C. S. Lewis’s former secretary Walter Hooper died this week at the age of 89: He lived most of his life knowing that this sentence would, with only minor variations across the different news outlets, be the first line of his obituary. In death, as in life, he’s played a supporting role to Lewis, and he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

As Joseph Loconte noted for National Review on Monday, Lewis was convinced that his works would vanish into obscurity shortly after his death. Hooper spent his whole life from Lewis’s death in November of 1963 to the date of his own just a few days ago working to prevent this from happening. After decades of editing, collecting, and championing Lewis’s work, he passed away safe in the knowledge that he had succeeded, especially in America, the land of his birth.

Like Lewis, I was born and raised in Belfast, and, like Lewis, I spent my university years at Magdalen College in Oxford. But in neither place is his name nearly as hallowed as it is among American Christians. Something about his work has always resonated more in the United States, probably because the British have become much more secular than their American cousins over the past half century.

It’s also the case, however, that Americans have had a native-born ambassador on Lewis’s behalf in the form of Hooper, whose equal isn’t to be found among Lewis’s compatriots. Walter Hooper should be credited not only for the survival of Lewis’s works, but for their particularly American survival.

There’s a C. S. Lewis Society in Oxford that’s attended almost exclusively by American students. I was at one of its meetings in the high Anglo-Catholic drawing room of Pusey House a few years ago when Hooper came to speak. It was bizarre but heartwarming in a way to witness an American man regale an American audience with tales of a British author in the most British of settings. It seemed to be yet another instance of Americans picking up time-worn treasures that the British have cast off in their long march towards secular technocracy, giving them a cherished home across the Atlantic.

In the end, Lewis will probably take his place alongside a whole host of other hand-me-downs, like constitutional liberty and even Christianity itself, which have become retrograde curiosities in the Old World, but continue to be the glory of the New. In light of this fact, Walter Hooper deserves to be remembered as the quintessential American Christian: a man with grit, determination, and a relentless work ethic who channeled his entrepreneurial spirit into the aggrandizement of another’s reputation instead of his own.

This devotion on Hooper’s part to his teacher and his friend was the thoroughfare of a greater devotion to his Lord. In the course of fulfilling his vocation, he fulfilled the two greatest commandments at once, loving his neighbor Lewis and his God Christ in one undivided movement of the soul. Now, at last, he can rest in the company of those other saints who, like himself, joined their voices to John the Baptist’s, proclaiming, “He must increase; I must decrease.”