A Letter to My Secular Friend

Here is a continuation of my letters to friends about Narnia inspired by Hugh’s question. The following is a letter to a friend who is a secularist. (I do have such friends!) Yesterday, I wrote to my religious friend.

Dear Edmund,

You just finished Narnia and I admire your being open minded enough to see the film. It is the sort of thing that irritates you a bit; the way a paean to atheism can ruin an otherwise fun night out for me. You end up wanting to argue with the movie and talking back to the screen simply ruins any date!  

Christmas must make the USA seem like a god-centered culture. I know “Merry Christmas” must grate on your nerves the way the “God bless America” closing of a President’s speech does. You have to put up with hymns to our God, disguised as holiday cheer, on your favorite political shows. The easy assumption of all your friends (eighty-five percent of us!) that everyone is religious is also tough. I have been in “tiny minority” situations so I know how it feels. Good cross-cultural manners taught me to accept my minority cultural status, when in Mongolia act like a Mongolian and not the “ugly American,” and that is one thing I have never understood about you.

You are a sensible guy. You know that most Americans are religious, have always been religious, and are likely to stay that way. Yet for some reason the fact that you have chosen to reject majority American culture means that the rest of us must change in order to become what you wish us to be. I don’t expect the Buddhists of Ulan Bataar to wish me a merry Christmas, but you seem offended if the Baptists of Alabama wish you one. That is odd, I think, and may have more to do with your personal pain than the best side of your personality.

Of course, my strong disagreement with your position often strains our friendship. I would argue that best evidence suggests that if society adopts your views it will ruin our culture (or it least make it extinct in short order) and damn our souls. There are plenty of people who are wrong, but Christians believe you to be perniciously wrong. You often return the favor by viewing us as the Taliban or a group of theocrats.

The problem, however, seems to me to be simple. You really do want America to be secular, more like Sweden than it is now, while I don’t want it to be a theocracy. No Christian I now wants the kind of religious rule found in Iran, for example. We are opposed to your actual position, while I feel that sometimes your Internet friends are opposed to a cartoon version of ours. Thank you for not making that mistake about your Christian friends!

Of course, I know you are smart. Your position is not stupid and there are good arguments for it. Heaven knows we can be annoying (or at least I can be annoying!) in our seemingly smug surety that we are right. However, please forgive us for that and realize that we too (at our best) are on a dialectical journey. I believe Christianity is true at some personal cost because I believe best reason and best experience demand it. It is not always what I wish were true, but it is what my intellect and my heart unite in demanding of my better self.

Christianity has problems, of course, like the problem of natural evil that are very difficult. I feel the force of them and sometimes think you might be right. Sadly, that old demon logic keeps forcing me back to traditional Christianity. But enough of that . . . philosophical argument can be endless! I will quote Plantinga and then you will quote Flew . . . at least the earlier Flew! I will get my favorite IVP book and you will lug out your Prometheus titles. We are not going to make much progress that way.

What does this have to do with the Narnia film? I think that the problem with your world-view is that it is fundamentally without beauty. It is not ugly since your world view cannot allow for a real beautiful.  If we struggle with the problem of evil, it is because we rejoice in being able to see goodness that is not subjective or merely an arbitrary label placed on reality by our own prejudices. Christianity can lead to ugliness, but it can explain that ugliness with resources from within. We don’t expect humans to be perfect and can account for forgiveness.

The story of Narnia, which is very much a Christian story, contrasts so strongly with the story of secularism. Ours is the world view of Aquinas, the founding of the Universities, medicine, modern science, the Renaissance, and most of the great art of the West, but we are also the religion of the fairy tale. Now I know you have been taught to be view fairy tales as childish nothings . . . myths by which you mean merely false stories.

But isn’t it obvious from a film like Narnia that some stories strike very deep? Themes of redemption and divine love may be overdone in our Western culture, but they are overdone because they still have the power to make men and women weep. Aslan dies for Edmund. That makes no sense by the calculus of atoms and scales that will not allow for the personal, but makes perfect, logical sense to a cosmos full of personality. Narnia is a grand romance and it is not an accident that secularists are not able to tell good fairy tales, but must rely on those old Oxford dons, Tolkien and Lewis, to do it for them. Your great truths cannot be found in myth for you have reduced romance to nothingness in a university without personality.

It is personality and romance that is missing from your universe. When your best thinkers tell me that my love for my wife is one set of selfish genes looking for another set, then I think that he has never read Trollope or Shakespeare or been in love. This is not soft sentimentality, but a set of facts that must be taken into account. Your worldview explains them away by reducing them to some fog floating off matter and energy in mindless motion. My worldview recognizes that we are more sure of love and passion than we are of the existence of that matter and energy themselves. Christians do not explain love away . . . they account for it in the Divine Mind.

