J.R.R. Tolkien helped C.S. Lewis regain Christian belief during conversations in the early 1930s.
Lewis and Tolkien met at Oxford and became close friends. Their discussions about myth, literature, and Christianity influenced Lewis’s movement from atheism toward Christianity. Lewis’s conversion was gradual rather than the result of one isolated conversation, and he became an Anglican Christian in 1931.
Tolkien was a Roman Catholic and did not convert Lewis to his own denomination. Instead, their conversations helped Lewis reconsider whether myth could communicate truth and whether Christianity should be understood as the “true myth.” Other friends, including Hugo Dyson and Owen Barfield, also influenced Lewis’s intellectual development. The friendship later continued through the Inklings, where the two authors read portions of their work aloud and discussed literary technique.