Apparently an offer has been made to Meryl Streep to portray Aslan in an upcoming Chronicles of Narnia series, and there are reports that Aslan will be a female character. Meryl Streep is a very talented actress, but making Aslan female is very problematic and gives us a chance to reflect on modern Western culture.
What Do We Know?
- Netflix has acquired the rights to produce a new Narnia series.
- The first movie will be coming out late 2026, around Thanksgiving time in the theaters, and then it will be on Netflix the next month, sometime in December.
- This new series is a reboot, not a sequel to the previous Disney films.
- They are planning on doing 8 films. The first two of which will be directed by Greta Gerwig.
- Apparently they are going to The Magician’s Nephew first.
- There is also talk of Daniel Craig playing Uncle Andrew.
Why is this a problem?
I liked the 2005 film The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I also like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings triology. In these cases, it didn’t feel like there was an agenda being imposed on the story. It seemed there was at least a basic attempt to honor the author’s intention with the story. For example, Peter Jackson put it like this:
“We made a promise to ourselves at the beginning of the process that we weren’t going to put any of our own politics, our own messages or our own themes into these movies. … In a way, we were trying to make these films for him (Tolkien), not for ourselves.”
You can argue with how successfully this was carried out, but the intention here is noble. It’s a way to honor an important part of culture, rather than impose an agenda on it. A female Aslan is quite different.
One way to state the concern is simply this: Aslan is the allegorical representation of Christ. Christ was a man. So we should not make the allegorical representation of Christ female. Doing so runs contrary to the Son of God’s choice to become incarnate as a man, and also runs contrary to C.S. Lewis’ own views about sexuality and gender. Lewis believed that masculinity and femininity each had a very specific meaning and are not interchangeable.
Consider this passage from Lewis’ Perelandra. In this scene, the character Ransom sees the two Oyarsa (angels) of Mars and Venus, and notices that one is masculine and one is feminine. Lewis then writes:
“What Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the organic adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity.”
It is worth pondering Lewis’ idea that Masculine and Feminine are realities that lie deeper than biology. As Western modernity progresses, we have almost totally lost this vision.
Those of us who are followers of Jesus should be discerning about the way our surrounding culture continues to change. We need to share the hope of Christ with people, and teach and proclaim God’s design for sexuality, gender, and marriage.
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