'New Age Snooze': De-Christianized ‘Wrinkle in Time’ Blasted by Critics

Mark Judge | March 8, 2018
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“A Wrinkle in Time,” the new fantasy film starring Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling, is getting shellacked by critics. There’s too much CGI, the original characters in the 1962 book by Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007) have been replaced by PC casting, and there are plot holes.

Also, there's this small problem: the Christianity of author Madeleine L’Engle has been removed. In its place Hollywood has given us a "New Age snooze."

Writing in the liberal website Vox, Tara Isabella Burton notes that “A Wrinkle in Time is a deeply Christian book, informed by not just L’Engle’s spirituality but her specifically Episcopalian background. For most of her life, L’Engle was a devoted Christian (she served as librarian and writer in residence at New York City’s St. John the Divine church) and her specific vision of Christianity was central to A Wrinkle in Time’s climax.”

“A Wrinkle Time” tells the story of Meg Murry, a young girl who travels to another planet to save her physicist father and her baby brother Charles Wallace. The main villain imprisoning the loved ones is IT, a disembodied brain that wants everything to be the same - kind of like communism. Meg wins the day though the power of love.

For L’Engle, that love was expressed in Christian terms. This context has been sanded away in the film version, which becomes about New age self-affirmation, multiculturalism, and being a  “MeToo” female warrior.

Writing in Christianity Today, Sarah Arthur, author of the forthcoming spiritual biography “A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L’Engle,” observes that “it was the wonder and humility of scientists, especially theoretical physicists like Max Planck and Albert Einstein, who eventually convinced [L’Engle’] to become a Christian. If the Creator of a vast and surprising cosmos could love this small planet enough to become one of us, then—despite her ongoing questions—that was a faith worth clinging to. As L’Engle said in a 1979 interview with Christianity Today, ‘I believe that we can understand cosmic questions only through particulars. I can understand God only through one specific particular, the incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth.’”

So while the Christian film industry is booming and Main Street America is tired of racial stunt casting and secular bullying, Hollywood passes up a chance to make a great film that brings in a ton of cash. Why risk success when there’s an agenda to push? 

Not to hammer the point too much, but it’s worth closing with this quote from L’Engle:

What I believe is so magnificent, so glorious, that [my belief] is beyond finite comprehension. To believe that the universe was created by a purposeful being is one thing. To believe that this Creator took on human vesture, accepted death and mortality, was tempted, betrayed, broken, and all for love of us, defies reason. It is so wild that it terrifies some Christians who try to dogmatize their fear by lashing out at other Christians, because a tidy Christianity with all answers given is easier than one which reaches out to the wild wonder of God’s love, a love we don’t even have to earn.
 

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