Not a Tame Lion

On the Conservative Evangelical Misuse of Aslan

My friend send me a poem by Tom Hirons entitled Sometimes a Wild God and before going on I would strongly encourage you to go read it or listen to the author reading it and come back.

Now that you have enjoyed that, I want to talk about Aslan and, because I am unable to help myself, I will begin with some background for those who have not yet had the joy of experiencing the Narnia books and, maybe, also for those who have read them. In the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan is the Son of the Emperor-over-the-Sea. He is a lion—the lion—who sang the world of Narnia into being. It is common for people to say that Aslan is an allegory for Jesus but, as Lewis and Tolkien both would have reminded us, that claim represents a misunderstanding of allegory and of the Narnia stories generally. Aslan isn’t so much an allegory for Jesus as He is Lewis’ conjecture about the mode in which Jesus might operate in a world with talking animals, dwarves, dryads, naiads, giants, and trolls, and fauns, and centaurs, and unicorns. Think if Narnia existed then Aslan is how Jesus would show up there.

Before the reader ever meets Aslan directly in the novels—and this is one important reason that the Chronicles really ought to be read in order of publication—we are introduced to him in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe through a description and by the protagonist’s reaction to his name.

And now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken [his name] everyone felt quite different.... At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in its inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer

Even in just his name Aslan communicates delight, dread, comfort, adventure: life. A little later on the children (Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy) are talking to Mr. & Mrs. Beaver about how they might save the faun Tumnus when the topic of Aslan comes up again and the same thing happens

“It’s no good, Son of Adam,” said Mr. Beaver, “no good your trying, of all people. but now that Aslan is on the move—”

“Oh, yes! Tell us about Aslan!” said several voices at once; for once again that strange feeling—like the first signs of spring, like good news, had come over them.

All of this sets up one of the most frequently quoted lines from the whole series:

“Why. Daughter of Eve, that’s what I brought you here for. I’m to lead you where you shall meet him,” said Mr. Beaver.

“Is—is he a man?” asked Lucy.

“Aslan a man!” said Mr. Beaver sternly. “Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-beyond-the-Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion—the Lion, the great Lion.”

“Ooh!” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”

“That you will dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver; “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”

“Then he is isn’t safe?” said Lucy

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

“I’m longing to see him,” said Peter, “even if I doo feel frightened when it comes to the point.” [emphasis mine]

I want to bring that introduction of Aslan into conversation with another description of him later in the same book. After the antagonist has been defeated and all is (for the time) set right we are told:

But amid all these rejoicings Aslan himself quietly slipped away. And when the Kings [Peter and Edmund] and Queens [Susan and Lucy] noticed that he wasn’t there they said nothing about it. For Mr. Beaver had warned them, “He’ll be coming and going,” he had said. “One day you’ll see him and another you won’t. He doesn’t like being tied down—and of course he has other countries to attend to. It’s quite all right. He’ll often drop in. Only you mustn’t press him. He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.”

Aslan is not a tame lion. Translating from Lewis’ fiction to a more conventional theology, Jesus is not predictable—He can’t be controlled or kept within our expectations of him. In her sermon this week my wife, Ashley, quoted “not a tame lion” and concluded her sermon saying “We do not serve a tame God. This life is full of twists and turns, but he is good. Trusting Jesus can be scary, but it’s worth it.”

These two descriptions of Aslan: that he isn’t tame; isn’t safe, but that he is Good are likely the two most quoted descriptions of him in contemporary culture. They are also touchstones throughout the series. Characters are forever reminding one another or explaining their inability to produce Aslan at a whim that He isn’t a tame lion.

This idea of Jesus as “not a tame lion” is one of profound truth and beauty and it is also an idea that can be, and has been, profoundly misused. Following Jesus is an adventure and God absolutely transcends our boundaries and our expectations. No sooner do we develop a theological system but the living God comes along an problematizes it. It has always been like that.

In Acts 10 Jesus shows Peter, whom he called “Rock” and to whom He had give the keys to the Kingdom, that what God, the Holy Spirit, was doing and had planned for him was far beyond the limits Peter had imagined for himself and for the Church. Through a vision, and a prophecy, and the unexpected gift of tongues to people Peter had thought unable to receive it, the Holy Spirit destroys Peter’s theology and invites him to see that his life and this world would be wilder and far less tame than he had imagine. Peter puts is pretty succinctly saying “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”. Rather than a tame God who followed the rules Peter had come to accept as defining the limits of God’s character and activity, Peter accepts that God is “not a tame lion”. It is beautiful and, as a queer Christian woman I certainly wish more Christian leaders were willing to as “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”

But “not a tame lion has also been misused. I had an alarming conversation with someone on Twitter lately and it was distressingly representative of conversations that seem to be happening more and more often. This person used the phrase “not a tame lion” to argue that God is not bound to act (or to expect us to act) in ways that are commensurate with “Love” as any normal or reasonable person might define it but that since Jesus is “not a tame lion”, Jesus definition of love might entail cruelty, hatred, the slaughter of innocents, wars, and mass death. Another Lewis quote, this time from the essay The Poison of Subjectivism sprung to mind: “If once we admit that what God means by ‘goodness’ is sheerly different from what we judge to be good, there is no difference left between pure religion and devil worship.”

