Why Lewis wrote fiction

Why did C. S. Lewis write Christian fiction? He seemed to have several related motivations:

“Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.” (C. S. Lewis, 9 August 1939), The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis.

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.  "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said"

And finally, though it may seem a sour paradox – we must sometimes get away from the Authorised Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls. Early associations endear but they also confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity the transporting or horrifying realities of which the book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame or struck dumb with terror or carried out of ourselves by ravishing throes and adoration. Does the word ‘scourged’ really come home to us like ‘flogged’? Does ‘mocked him’ sting like ‘jeered at him’? "Introduction to J.B. Phillips’ Letters to Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles." 

Our great danger at present is lest the church should continue to practice a merely missionary technique in what has become a missionary situation. A century ago our task was to edify those who had been brought up in the faith: our present task is chiefly to convert and instruct infidels. Great Britain is as much part of the mission field as China. Now if you were sent to the Bantus you would be taught their language and traditions. You need similar teaching about the language and mental habits of your own uneducated and unbelieving fellow countrymen. Many priests are quite ignorant on this subject. What I know about it I have learned from talking in R.A.F.8 camps. They were mostly inhabited by Englishmen and, therefore, some of what I shall say may be irrelevant to the situation in Wales. You will sift out what does not apply.

(1) I find that the uneducated Englishman is an almost total sceptic about history. I had expected he would disbelieve the Gospels because they contain miracles: but he really disbelieves them because they deal with things that happened two thousand years ago. He would disbelieve equally in the battle of Actium if he heard of it. To those who have had our kind of education, his state of mind is very difficult to realize. To us the present has always appeared as one section in a huge continuous process.

In his mind the present occupies almost the whole field of vision. Beyond it, isolated from it, and quite unimportant, is something called "the old days"—a small, comic jungle in which highwaymen, Queen Elizabeth, knights-in-armor, etc. wander about. Then (strangest of all) beyond the old days comes a picture of "primitive man." He is "science," not "history," and is therefore felt to be much more real than the old days. In other words, the prehistoric is much more believed in than the historic.

(2) He has a distrust (very rational in the state of his knowledge) of ancient texts. Thus a man has sometimes said to me, "These records were written in the days before printing, weren't they? And you haven't got the original bit of paper, have you? So what it comes to is that someone wrote something and someone else copied it and someone else copied that and so on. Well, by the time it comes to us, it won't be in the least like the original." This is a difficult objection to deal with because one cannot, there and then, start teaching the whole science of textual criticism. But at this point their real religion (i.e. faith in "science") has come to my aid. The assurance that there is a "science" called "textual criticism" and that its results (not only as regards the New Testament, but as regards ancient texts in general) are generally accepted, will usually be received without objection. (I need hardly point out that the word "text" must not be used, since to your audience it means only "a scriptural quotation.")

(3) A sense of sin is almost totally lacking. Our situation is thus very different from that of the Apostles. The Pagans (and still more the metuentes9) to whom they preached were haunted by a sense of guilt and to them the Gospel was, therefore, "good news." We address people who have been trained to believe that whatever goes wrong in the world is someone else's fault—the capitalists', the government's, the Nazis', the generals', etc. They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world. "Christian Apologetics"

To take stock, Lewis wrote Christian fiction because:

i) Many Englishmen of his generation were too illiterate to understand traditional Christian jargon. 

ii) Many were skeptical about historical knowledge.

iii) Traditional English worship coated the Gospel in so much pious shellac that it made no impression. 

iv) A good story, a story with mythic power, can steal past the censor. 

How should we evaluate his motivations?

i) His evangelistic impulse is commendable.

ii) From a strictly artistic standpoint, the best way to write fiction is to have a good idea for a story, and not begin with an agenda, then create a story to illustrate the agenda. Mind you, some authors have the talent to pull that off, but for less talented authors it comes across as preachy and stilted. Where the story is secondary to the agenda, where the story exists to make a point, and not because it has its own dramatic logic and appeal.

iii) Of course, it might be objected that evangelism should take precedence over artistic considerations, and in an ultimate sense that's true, but it's a false dichotomy. It's not as if you can only do one or the other. You can write fiction and do apologetics. Just keep them separate. 

iv) In addition, when writing Christian fiction (or nonfiction devotional writing), the most authentic expression of Christian piety will come, not from beginning with an evangelist agenda, but from how the author finds Christian meaning in his own experience. How he makes sense of his own life and the world around him. Christian fiction should be one way for an author to internalize his faith. Life as interpretation and interpretation as life. That may have an evangelistic side-effect on the reader, and it will be more persuasive because it goes to the taproot of the author's lived-in faith. 

v) A more serious problem with writing analogical Christian fiction is that the mythos of the storybook world may become a substitute for the original message it was designed to illustrate. When the author transmutes Christian theology into fictional analogies, do readers make the reverse transition? Or does that become an alternative to Christian theology? Does the mythos become their theological frame of reference?

vi) Apropos (v), the fiction of Lewis is more entertaining than the Bible. It avoids much that is dull, grubby, tawdry, and obscure in Scripture. Fiction is selective in a way that history is not. So it's easier for the reader to get his theology from The Space Trilogy, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Screwtape Letters, than the complex, emotionally and intellectually demanding anthology of Scripture. To be sure, a reader is as much at fault as the author when that happens. 

In fairness, I hasten to add that Perelandra is a little different. It's not a recasting or reinterpretation of the biblical Fall, but an alternate history. What if the Tempter failed? In that regard, it doesn't replace Gen 3.