A New Narnia, and the Woke Left’s Failure of Imagination

October 5, 2026

4

I’ve been thinking about the controversy surrounding Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming and predictably woke adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia. Meryl Streep will voice Aslan, the explicitly male lion who stands at the theological center of Lewis’s universe and functions as its representation of Christ, because of course we have to take things the way they were and make idiotic changes for no reason. Maybe Gerwig will surprise everyone and the series will be wonderful. I hope so. But the decision already raises more interesting questions for me: Why does so much contemporary woke / progressive culture seem determined to express itself through somebody else’s creations? Why are they so incapable of making their own art?

That got me thinking that there is a significant difference between the traditional Left and what we now call the woke Left. The traditional Left has always had a powerful creative streak. While conservatives tend to be more analytical, the artistic, the emotional, the unconventional, and imaginative all tended to be solidly on the Left. I disagree profoundly with much of its politics, but culturally it has often been an enormously productive force. It created new music, literature, cinema, aesthetics, and entire countercultures. In that respect, it has even complemented the more ordered and analytical temperament traditionally associated with conservatism.

What strikes me about this new woke Left, however, is how frequently its cultural instinct seems not to be creation, but criticism, revision, and outright vandalism of someone else’s work. Even its academic vocabulary reflects the impulse: critical theory, critical race theory, critical studies. It begins with something that already exists and interrogates it, deconstructs it, exposes its supposed power structures, and reconstructs it according to a different worldview. Increasingly, the same instinct seems to characterize its ventures into popular culture.

So we get Disney rewritten, Tolkien rewritten, and now C.S. Lewis reinterpreted. Rather than create new worlds, characters, mythologies, and stories embodying their own worldview, contemporary cultural progressives repeatedly inherit worlds somebody else created, retain the names, characters, settings, mythology, and enormous reservoir of public affection attached to them, and then retrofit those creations to make them their own.

And no, this is not the same thing as saying that Tolkien borrowed from Norse mythology, or that Shakespeare borrowed plots, or that Lewis combined the Bible with children’s stories. All art has influences. Tolkien took elements of existing traditions and synthesized them into something astonishingly new in Middle-earth. That is creation. But taking Middle-earth itself, keeping its name, its characters, its mythology, and the audience Tolkien created for it, and then changing what those things mean is something fundamentally different.

Some of this is undoubtedly corporate cowardice. Hollywood loves established intellectual property because an audience already exists. And adaptation can obviously be great art. But there is nevertheless something peculiar about a cultural movement that regards so much of the inherited Western canon as morally suspect while remaining so dependent upon its imaginative achievements.

Perhaps there is a deeper reason for this creative sterility. Great imaginative works require more than technical talent. They require the artist to believe in something strongly enough to build a world around it. Lewis had Christianity. Tolkien had his Catholicism, his languages, his mythology, and his profound attachment to an older European inheritance. Even the countercultural Left had its utopianism, romanticism, rebellion, and faith in liberation. But a culture trained principally to interrogate, problematize, deconstruct, and expose has equipped itself wonderfully for criticism and rather poorly for creation. Suspicion can tell you what is wrong with Narnia, but cannot give you a Narnia of your own.

There may also be a delicious irony awaiting all of this. In attempting to repurpose Christianity’s stories for a new secular religion, the people doing the repurposing may inadvertently become evangelists for the faith they mean to displace. Narnia is not vaguely Christian; Christianity is woven into its bones. Aslan is not merely a lion who happens to possess a few Christlike qualities; he is Lewis’s imaginative representation of Christ Himself. Introduce millions of new readers and viewers to Narnia and some percentage of them will inevitably become curious about what Lewis was actually trying to say. They will discover the books, and perhaps from there Lewis’s explicitly Christian writings, and perhaps from there Christianity itself. In trying to vandalize the cathedral, the woke may succeed chiefly in drawing an enormous crowd to its doors. God seems to take special delight in turning the tables.

Time will tell what becomes of Gerwig’s Narnia, and perhaps, in the end, Lewis will have the last laugh. But time has already told us something else: the new woke Left carries remarkably little of the imaginative tradition of the old liberal Left, which didn’t merely demand admission into somebody else’s imagination, but built an imagination of its own. A genuinely creative counterculture does that. If you believe the old culture is exhausted, corrupt, or morally inadequate, then surpass it. Create your own Narnia. Create your own Middle-earth. Create characters so compelling that people are still telling their stories a century from now. What we see now is a telling lack of imagination from those very people who claim to have a superior imagination of what our world should be.

You may also be interested in: