Here on Our American Stories, we celebrate the lives that shape our world, and today we turn to a true literary legend whose words have captivated generations across America: C.S. Lewis. Famous for ushering readers into the enchanting world of The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis was a master storyteller whose books, like Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters, continue to sell millions annually. His powerful insights into faith, good versus evil, and the human condition have made him a beloved figure, inspiring countless people from all walks of life.
But C.S. Lewis’s own journey was as compelling as any of his fictional tales. He began as a fierce atheist, wrestling with life’s biggest questions, before embarking on a profound transformation to become one of the twentieth century’s most influential Christian apologists. Join us as we explore the remarkable path of this Oxford scholar, a man whose friendships, intellectual quests, and deeply held beliefs led him to craft stories and arguments that resonate with enduring hope and wisdom. Discover the enduring legacy of a man whose quest for truth continues to speak to the heart of our shared American experience.
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On November 22nd, 1963, three towering figures of the twentieth century died. President John F. Kennedy was killed by a sniper’s bullet in Dallas, Texas. Huxley, author of Brave New World, succumbed to cancer. And in the exact hour as Kennedy’s assassination, in the cloistered, scholarly world of Oxford, England, the long career of Clive Staples Lewis ended due to kidney failure. He was sixty-four years old. C. S. Lewis’s career was defined by his works and Christian apologetic writings. Apologetics, meaning the discipline of defending or attempting to prove the truth of Christian doctrines through systematic argumentation and discourse. Here’s Lewis scholar Dabney Hart, answering the question, “Who was C. S. Lewis?”
He became the leading Christian apologist of the second half of the twentieth century, and he became the author of the most important chol series of the twentieth century. He was a complex man. C. S.
Lewis was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on November 29th, 1898. The younger of two boys, Lewis enrolled at Oxford University, the oldest university in the English-speaking world, and referred to himself at this age as an atheist. His time at Oxford was cut short at nineteen when he volunteered and was sent to the frontline trenches in northern France during World War I, wounded from an exploding shell. After one year in battle, Lewis returned to Oxford University, where he graduated with honors, and it was there where he was then elected to begin his nearly thirty-year tenure at model In College. Here, with a pint of beer and a pipe, Lewis spent many late evenings at local pubs in philosophical discussion with friends such as J. R. R. Tolkien, Hugo Dyson, and other members of his late-night social group were also important for his transformation from an atheist to a theist to a Christian. From about the age of ten until he was thirty-three, he had been assuming that Christianity was just another myth, a beautiful lie. Here are Lewis scholars Professor Lyle Dorsett and Christopher Mitchell from Wheaton College.
He was the most reluctant convert in the United Kingdom. He didn’t really want to be a believer, but he couldn’t help himself. He was drawn to God. God kept drawing him to him.
And then he read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man, and at that point he began to see that maybe Christianity was not so intellectually in the dark as he had thought. And so there’s this journey. But what he’s doing at this point is he’s really looking for reasons not to believe in the Christian faith. And yet, without him even trying, things are coming into his life to force him to look at it and say, “Well, maybe it’s not such an open and shut case.”
It was also during these conversations at the pub where C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien decided to write what we now know as The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. Here again is Christopher Mitchell.
The story is told that at a point they sort of agreed that nobody was writing the kind of books that they liked to read, so they decided that they would do it.
All of C. S. Lewis’s forty-plus books have stayed in print since their initial publishing. In fact, sales have been increasing, with Narnia sales reaching 1 million annually, and his nonfiction Christian writings are not only popular, but they appeal to Christians from all denominations. Here’s Lewis scholar Hart.
The basis of his widespread popularity is that his Christian faith was, as he called it, Mere Christianity. It was basic Christianity. It was Christianity that created a unifying element, and so Roman Catholics and Baptists and many others find there a reinforcement.
A central part of Lewis’s so-called Mere Christianity is what has become known as Lewis’s trilemma: “What do you do…
…with a world full of people who say Jesus was a great teacher, yet they’re saying he’s not who he said he was? He’s a great teacher, but he’s not God.” And Lewis says, “Well, you know, how can he be a great man and a great teacher? You know, a wonderful man, a wonderful prophet, but yet not who he says he is. He’s either a liar, he’s a lunatic, or he’s who he says he is.”
This was a brave move considering the secular age Lewis was living in. After all, most of the world saw only two ways to live. You either became a Nazi and conquered the world, or you became a Communist and saved it. Years before Oslan and the White Witch in the fictional Kingdom of Narnia was penned, C. S. Lewis explored the theme of good and evil in a thin volume of imaginative letters between two devils, philosophical and diabolical, yet entertaining and easily readable by the masses. The Screwtape Letters as a satirical portrait of an elderly retired devil named Screwtape and his nephew, a young demon apprentice tempter named Wormwood. Each of the thirty-one letters from Screwtape were originally published each week in a church newspaper in 1941. The full collection of letters were published on February 9th, 1942. The first edition of 2,000 copies were sold out even before the book was released. It would be reprinted eight more times before the end of the year and led Lewis to being put on the cover of Time magazine with the demon Screwtape standing on his left shoulder.
