C. S. Lewis's Theology of Fiction

The exact phrase “stock responses” appears in his discussion of how moral training forms habitual reactions rather than mere opinions.

C. S. Lewis once described the power of good stories in a cluster of phrases that are as suggestive as they are profound. Good literature, he said, is “training in the stock responses,” it “baptises the imagination,” and it sometimes “smuggles in the gospel.”

Taken together, these lines form a miniature philosophy of art, formation, and Christian discernment. They also offer a far wiser framework for evaluating stories and films than the anxious questions that often dominate Christian conversations about culture: Is this Christian? Is this dangerous? Is this a gateway to something dark?

Lewis invites us to ask better questions.

Training in the Stock Responses

This phrase comes most clearly from The Abolition of Man (1943), especially Lecture I, “Men Without Chests”.

Lewis writes:

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts……The heart — the seat, as Alanus tells us, of the emotions — is the indispensable liaison officer between cerebral man and visceral man.It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man.”

And most famously:

“Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it — believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt.”

Here Lewis explains that education must train people to have the right emotional responses to the right objects — what he elsewhere paraphrases as “trained affections” or “trained stock responses.”

By “stock responses,” Lewis meant the deep, almost instinctive reactions by which we recognise goodness, beauty, courage, loyalty, treachery, and love. These are not learned primarily through definitions, but through experience — and especially through stories.

A child who reads about noble sacrifice, steadfast friendship, or the cost of betrayal is not merely entertained. They are being trained in how to feel rightly about the world. Their moral reflexes are being formed.

Lewis believed that modern education had largely failed here. We teach people how to analyse, critique, and deconstruct, but rarely how to love what is lovable and hate what is hateful. As a result, we produce clever minds with malnourished affections.

Good literature repairs this. It teaches us, long before any sermon does, that:

• cruelty is ugly

• loyalty is beautiful

• pride destroys

• mercy redeems

It does not tell us these things as propositions. It shows us. And in showing us, it trains the heart.

Baptising the Imagination

This phrase comes from Lewis’s later reflections on imagination and conversion, especially:

a) Letter to Sister Penelope (1950)

Lewis writes:

“I believe that the imagination is the organ of meaning.…Reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”

And more pointedly, reflecting on myth and story:

“Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley; in hac valle abstractionis.”

While he does not use the exact phrase “baptise the imagination” here, the idea comes from multiple places where he describes how imagination must be prepared before reason can receive doctrine.

b) “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said” (1956)

Here he explicitly describes the function you are paraphrasing:

“The value of the myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.”

And most relevant:

“For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.I believe that my long training in fantasy… had done much to make me ready to accept the Christian faith.”

This is where the idea of pre-baptising the imagination before conversion comes from.

Many later writers summarised this as “baptising the imagination,” and Lewis himself uses very similar language in letters, though not always in that exact phrase.

If “stock responses” concern our moral reflexes, “baptising the imagination” concerns our inner world of images.

Lewis thought that many people rejected Christianity not because the doctrines were incoherent, but because the pictures in their minds were wrong. When they heard words like God, heaven, miracle, or holiness, what they imagined was sentimental, childish, thin, or absurd.

Good literature quietly cleanses those pictures.

It gives us better images of:

• transcendence

• awe

• evil

• glory

• redemption

Before a person ever believes in God, a great story may have already taught them what holiness feels like, what sacrifice costs, and what joy beyond the world might be.

Lewis’s own conversion followed this path. Long before he was a Christian, pagan myths had trained him to long for goodness, heroism, and a joy beyond the ordinary. When he finally encountered the gospel, it did not feel alien. His imagination had already been prepared.

Doctrine convinced his reason. Story had prepared his soul.

Slipping past the sleeping dragons.

Smuggling in the Gospel

When a reader encounters the gospel directly, defences often rise immediately. They hear slogans, clichés, or cultural baggage. But when the same truth arrives clothed as narrative — sacrifice, resurrection, forgiveness, kingship, restoration — it slips past resistance.

The phrase "smuggling in the gospel"—or more precisely, smuggling theology through fiction—stems from C.S. Lewis's private letter of August 9, 1939, to Sister Penelope CSMV. Reflecting on his novel Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis marveled at how the veil of ignorance in modern minds could become an unexpected ally for truth:

“Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.”

In this whimsical yet profound observation, "romance" evokes the enchanting power of imaginative storytelling—adventure, myth, fantasy—that captivates before defenses rise. Lewis saw fiction as a stealthy vessel, carrying eternal realities past barriers of skepticism or familiarity, allowing gospel truths to take root quietly, delightfully, and irreversibly.He later illuminated this same vision in his essay “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” where he described writing The Chronicles of Narnia to steal past those watchful dragons—the inhibitions, stained-glass associations, and dutiful obligations that paralyze genuine response to divine things:

“But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.”

Here lies the poetic heart of Lewis's method: not confrontation, but enchantment. Stories slip like moonlight through guarded gates, awakening wonder where argument might only provoke resistance. In an age armoured against overt preaching, good literature becomes the subtle, sovereign art of grace—smuggling the gospel not as contraband, but as hidden treasure, discovered with joy when the dragons slumber and the heart wakes.

Its not propaganda. Its not as an allegory with labels. But as a reality-shaped story.

In this way, a novel or film may carry more theological power than a tract.

It does not replace preaching or Scripture. But it prepares the soil in which preaching and Scripture can take root.

Rethinking How We Discern Art

This brings us to the practical consequence.

Christians often approach art with a narrow and anxious set of questions:

• Is this explicitly Christian?

• Is this spiritually dangerous?

• Is this a gateway to the occult?

• Is this morally “clean”?

These are not unimportant concerns. But they are not the deepest ones.

Lewis would have us ask something far more formative:

• What stock responses is this story training in me?

• What kind of imagination is this shaping?

• What vision of the world is this normalising?

• What does it make me love, admire, fear, or desire?

A story can be “clean” and yet trivialise courage, cheapen love, sentimentalise suffering, and flatten holiness. Another can contain darkness, myth, or ambiguity, and yet awaken reverence, humility, longing, and moral seriousness.

The question is not first whether a work is labelled “Christian,” or whether it touches forbidden symbols.

The question is whether it forms the soul well.

Does it:

• deepen our sense of good and evil

• sharpen our moral vision

• enlarge our capacity for wonder

• teach us to recognise sacrifice and grace

• prepare us to understand redemption when we meet it in Scripture

If it does, then it may be doing profoundly Christian work — whether or not it ever names Christ.

Conclusion: Toward Wiser Discernment

Lewis did not fear imagination. He feared a malformed one.

He knew that before people can believe rightly, they must often learn to see rightly. And stories, more than arguments, do that work.

So perhaps instead of asking whether a piece of art is “Christian,” or “dangerous,” or “a gateway,” we should first ask:

• Is this training me to love what is worthy of love?

• Is this baptising my imagination into deeper truth?

• Is this, quietly and honestly, preparing me to recognise the gospel when I meet it?

If so, then we may be standing in the presence of one of God’s most subtle gifts:a story that does not preach — but prepares the soul for truth.