C.S. Lewis

Why C.S. Lewis Became a Christian

Written by: Paul Cozby | Published on: August 9, 2024

C.S. Lewis remains one of the world’s most beloved and renowned Christian writers even decades after his death in 1963. His books have sold more than a quarter of a billion copies, and he sells more every year than the year before.

Now, with Netflix announcing a new series of films adapting The Chronicles of Narnia books, sales of Lewis’ writings are unlikely to slow down anytime soon.

What may come as a surprise to many is the author of the Narnia series, The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity followed a spiritual path to the Christian faith from a position of deeply held and rigorously defended atheism.

Reflecting on the journey to admitting, at least, there is a God, Lewis described 
himself as “the most reluctant convert in all England.”

His story is a fascinating one and well worth exploring.

C.S. Lewis’ Childhood of Joy and Trauma

Lewis was born and raised in Ireland to an austere, lawyer father and a ray-of-sunshine mother. With his older brother Warnie, Lewis created imaginary worlds, better worlds than the one he knew, which introduced him to a concept he would call “Joy.”

It was short-lived. At age 9, his mother died of cancer, his father – already distant and severe – withdrew even more. As a child, Lewis renounced the protestant faith he was raised in and became an atheist . . . even if he kept it to himself at the time.

The Influence of W.T. Kirkpatrick and Authors Lewis Would Read

Recoiling at the traditional boarding school education of that time, Lewis went to live with and learn from W.T. Kirkpatrick just as Warnie had done before him. As a man who took himself and his work quite seriously, Kirkpatrick formed uncharacteristically solid relationships with his students.

It was a transformational time in more ways than one.

“You will often meet with characters in nature so extravagant that a discreet poet would not venture to set them upon the stage,” Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy, his autobiography. “At Bookham I was met by my new teacher ‘Kirk’ or ‘Knock’ or the Great Knock as my father, my brother and I all called him. We had heard about him all our lives, and I therefore had a very clear impression of what I was in for.”

The Great Knock taught young Lewis the beauty of the rigors of logic. His education was classical, at once broad and deep. In these years he learned to challenge every thought, examine it, weigh it and, eventually, make a judgment on it.

Also in these years, the first seeds of the faith to come were planted. A chance encounter at a rail station book stall introduced Lewis to the Scottish pastor and writer George MacDonald through his fantasy novel Phantastes.

MacDonald was a pioneer in the genre of modern fantasy. In Phantastes, a young man experiences an adventure in a dreamlike land. The work influenced both Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Lewis said Phantastes baptized his imagination. In it he found an invented world similar to those he created as a boy and inspiring a similar joy . . . as if remembering a journey in a country he had never visited.

The Great War. A Great Friendship.

Entering Oxford University in 1917, World War I interrupted Lewis’ education. A year later, at age 19, he was fighting in the trenches in France. A year after, a shrapnel wound sent him from the front to duty in England and eventual discharge.

The death and wanton destruction marked him and led him into deep despair. But it did not destroy his desire to find the joy he had discovered as a youth. That search took a hard turn as he taught at Oxford in the ’20s, found acclaim in his chosen field of Renaissance literature and developed a friendship with fellow instructors who were Christians, among them, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Through many a late-night debate, Lewis’ friends helped him see that a purely material world offered neither hope nor purpose. It could not explain moral order. It could not satisfy his deepest longings.

From a strident atheism, Lewis came to accept a deistic universe, admitting, as he put it, “that God was God.”

His commitment to logic and intellectual honesty served him well here. He may not have wanted a spiritual order beyond the material universe to be true, but he had to admit that reality could not be rationally explained without it.

The Big Turning Point, and Friendship With Tolkien

He conducted his own rigorous study of the gospels and found the promise of the “unvisited country” that had called to him his whole life. Then in 1931, on a stroll with Tolkien along Addison’s Walk at Oxford, the light finally came on.

Lewis loved myths and fairytales, but he considered them “lies breathed through silver.” Tolkien disagreed. The fact that we are able to imagine a world beyond material reality is the first clue there may, in fact, be such a place.

And the gospels, Tolkien argued, are the most important stories of all; however, unlike myths, they are true.

It would be a few days later, on a motorcycle ride with Warnie to Whipsnade Zoo, that his intellectual and spiritual journey led him to believe in Christ and accept him as savior.

In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis wrote: “When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. ‘Emotional’ is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.”

The inspiring conclusion to Lewis’ dramatic early-life story forms the basis of FPA’s play C.S. Lewis On Stage: The Most Reluctant Convert. It led to a film adaptation that opened as the No. 2 movie in the country in 2021 (only behind Dune) and remains streaming around the globe to this day. The compelling story has drawn millions of viewers from 130 countries.

Click the link below to view the trailer for The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis. And visit major streaming services like Amazon Prime, Google Play and Apple TV to watch Lewis’ journey from atheism to faith come to life on screen.

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