Let us be clear, the demons are more than happy to be called Jesus and to call their hateful, destruction “kind”, “good”, or “loving” if that will allow them to recruit to their cause people who call themselves by the name “Christian”.

My mother lived and worked in Turkey from 1990 to 2020, when she left for Turkey, eager to share the good news about Jesus, she called herself an Evangelical. By the time she returned to the states, that wasn’t a term she much used to describe herself. She has told me that what first alerted her to the need to re-examine the meaning of that label was when she met a young American who had come to Turkey to teach English and when they started talking about religion, the young teacher told my mom that theses days (this would have been somewhere around 2008) Evangelicals were known as “the people who hate.” The “deconstruction movement” is full of post-evangelicals who trace the first cracks in their old faith structures to the realization that the image of Jesus they were being told to embrace was anything but good. In reminding one another that Aslan is not a tame lion, we cannot neglect to say also that he is good and that also means something.

Or as Lewis puts it in The Problem of Pain

Divine goodness differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different; it differs from ours not as white from black, but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.

I wish that those people who quote The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to justify their support for cruelty and hatred would bother to read all of the Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis predicted them too.

In The Last Battle we encounter a false Aslan in the form of a duped Donkey named Puzzle who is being used by the opportunist ape Shift, to murder dryads, and to extract goods and unpaid labor from innocent Narnians. On the way to investigate the slaughter of dryads, Tyrian the king and his friend have the following exchange which echoes so many horrible Christian conversations today:

The King and the Unicorn stared at one another and both looked more frightened than they had ever been in any battle.

“Aslan,” said the King at last, in a very low voice. “Aslan. Could it be true? Could he be felling the holy trees and murdering the Dryads?”

“Unless the Dryads have all done something dreadfully wrong—” murmured Jewel.

“But selling them to Calormenes!” said the King. “Is it possible?”

“I don’t know,” said Jewel miserably. “He’s not a tame lion.”

Faced with church leaders claiming that God sanctions the death of immigrants, celebrates war, and loves the death by suicide or directly murder of LGBTQIA+ youth; how many Christians today are echoing the words of Jewel. “I don’t know…He’s not a tame lion.”

Eventually the stark difference between this imposter Aslan and the real Aslan as these Narnians had learned about him comes to a head at an early gathering in the book. Notice Shift accuses the animals of thinking that Aslan is a “tame lion” separate from any discussion of “but he’s good” in this passage:

Then a deep voice—it beloved to a great tusked and shaggy Boar—spoke from another part of the crowd.

“But why can’t we see Aslan properly and talk to him?” it said. “When he used to appear in Narnia in the old days everyone could talk to him face to face.”

“Don’t you believe it,” said the Ape. “And even if it was true, times have changed. Aslan says he’s been far too soft with you before, do you see? Well, he isn’t going to be soft anymore. He’s going to lick you into shape this time. He’ll teach you to think he’s a tame lion.

…

“And now here’s another thing,” the Ape went on, fitting a fresh nut into its cheek, “I hear some of the horses are saying, Let’s hurry up and get this job of carting timber over as quickly as we can, and then we’ll be free again. Well, you can get that idea out of your heads at once. And not only the Horses either. Everybody who can work is going to be made to work in future. … All you Horses and Bulls and Donkeys are to be sent down into Calormen to work for your living—pulling and carrying the way horses and such-like do in other countries. And all you digging animals like Moles and Rabbits and Dwarfs are going down to work in the Tisroc’s mines. And—”

“No, no, no,” howled the Beasts. “It can’t be true. Aslan would never sell us into slavery to the King of Calormen.”

“None of that! Hold your noise!” said the Ape with a snarl. “Who said anything about slavery? You won’t be slaves. You’ll be paid—very good wages too. That is to say, your pay will be paid into Aslan’s treasury and he will use it all for everybody’s good.

Within a few days, Shift's false Aslan gives way to a being he call’s “Tashlan” an amalgamation of Aslan and the Calormen god Tash. Un-tamed-ness taken and warped without the guiding restriction of goodness leads, in the end to worship of something twisted and utterly contrary to God—there is no difference left between pure religion and devil worship.

Increasingly I am finding that, here in the US the white Christian Nationalist church are little more than adherents of Tashlan.