Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker piece on C.S. Lewis will be the first of many attempts this winter to put the Christian apologist in his place now that his work, in the form of a Narnia movie, enjoys a new round of popularity. Gopnik’s condescension is only exceeded by his ignorance. Gopnik tells us what is and what is not valuable in Lewis’s work: his Christian work, bad and inept; his imaginative work, as long as it was freed up from his Christian prejudices, good. Gopnik in know-it-all mode even sketches out what he considers a better animal than a lion to use for a Christian allegory — a donkey. Gopnik reveals his cluelessness early on when he attributes significance to a criticism of Lewis as a Christian apologist by a “former Archbishop of Canterbury, no less.” The “no less” added at the end suggests that Gopnik isn’t aware that Canterbury archbishops are about as interested in the actual meaning of Christianity as he is.
