A deepening atheism may have had something to do with it. Lewis was reared in the Anglican Church, but he came to associate Christianity with “ugly architecture, ugly music, and bad poetry.” Church sermons seemed vapid and irrelevant. Lewis’s doubts about God and Christianity were reinforced by his tutor, Kirkpatrick, under whom he studied before applying to Oxford. Kirkpatrick was, in Lewis’s words, “a hard, satirical atheist.” From Kirkpatrick Lewis learned that unexamined beliefs and assumptions must be taken to the woodshed. Hardly any subject was taboo, including the war, which had begun
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