Cs lewis gay

Was C.S. Lewis gay? History may have neutralized the sexuality of the man made a posthumous Christian superstar by a gay scholar/fan, but it's all still there. Even with the provision that one partner was gay and the other straight in a “vowed friendship,” Lewis clearly would have seen this as a deeply unhealthy way of trying to satisfy a privation. While some may speculate about his orientation, there is no substantial evidence to suggest that Lewis was gay.

Throughout his life, Lewis had close friendships with both men and women, and he experienced significant relationships with women, including his eventual marriage to Joy Davidman in the later years of his life. Mark Shea reprints an interesting letter from C. S. Lewis to Sheldon Vanauken, who had written for counsel on how to counsel students with questions about Christianity and homosexuality (reprinted in A Severe Mercy [reprint: HarperOne, , pp.

]). Letter from C. S. Lewis regarding homosexuality, quoted in Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy, pp. , in response to a question about a couple of Christian students of Vanauken who. I responded directly to this yesterday , and also published a response by Kyle Keating. Today, I want to highlight C. Lewis is probably the most effective, clear-headed communicator of Christian belief to unbelievers the Church has produced in a century.

His perspective is worth listening to when it comes to one of the most difficult communication challenges the Church faces in America today. Lewis wrote in a very different cultural situation, where there was much more stigma attached to homosexuality than there is today. Lewis wrote about the schoolboy homosexuality at Wyvern, the boarding school he attended as an adolescent.

He then speaks directly to an imaginary reader:. But there are two reasons. One you shall hear before this chapter ends. The other is that, as I have said, the sin in question is one of the two gambling is the other which I have never been tempted to commit. I will not indulge in futile philippics against enemies I never met in battle. This point is worth examining on its own. In the last few decades, Christian leaders have made a big issue of speaking out against gay rights and same-sex marriage.

During the same period of time, they have taken a much softer line on no-fault divorce, fornication, and other offenses against the sanctity of marriage. Lewis was an unusually persuasive apologist because he spoke humbly about struggles with sin in a way that others who struggled could relate to. This made him an attractive and trustworthy guide, and made the Gospel as he presented it believable and approachable.

The Wyvernians seem to me in retrospect to have been the least spontaneous, in that sense the least boyish, society I have ever known. For this games were played; for this clothes, friends, amusements, and vices were chosen.

And that is why I cannot give pederasty anything like a first place among the evils of the Coll. There is much hypocrisy on this theme. People commonly talk as if every other evil were more tolerable than this. But why? Because those of us who do not share the vice feel for it a certain nausea, as we do, say, for necrophily? I think that of very little relevance to moral judgment. Because it produces permanent perversion?

But there is very little evidence that it does. The Bloods would have preferred girls to boys if they could have come by them; when, at a later age, girls were obtainable, they probably took them. Is it then on Christian grounds? But how many of those who fulminate on the matter are in fact Christians?

I’ m looking over a

And what Christian, in a society as worldly and cruel as that of Wyvern, would pick out the carnal sins for special reprobation? Cruelty is surely more evil than lust and the World at least as dangerous as the Flesh. The real reason for all the pother is, in my opinion, neither Christian nor ethical. We attack this vice not because it is the worst but because it is, by adult standards, the most disreputable and unmentionable, and happens also to be a crime in English law.