Introduction
I have an exhilarating task before me. I want to argue with C.S. Lewis about politics, and I also want to praise him highly at the same time. The praise is because he puts his finger on the central sore spot when it comes to understanding the law of God and the laws of men. My argument has to do with his dismissal of certain phrases, phrases that I believe must be maintained and defended if we are ever to get out of the mess we are in. Nevertheless, his critiques of the abuses associated with such phrases is on point, and hence my applause. By the end of all this, you might not know what side I am on. In short, we have to grasp the force and pungency of Lewis’s argument before we don’t do what he suggests.
The passage that put me in mind of this issue comes from his magnum opus, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Lewis is in the process of contrasting the Anglican theologian, Richard Hooker, with the arch-Presbyterian, Thomas Cartwright. Earlier in the book, in his discussion of Tyndale and More, Lewis’s sympathies were clearly with the early puritans. He describes, quite wonderfully, what it meant to be freed from all medieval motive scratchings, and to be freed from that bondage by sheer grace alone.
But we are now somewhat later in the history. It is in Cartwright, he says, that we first meet the Puritan of popular caricature, someone who managed to get all of his scruples wound tight around his axle. Confronted with this situation, his only apparent solution was to gun it again, and everything around him was starting to smoke a bit.
So earlier, Lewis had leaned in Tyndale’s direction and here he leans in Hooker’s. But whichever way he is leaning, he is really clear-eyed about the bind that both sides were in. And both sides were in a true bind.
I have argued before that Mere Christendom is actually Christendom 2.0. It is not simply a rerun. There were some bugs that needed to be fixed, and this is one of them. And from some of the online chatter I have seen, it appears that some folks are hellbent on not fixing anything. At least that would be the conclusion I would draw if I saw someone circulating an image of Vlad the Impaler smoking a heater, saying that we need to do better next time.
Extended Quote Time
“Neither side questions the medieval assumption that unorthodoxy is sinful and that sin must be treated as crime. Their picture of Christianity always includes that disastrous figure ‘the Christian magistrate’ or ‘godly prince’. As a result of his presence the puritan maxim ‘that nothing be don’ in the Church ‘but that which you haue the express warrant of Gods worde for’ (Admonition) has very serious political consequences. “Gods worde’ mean the Bible as interpreted by a consistory. The prince, enforcing by law what the consistory declares to be God’s will, thus become in effect merely the executive officer of the Church, and, as Bridges complains (Defence, xvi. 1335), the Church will thus have that very dominion over the State which the puritans blamed the pope for usurping. The Anglican position, on the other hand, by freeing the prince from this strict dependence on scripture and yet making adherence to the prince’s church compulsory, leaves the religious life of every individual in bondage to political power. Whatever they say, even whatever they wish, the puritans are driven to put the Church above the State, and the Anglicans to put the State above the Church. And until the confusion between sin and crime is cleared up, there is no escape. Price and priest in the sixteenth century both still desire to ride the pale horse theocracy: and when two men ride a horse we know where one must sit.”
C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century
If you read that carefully, no further exposition should be necessary. But alas, while I know that you read that carefully, there will be others out there who did not. I write for them only, more in sorrow than in anger.
That Disastrous Figure
Lewis here calls the idea of “the Christian magistrate” or “godly prince” a disastrous figure. But what is the actual alternative? Should Christians pine away until God answers our urgent prayers in order to give us an ungodly prince? That would be absurd. It was Lewis who taught me the true ideal of the godly prince . . . Lune, Tirian, Peter, Edmund, Caspian. What Lewis actually appears to be rejecting here is the idea of a Miraz with Bible verses attached. This is the more likely in that Miraz is called the “Lord Protector,” the same title that Cromwell used. And even though Cromwell was no Miraz, I still take the point.
It just seems odd to me that a rejection of ungodly princes should take the form of rejecting godly princes.
But what Lewis is clearly trying to head off is an ungodly prince who is absolutely convinced that he is doing God’s will. He hates the idea of someone in power who has managed to cauterize his conscience with some “sound theology.” And this is where my “yeah, but” enters in. It isn’t really sound theology.
Lewis would far prefer a robber baron, a man whose avarice might sleep sometimes, to a man who is filled to the brim with Sunshine and Uplift, and who tyrannizes over all of us with serenity of heart.