When we come back, more of the remarkable story of one of the world’s greatest writers, C. S. Lewis, on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here. As we approach our nation’s 250th anniversary, I’d like to remind you that all the history stories you hear on this show are brought to you by the great folks at Hillsdale College. And Hillsdale isn’t just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale.edu to find out about their terrific free online courses. Again, go to Hillsdale.edu and sign up for their free and terrific online courses. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of C. S. Lewis. Let’s pick up where we last left off with Greg Hengler telling the story of C. S. Lewis’s satirical masterpiece, The Screwtape Letters. Here again is Lewis scholar Lyle Dorsett.
He wanted to do something that would engage people, that would engage their imaginations as well as their minds, so he settled on this technique of these letters. But one of his purposes is for people to understand the battle that’s going on in their own souls and in the world around them, the struggle between good and evil, and understand what the stakes are and how deep these are.
The two devils are rather cunning. They’re not interested in finding the one perfect moment by which the young man will turn back on his faith and his God. After all, Screwtape advises Wormwood, “Why use adultery when golf will do?” Here’s Wormwood reading a letter from his Uncle Screwtape.
And doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to hell is the gradual one, the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. Your affectionate uncle.
Screwtape. Lewis’s point was this: if we could overhear what our enemies say about us, in this case, demonic enemies, it would shock us into realization that we’re really in a spiritual battle.
You young tempters are so predictable, it’s all so and flash with you, when in fact it’s much better to keep the patient ignorant of your existence.
“How could we accomplish such a thing?” “Well,”
There are many different ways. The worship of sex, some aspects of psychoanalysis, this thing some call a life force. They may prove useful if once we can produce our perfect work. The Materialist Magician—the man not using but veritably worshiping what he vaguely calls forces while denying the existence of spirits—then the end of the war will be in sight. Oh, wondrous day! The fact that devils are predominantly comic or absurdly exaggerated figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that—it is an old textbook method of confusing them—he therefore cannot believe in you.
Right. Here’s Screwtape explaining to Wormwood that the battle is not a carnal one, as humans often think, but it is spiritual.
But this business of the humans being in love, is that desirable or not?
Really? Wormwood? That is the sort of question what expects them to ask. Leave them to discuss whether love or patriotism, or celibacy, or candles and altars, or teetotalism, or education are good or bad. Can’t you see there is no answer? Oh, nothing matters at all except the tendency of a given state of mind in given circumstances to move a particular patient at a particular moment nearer to the Enemy or nearer to us.
“Got it. Yes, Uncle.” Temptation and Screwtape is distortion, exaggeration, and short lies that the Enemy tells the believer so that he will mistrust God. In small sins will snowball into big sins.
Talk to him about moderation in all things. If you can get him to the point of thinking that religion is all very well up to a point, you can feel quite happy about his soul. Brilliantly, a “moderated religion” is as good for us as no religion at all, and much more amusing.
Here’s Wormwood reading a follow-up letter from his Uncle Screwtape.
My dear Wormwood, obviously you are making excellent progress. For this reason, I am almost glad to hear that he is still a churchgoer and a communicant. What I know, there are dangers in this, but anything is better than that: He should realize the break he has made with the first months of his Christian life. As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian, he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements, but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago. And while he thinks that we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognized sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy feeling that he hasn’t been doing very well lately.
The purpose of Lewis’s Screwtape Letters was to stimulate a fascinating discourse on the sinful nature of man versus the redemptive nature of God. As Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.” Yet, despite his lengthy and acclaimed tenure at Oxford, this man was repeatedly denied professorship.
His popularity on a lay level, his willingness to write outside the academic community, to write for the common person, and especially to write theology—to write Christianity—and to do it so boldly and actually to attack his colleagues’ positions didn’t make him popular.
Despite being shunned by his colleagues in academia, Lewis was besieged by countless letters from fans in the English-speaking world, and he personally responded to every single one. Considered by many, if not most, to be the greatest Christian writer in the English language, C. S. Lewis has left an unmatched legacy. Here again is Lyle Dorsett, Christopher Mitchell, and Walter Hooper, literary advisor to the Lewis estate.
I consider Lewis’s greatest legacy being that the thirty-some books he wrote in many genres, all the writing he did, that many, many lives during his lifetime and continuing to this day have been utterly changed because of what he did. Broken people, wounded people, people bound up in all kinds of things they wanted to be free from, have found freedom through Jesus Christ that Lewis’s books pointed to. I certainly was one of those, and I am not unique.
You may not, at the end of the day agree with him, but Christianity is no longer this mindless believism. But there there’s a reason for accepting these things, and you just can’t write it off. And those who do, I think have not really listened to him.
Well. In other writers you’ve been finding…
You’ve been reading, you’ve got a corner of the curtain that’s raised; you’ve got a little bit of the truth. With Lewis, the big curtains just open up wide. They extend all the way to the side of the theater, and you see everything that’s in front of you. You see more than you’ve ever seen before. To see through Lewis’s eyes is to see the universe almost as I think God sees it.
Lewis admitted that while the writing process for The Screwtape Letters was easy, he confessed, “being in the mindset of a demon had its consequences.” It almost smothered me before I was done. But Lewis’s readers are eternally grateful. As The New Yorker stated, “if wit and wisdom, style, and scholarship are requisites to passage through the pearly gates, Mr. Lewis will be among the angels.”
Had a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler, and I love that line: “No man knows how bad he is until he tries to be good.” And of course, The Screwtape Letters may be the best entrance point to Christianity because it starts with life as seen by demons, by devils, a masterpiece of humor, wit and grace, the story of The Screwtape Letters, here on Our American Stories.
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