Could Reading C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien Be Subversive in the UK?

PJ Media ^ | 04/13/2023 | Lincoln Brown

[SeekAndFind]

It must be miserable to be a citizen of the United Kingdom these days. To be an unwilling participant in a nation’s slide into tyranny must be an awful thing. I know that we are witnessing it in the States, but they’ve been at it for a while now in the United Kingdom, which is tumbling with near-terminal velocity toward the bottom of the slippery slope. The UK, let us not forget, mobilized its citizens to evacuate troops from Dunkirk during the Second World War and to stand firm against Nazi Germany during the Blitz. But it would seem that it is interested in crafting its own form of tyranny.

Writing in The Spectator, Douglas Murray talks about a plan by the government’s Prevent program to list certain works as having the potential to lead to radicalization. The list includes works by a number of commentators and authors including Murray, Peter Hitchens, and Melanie Phillips. Murray writes:

There is also a reading list of historical texts which produce red flags to RICU. These include Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, as well as works by Thomas Carlyle and Adam Smith. Elsewhere RICU warns that radicalisation could occur from books by authors including C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, and Joseph Conrad. I kid you not, though it seems that all satire is dead, but the list of suspect books also includes 1984 by George Orwell.

RICU refers to an arm of Prevent and is an acronym for “Research, Information, and Communications Unit.” Reading the works by the authors above could allegedly launch one on the road to right-wing extremism. As could watching Civilisation, The Thick of It, and Great British Railway Journeys.

[I-ambush]

Your C S Lewis reading recommendations are spot on, although Lewis would have to update these if he were alive today:
Women Without Chests
The Abolition of Woman
Screwtape.com

[metmom]

It is an irrefutable matter of history that that the Catholic Church was established by Jesus himself 2000 years ago

Nonsense. Co-opting Bible verses to make a retroactive claim proves nothing. He used the generic term of church, not one specific denomination.

As long as Catholicism teaches unscriptural doctrines, and allows for child molesting homosexual priests to serve as priests in it, allows for cocaine fueled homosexual orgies to be hosted at the Vatican, and permits the heretic pope you all are saddled with to remain in office, it has forfeited the right to call itself the body of Christ.

Jesus never allowed for sin to remain unaddressed in His church. That is evident in Revelation 2 & 3, and Catholicism is no exception. God does not play favorites and it is unfathomable that He would permit such a corrupt, immoral religious system for so many centuries to go undisciplined for so long.

You all can claim that the Holy Spirit is protecting the Catholic religion, but the HOLY Spirit would NEVER protect the kind of egregious sin that Catholicism is infested with.

Whatever, or who ever, is protecting Catholicism, it is most certainly not of the Holy God who hates sin and calls us out of it and demands that church disciple be acted upon. And Catholicism has ignored that for far too many centuries.

[Scrambler Bob]

The way things are headed, reading itself will be considered subversive.
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Especially if you can read “English”.

[Scrambler Bob]

It is an irrefutable matter of history that that the Catholic Church was established by Jesus himself 2000 years ago.
= = =

So that would make Jesus the first Pope, right?

[Billthedrill]

The, ah, "Research, Information, and Communications Unit"? No wonder they don't want anyone to read Orwell, they've plagiarized him.

It is fun to see defenders of an infinitely malleable orthodoxy attempt to establish standards. Empty heads, empty lives. There is a certain irony in banning Tolkien, for example - his most "subversive" discourse in LOTR was left out of the Jackson movies to their great loss, the Scouring Of The Shire. Herein the returning Travelers are confronted with a Shire deliberately ruined by a not-dead-yet Saruman and his buddy Wormtongue installing a brutal socialist police state - "gatherers and sharers" if you please - tearing down traditions such as the Party Tree and replacing them with joyless obedience to a band of thugs. Tolkien knew exactly what he was writing.

So yes, guard your dead-tree editions, because the RICUs of the world will do exactly that using subverted technology. In one of the 20th century's great ironies Amazon was caught literally deleting books from their customers' Kindles, the volume in question being "1984". They said they'll never do it again. They lied.