Is Mere Christianity too hard?

Reflecting on his experience with college students, Andrew Cuneo has found that many of them find C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity too difficult and its approach unpersuasive:

...[T]he amazing thing (to my mind) is that a book once considered — and vilified — as a work of popular apologetics has come to be seen as exceedingly intellectual. The young minds of today’s universities find the book too argumentative, too predicated upon logic, and so one must ask about the book as well as the Christian belief proposed: is it too hard?

For full disclosure, I will note that it is not only students at my former university, Hillsdale College, who prompted the question. Whether I tutored students from Calvin College, Wheaton College, Williams College, Boston College — choose what you like — the unexpected feedback was that as admirable as Mere Christianity is, it might be pitched too high for today’s audience. ....

A syllogistic proof, a tight argument, an extended discourse, for whatever reason, simply doesn’t seem to move most students. Alas, too often they fail to perceive the argument in the first place. Once they do, they often find argument as a species too immaterial or hopelessly abstract. On the other hand and to their credit, a contemporary student is much more likely to be moved by personal narrative or an emotional appeal: by passion (reasoned or not), enthusiasm, and sincerity of purpose. What this means for their assessment of Lewis’s apologetics is then clear: too hard, too logical. Books like Mere Christianity, for them, take some wading and books like The Abolition of Man and Miracles are about beyond the pale for all but senior-year students. Such is the feedback from my approximately ten years of teaching and tutoring. ....

There is something about the temperament of the soul of the young that makes our age distinct from Lewis’s. I am here reminded of Chesterton’s observation that a cultural loss of faith makes that culture fall back upon reason, and a loss of reason makes it fall back upon emotion; and emotion, as Lewis points out so well in Abolition, is extremely easy to manipulate when it is a prime determinant in decision-making. One has to be thankful, then, that so many of Lewis’s non-apologetic works employ emotional and imaginative power to sway a generation and culture that does still eagerly enjoy narrative, story, art, and advertisement. .... (more)

Is he right? I am curious about whether recent college students agree. I used certain Lewis essays with high school students in my political science classes and they seemed to find them accessible.

C. S. Lewis Blog: Is Mere Christianity Hard or Easy?