Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis

3/5

"I liked it"

A Foreword to My Review

Among all Christian books, Mere Christianity sits atop a high pedestal. It’s an incredibly famous work, which I find always makes books feel… weird to read. It’s hard to honestly analyze and objectively critique a book I’ve heard mentioned and praised so many times, without being myself biased in some way as a result. As I read this book, I kept analyzing my own opinions of the book, wondering “am I being too hard on this book because it’s popular?” or “am I impressed by this sentence because it was written by C.S. Lewis, and I feel like I should be?” So I’d just like to remind you to please remember, as all my book reviews are, this review is biased.

Review

Like other C.S. Lewis books, I found Mere Christianity to be a difficult read, largely because of the way he writes— something about the grammar, ordering of words, and the general style of his prose feels dense and slow for me to grasp. It’s not my favorite type of writing.

The book is primarily a defense and explanation of Christianity, and its beliefs and purposes. It attempts to answer questions that people still ask today, like:

I went into this book blind, but I think some context would be helpful for those that are yet to read Mere Christianity. In the foreword, Kathleen Norris writes:

This is a book that begs to be seen in its historical context… in 1942… Great Britain was at war again. Now it was ordinary citizens who suffered… As a young man, C.S. Lewis had served in the awful trenches of World War I… [he was] invited by the BBC to give a series of wartime broadcasts on Christian faith. Delivered over the air from 1942 to 1944, these speeches eventually were gathered into the book we know today as Mere Christianity.
—Kathleen Norris

All in all, C.S. Lewis demonstrates a great understanding of the Christian faith, offering answers to many questions that non-Christians pose about the religion. I don’t necessarily agree with every single one of his answers, and I think there are plenty left unanswered, but it was shocking to see how little the world has changed in its perspective of Christianity. Most of the questions he answers in the book are still being asked today, and for this reason, the book is still highly relevant to our culture an impressive ~80 years after it was written.

For those Christians who consider themselves “strong” in their faith, I think this book has less to offer- it is mostly written to an unbelieving audience. That being said, I still think there are important reminders of Christianity that C.S. Lewis discusses (see my notes).

I wanted to be blown away by Mere Christianity, and I think I gave it a fair shot, but I ended up just liking it. I prefer some of his other writing a bit more.

Notes

For my notes, rather than write the book’s arguments and points in my own words, I chose to mainly include snippets of the book to support each idea. Given this book’s weight in the Christian world, I think it would be unwise to suggest the book says something without showing you exactly what it says.

Morality

Marriage and Sex

The Purpose of Christianity