A certain group of Catholic readers\u201d\u201dlet\u2019s call them \u201cChesterton\u2019s warrior children\u201d\u009d\u201d\u201dcannot imagine someone like Lewis writing the things he did and not converting to Catholicism at some point. And since they cannot grant the possibility that one can write like Lewis and be Protestant, they are forced to conjure up fanciful theories to explain Lewis\u2019s Protestantism. The best example of this is the \u201cUlsterior motive\u201d\u009d theory, which claims that Lewis never got over the deep-seated anti-Catholic sentiments of his youth. (These critics conveniently fail to note that his family never seemed to possess any strong anti-Catholic sentiments to begin with, given that their servants were Catholic and Lewis\u2019s parents were not terribly committed to the more radical brands of Irish protestantism.) The warrior children manage to say this with a straight face, which is somewhat remarkable given that many of Lewis\u2019s closest friends were, of course, Catholic.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, American evangelical readers tend to see Lewis as a proto-evangelical, a man utterly committed to classic creedal orthodoxy and utterly uninterested in delving any deeper than that. He is the mere Christian par excellance in their minds and represents a tacit endorsement of the evangelical tendency to avoid the thornier theological questions that usually prompt one to seek out a confessional identity of some sort.<\/p>\n
Both readings, of course, miss the most basic fact of all about Lewis the Christian: CS Lewis was a conservative Anglican churchman. It\u2019s perhaps fitting that amongst all the tributes, it the was the Anglican Alan Jacobs who made this point about Lewis\u2019s identity while also drawing attention to its neglect amongst many of his readers.<\/p>\n