Before he delighted children with the Chronicles of Narnia, and made readers think and reflect with Mere Christianity, Lewis wrote literature and taught at Cambridge as an avowed atheist.
The new film The Most Reluctant Convert, filmed in and around Oxford, details Lewis’s journey to faith: From a young boy who lost his mother to an Oxford University student challenged over his own beliefs by friend and fellow student J.R.R. Tolkien.
Veteran actor Max McLean of The Fellowship for Performing Arts appears as the middle-aged Lewis in the film.
“Lewis is considered the most influential Christian writer of the 20th century,” McClean says. “Yet he began as a hard-boiled atheist, a vigorous debunker of Christianity almost on level of Christopher Hitchens. He had those kinds of rhetorical gifts.”
The film is playing in selected cities through November 18.
The Most Reluctant Convert will eventually hit streaming platforms, too, but McLean urges the audience to see it on the big screen.
“The film has got a beautiful cinematography, a beautiful sound track,” he tells American Family News, “that is best experienced in those kinds of theaters that were made for all that.”
The Most Reluctant Convert was written and directed by Norman Stone.
