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F e a t u r e A r t i c l e
Who killed C.S. Lewis?
By Mark P. Shea
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This Rock
Volume 6, Number 7/8
 July/August 1995 
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ONE of the advantages Christians have over those who live in the world is the range to which we can extend our angst. Secularists, forced by their own principles to live in a one-floor, ranch-style universe, inevitably wind up wasting time on neuroses that are small beer in the grand scheme of things. That's why the secular media are unable to conceive of any higher conspiracy than the hackneyed "Who Killed JFK?" question.
But suppose Oliver Stone were a good Fundamentalist filmmaker with a cosmic conspiratorial perspective. Then we might be reading film reviews like this:
STONE BREAKS THE SILENCE ON THE SILENT PLANET
WHETHER you love him or hate him, you've got to concede that Christian Fundamentalist filmmaker Oliver Stone has once again made a forceful movie that commands our fascination almost against our will. His most recent Chick Production release, CSL, is in many respects superior to his recent films (the ardently pro-Israeli Wailing Wall Street and the powerfully evangelistic Born Again on the Fourth of July) in that it dares to grapple with the unforgettable events of November 22, 1963.
True to form, Stone does not mince words. From the opening scene (in which a prophetic Loraine Boettner warns a sleepy Lausanne Conference of a sinister "secular-papal-pantheist complex") to the closing eulogy by maverick Christian investigators Dave Hunt and Constance Cumbey (played by Kevin Costner and Kathy Bates), Stone relentlessly implicates President John F. Kennedy and pantheist philosopher Aldous Huxley in a vast Catholic/New Age conspiracy to assassinate Christian apologist and fantasy author C. S. Lewis on that fateful day.
Of course, some will undoubtedly call Stone the real fantasy author here, yet his challenge to the official story is, to say the least, disturbing. For example, Stone strenuously attacks the conventional wisdom that "Lewis died of natural causes after a period of extended illness," citing as his evidence Lewis's ongoing correspondence with a mysterious "American Lady" throughout the period of his so-called "declining health."
"Writing to a total stranger about cats and sinus infections?" says Stone. "Not what I'd be doing if I were as sick as the official story makes out. These notes were clearly some kind of code. Why else would Lewis, an Anglican, be so concerned (in his letter of June 10, 1963) over 'the removal of such a Pope at such a time'? What did Lewis know about the 'removal' of Pope John XXIII? Is it a coincidence that as Vatican II was in full swing the United States under the Catholic Kennedy was escalating its military presence in Vietnam and the Beatles, who were from Lewis's native land, were preparing their godless assault on our shores?"
Why did Lewis have to die? Stone says there were two reasons: envy and fear. "Lewis threatened the papistical pantheist powers who purposefully pervert and persecute the Remnant." How? First, Lewis's best-selling books had long driven the "Babylon Mystery Cult" (as Stone calls the Roman Church) to murderous jealousy. And, of course, pantheists and proto-New Agers like Aldous Huxley bitterly resented Lewis's intransigent Christian theism.
But more than all this, the Catholic Church was spurred to action when Lewis stumbled (via a correspondence in Latin with a Catholic priest) onto the Dark Secret: a vast Roman conspiracy that already engineered the creation of Islam, assassinated Abraham Lincoln, pushed through the publication of the Origin of Species, fostered the rise of Stalin, tampered with the inspired King James Version of the Bible, placed a pyramid and the words "Novus Ordo Seclorum" on the back of the dollar bill, and minted the notorious Proctor & Gamble logo in its centuries-old war on the saints.
In 1963, Stone says, having failed in its attempt to seduce Lewis into "Romish idolatry&quo
t through the influence of Special Jesuit Agent J. R. R. Tolkien, the Roman Curia contacted Catholic President Kennedy with a secret request for "special action" in the Lewis matter. With the usual unquestioning Kennedy obedience to Vatican superiors, the thirty-fifth President, in coordination with Huxley and members of the Theosophical Society of Great Britain, designed a complex plot to eliminate Lewis before he blew the lid off Rome's plan to subvert true Christianity by means of a demoralizing Southeast Asian war and pro-drug propaganda hidden on phonograph records through backward masking. ("Remember 'Paul is dead' on the Abbey Road album?" asks Stone. "They meant St. Paul! And 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'? Huxley used LSD! And then they started leading our youth toward pantheistic Eastern cults! Don't you see the pattern emerging?")
Yet, asserts Stone, the conspiracy was wider in scope than Kennedy and Huxley knew. Having outlived their usefulness to their faceless overlords, both Kennedy and Huxley were themselves eliminated, says Stone, within hours of the assassination of Lewis--eliminated by the very forces they sought to control.
Of course, Stone (and screenwriters Alberto and Geraldo Rivera) do not answer all the lingering questions: Who was the mysterious "American Lady"? (Although speculation has long ranged from Lady Bird Johnson to then-debutante theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, Stone ventures no opinion.) When did Lewis first make the web of connections between the Fab Four, Vatican II, the death of John XXIII, and the Vietnam debacle? Were the "elvish tongues" which Tolkien used in his stories demonically inspired? What role did the sinister Rosicrucian Charles Williams and the radical feminist Dorothy L. Sayers play in the events leading up to Lewis's liquidation by the forces of darkness? All these issues are raised by Stone but are not answered, leaving the viewer tantalized by ominous possibilities.
"Sure, there are some loose ends," says Stone. "We don't have all the facts because the conspirators are very clever. But by and large the basic theory behind the movie is sound. After all, look how much it explains. The Vietnam War happened, just as it would have if my conspiracy theory is correct. And the Beatles . . . how else can we explain the immense popularity of that group? And look at this startling fact: The overwhelming majority of songs by that youth-seducing crew were written by John and Paul-- which just happen to be the names of the two popes of the sixties. Coincidence . . . or something more?"
"In fact, the longer you look at it," insists Stone, "the more pieces fall into place. Why, for example, is the binding glue on all of Lewis's Macmillan paperbacks so cheap that the books disintegrate when they are opened? Could it be we're not meant to read his works? How is it that Profiles in Courage and Brave New World are available at every high school in America, but the Chronicles of Narnia are relegated to elementary school libraries? Most frightening of all, why is it that all those who purport to wear Lewis's mantle as Christian writers are, one by one, succumbing to Rome? Sheldon Vanauken, Peter Kreeft, Thomas Howard--the list goes on. Even Lewis's literary executor, Walter Hooper, became a papist. It's eerie, I tell you! Eerie! The fact is, I don't think these are the same men we knew and loved in the past. They couldn't be! It's insane!"
This final conundrum is the subject of Stone's sequel to CSL: The Stepford Christians.
Mark P. Shea freelances from Washington State.
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