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Mark Tauber, senior vice president of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins which owns the rights to Lewis’s estate, says, “Lewis reaches kids whose parents are reading [Narnia] to them at seven [years-old] or earlier, then people in evangelical or Catholic settings and in Mormon churches are using his adult nonfiction in their teachings. He reaches across age groups and different faith traditions” (“Exploring C.S. Lewis’s Lasting Popularity,” Publishers Weekly, Oct. 14, 2015).
Though Lewis died in 1963, sales of his books rose to two million a year by 1977 and totaled over 200 million in 2026, with no end in sight. No other “evangelical” author comes close to this. (Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life has sold 50 million copies.)
Robert Hosack, executive editor of Brazos Press says, “C.S. Lewis has become a veritable cottage industry in religious publishing circles” (“Exploring C.S. Lewis’s Lasting Popularity,” Publishers Weekly, Oct. 14, 2015).
The December 2005 edition of Christianity Today was devoted to “C.S. Lewis Superstar.” In an article commemorating the 100th anniversary of Lewis’ birth, J.I. Packer called him “our patron saint” and said that Lewis “has come to be the Aquinas, the Augustine, and the Aesop of contemporary Evangelicalism” (“Still Surprised by Lewis,” Christianity Today, Sept. 7, 1998).
A Christianity Today reader’s poll that year rated Lewis the most influential evangelical writer. In light of the wretched spiritual-doctrinal-moral condition of “evangelicalism” today, that is a very telling statistic.
In its April 23, 2001, issue, Christianity Today again praised C.S. Lewis in an article titled “Myth Matters.” Lewis, called “the 20th century’s greatest Christian apologist,” wrote several mythical works, such as The Chronicles of Narnia, which Christianity Today recommends in the most glowing terms, claiming that “Christ came not to put an end to myth but to take all that is most essential in the myth up into himself and make it real.” I don’t know what to say to this except that it is complete nonsense. In his Chronicles, Lewis depicts Jesus Christ as a lion named Aslan who is slain on a stone table. Christianity Today says, “In Aslan, Christ is made tangible, knowable, real.” As if we can know Jesus Christ best through a fable that is vaguely and inaccurately based on biblical themes and intermingled with paganism.
Lewis is praised on all spectrums of evangelicalism and beyond. He is credited by John Piper as a father of his doctrine of “Christian Hedonism,” and he is praised by Rob Bell in his hell-denying, universalistic book Love Wins. Under the Acknowledgements section, Bell writes, “... to my parents, Rob and Helen, for suggesting when I was in high school that I read C.S. Lewis." I would imagine that Bell’s parents regret that recommendation today, since he has rejected and reinterpreted the biblical Christian faith.
LEWIS’S “DAMNABLE HERESIES”
Even Christianity Today admits, “Clive Staples Lewis was anything but a classic evangelical, socially or theologically. He smoked cigarettes and a pipe, and he regularly visited pubs to drink beer with friends. Though he shared basic Christian beliefs with evangelicals, he didn’t subscribe to biblical inerrancy or penal substitution. He believed in purgatory and baptismal regeneration” (“C.S. Lewis Superstar,” Christianity Today, Dec. 2005).
Following are some of the fundamental doctrines of the Bible that Lewis rejected:
- The inerrant inspiration of Scripture
- The historicity of the Bible
- The necessity of supernatural conversion through repentance and personal faith in Christ
- The “Penal Substitutionary Atonement”
- Salvation by grace without works and sacraments
- The sole Mediatorship of Jesus Christ
- The existence of heaven and hell
- The literal six-day creation
- The doctrine of an eternal, fiery hell
- The doctrine of the finality of one’s destiny at death
- Salvation exclusively through the name of Christ
WHY IS LEWIS SO POPULAR WITH EVANGELICALS TODAY?
In light of his lack of a scriptural salvation testimony, his heresies, his worldliness, and the massive pagan influences in his work, why are evangelicals today so enamored with C.S. Lewis? I believe the following are some of the chief reasons:
First, evangelicals love C.S. Lewis because of his intellectualism.
Second, evangelicals love C.S. Lewis because of his ecumenical thinking and his refusal to practice biblical separation.
Third, evangelicals love C.S. Lewis because of their shared fascination with and sympathy with Rome.
For documentation of these points, see the free eBook C.S. Lewis and Evangelicals Today at the Books section of wayoflife.org.
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