I’ve recently started using the term Evangelical Narnia as a kind of private shorthand.
I don’t mean it entirely negatively. In fact, that’s the point.
It’s not the case that everyone wants to leave Narnia because it’s awful.
In fact Narnia can be quite wonderful.
That’s why people stay.
I grew up in a conservative Plymouth Brethren environment, and much more than that I had the hard core experience: I was also the Preacher’s kid and the Pastor/Elder’s Kid.
Later in my life I’ve looked back and thought that I was locked in a kind of cultural cupboard for many years. But thinking about it, a cupboard is small, dusty and disappointing.
Evangelical Narnia is rather more attractive.
It is a complete world. It contains stories, heroes, villains, certainty, meaning and a reassuring explanation for almost everything. Most importantly, it contains a clear distinction between inside and outside.
Inside is where the truth is.
Outside is where people are mistaken.
At least, that is the theory.
The University Problem
People often imagine that university destroys faith through clever lecturers spouting militant atheism. Apart from one lecturer, that wasn’t really my experience. Even the study of other religions didn’t at the time, drown my naive faith in a sea of new founded relativism.
University did not initially challenge my faith directly. The Christian Union saw to that. Our friendly holy huddle had Bible studies, worship meetings and enough apologetics to repel a small invasion. It was a mini Evangelical Narnia all of its own.
Reality, however, proved considerably more difficult to defend against.
The real problem was encountering actual people.
Among them was an atheist girl.
This is not a simple “met a girl, lost my faith” story. My certainty was already wobbling, and the implications would take another decade to work themselves out.
But she did present a problem.
Not because she won arguments.
Because she stubbornly refused to fit the category.
She was supposed to be an unbeliever.
Instead she appeared to be a human being.
This was unexpectedly inconvenient.
It is surprisingly difficult to gaze lovingly into somebody’s eyes whilst simultaneously regarding them as an evangelistic project.
As a foundation for a healthy relationship, this is not ideal.
Reality Overload
The crisis that really destabilized me as a young student was not simply theological.
It was existential.
The best description I have for it now is reality overload.
For years I had been raised within a tightly integrated symbolic world. Then I stepped outside it and discovered reality was larger than advertised.
Much larger.
I sometimes describe the experience this way.
I opened the wardrobe door and stepped out into the street. The sun was shining. My eyes were watering. I couldn’t focus properly.
The shock wasn’t the darkness. I was after all a young pilgrim girded with the shield of faith.
It was the light.
And yes, perhaps the devil appears as a highly illuminated angel but I could not shake my impression that the outside world contained far more goodness than I had been led to expect.
Good atheists.
Wise unbelievers.
Beautiful ideas.
Different kinds of love and alternative forms of family life
Even other ways to finding meaning and purpose in life.
Entire worlds that existed perfectly happily without asking Evangelical Narnia for permission.
The Virtues of Narnia
Human beings seem to have an incurable tendency to create Narnias. We gather with those who have similar beliefs and therefore reinforce our own. And in this group everything makes sense, and even the implausible suddenly becomes believable. More than just creating an echo chamber we also try to create the ultimate safe space – even if we don’t call it that – a social and intellectual pocket reality in which to dwell. This is a reality with fortified borders, doctrinal shibboleth passwords, and earnest thought police gatekeepers. In this way we are separated from what would otherwise be problematic and challenging for our world view.
The trouble starts when we forget that Narnia is Narnia.
As a young evangelical, I assumed Evangelical Narnia was simply reality described accurately. Later, after some considerable reality overload, I discovered that reality was inconveniently larger.
The trouble with escaping one plausibility structure is that one soon discovers a regrettable human tendency to construct another.
That is perhaps the most annoying lesson of all.
Conservative Narnia
My family’s brand of British evangelicalism was generally non-political though socially conservative. Believe it or not, there was a long period when I was an old style Lefty after university, which was also my agnostic era and a time when I was, I suppose, eclectically neo-pagan adjacent. I was even a member of the Green Party for a while – neo-paganism being of course ‘the Green Party at prayer’. These days I have been on a further intellectual journey and I lean more into traditionalism and conservatism in the political secular sense. So it had to happen: now and again I look around me and catch myself building (or entering) a conservative political Narnia to replace the religious version.
This Narnia has traditions.
Boundaries.
A sense of cultural inheritance.
It is deeply concerned about decline, suspecting that Western Civilization peaked around 1957 – the rose tinted era before I was born.
Well, at least I now recognize the architectural style.
The interesting thing is that all the arguments which eventually undermined Evangelical Narnia also apply to Conservative Narnia.
The world beyond the walls is never as simple as the people inside imagine.
The outsiders are not barbarians.
The insiders are not saints.
Reality remains stubbornly untidy.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously observed, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. I would also add, the line between truth and error, and the beautiful and the ugly.
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