Can secularism produce beauty or must it always be parasitic on it? If it is true that religion has produced horrors like the Inquisition, but we have also produced the Renaissance and the great cathedrals of Europe. Can a world-view that believes at bottom that life is meaningless (finding meaning only in the creation of meaning by the individual) inspire the sacrifice necessary for great art? There is no evidence that it can.

Narnia stands for the small against the strong. It stands for the importance of even the animals against the barren and bleak efficiency of an all powerful state. Christianity cannot tolerate the abuse of the individual by either big government or big business and as Narnia demonstrates provides a basis for the nobility of the common. Every sentient being is created in the Image of God and has value. Every voice must be heard and in that universe a hierarchy of gifts can be recognized without fear for basic human rights are secured by who were are and not what we can do.  

The mindless consumption of the unfettered pursuit of wealth, living for self, and not for others can never be made consistent with the religious mind. The jollification of Christmas can be commercialized but only destroyed in doing so. A feast day is about human values and can be enjoyed as well by the poor as by the great and mighty. Religion can account for this, but secularism cannot. Where is the value of the small man in the world where personhood is reduced to DNA? If merit can be measure and worth is based on merit, I fear that is mere sentiment on your part (or a residual Christianity) that prevents debasing the average in favor of the great god of the famous and the powerful. Heaven knows that this is a great enough temptation for Christians, even with our example of the humble Virgin and the crucified Lord, what will happen when our role models come not from the martyrs, but only from the “successful?”

I love free markets, but do not worship them and where they break the dignity of the human person and the laws of God, and then I can limit them. Where shall you find your limits to the desires of the brightest and the best in the meritocracy that you would create?

Can secularism even produce children let alone children’s literature? Children are difficult and they get in the way. They seem a bother and secularists, who proclaim that they are only a Darwinian vehicle for making babies, seem very chary about actually having them. I understand that feeling and Lewis himself, steeped in the comfortable atheism of his intellectual class, missed any chance to have his own children. Surely it is no accident; however, that he began to write stories for children, got married, and became something of a step-father in his later years as he became more thoroughly a Christian? He had a basis in an immortal soul and in eternity to think that present selfishness would be judged as bleak and worthy. Exactly what does a secularist need children for and if secularism itself causes its proponents to stop making babies then how is its embrace of Darwinian fitness coherent?

The world of Narnia on the other hand knows nothing of Darwin or of men and women too selfish to “sacrifice” their present happiness for eternity. This is a world where Peter must fight, because it is his duty to fight. It is a world where children are not just called to stern duties, but an entire world rallies to save them from the secular modern who would stamp out all children to preserve her reign for all eternity. It is the essence of Christianity that the old human order changes and gives way to the new. This is not merely sad, but part of the very fabric of the world, and the sorrow is mitigated by our future hopes. Secularism has no such future hopes and so must try to botox what it has to preserve it in the face of change.

And oddly enough this allows Christians to face the world that way it is, full of death and suffering caused by our evils, and still find joy.

The Narnia film calls for jollification! It opposes a world where it is always bleak winter and never Christmas. Pardon me, but that looks a great deal like your world, old friend. The great philosopher W.V. Quine once said that he preferred ontological deserts . . . he wanted a universe with as few things in it as possible. Pardon me, but some of us, for good reason it seems to me, prefer the fecundity of the Narnian spring to the barren “purity” of the Narnian winter.

All things being equal, and surely you must concede that there good arguments on our side as there are on yours  . . . why shouldn’t we prefer to believe in a world where real goodness, real truth, and real beauty are possible?

“God rest you merry, gentleman.” That is the first line of an old carol. It bids busy men, worldly men like the two of us, to retreat from despair. Why? Christ our Savior was born on Christmas day! The fact that it is an old story and a beautiful one does not make it any less true. The fact that it has profound philosophical defenses does not make it any less beautiful. It is the old story that is at once rational and moving. It unites head and heart by worshipping a divine Logic made flesh.

The Narnia film shows that all the old religions had a fore taste of that great truth. Christianity need not be dour or Puritanical. It has been, and still can be, the basis for science . . . which we both know was the product of the Christian West. It has been, and still can be, the basis for a Bach, Mozart, and Michelangelo. Bluntly, it seems to me that you worldview cannot have both. Where are your fairy stories? Where is your beauty? Where is an adequate basis for the life of self-sacrifice, almost monastic self-sacrifice, which high science demands? As religion fades in this land or in Western Europe, I see more sterility in the culture and more death. I see more despair and bluntly more drugs and less jollification.

At least consider that this children’s story might point to a better way!

Merry Christmas my friend,

John Mark