed, there is a moral logic to the Genesis story that has no historical parallel.
Jews and Christians alike believe that although God is Spirit and has no gender, he possesses the qualities of both sexes, male and female. The distinctions between the two, announced at the beginning of the human story, are believed to have a divine origin: They are an intimation of the very nature of God. Moreover, the sexes are complementary and not, by design, interchangeable; an assault on the unique dignity of either sex is equally an assault on their Creator.
Virtually every effort to create a more just, humane, and egalitarian society in the West has regarded this idea as its north star. Indeed, the modern human rights movement would be inconceivable without this bedrock belief that men and women carry the imago Dei. As the late Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Great Britain, summarized it: “The idea set forth here is perhaps the most transformative in the entire history of moral and political thought. It is the basis of the civilization of the West with its unique emphasis on the individual.”
We learn something crucially important about God’s nature in the bargain. In the creation narrative and throughout the Bible, God is consistently described in masculine terms: “he,” “king,” “husband,” and “father.” For believers such as C. S. Lewis, this is how God has chosen to reveal himself to mankind, with an unapologetic emphasis on the masculine qualities. In his essay “Priestesses in the Church,” Lewis sharply disagrees with those who regard this fact as irrelevant to the spiritual life: “Goddesses have, of course, been worshipped. . . . But they are religions quite different in character from Christianity.”
As Gerwig and her screenwriters surely know, the character of Aslan the ruler of Narnia — also called “the Son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea” — is not a tribal chieftain. He plainly represents the Christ of the Gospels: a man in every sense, Jesus of Nazareth, as well as the Son of God, the God-man. When Lewis considered what form Christ might take in his imaginary world, he upheld the biblical teaching and chose a lion — not a lioness — to represent him.
“We are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature,” Lewis explained, “but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge.”
Here, it seems, lies the taproot of the gender distortion that darkens the progressive worldview: the desire to control every facet of our existence. The desire begins by reconceiving the nature of God in one’s own image. Whether the image takes the form of a transgender activist, a racist apologist, or a Marxist revolutionary makes little difference. The dumb idol has been substituted for the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus.
The great attraction of an idol, of course, is that it can be manipulated to serve the ego, the will to power. And one of Lewis’s chief aims in The Magician’s Nephew was to make clear that the scientist, like the magician — if devoid of humility — will regard people only as a means to an end. “But he was, in any case, as vain as a peacock,” the narrator tells us. “That was why he had become a Magician.”
Untethered by the Moral Law, the scientist (or the liberal reformer) will exploit and subjugate the natural world — including its human inhabitants — to achieve his fantastical goals. “Men like me, who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures,” the Magician boasts to his nephew Digory. “Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny.”
Here is the “hidden wisdom” of modern progressivism: A person’s “gender identity” is infinitely malleable, rooted not in the natural order or in human nature, but rather in individual desire, a desire that accepts no limitations. Now, for the first time, modern science has provided a way to act on this desire: “gender-affirming” surgeries that represent, at their heart, a rebellion against the Creator and his design for human flourishing.
It is an outlook that Lewis referred to as “scientism,” that is, science without God or his Moral Law. By the late 1930s, the consequences of science run amok — by Nazi doctors and eugenicists of all stripes — were becoming frighteningly clear.
The theme looms large in Lewis’s science-fiction series, the Ransom Trilogy, especially in its final book, That Hideous Strength. In the story, the scientific elite of the N.I.C.E. ( National Institute of Coordinated Experiments) use deception and violence to impose their “progressive” vision of humanity on an entire population. “This time we’re going to get science applied to social problems,” announces Mark Studdock, the novel’s protagonist, “and backed by the whole force of the state.”
Lewis took up the theme again in a series of lectures on ethics in 1943 at Durham University, published a year later under the title The Abolition of Man. Without a solid basis for respecting every human life, for honoring one’s moral commitments, the principles of justice and humanity “can be properly swept away” when they clash with other desires. “The real objection,” Lewis warned, “is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners.”
This is the consequence of degrading the imago Dei, of obliterating the God-given distinction between the sexes, of treating men and women as mere raw material. The entire project is both irrational and futile — and self-destructive. As Lewis observed, idols always break the hearts of their worshippers. Or, as he wrote in The Problem of Pain, “A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”
Nevertheless, the attempt to do so continues apace. In defending her decision to have Streep play the role of Aslan, Gerwig prevaricated — like Digory in the story, who tries to shift the blame for bringing the evil Witch into his world. Gerwig claimed she wanted “someone who was profound and not pretentious” — as if no male actors in Hollywood could supply those qualities.
The author of The Chronicles of Narnia confronted this rebellion head-on in his own day, offering a Christian vision of human life rooted in Grace and Truth: the nearly irresistible qualities of Aslan the Lion and of Jesus the Christ. What might Narnia’s High King say about the director of a film hell-bent on his negation? “He thinks great folly, child,” Aslan explained to Polly about the Magician. “He has made himself unable to hear my voice.”
Yet this voice, the Voice that called the world of Narnia and our own world into being, the Voice that summons us to put away our folly and follow him with all our hearts, speaks to us still.