It’s not often I get to crib book news from Wonkette, but that’s because her item on the possible motivations behind Jeb Bush’s selection of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for a Florida literacy program was filed under politics when Palm Beach Post staffer S.V. Dáte broke the story. Here’s the gist of the situation: The program includes a contest that will give winners a trip to Orlando where they’ll stay at a Disney hotel and get to see an advance screening of the new film version of C.S. Lewis’s classic novel. That film’s co-produced by Disney and Walden Media, which is owned by Philip Anschutz, a billionaire who’s helped raise a bunch of money for Republicans. Walden’s already a longtime collaborator with the “Just Read, Florida!” program, having contributed cash and prizes in previous book promotions, so there’s some talk about the potential backscratching involved.
It seems like the bigger fight, though, may turn out to be over whether it’s appropriate for a state program to promote a novel that is, as the director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State claims, “simply a retelling of the story of Christ.” Frankly, that strikes me as more than a little reductive.* But let’s leave aside the question of whether The Chronicles of Narnia are proselytizing works, and for that matter the problems many evangelicals have with Lewis–if state programs can’t suggest books with Christian themes, does that mean that public institutions can’t get kids excited about Charles Dickens? Oh, wait, apparently it does.
*Yep, it’s that “simply” that bugs me. As Lewis himself once said, “I did not say to myself ‘Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia’; I said ‘Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as he became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen’.”