Which author and fellow Oxford scholar helped C.S. Lewis return to Christianity?

J.R.R. Tolkien helped C.S. Lewis return to Christianity through sustained friendship and conversation.

Lewis and Tolkien met as colleagues at Oxford and became members of the informal literary group known as the Inklings. Tolkien, a Roman Catholic, discussed myth, Christianity, and the relationship between pagan stories and Christian belief with Lewis. Their conversations helped Lewis reconsider his earlier atheism.

Lewis’s conversion was gradual. He moved from atheism toward theism and later embraced Christianity in the early 1930s. Lewis described a decisive discussion with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson during a night walk in September 1931, after which he came to see Christianity as the “true myth.”

Tolkien did not write the conversion for Lewis or act as a formal religious teacher. Their friendship was intellectual as well as personal, and both writers influenced twentieth-century fantasy literature. Charles Williams and Owen Barfield were also members of the Inklings, but Tolkien is the specific friend most closely associated with Lewis’s return to Christian belief.