The American historian George Marsden supposedly once quipped that “an evangelical is anybody who likes Billy Graham.” A very 20th century definition, but it worked pretty well in practice.
C.S. Lewis, however—another towering figure of 20th century Christianity—is known by many to have not been an evangelical, despite having become the evangelical “patron saint” over the years. He was, of course, a faithful, orthodox believer—a mere Christian, and, it must be said, a convinced Protestant and a content Anglican. Yet evangelical he was not. As Mark Noll has recently made abundantly clear in his 2023 book Lewis in America, Lewis was first received somewhat coldly by US evangelicals—his earliest US fans were Roman Catholics, followed by the mainline, and “Evangelicals only slowly”, as Noll puts it.
And yet, in John Stott: The Making of a Leader, the now-late Timothy Dudley-Smith describes a brief meeting between Graham and Lewism organised by Stott (another huge 20th century name!) This was in 1955, when Graham had been invited to speak at that year’s CICCU (Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union) mission:
John Stott arranged that Graham should have a chance to talk privately with C.S. Lewis, then a Fellow of Magdalene, who had migrated from Oxford a year before to be the first holder of a new Chair as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English. Lewis himself has suffered hostility at Oxford for what he himself called his ‘hot-gospelling’, which may have contributed to his being passed over for Professorships there. The three of them met in Magdalene. Billy Graham recalled how –
… we talked for an hour or more. I was afraid I would be intimidated by him because of his brilliance, but he immediately put me at my ease. I found him to be not only intelligent and witty but also gentle and gracious; he seemed genuinely interested in our meetings. ‘You know,’ he said as we parted, ‘you have many critics, but I have never met one of your critics who knows you personally.’[1]
Evangelicals can rest at ease at last—we have all we need to prove via syllogism that Lewis was, after all, an evangelical.
- An evangelical is anyone who likes Billy Graham
- C.S. Lewis liked Billy Graham
- Therefore, C.S. Lewis was an evangelical.
Oh, and the same goes of course for Her Late Majesty Queen Elizbaeth II, too, of course.
Rhys Laverty is the Senior Editor of Ad Fontes.
Timothy Dudley-Smith, John Stott: The Making of a Leader (Leicester: IVP, 1999),360-61. ↑