Everybody’s taking sides on the ideological content of the new Narnia movie, from the unapologetic enthusiasm at the Christian Broadcasting Network (you must click to believe how many message boards, polls, articles, excerpts, character profiles, teaching guides, etc. can be crammed onto one tiny web page) to the unabashed excoriation at the Guardian.

For secular viewers, the question often comes down to this: Can you watch the movie without being bothered by the Christian content?

In Salon, big fan Laura Miller says mais oui:

“If [children] don’t realize that all this supposedly conceals a Christian message like a drop of monotheistic medicine concealed in a spoonful of pagan sugar, we’ll be foolish to think they’ve been duped. If they’re like the generations of children before them, they won’t see or learn the lesson Lewis was trying to teach. Instead they’ll see battles and adventure and magic — and who’s to say that’s not what really counts?â€�

Well, C.S. Lewis, for one. Here’s a chilling quotation from his biographer (or should that be hagiographer?) George Sayer, excerpted from Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis:

But the author almost certainly did not want his readers to notice the resemblance of the Narnian theology to the Christian story. His idea, as he once explained to me, was to make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life. He hoped that they would be vaguely reminded of the somewhat similar stories that they had read and enjoyed years before. “I am aiming at a sort of pre-baptism of the child’s imagination”.

Want an example? Read on.

I give a few of the emotional resonance examples in my review. But it's easiest to see the parallels in the C.S. Lewis's logical arguments.

In the book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lucy gets into the wardrobe first and tells her older brothers and sisters about what she's seen. They don't believe her. The eldest, Susan and Peter, then engage in an Oxfordian tutorial with the learned professor they're staying with:

[H]e sat listening to them with the tips of his fingers pressed together and never interrupting, till they had finished the whole story. After that he said nothing for quite some time. Then he cleared his throat and said the last thing either of them expected.

"How do you know?" he asked, "that your sister's story is not true?"

"Oh, but--" began Susan, and then stopped. Anyone could see from the old man's face that he was perfectly serious. Then Susan pulled herself together and said, "But Edmund said they had only been pretending."

"That is a point," said the Professor, "which certainly deserves consideration; very careful consideration. For instance--if you will excuse me for asking the question--does your experience lead you to regard your brother or your sister as the more reliable? I mean, which is the more truthful?"

"That's just the funny thing about it, Sir," said Peter. "Up till now, I'd have said Lucy every time."

[. . .]

"[A] charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed."

"We were afraid it mightn't even be lying," said Susan. "We thought there might be something wrong with Lucy.""

"Madness, you mean?" said the Professor, quite coolly. "Oh, you can make your minds easy about that. One has only to look at her and talk to her to see that she is not mad."

"But then," said Susan and stopped. She had never dreamed that a grown-up would talk like the Professor and didn't know what to think.

"Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities: Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know that she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth."

This dialogue is condensed in the film. But the essence remains the same.

Now, what do you think these children who have read the book or seen the movie might be inclined to believe, when they read the following:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us .... We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

That's C.S. Lewis, in his introductory apologetics book for adults, Mere Christianity. So is he softening kids' minds up for later conversion? You make the call.