The casting of Meryl Streep as Aslan in Netflix’s forthcoming adaptation of “The Chronicles of Narnia” has set off a wave of conservative backlash — and not everyone on the right thinks that’s a good look. In a new op-ed for The Daily Wire, one of the outlet’s own writers argues that the uproar over a female-voiced lion is both theologically confused and politically self-defeating.
The project in question is director Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of “The Magician’s Nephew,” the first book in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, for Netflix. Gerwig arrives with considerable cultural momentum after “Barbie,” her blockbuster take on another classic children’s property. The Daily Wire piece notes that the controversy erupted this week when it was confirmed that Streep would lend her voice to Aslan — the lion who anchors the series and serves as its unmistakable Christ figure.
According to the op-ed, the reaction from some conservatives treated the casting as an existential assault on the faith. The piece catalogs the complaints: that it’s “woke,” that it’s an attack on Christianity, that it’s poisoning the youth — the core objection being that Aslan is Jesus, Jesus is a man, and therefore the lion must be voiced by a man.
An argument about what is — and isn’t — sacred
The writer’s central rebuttal is blunt: Aslan is not Jesus. He’s a lion. The op-ed points out that Christians don’t kneel before wooden carvings of the king of the jungle on Sunday mornings, and that however deliberately Lewis patterned Aslan on Christ, the character remains a fictional animal in a children’s story.
That distinction, the piece argues, matters for how believers should respond. “You can’t desecrate that which isn’t sacred,” the writer says, adding that a fairy tale — no matter how inspired by Christian teaching — is not holy. The op-ed singles out commentary from commentator Kangmin Lee, who reportedly called the Gerwig adaptation “a desecration of Lewis’s work.” The Daily Wire writer rejects that framing outright.
The piece also pushes back on the idea that Gerwig is deliberately trying to subvert Christianity. The writer’s read is more mundane: she simply wanted to cast Meryl Streep. And even if the intent were subversive, the op-ed argues, a symbolic Christ voiced by a woman ranks well down the list of history’s offenses against Jesus.
There’s also a practical point about how adaptations work. Narnia, the writer notes, is either in the public domain or licensed to filmmakers by the corporation that manages Lewis’s estate — meaning reimaginings are the price of doing business when you hand your stories to artists. The op-ed describes the Gerwig take as a “David Bowie-inspired, gender-bent kaleidoscope,” and says that’s simply what happens when fiction is opened up to new interpreters.
An inconsistent standard, the op-ed claims
The piece widens its lens beyond Narnia to the broader conservative fixation on Lewis and his friend J.R.R. Tolkien. The writer acknowledges liking the books personally but argues that the right has loaded these stories with so much meaning that any change or criticism triggers a full news cycle of outrage.
The comparison offered is “Hamilton” — the musical that cast the first Treasury secretary as a rapping Puerto Rican and drew similar protests years ago. Artists, the op-ed observes, tend to be liberal, and liberals enjoy this kind of reinterpretation. Some results, like “Hamilton,” are good; others, like most modern Shakespeare adaptations, are not. The writer says it’s too early to know where Gerwig’s Narnia will land — but adds that a movie featuring a female Jesus lion is preferable to watching fellow conservatives throw tantrums over a big cat.
The op-ed also invokes a recent episode on the other side of the aisle: an advertisement from a golf company that depicted a man bodychecking a woman, which set off its own liberal meltdown. The Daily Wire’s editor-in-chief, Brent Scher, criticized that reaction at the time, asking whether he’d missed a time machine back to the height of cancel-culture idiocy. The writer cites that as evidence that the standard should be applied consistently.
The right, the piece contends, generally handles these cultural flashpoints better than the left — but when its own beloved properties are at stake, it clutches its pearls just as fiercely. The closing argument is less about Streep or Gerwig than about proportion: most things matter more than a Narnia movie, and conservatives, on some level, know it.
The article ran as part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s culture and lifestyle vertical, which the outlet describes as a home for “real human insight and human stories.” The piece is an op-ed and reflects the author’s views rather than a news report, though it captures a genuine intraparty argument about how the right should pick its cultural battles — and whether a talking lion is one worth fighting.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/aslan-isnt-jesus-hes-a-lion