Donald Clarke: The anger Meryl Streep and Greta Gerwig have triggered over Narnia is biblical

We should have seen this coming. It was reported as long ago as April of 2025 that Meryl Streep was in talks to voice Aslan, the lion, in Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew for Netflix. There was some rolling of eyes. Then the story went away again.Now, four months before the film is scheduled for cinema release, Gerwig confirms Streep will indeed be taking over voicing duties most recently carried out by our own Liam Neeson. We are used to nerds complaining when some actor is deemed insufficiently magnificent to play their favourite superhero. But the anger this week was biblical. The aggrieved were nailing their numbered objections to church doors in Wittenberg. (Not really, but you get the idea.)Jenna Ellis, a conservative lawyer and former adviser to Donald Trump, was having none of it. READ MORE“Greta Gerwig cast Meryl Streep as the female Aslan in her new ‘adaptation’ of Narnia, profaning Christ with the divine feminine,” she thundered.“It’s an act of creative vandalism pretending to be artistic sophistication.” L David Fairchild, a pastor from Texas, elaborated.As you will probably be aware, Aslan is not just a talking lion in the sense that Dorothy’s cowardly friend in The Wizard of Oz was just a talking lion. CS Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, written between 1950 and 1956, propels earthly children into a magic realm of white witches, amiable fauns and gloomy “marsh-wiggles”. Readers and critics have puzzled over Christian readings of the text ever since. Lewis, raised in Belfast, denied the sequence was an allegory but made no secret of its religious underpinnings. “What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?” he wrote. Aslan is that figure.[ How CS Lewis’s Irish childhood influenced the Chronicles of NarniaOpens in new window ]The controversy, if it can be called that, comes at a time when the recreationally offended are on alert for anything that reeks of gender swapping or trans accommodation. Just cock an ear to the yelling about Elliot Page’s appearance in The Odyssey a month or two ago. Jesus Christ was a man. Casting a woman, even one so exalted as Meryl Streep, is, the argument goes, an act of blasphemy (or something).If my memory of Sunday school serves, Jesus wasn’t a lion either. Indeed, his humanity was a pretty big deal. “But look! He has a mane in the stills!” the originalists yell. Well, sure. But is that supposed inconsistency any more egregious than the fundamental absurdity of a talking lion? Once you let an animal speak, it requires little more of a leap to have him pilot a steamboat (like Mickey Mouse) or sell breakfast cereal (like Tony the Tiger).At base, the current kerfuffle is, for all the bashing of Bibles, not much different from 100 other furies about film-makers not kowtowing to the sacred principles of faithfulness. East of Eden: Florence Pugh as Cathy Ames. Photograph: Netflix There was a similar rumble this week when Florence Pugh, who plays the psychotic Cathy Ames in Netflix’s imminent adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, dared to suggest the series doesn’t try to make the character “a monster”.The release of images from The Magician’s Nephew, the first in a new Narnia imagining, to accompany a feature in Empire magazine provided the purists with a wealth of ammunition. [ Florence Pugh on getting her way: ‘I was very sassy. I cornered a few people’Opens in new window ]We already knew Gerwig was having fun with the chronology. The Magician’s Nephew was the sixth of the seven novels to be published, but it is set before the time frame of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book to emerge. It had not, however, been made clear that she was taking promiscuous influence from 1970s rock opera. “David Bowie saved my life. Paul McCartney saved my life. David Gilmour saved my life. Pete Townshend saved my life,” the director told Empire. Cue more hysterics about not remaining true to the source material.[ Saoirse Ronan says she was meant to be ‘a weird Barbie’ in Greta Gerwig’s filmOpens in new window ]Here’s the odd thing. In cinema and television, ardent fans, many just wishing to show off they’ve read the book, get in a tizzy at the tiniest deviation from their beloved tome. Just watch how they are already poring over stills from the upcoming Harry Potter series. Yet, over the past century (and before), theatrical producers have worked the most imaginative liberties on Shakespeare to only the mildest of objections. Would anyone now blink an eye if you staged Macbeth as kabuki or Coriolanus on an aircraft carrier? If the screen originalists had their way, all Hamlets would play out in doublet and hose while banners flapped over the cardboard ramparts of Elsinore. How unspeakably dull.I have no idea how The Magician’s Nephew will turn out, but I praise Gerwig for her willingness to experiment.East of Eden streams on Netflix from Thursday, October 1st; Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew is due to be released on Friday, February 12th, 2027