If Lewis wrote today

Off the top of my head, the following things accurately describe C. S. Lewis when he was writing Christian apologetics:

• Avid tobacco smoker.

• Avid beer drinker.

• Oxbridge don.

• Scholar of medieval literature.

• Devotee of pagan literature.

• Lover of pagan myth.

• Poet and advocate of poetry (secular and religious).

• Novelist and advocate of fiction (secular and religious).

• Husband to a divorcee.

• Believer in evolution.

• Believer in a cosmos billions of years old.

• Confirmed member of the Church of England.

• Believer in the necessity and efficacy of the sacraments.

• Believer in the authority of church tradition.

• Believer in the ordination of priests.

• Witness and/or godfather to numerous infant baptisms.

• Participant in the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer.

• Confessor of the creed.

• A writer who refers readily and without apology or embarrassment to saints, mystics, and “the blessed sacrament.”

In other words, Lewis was not much of an American evangelical—that is, not a primitivist, not a teetotaler, not a literal reader of Genesis 1–11, not a strict inerrantist, not a Young Earth Creationist, not a Zwinglian on the Supper, not hesitant about sacred tradition, not anti-creedal, not anti-paedobaptism, not anti-establishmentarian, not anti-sacramental, not congregationalist, not anti-evolution, not squeamish about pagan or secular culture, not allergic to “catholic” language about the saints or sacraments or liturgy.

To be clear, Lewis was not a closet Roman Catholic either. And I may be stretching or misremembering on one or two bullet points. Regardless, the point isn’t that Lewis was Roman rather than (American) evangelical. It’s that he was Anglican, with all that that identity meant and entailed in the early to mid–twentieth century.

Others have drawn attention to similar features of Lewis’s life, thought, and work. Mark Noll reminded me of this in his recent piece for Ad Fontes on Lewis’s initial reception in America. But here’s the question it raised for me.

If there were a similar author today, would American evangelicals feel about him the way they feel (now) about Lewis? Would they blurb his books and invite him to conferences? Would they push him into pulpits and put his works in the hands of young people? Would they move heaven and earth to publish him in their flagship journals and magazines? Would they feel that he represented them, giving eloquent voice to their life and faith as believers?

What I don’t mean is: Could someone like this get a hearing today? Clearly there are plenty of Anglican (and not a few old-school Presbyterian) authors and speakers who fit the bill and don’t seem to have trouble getting published or finding venues. I would argue that many of them code “moderate” or occasionally “left of center” to normie evangelicals, but even still: they exist.

No, what I mean is: No one that I can think of who meets most/all of these descriptions would be received across the board—by charismatics, by non-denom-ers, by Baptists, by Reformed, by conservatives, by hardliners, by squishy nonpartisan types—as “our guy,” as “one of us,” as fundamentally non-threatening and unqualifiedly lauded. I just can’t see it. Whether it’s the “catholic” language and doctrine, or the personal life, or the evolution stuff, or the scriptural issues, or the elite status—one or another item would prove one too many.

Now. At first glance there’s an obvious rebuff here: N. T. Wright. Is Wright’s popularity an exception that proves the rule, then? Or just a debunking of the rule altogether?

I think it’s the former, for at least four reasons.

First, because Wright very famously has from the beginning been a point of serious dispute among Reformed pastors, seminaries, institutions, and theologians in America. Second, because Wright’s writing is so much less “cultural” (for lack of a better term) than Lewis’s and so much more biblical: quite literally translating, commenting on, and interpreting the Bible. Third, because Wright isn’t exactly known for his tobacco and alcohol habits, much less for asking parson after parson to perform a wedding—as Lewis did—in contravention of the laws of the Church of England.

And fourth, because it seems to me that evangelicals’ relationship to Wright is less affective and more transactional than it is with Lewis. They want (above all) the imprimatur of the Oxbridge New Testament scholar and his confidence in the reliability and truth of the Scriptures; they don’t want (on the whole) their kids to become “high church” and start baptizing babies, reciting the creed, grabbing a pint, and believing in evolution. (Not to mention—as American evangelicals who have gone Anglican are known to do—adoring the Eucharist, submitting to bishops, calling priests “Father,” or asking saints for intercession.)

I don’t mean the foregoing as some sort of knockdown argument. There are other, smaller exceptions one could point to. And Lewis is Lewis; he’s a one of one. There are historical and social and political and generational reasons why Living Lewis in 2024 wouldn’t fly with American evangelicals the way Dead Lewis does. I get it.

It’s just a thought I had. And it gets at something that irks me, even if I can’t quite put a finger on it. A gesture or a feeling. I wonder whether it resonates with others.

That’s what a blog’s for, no? Floating half-formed intuitions into the world…

My latest: a review of Mark Noll in The Christian Century

In the new issue of The Christian Century I have a review of Mark Noll’s latest book, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911. Superlatives fail, as they usually do with Noll’s work. The book is more than a “mere” history, though. It has an argument to make. Here’s how I begin to lay it out:

The United States was, from the start, founded and widely understood as a repudiation of and alternative to European Christendom. Whatever the proper relationship between church and state, the federal government would have no established religion—would not, that is, tax citizens in sponsorship of a formal ecclesiastical body. On this arrangement, most nascent Americans agreed. What then would, or should, the implications be for Christian faith and doctrine in the public square? How could Christian society endure without the legal and political trappings of Christendom?

Answer: through the Bible. Not the Bible and; not the Bible as mediated by. The Bible alone. America would be the first of its kind: a “Bible civilization.” That is to say, a constitutional republic of coequal citizens whose common, voluntary trust in the truth and authority of Christian scripture would simultaneously (1) put the lie to the “necessity” of coercive religious regimes, (2) provide the moral character required for a liberal democracy to flourish, and (3) fulfill the promise of the Protestant Reformation. Sola scriptura thus became the unwritten law of the land. Regardless of one’s confession or tradition, the sufficiency of the Bible for all aspects of life—the canon as the cornerstone for religion, ethics, and politics alike—was axiomatic. For more than a century, it functioned as a given in public argument. Only rarely did it call for an argument itself.

Keep reading for more, including a disagreement with Noll regarding how to interpret prior generations’ disputes over how to read the Bible, in this case about chattel slavery.