Deconstructing Lewis?

This is old news, but I think it's worth bringing up...I just found this review of Alan Jacob's book The Narnian, which came out just before the movie this past Christmas. This review is by New Yorker critic Adam Gopnik. I found his review to be a poor piece of journalism. I say this not because of the dirt he uncovers on Lewis (Lewis doesn't hide his dirt, and what he does hide is out of a sense of propriety), which comes from A.N. Wilson's biography of Lewis' life (one that relies on the "hermeneutic of suspicion"). I say this because Gopnik's write up is dripping with a preunderstanding of Lewis that is reactive to Lewis' reception in America by conservative Christians. It's so reactive that it gets the most basic of details wrong. Consequently, his review is so biased with a desire to deconstruct Lewis that it fails to offer a fair reading.

Here's an example:

Converted to faith as the means of joy, however, Lewis never stops to ask very hard why this faith rather than some other. His favorite argument for the truth of Christianity is that either Jesus had to be crazy to say the things he did or what he said must be true, and since he doesn’t sound like someone who is crazy, he must be right.

Compare this to a letter from Lewis to Sheldon Vanauken published in Vanauken's book A Severe Mercy (pp.89-90). This is a long quotation but worth reading:

What you really start with [in the history of religion] is ritual, myth, and mystery, the death and return of Balder or Osiris, the dances, the initiations, the sacrifices, the divine kings. Over against that are the Philosophers, Aristotle or Confucius, hardly religious at all. The only two systems in which the mysteries and the philosophies come together are Hinduism and Christianity: there you get both Metaphysics and cult...That is why my first step was to be sure that one or the other of these [Hinduism or Christianity] had the answer. For the reality can't be one that appeals either only to savages or only to high brows. Real things aren't like that (e.g. matter is the first most obvious thing you meet--milk, chocolates, apples, and also the object of quantum physics). There is no question of just a crowd of disconnected religions. The choice is between (a.) The materialist world picture: wh. I can't believe (b.) The real archaic primitive religions: wh. are not moral enough (c.) The (claimed) fulfillment of these in Hinduism (d.) The claimed fulfillment of these in Christianity. But the weakness of Hinduism is that it doesn't really join the two strands...It is only Christianity wh. compels a high brow like me to partake in a ritual blood feast, and also compels a central African convert to attempt an enlightened universal code of ethics.

How one can say that Lewis really did not think through the "Liar, Lunatic or Lord" argument and can imply that he used it as a catchy word device to sum up his faith is beyond me. Moreover, Lewis did, in fact, look into Hinduism before converting to the Church (as the quotation above implies).

I am not for enshrining Lewis in the stain glass of churches--and undoubtedly, Lewis would not have wanted anything like this either--but at least give him a fair reading and be more careful in your journalism, Mr. Gopnik.