One way to observe how modern society interacts with religion is to look at its dealings with authority figures. An upcoming adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, part of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, presents an opportunity to do so in the possible casting of the character Aslan as female.
In the story, the lion Aslan is an explicit Christ figure, both the creator and king of Narnia. To leave the character male is simple adherence to plot and intent. To make him Meryl Streep, as reportedly is in consideration, is a wealth of commentary on the place of Christ in the world. Oddly, the move leaves a rather significant place for him.
It is no minor oversight in cast accuracy, as in examples of complaints over nondisabled actors voicing disabled characters. Artistic representations are particularly useful tools for the ideologically motivated, and the Narnia directors are not unaware of its capacity. For us, too, they are equally as useful as real-life demonstrations, but revealing a different layer. Whereas protests or essays might depict actual reactions to given circumstances, messaging choices in media such as films show societal aspirations, if not existing undercurrents.
In this case, the sad reality is that a feminized Aslan is both aspirational and existent. There is some gender blurring infused into the casting choice, in that social liberals are to a great degree occupied with advancing the position of women, and their preferred method is to try to negate the differences between the sexes. It’s an unworkable idea, but they want conservatism to be softer on doctrine than its institutions teach, so they make new molds out of the same starting matter. That is the stronger intention behind the choice: More than political posturing, it communicates a society that wants authority, but wants it to come without definition.
Christianity is maligned for its connection to authority, but is constantly reaffirmed in it when bad actors take recourse to the framework for their own ideas. A civilized society such as ours refuses innately — and, to remain free, must refuse continuously — to rid itself of the trajectory toward justice and charity. So it clings on to the most persuasive and well-known model, who is Christ, and deforms him into whatever its interpretation of human goodness. Still, they want him to teach — it is just that they want him to teach absolute freedom. Theirs is freedom “almost to the point of idolatry,” as Pope John Paul II wrote in encyclical Veritatis splendor, such that it leads to a “creative understanding of moral conscience.” A maladapted Narnia is one new, but unoriginal, presentation of this tendency.
The artform tendency maps onto existing patterns, of course, and makes the looming Aslan all the more reflective of the age. When President Donald Trump attained his first-term victory, “every step down in church attendance brought a step up in Trump support.” Religiosity was then on steep decline, and the unaffiliated-but-Republican crowd flocked to him. Not because he is obviously irreligious, but because of the opposite impression: Full Trumpism is a less demanding semblance of the Real Thing, and that, unfortunately, is the sort of authority that interests human hearts.
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Flip the political spectrum, and the Left does the same with former Pope Francis. His death has brought an onslaught of the typical headlines that prove frustrating to conservative Catholics: Stuff about the Pope’s “inclusive style” and “social justice” taking precedence over “doctrinal purity.” Honest impressions, and yet ones that fail to confront what draws Leftists en masse to him, and what they intentionally leave out of his character.
So, too, with Jesus, as already established. This is a pattern that starts with him and ends with him — not only in reference to “the beginning” of creation, but because it has occurred since he began preaching publicly. It is a stumbling block of the human condition. But, it is sort of a beautiful thing that we have not changed at all, and neither has he.