2nd January, 2006

BARNEY ZWARTZ

It is hard to find a group today more puritanical than the anti-Christian, anti-Narnia brigade. They have unleashed an entirely disproportionate assault on the film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which opened in Melbourne at the weekend.

Britain's Observer newspaper called it "holy war", while Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee wrote that "adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a sickbag handy". Of the idea of Christ dying to save sinners, she sneers like a petulant adolescent, "did we ask him to?"

Such critics are appalled that the film may smuggle in some form of subliminal Christian proselytising of unwary children.

First, that's very unlikely. Second, even if it were true, so what? It's a practice hallowed throughout the history of film that moral messages seethe below the surface. And third, some of the fuss rests on a long-standing secular prejudice that religion presents a coloured (and egregious) worldview, whereas their own is neutral, value-free and corresponds to reality.

It is not surprising that Andrew Adamson's long and lovely adaption of C. S. Lewis' children's tale has evoked such wrath. In fidelity to the book, he does not shy away from the allegorical aspects (though he doesn't highlight them either). More offensive to the cultural guardians, though, is that the film was backed by a fundamentalist Christian (Philip Anschutz of Walden Media) and that it was heavily promoted, following Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, to organised Christianity in the United States.

And the film certainly has specific Christian allusions, not least the way the "passion" of Aslan on the stone table mirrors that of Christ, with brutality, humiliation and death. Afterwards Aslan quotes Christ on the cross: "It is finished."

However, you have to understand something of Christianity already to get the allusions. Otherwise these are buried among a plethora of influences, which Age reviewer Philippa Hawker yesterday identified as E. E. Nesbit, Enid Blyton, The Wind in the Willows, Greek and Norse mythology, Hans Christian Andersen and schoolboy chivalry.

Many commentators have observed that to those who don't already have a background in Christianity - and a recent poll of British teens revealed that 43 per cent did not know what Easter commemorated - that message is lost among the special effects of talking animals, fauns, centaurs, minotaurs, dwarfs and magic.

Also, in a world where children watch Die Hard, Alien or Dumb and Dumber, the positive messages of films like Harry Potter and Narnia must surely be welcome.

To those who complain that the film might prepare people to accept Christianity in a sort of pre-evangelism, I argue that many fine films have sought to persuade people under cover of a good story.

I'm sure that those outraged by Narnia are not equally upset by To Kill a Mockingbird or Mississippi Burning, with their anti-racism message, or the new George Clooney film Good Night and Good Luck. This film about the McCarthy era resonates because many see in it the modern America of the Patriot Act. Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator wasn't just a comedy.

Yet such films can be more effective in shaping opinion or breaking prejudices than films that are overt propaganda, such as Leni's Riefenstahl's apotheosis of Nazism or Mike Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Some put Mel Gibson's Passion in the same category.

Both left and right, Christian and secular, are prone to selective outrage, but this can readily segue into hypocrisy (something against which Christianity's founder fulminated, but into which his followers can fall as swiftly as anyone else).

Finally, worldview. Certainly, Christians have a specific worldview, which they claim is both reasonable and internally coherent. Others, such as Polly Toynbee, disagree - but they do so because they also have a worldview built apart from God.

Christians find this secular claim to the epistemological high ground as annoying as atheists find Christians' claim to the high ground in morality. Both claims are false.

In the worldview conflict there is no such thing as neutrality. That would require a God's eye view that encompassed all and understood all, which stood outside the universe and independent of it. And, according to all theistic religions, God chooses not to stand apart from creation.

If there is a paradox involved in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that bothers me, it is employing Christianity in the pursuit of Mammon. I was delighted to see that Father Christmas in the film was not dressed in Coca-Cola red, but - and my dismay is doubtless naive - before the film began there were three advertisements for marketing merchandise, the Narnia Playstation game, and a Narnia competition. Few can doubt that for Disney, and others, that's the real agenda.

This article was first published in 'The Age'. Barney Zwartz is religion editor at the newspaper.