As the release date of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe approaches, I'm becoming increasingly annoyed, not at the movie itself, but at the treatment of C.S. Lewis by, er, well, the liberal media, which insists upon tarring Lewis with the same brush that it uses for American evangelical Christians. The current nadir of this trend is this article in Sunday's New York Times, which may be the meanest, most ill-spirited thing the Times has published since it tried to eviscerate Woody Allen three years ago. The article is ostensibly about the difficulty of balancing the Christian and commercial aspects in the upcoming Narnia movie—and really, hasn't this angle been beaten to death already?—but it's really an excuse for a lot of snarky ad hominem jokes at Lewis's expense. Writes author Charles McGrath:

The exact nature of [the relationship between Lewis and Minto Moore] is something that many of Lewis's biographers would prefer to tiptoe around. But Lewis was far from a sexual innocent, and the evidence strongly suggests that, at least until he got religion, there was an erotic component to his life with Minto. Did they actually sleep together, this earnest, scholarly young man, conventional in almost every other way, and a woman 26 years his senior? Walter Hooper, the editor of Lewis's "Collected Letters," thinks it "not improbable." A.N. Wilson, the best and most persuasive of Lewis's biographers, argues that there's no reason at all to think they didn't, leaving us with the baffling and disquieting psychological picture of C.S. Lewis, the great scholar and writer and Christian apologist-to-be, pedaling off on his bicycle, his academic gown flapping in the wind, to have a nooner with Mum.

Actually, Charles McGrath is the one who has left us with this "baffling and disquieting psychological picture," which he so lovingly limns, even when the "strongly suggestive" evidence boils down to "Hey, there's no reason to think they didn't." (I really hope that my biographer takes the same approach someday, and concludes that there's no reason to think that I didn't make out with Natalie Portman one night at the Signet.) McGrath goes on to note that "Lewis was a progressive in nothing except his choice of women to sleep with," calls Aslan "Jesus in a Bert Lahr suit," and also claims that the Narnia books are "not nearly as well written as either the Potter or the Dark Materials books." You don't need to be Harold Bloom to find that last judgment more than slightly questionable.

Really, though, I shouldn't blame the Times, but the American evangelicals who have persuaded a bunch of otherwise reasonable people that if something expresses even a hint of Christian allegory, we ought to attack it, boycott it, or—worst of all—condescend to it, as if there were no distinction between The Divine Comedy and the Left Behind series. In all seriousness, we aren't too far from a point where people will confuse Dante with Jerry Falwell, and assume that he must have been a questionable moron. C.S. Lewis was no Dante, but he was no Jerry Falwell, either, and we all lose out, culturally speaking, if we can't make the distinction. This may be one of the worst aspects of the American evangelical legacy: with their sanctimoniousness and occasional stupidity, they've alienated a lot of really smart people from some really good books.