Meryl Streep’s casting as Aslan has angered the Christian right. Don’t they have more pressing issues?

It is a confusing time to be alive, given how often these days Hollywood indulges in revisionism. Who knew that the Wicked Witch of the West was the heroine after all, that Cruella de Vil simply had a difficult childhood, or that Mufasa was adopted? Now it turns out that Aslan, CS Lewis’s messiah with a mane, is a lioness – or at least, may sound like one in Greta Gerwig’s upcoming adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, because Meryl Streep is providing the voice.

News that the Oscar-winner might be portraying Narnia’s Christ-like big cat first surfaced in April last year, prompting a flurry of complaints from conservative Christians. This week, the naysayers were back after Empire published a first look at the film, along with an interview with Gerwig in which the director confirmed the casting and explained her choice of actor. Streep, it turns out, was hired not because the Barbie director desperately fancied stoking the flames of controversy, but because she needed someone over 70 who could convey both wisdom and childlike wonder.

“I wanted someone who was profound but not pretentious, who had gravitas but not morose self-seriousness,” Gerwig said. She also explained she wanted one of the finest actors working today, adding: “That list is not a long one.”

Some American evangelical commentators have already made up their minds that this new version of Narnia comes from from the seventh circle of hell. Radio host Jenna Ellis accused Gerwig of “profaning Christ with the divine feminine”, while Texas preacher David Fairchild called the casting “creative vandalism”. The Daily Wire’s Isabel Brown said the decision to cast Streep was offensive because “CS Lewis literally intended Aslan to be the incarnation of Christ inside the world of Narnia”. She pointed to the end of Lewis’s novel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in which Aslan tells Lucy and Edmund they will come to know him by another name in their own world. For Brown, casting Streep was a “deliberate mockery of Christianity”.

There has been no confirmation from Gerwig that this new Aslan is in fact female. And not everyone agrees that casting Streep is a problem: Christian writer Mary Pezzulo has pointed out the irony that some evangelicals think it’s perfectly all right for Jesus to be portrayed as an animal yet draw the line when he’s given a woman’s voice. “Very Online conservative Christians really think that portraying Christ as a lion, a carnivorous beast with notoriously smelly urine who sleeps 23 hours a day and steals meat from hyaenas, is beautiful sacred art,” she wrote. “But having Christ portrayed by a woman is sacrilege.”

However you view this one, it’s weird that a film adaptation of one of the least known books in the Narnia series now feels like the subject of an emergency reconvening of the Council of Nicaea. Also, Gerwig has said she plans to reimagine the fantasy world through a rock opera prism: the great lion king’s eyes have been coloured like David Bowie’s mismatched peepers in publicity shots, and the creation of Narnia is apparently designed to look and sound as if Genesis is being staged by the Spiders from Mars. Daniel Craig is playing the deeply suspect sorcerer of the title, while Emma Mackey steps into Tilda Swinton’s shoes as the White Witch, Jadis. But all anyone can think about is that Aslan now sounds remarkably similar to Miranda Priestly, Julia Child and Mrs Thatcher.

That’s actually a shame, because The Magician’s Nephew has enough going on that it shouldn’t require a culture war to make a splash. Its story sees two children discover a wood full of pools leading to other worlds; one takes them to a dead city beneath a dying sun, where they wake the queen who exterminated its entire population and accidentally bring her back to London. The book has a sense of madcap wonder about it that occasionally makes all the waiting for Aslan to turn up in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, only for him to immediately sacrifice himself, feel like a glacially paced, religiously didactic slog by way of comparison.

Remember when Barbie went from a potentially cheesy movie about an anatomically unlikely child’s doll to the most talked about film of the year? Something similar could happen here. And then again, Streep might just be playing a lion in a children’s film. Either way, it seems remarkable that an actor whose voice nobody has yet heard in the movie has apparently displaced the White Witch herself – or perhaps even some of her famously addictive turkish delight – as Narnia’s most devious and malign influence.