Alister McGrath: A 'mere Christian'? Assessing C.S. Lewis after fifty years

Few can have failed to notice that this day marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis (1898-1963).

Throughout the summer, Lewis has featured prominently in literary festivals across the length and breadth of England. His home church - Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, Oxford - arranged a modest celebration of the anniversary in September, and found themselves swamped by the public interest. Westminster Abbey organised a major conference to mark his religious significance, and were astonished and delighted when the 850 tickets sold out well in advance. The BBC - for whom Lewis gave four series of talks during the Second World War - has made frequent reference to Lewis in recent weeks, and will be highlighting his significance in a series of programmes dedicated to Lewis.

Why this interest in Britain, I found myself wondering? Conventional wisdom has it that Lewis is phenomenally successful in North America, while being a prophet without honour in the United Kingdom. Yet the response to the Lewis anniversary events in England suggests that this judgement may need to be reviewed. Lewis's star has risen in the media, popular culture and the academy. 50 years after his death, Lewis has become a figure of cultural, intellectual and literary significance in his homeland, without losing his appeal elsewhere.

This development would have taken Lewis by surprise. In the final years of his life, Lewis was given to expressing the view that he would be remembered at most for about five years after his death. He would be a spent force, culture having moved on in directions which would have left him behind. There is ample evidence that Lewis did indeed go through some such marginalisation in the 1960s. Many have noted the inadequacy of his response to John Robinson's hugely influential book Honest to God (1963), although this probably reflects his poor health as much as his inability to grasp the new directions in which British society was moving. Lewis might well have connected up with cultural anxieties of the period of the Second World War and its aftermath. But the new cultural mood of the 1960s had no place for Lewis's defence of the Christian faith, or his careful justification of the continuing value of older literary works and their embedded ideas and norms. The sales of his writings went into decline. Keep reading