Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 07:2 (Fall 2025)
Article: Escaping Eschropolis: Masculinity And Femininity On The Silent Planet
Author: Colin J. Smothers

Eikon 7.2 (Fall 2025) p. 74

Escaping Eschropolis: Masculinity And Femininity On The Silent Planet

Colin J. Smothers

Colin J. Smothers is Executive Director of CBMW

C.S. Lewis was arguably one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, and he bequeathed on the world a great literary treasury.1 Many readers first encounter Lewis the Christian apologist through his inimitable work Mere Christianity. Others discover Lewis the children’s author in his enchanting Narnia series. These two projects often act for the adventurous reader as a kind of wardrobe into Lewis’s vast bibliography, a journey that rewards any who take the time to explore this wonderfully rich world. But readers who spend any sustained time ruminating on this great mind are sometimes surprised to encounter Lewis the “complementarian.”

The claim that Lewis was a “complementarian” is obviously anachronistic, because the term itself was coined by conservative evangelicals in the 1980’s, decades after Lewis’s death. The term was coined to describe a movement that defines itself over against another movement known as “egalitarianism,” which has intellectual headwaters that were active in Lewis’s day. The simplest definition of a complementarian is one who believes men and women are created equal by God in His image, yet with important differences that make a difference for how we live. Specifically, complementarians believe that God’s good design for us as male and female informs the Bible’s instructions regarding leadership in the home and the church, and to defy either

Eikon 7.2 (Fall 2025) p. 75

is to defy the created order, or what Lewis refers to as the Tao (more on this below). Gender egalitarians, on the other hand, tend to downplay and flatten male-female differences, to the point that these differences have little bearing on how we live at home, in the church, and in society. In a word, egalitarians believe men and women are socially interchangeable — a concept that Lewis himself vehemently opposed in his lifetime. This theme shows up in a surprising number of places across his literary corpus.

To put a fine point on it, Lewis believed that men and women are wonderfully equal yet beautifully distinct, and he had a lot to say about God’s design for men and women. He also had a lot to say about how we should live according to and not contrary to God’s good design. Hence, Lewis the “complementarian.”

What was it that Lewis encountered in the early-twentieth century that made him so attuned to this theme? In short, he was alarmed by the rapid erosion of true masculinity and femininity in modernity. While it is impossible to reconstruct in th...