I remember reading the chronicles of Narnia as a child and really enjoying them.
Thankfully, the Christian sub-text went well over my head, as I'm sure it did for most young readers.
Children are clearly capable of understanding concepts like honour, injustice, Good and Evil and so on, but religious metaphors can be a little trickier to grasp, especially if Lions and Witches are involved.
C.S. Lewis wrote the books to "make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life". Polly Toynbee has written an interesting article in the Guardian on Lewis' epiphany-by-stealth approach.
With the film about to hit Irish cinema screens, it definately won't have the same kind of religious hype surrounding it as it has had over in the States and I can't really imagine any little halos sprouting up overnight around the country. Children like good stories with lots of magic and excitement and there's plenty of that in the Narnia stories.
Still, the propogation of religious ideas through the medium of cinema is an interesting issue. This week saw Californian Republicans losing their patience with Governor Arnold Schwarzeneggar. There is a campaign up and running to try and persuade Mel Gibson to run for office on the Republican ticket. The well-known actor has impeccable conservative credentials. The Passion of Christ was a huge success in America and churches organized block bookings of cinemas to send their congregations to see it.
As Ms. Toynbee points out when talking about the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the basis for both films is a muscular and bullying kind of Christianity, and it's all about power, suffering and guilt. The positive messages of Christ are left out of the Passion, and instead what is focused on is agony and torment. Physical pain is glorified and the whole spectacle is designed to produce only one kind of emotional response: Guilt. Here is a section from her article where she describes Aslan the Lion's death (don't worry, he gets resurrected later on), all because of the little boy Edmund's greed (may he burn in the fires of Hell!).
"The devil, in the shape of the witch, tempts him: for the price of several chunks of turkish delight, rather than 30 pieces of silver, Edmund betrays his siblings and their Narnian friends.
The sins of this "son of Adam" can only be redeemed by the supreme sacrifice of Aslan. This Christ-lion willingly lays down his life, submitting himself to be bound, thrashed and humiliated by the white witch, allowing his golden mane to be cut and himself to be slaughtered on the sacrificial stone table: it cracks in sympathetic agony and his body goes missing."
Religious groups are promoting the film feverishly, looking at it as a way to attract young people into the church. They also fell over themselves to transform the documentary March of the Penguins into something it clearly wasn't. According to them the penguins were monogomous (they change partner every year) upholders of traditional family values(they're birds) and the living proof of intelligent design (the pseudo-scientific theory which people-who-can't-believe-they're-not-special use to attack evolution).
Devout Christians believe in something which cannot be proven. I am fine with that. So why is is that they have to constantly clutch for these little straws. Whatever happened to faith? Why try and engage in scientific debate if at the end of the day you're going to ignore what almost all of the scientists tell you? I think most ten year olds would be able to see that a multitude of penguins on the march has absolutely no religious signifigance whatsover for humanity.
It would be easy to dismiss these people as irrational nuts, but there are many of them and they are quite political. Think of Pat Robertson calling for the assasination of Hugo Chavez. As far as I am concerned it is a good thing for society when the Church and the State maintain a respectful distance. Unfortuantely that is not the way things are happening in many parts of the world, with invariably negative results for free speech and political freedom.
One of the sickest and most distressing manifestations of religious interference is the encouragement of abstinence as a way of combating AIDs in Africa. It doesn't work. It ignores hard material facts. It ignores reality. What is clearly needed is family planning and access to condoms and other forms of protection. It wouldn't hurt to allow them to make their own medicines either, and not be dependent on large multi-nationals. But, no, what matters most is that people thousands of miles away can get to sleep at night, knowing that, ineffective as their solution is, they haven't compromised their Christian values. Much of the funding which is given by the US is dependent upon recipient countries promoting abstinence instead of promoting safe sex.
It reminds me of something I remember reading in the fantastic book (read it please, it's great!) King Leopold's Ghost, which tells the story of Belgium's only colony, the Belgian Congo. Missionaries would travel into the jungle to small villages and take the children away from the heathens, so they could be baptised, often marching them for several days back to their outposts. Many of them would die en route, but as one of the nuns wrote in a letter home, they were lucky enough to have been baptised first.
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