Some of the writings of C.S. Lewis and especially Mere Christianity are widely revered in evangelical circles, sometimes almost as if C.S. Lewis contributed to the Bible itself. Aside from the fact that C.S. Lewis was guilty of many Biblical and more foundational philosophical errors, there is the fact that many Christians who praise him might not even have read some of his claims that would not at all be welcome in the American church at large (such as his correct belief that there is no such thing as a Biblical moral obligation to cover a certain amount of the body [1]), and then there is the additional fact that he is still sometimes elevated almost to the level of a Biblical author by some evangelicals one way or another. For whatever reason, a mostly incompetent philosopher has become the functional representative of a religion he scarcely understood.
The strange evangelical fixation on random Christian figures further separates their distortions of Christianity from Christianity itself. Presuppositionalist apologetics, complementarianism, conscience-based moral epistemology (which relates back to his general presuppositionalism when it comes to his worldview's real foundations), and other objective errors, with each of these examples being both false in the rationalistic sense of being logically incapable of being true and in the sense of even being contrary to the Bible, consistently show up in the ideologies of Lewis. There is litte that is rational about his conclusions or the reasons he says he embraces them. There is even little that is truly Biblical about his assertions, which are commonly reflected in the ideas of the mainstream crowd identifying as Christians.
Evangelical protestants love to claim that they base their theology on the actual contents of the Bible, when almost everything they say they believe--from their elevation of salvation over morality to their condemnation of that which the Bible permits (profanity, nudity, opposite gender friendships, and so on) to their potential insistence that it is rational to not be a rationalist--outright contradicts the Bible. They cannot demonstrate that the Bible teaches their dishonest or superficial claims because it does not, just as typical protestants cannot demonstrate that most of their extrabiblical philosophical stances are correct because these beliefs are demonstrably false or unprovable. Since they cannot demonstrate their philosophical and theological ideas from reason or the Bible, they just default to the fallacies of faith in the claims of revered figures.
C.S. Lewis, like Tolkien, has become one of these revered figures not because the ordinary kind of Christian is thoughtful, deep, rationalistic, and found Lewis and Tolkien to be the same. It is because Lewis and those like him appeal to their mere presuppositions about the Bible and broader philosophy. Of course, most evangelical Christians will not even read the Bible very thoroughly, so it should not be totally shocking that they rarely read the more philosophically direct works of Lewis, like Mere Christianity, very thoroughly. If they did, they would find that one of their undeserving heroes does not support some of their favorite fallacies at all and that he embraces total errors in other places. One of the only consistent things about the philosophy of Lewis is his utter lack of rationalistic awareness.
Even aside from all of his errors and assumptions, it is odd in one sense that evangelical protestants are so quick to hold up someone like Lewis as if they must be agreed with personally (as opposed to sharing whatever particular rational ideas Lewis sporadically had because they are rational and not out of interest in Lewis to begin with) when they very explicitly condemn relying on any sort of extrabiblical tradition the Bible in the first place. Their whole alleged approach to philosophy, of which theology is merely a subset, is one of rejecting church traditions in favor of Biblical teachings--but this is often forgotten the moment they are not thinking specifically about asinine traditions associated with Catholicism. C.S. Lewis is one of the comforting voices they like to listen to in order to feel justified in believing things they would probably believe on the basis of preferences and assumptions anyway.
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