Chronicles of Narnia: Good Old (Racist) Christian Values?
This admission is sure to lower my standing in the geek community, but I somehow made it through my childhood without touching a single Narnia book. For the rest of you who are more culturally literate, does this critique ring true?
...To millions of readers of the original C. S. Lewis books, the story is a childhood tale of wonder and triumph, but a celebrated fantasy author, Philip Pullman, has warned they are stories of racism and thinly veiled religious propaganda that will corrupt children rather than inspire them.
He complained at the weekend that Lewis's books portrayed a version of Christianity that relied on martial combat, outdated fears of sexuality and women, and also portrayed a religion that looked a lot like Islam in unashamedly racist terms.
"It's not the presence of Christian doctrine I object to so much as the absence of Christian virtue," Pullman told the Observer. "The highest virtue, we have on the authority of the New Testament itself, is love, and yet you find not a trace of that in the books," he said...
