A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18

by Joseph Loconte

The obscenity of belief in God: such was the tide of elite opinion in much of postwar Europe. To many of the best and brightest, Christianity appeared to lack any explanatory power. It could neither account for the internecine conflict of the supposed Christian nations of Europe, nor offer a realistic hope of achieving a more peaceful and just global order. Rather, the church of the modern age seemed tethered to destructive doctrines and medieval superstitions. “We find at the present day among the educated classes . . . a great output of new and more or less fantastic superstitions drawn indifferently from the mysterious East or the neurotic West,” wrote Gilbert Murray in The Ordeal of This Generation (1928). “Also a large and outspoken rejection of all religion and particularly of all morality.”