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Comment by exsomet | Hacker News Reader

I had a bunch of these books as a kid. I don’t remember any overtly Christian themes, just what was essentially a modernized version of Aesop’s fables.

But I was also pretty young so maybe I just missed that part.

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I had the same thing about Narmia — only learned as an adult that it was a Christian set of books. By then I’d learned a bit about Christianity so in re read them but still have no idea. Perhaps they aren’t christian and I was just being pranked.

They absolutely come from a Christian worldview and tell some classic Christian tales in a different way. They're "Christian" in that sense, but they aren't proselytizing or anything. They demonstrate that good literature is just good literature. It doesn't matter what the worldview is.

The books are heavily allegorical and knowledge of who Aslan represents is usually enough to clue people in that it’s clearly a Christian metaphor, but I could easily see someone that didn’t have that background missing it. Even as a kid that grew up with a high level of Christian indoctrination a lot of the metaphorical concepts went over my head at the time. For example, in The Silver Chair there are rich metaphors about sin and salvation surrounding the characters that were totally unknown/unnoticed to me as a child, even though I knew all of the themes from my upbringing.

Interestingly (for me) the Narnia series is one that I picked up on being allegorical pretty fast. Not exactly the first book, but I think by the middle of the second I had figured it out. Definitely by the time Aslan was resurrected.

As an insufferable teenage atheist, the Christian themes went right over my head. They were just enjoyable as great stories.

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