Is Meryl Streep Guilty of Blasphemy?

Over the years Meryl Streep has been accused of a lot of things – primarily being the greatest film actor of all time – but now she can add a new charge to the list: blasphemy.

That's because, after decades of gracing our screens as Joanna, Sophie, Mary, Eleanor, Miranda, Donna, Julia, Margaret, Violet, Sister Aloysius, etc. etc. she's preparing for another iconic role: Jesus. Sort of.

In taking the part, she joins Willem Dafoe, Jim Caviezel, Joaquin Phoenix and countless lesser-known actors who have all taken a turn.

Streep will voice Aslan in Greta Gerwig's upcoming adaptation of The Magician's Nephew, the first Narnia film ever made from C.S. Lewis's creation story. Netflix has confirmed Streep among the cast, and Gerwig has discussed choosing her specifically for the role of Aslan. The movie arrives in theaters February 12, 2027, before hitting Netflix in April.

For some Christian Narnia fans, this is not merely unusual casting.

Aslan, after all, is not just a very large talking cat. Lewis created him as the Narnian incarnation of Christ, and in The Magician's Nephew, he is at his most unmistakably divine. Aslan literally sings an empty universe into existence.

So when one of Christianity's most beloved fictional depictions of Jesus suddenly sounds like Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada, some believers have questions.

Aslan Is Not Just a Lion

Calling Aslan a “Jesus figure” actually understates what Lewis was trying to do.

Lewis rejected the idea that the Narnia books were straightforward allegories where one character simply stands in for another. Instead, he described Aslan as an imaginative answer to a question: What might Christ be like if a world such as Narnia really existed and Christ chose to enter it?

In one letter, Lewis described Aslan as an imagined version of what Christ might become if he were incarnated, died and rose again in another world. Lewis called the idea a “supposal.”

In Narnia, Aslan does things Christians believe Christ does. He sacrifices himself for another person, rises from the dead, judges, forgives and ultimately leads his followers into a world beyond death.

And The Magician's Nephew pushes the connection even further.

The book takes readers back to Narnia's beginning. There is darkness. Then a voice starts singing. Stars appear. Light comes. Plants emerge. Animals awaken. The singer is eventually revealed as Aslan.

Narnia's version of Genesis places the lion where God would be.

Gerwig seems particularly interested in that moment. She has described wanting Aslan to have both gravity and delight, saying she needed a performer capable of “depth and pathos” as well as “joy and delight.” Streep, now 77, checked those boxes.

To Gerwig, the casting appears to be about the voice of a creator.

To some Christians, however, the sex of that voice is inseparable from who the creator is supposed to represent.

“Aslan Is Male”

There is a serious argument underneath some of the online outrage.

Jesus of Nazareth was a man. The New Testament calls him the Son of God. Lewis consistently refers to Aslan as “he,” and Aslan is depicted as a male lion with a mane.

For readers who view Narnia as a deeply Christian work rather than merely a fantasy series with Christian influences, changing something so conspicuous can feel less like creative casting and more like tampering with theology.

Some reactions were considerably less restrained. Texas pastor L. David Fairchild called the casting “creative vandalism pretending to be artistic sophistication.” Commentator Liam McCollum accused Gerwig of summoning a “feminist god” in Aslan's place, while Isabel Brown called Streep's casting a “deliberate mockery of Christianity.”

Pastor Joel Webbon went further still, calling Hollywood “demonic” and complaining: “They're transing the Jesus lion.”

Phil Vischer, the creator of VeggieTales, offered a less apocalyptic objection.

“If Meryl Streep is Aslan,” he wondered, what exactly are audiences getting? A male lion with a woman's voice? A female lion with a mane?

Vischer said he was not prepared to condemn the film without seeing it. But he identified the reason the casting generates more heat than an ordinary Hollywood adaptation: “this character represents Jesus.”

Also, despite all the fear of a “gender-swapped” Aslan, Gerwig may not have gender-swapped him at all.

Empire's first-look coverage still calls Aslan “he,” and the new design still depicts a maned lion. When Entertainment Weekly asked Netflix about Aslan's gender, a representative pointed to Empire's wording and said it “says it all.” The available evidence suggests something simultaneously simpler and stranger: Aslan is still male. He's just being voiced by Meryl Streep.

That said, Gerwig's depiction of Aslan is also rumored to have heterochromatic eyes and a red facial marking inspired by David Bowie, which honestly just makes the "what gender is this cartoon lion" question even harder to answer.

Still, the controversy has stumbled into a theological question much, much older than Netflix.

So Is God a Man?

Jesus was male. But God's gender? That's more complicated.

Christianity usually refers to God using masculine language: Father, Lord, King, He. Jesus taught his followers to pray to “Our Father.”

But masculine language for God is not the same thing as saying God possesses a male human body.

The Catholic Church's Catechism makes the distinction remarkably plainly:

“He is neither man nor woman: he is God.”