“It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Lewis, The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment
Now it is quite possible that white women with liberal arts degrees will interrupt us at this point in order to state that this is precisely their worry. They don’t want puritanical theocrats telling us what we can and cannot do (on the sabbath, say), and who do this without a qualm, for are they not among “the righteous”? What these white women with liberal arts degrees (WWWLAD) don’t realize is that they are exactly this kind of puritan, only with Jesus left out, and climate change put in.
To take another image from Lewis, the trick is to have us running around with fire extinguishers when there is a flood on. We are so on guard against the possible abuses and predations of “godly” princes, the last of whom died centuries ago, that we tolerate with nary a qualm (it has been a while since I have been able to use “nary a qualm”) ungodly magistrates who put the Spanish Inquisition into the shade. We all of us drowned in Noah’s flood months ago, and our bodies are still floating in the water, and some of us want to make sure we are floating next to the fire extinguishers.
The hard totalitarians, the commies, murdered 100 million of their own people. The Western democracies sought to match that, but limited themselves to little victims who couldn’t possibly fight back. And emerging from that blood-soaked century, our big worry is that Cromwell’s men are going to try to outlaw Christmas dinners again. We think this way because we are sophisticated moderns.
Sins and Crimes
I said earlier that Lewis put his finger on the sore spot, and here it is.
“Neither side questions the medieval assumption that unorthodoxy is sinful and that sin must be treated as crime . . . And until the confusion between sin and crime is cleared up, there is no escape.”
See above
And he is absolutely right. There really is no escape. For anybody involved in the Christian Nationalism discussion, this really needs to be a front and center issue.
While it is true that Scripture needs to be our foundational guide when it comes to what we penalize and what we do not, it needs to be Scripture rightly handled. To say that all capital punishments need to have a scriptural foundation is not the same thing as saying that anything condemned in Scripture should be a capital offense. Or ratchet it down a couple of notches. To say that all civil punishments needed to be grounded in the teaching of Scripture is not to say that anything prohibited by Scripture is a legitimate target for the magistrate’s ire.
And taking a page from James Madison, we need, in the first instance, to ensure that the civil enforcers of all scriptural standards are themselves bound by scriptural standards. There is absolutely no way to do this apart from the theological rich concept of limited government.
The Bible contains a vast array of sins that are flatly condemned, but to which we see no civil penalties attached. These are sins, not crimes. Lust is a sin, but ought not to be a crime. Covetousness is a sin, but ought not to be a crime. Unbelief is a sin, but ought not to be a crime. Malice is a sin, but ought not to be a crime.
On the other end, many crimes are obvious, and the scriptural ground for penalizing them is equally obvious. Murder is a crime. Theft is a crime. Rape is a crime. Adultery is a crime. Sodomy is a crime. Outlaw them.
In the minds of some, the insurmountable challenge is that pesky First Table of the Law. Does the civil magistrate have authority from God to restrict things like blasphemy? Can that be done without Star Chambers? Yes, it can be, and I would suggest, in my own modest way, that America had a good run. We figured out how to do it, and we went for almost two centuries before collapsing into our current secularist nonsense.
A Bit of Historical Context to Wrap Up
Since we are talking about the dangers of Christian theocracy (and to be frank, this is a fallen world and there are some), I would now unsay some of the hard implications that may have resulted from my earlier description of Thomas Cartwright. For all his strictness, Cartwright was the persecuted one, spending time in an Anglican hoosegow for his convictions. The Anglicans of that era were tough cookies, and if I may mix a metaphor here, they knew how to play hard ball. And they did play hard ball. In the immortal words of Martin Marprelate, renegade puritan, the “bishops had learned their catechisms and were past grace.” Martin should know, as his publisher was executed. They knew how to cut out tongues in those days. Anglicanism has had a retroactive reputation of benevolence imposed on it over the last century or two, but this has largely come from the ranks of the effete who just wanted more sensate worship services, and choir boys to groom.
The Elizabethan settlement was enforced by scores of religious executions—mostly of Catholics, but some anabaptists and hardline puritans were thrown in for good measure. But if we were to go by Milton’s nerves—“New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large”—we might anticipate the same and worse up in Scotland, once the feared and fierce Presbyterians had their way up there. But measured against the Anglicans under Elizabeth, the Presbyterians were a regular collection of baa-lambs. Religious prosecutions were very rare.
Well, okay. There was the occasional war.