Can Protestants and Catholics work together? The world would be very different today if we couldn’t.

Lately I’ve been reading some history that highlights how much good can come through working together across denominational lines. It’s in Colin Duriez’s 2003 book Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship.

Not everyone thinks it’s such a great idea. Several years ago when I signed the Manhattan Declaration in support of life, marriage and religious liberty, I got some pretty strongly worded email telling me I was wrong to do so. Some of it was the usual liberal objection to biblical and traditional values. Some of it, though, came from strict Protestants telling me it was sin to cooperate with Catholics.

Above all else, we’re completely in agreement with Christianity’s historic, orthodox creeds.

Now at The Stream I’m working with both Protestants and Roman Catholics here at every level of leadership and production. I still come down firmly on the Reformation side of Christian doctrine, so I think my Catholic friends have got some things wrong. But that’s okay — they think we Protestants have some things wrong, too. And we’re friends.

Above all else, we’re completely in agreement with Christianity’s historic, orthodox creeds. We all believe “in God the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ His only Son Our Lord….” We’re colleagues and partners in this united enterprise providing news, insight and commentary from a creedal Christian perspective.

Lewis and Tolkien

C.S. Lewis was a low-church Anglican, which is to say he stood in the branch of the Anglican church that was least like Catholicism. J.R.R. Tolkien was completely committed to his Roman Catholic faith. The two met before Lewis came to faith, however, in 1926, when both were teaching at Oxford University.

Lewis’s conversion was in two steps. In 1929 he turned from his youthful atheism to theism, that is, a general belief in God. His complete conversion to Christianity took place two years later. Duriez writes (pp. 53-54):

Lewis had a long conversation with Tolkien, now a fast friend, and a mutual friend, Henry “Hugo” Victor Dyson Dyson [the repeated “Dyson” is accurate], which had shaken him to the core. Like Tolkien, Dyson was a devout Christian….

Undoubtedly Dyson gave emotional weight to Tolkien’s more measured argumen that momentous night. Tolkien had argued for the Christian Gospels on the basis of the universal love of story which, for him, was monumental….

Shortly afterward, Lewis made his full conversion to belief in Jesus Christ. Later in life he pointed to that conversation as a decisive turning point. He dedicated The Screwtape Letters to Tolkien; and as Humphrey Carpenter tells in another record of their friendship, The Inklings, Lewis added these words to Tolkien’s personal copy: “In payment of a great debt.”

Their friendship exhibited none of today’s “tolerance;” there was no mutual agreement to respect each other’s views as “equally valid” or any such nonsense.

No Surface “Tolerance”

Their friendship exhibited none of today’s “tolerance;” there was no mutual agreement to respect each other’s views as “equally valid” or any such nonsense. Tolkien didn’t think much of allegory as a literary genre, and he was perfectly willing to say so when, to him, The Chronicles of Narnia came out looking like allegory.

The two were never reticent to air their Protestant-Catholic theological differences. Tolkien even spoke jestingly once of Lewis’s “Ulsterior motives,” referring to Lewis’s Northern Ireland upbringing and what Tolkien considered its Protestant prejudice.

In 1956, when Lewis decided to marry Helen Joy Davidman, a divorcee, Tolkien “composed a long letter setting out reasons that he thought his friends views were mistaken. The letter was never sent,” writes Duriez, “but it it is likely that the friends discussed the main points, and that Lewis was aware of Tolkien’s views.” Lewis didn’t tell Tolkien about the marriage until after the event.

Their friendship cooled somewhat in the mid 1950s. Still in 1954 when a Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature — a professorship of the sort Lewis’s Oxford colleagues had denied him, likely because of his unseemly willingness to connect with a non-scholarly audience — it was Tolkien who repeatedly encouraged Lewis to accept it, and made sure the door stayed open for him while he hesitated to accept it.

The Inklings, Lord of the Rings, Mere Christianity and More

In Oxford the two had famously been at the heart of the literary discussion group The Inklings. All the Inklings took part in the writing and reading, but the most significant reading in view of what it produced was undoubtedly Tolkien’s, from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as he was writing them. Lewis in particular was constant over the years in urging Tolkien to carry the long project through to completion.

Can Protestants and Catholics work together? You’d better believe it.

Thus it is that without the Roman Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien we never (humanly speaking) would have had the Anglican C.S. Lewis. We never would have had Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, or The Chronicles of Narnia. We wouldn’t have had the man whom I think most thoughtful Christians in the English-speaking world would call the most significant writer on reasons for belief in Jesus Christ in the entire 20th century, and one of the most delightfully imaginative besides.

And without C.S. Lewis we never would have had Tolkien’s monumental Lord of the Rings trilogy — my own choice for the greatest books of the 20th century and the best movies of the 21st.

Can Protestants and Catholics work together? You’d better believe it. Do we need to ignore our differences to do so? Of course not. Can we build fellowship anyway on our shared belief in Jesus Christ, God’s Son, our resurrected Savior? Lewis and Tolkien did, and the world is far richer for it. So can we.