It goes on to say that God's tenderness can also be expressed through motherhood and that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes.

The Bible itself gets surprisingly comfortable with maternal imagery.

In Isaiah, God tells Jerusalem: “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.”

Elsewhere in Isaiah, God's faithfulness is compared with a nursing mother who cannot forget her child. Genesis says male and female humans are both created in God's image.

Jesus reaches for the same imagery. Lamenting over Jerusalem, he says he wanted to gather its people together “as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings.”

None of those passages says God is a woman, but they do make it difficult to argue that imagining God through feminine characteristics is automatically foreign to Christianity.

But there's an awkward wrinkle for anyone arguing that Lewis himself wouldn't have cared about Aslan's gender: he most certainly did. Lewis actually had very strong feelings about God's gender, and about the role of women in faith overall.

In a 1948 essay he published opposing the ordination of women, Lewis readily acknowledged that “God is in fact not a biological being and has no sex.” Yet he also argued that Christianity's masculine language for God wasn't arbitrary. A priest, in Lewis's view, represents God to the congregation, and only a man could properly fill that symbolic role.

Lewis even argued that replacing “Our Father” with “Our Mother” would fundamentally change Christian religious life. So while a voice actor is obviously not a priest, Christians who say Aslan's maleness mattered to Lewis aren't inventing that concern out of thin air.

The opinionated author surely would have been disappointed, then, by what the Christians were doing hundreds of years before his time, and before anyone would accuse them of being "woke."

Christians Once Called Jesus “Mother”

Around the late 14th century, an English mystic known as Julian of Norwich wrote one of medieval Christianity's strangest and most beautiful descriptions of Jesus.

She called him mother.

Not symbolically, either. In fact, "Motherhood" became a vital part of Julian's understanding of Christ.

Julian compared Christ's suffering with labor and childbirth. Jesus brings believers into new life, nourishes them and protects them. In another passage, she refers to “our Very Mother, Jesus.”

And Julian did not invent the idea from nothing.

Historian Caroline Walker Bynum's scholarship on medieval spirituality found maternal imagery for Jesus among male Cistercian writers in the 12th century. Medieval Christians could talk about Christ as mother without believing that the historical Jesus had secretly been female. Motherhood was a way of talking about divine love, suffering, protection and nourishment.

Nor would a feminine-looking Christ have been entirely foreign to Christian art. Leonardo da Vinci, famous for giving some of his male figures remarkably soft and androgynous features, painted a notably delicate Christ in Salvator Mundi. Some modern scholars have even argued that the painting deliberately combines masculine and feminine visual cues, though that interpretation remains disputed.

That all makes the current argument considerably stranger.

Some Christians in 2026 are offended by the mere possibility that a fictional incarnation of Jesus might sound like a woman.

Meanwhile, Christians in the Middle Ages were calling Jesus their mother.

Three Different Questions

Part of the fury surrounding Streep's casting comes from collapsing three separate questions into one.

1. Was Jesus of Nazareth male? Historically, yes.

2. Does Christianity teach that God is literally male in the biological sense? At least in major Christian traditions, no. God is routinely described with masculine language, but Christian theology does not reduce God to a human male body.

3. Should Greta Gerwig change the gender presentation of a character C.S. Lewis intentionally wrote as male?

That last question has no catechism.

It's a question about adaptation, artistic freedom and how much ownership readers feel over stories that helped form their faith.

Author Mary Pezzulo, herself a longtime Narnia fan, put the discomfort on the other side.

If Christians accept Jesus becoming a lion without believing the comparison demeans him, she asked, why would becoming a woman be inherently insulting?

The Lion We Met as Children

There may also be a simpler reason this casting feels personal.

For generations of Christian children, Aslan was one of their first imaginative encounters with Jesus.

Lewis understood that power. He said fairy tales could slip past some of the emotional resistance he had felt toward religion as a child. Narnia allowed readers to encounter sacrifice, resurrection, evil, grace and God without first putting those concepts into explicitly religious language.

That may explain why changing Aslan feels different from changing almost any other literary character.

Readers did not merely picture the lion; some of them loved him. Intensely.

In 1955, the mother of nine-year-old Laurence Krieg wrote Lewis because her son was worried that he loved Aslan more than Jesus and might therefore be committing idolatry. Lewis reassured him that the qualities Laurence loved in Aslan were the very qualities he was meant to love in Christ.

Gerwig is now asking those readers to hear something unexpected when it opens its mouth.

C.S. Lewis once asked Christians to imagine that Christ could enter another universe not as a Jewish man from Galilee, but as an enormous talking lion who sings stars into existence.

Seventy-five years later, that lion has become something close to sacred for some of the people who grew up with him.

Ultimately it all leaves us with one obvious question:

If Christians can go so far as to accept Jesus as a CGI lion, why can't that lion be a woman?