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July 25, 2007

It was in 8th grade public school that I first wondered if C.S. Lewis was a Satanist. My class read and discussed all seven of the Narnia books. The Christian influence was quite obvious, but the last book--The Last Battle--seemed a bit odd to me for a supposedly Christian perspective.

That book portrays the end of the world(s) Narnia and Earth, from the perspective of the former. There is an evil Satan figure called Tash, worshipped by a people made to appear similar to Arabs. Tash demands the standard bad god vile acts, notably human sacrifice. What is most unusual is that C.S. Lewis makes a faithful and devout follower of Tash (named Emeth) to be a good guy who ends up going to the Narnia version of heaven at the end of the world. (Most followers of Tash did not really believe in him.)

I pointed out to my public school teacher (coincidentally a Baptist minister's wife whose husband took Greek lessons from my father, a Church of Christ minister) that Lewis seems to imply that faithful Satan worship can get one to heaven too. Does this imply Lewis was endorsing Satanism? Was it OK to be a devout and faithful follower of a human-sacrificing religion? I got my teacher to at least admit that this was a critical perspective that could be seriously discussed.

At the time, I did not push the issue beyond it being an anomaly and likely an accident of mixing analogies.  Lewis tried to mix figures of a Satan character with an Arab-like culture to make an antagonist, and trying to be inclusive of some devout Muslims, while it was likely only an accident to be inclusive of Satanism.

I held this position that C.S. Lewis was only supporting Satanism by accidental analogy until I learned the truth in college. At that time I read his Mere Christianity and discovered that C.S. Lewis was more than accidentally inclusive of Satanism. Quite the opposite of the religion of Jesus, Lewis believed in involuntary human sacrifice, and made it clear in his non-fiction where there were no accidents of analogy to take the blame.

How does he claim to justify this? "We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate or enjoy hating." (ibid.)  He implies that both parties, English and German soldiers, are innocent of any crime or sin worthy of capital punishment. Lewis makes it clear that he thinks the soldiers are committing no sin in participating in the war, but argues that it is acceptable for both sides to "mutually" kill each other, with the only justification that some political-military elite told them to do so.  As long as they don't hate the innocents they kill, of course. That is Christian morality? Not at all, it is the opposite. It is a religion of human sacrifice of innocent victims who would strongly prefer to live.

The case of two warring governments supposedly able to require their Christian subjects to kill each other, and a Christianity that requires them to comply is an absolute mockery of morality. Would it have been any different morally if the ancient Romans had sent hundreds Christians to the Colosseum and said they had to kill each other? This would not be meaningfully different than Lewis' WW1 soldiers. Would it be different if instead some Christians brought to the Colosseum had been drafted by Rome , and others by the Parthian Empire?  Not in any moral sense.

Lewis argues that the morality of the act (killing innocents) is not important, at least for soldiers, and by lack of addressing, he seems to imply that it is not wrong for governments to create armies and have them kill innocents. It might be better to say that from Lewis' perspective, obedience to the state precedes any consideration of fundamental issues of morality, and is why he, for the most part, never even brings them up to be considered.

This is really the key to Lewis’ morality.  Does he believe in the Golden Rule?  (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.)  To a limited degree, he does.  However, the key to understanding Lewis is that he believes that obedience to the state is a higher law than the Golden Rule.

While this maybe an internally consistent ethic despite providing no rules at all to limit those who gain power in governments, it is not a peaceful ethic. Any respectable ethical system requires not only internal consistency, but respect for person, property, and peaceful means to settle disputes. On this, all Lewis offers is killing on command.

Admittedly, Lewis' followers would not be consistent on this.  If a government tells you to kill someone, a Lewisite would require you obey but not hate the victim.  The command of government is the only difference to justify a killing that is otherwise murder.  But what if the government told you to have sex with someone, or to speak a dirty word?  "Oh, that's different," they say without recognizing inconsistency.

If we attempt to formulate Lewis' religion into a universal ethic, we might call it the universal soldier's ethic, worded such as this: It is justified to do whatever commanded by a government authority even if the act would otherwise be a terrible evil, such as murder, and individuals do not have the authority to judge which governments are legitimate or not.

C.S. Lewis was perhaps the central theologian/propagandist for pseudo-Christianity to the postmodern world. Postmodernism lost the modernist hostility to religion, but gained no concern for it.  Lewis saw its weakness and made a wedge for his broadly defined Greater Christendom to help provide a rebirth to his faith.  Modernism was a handmaiden of the nation-state, reaching a peak with the French Revolution to post-Napoleonic era, including the Western World's response by breaking sub-national/regional cultures and rebuilding them as nation-centric cultures.  Local communities lost their self-support mechanisms, replaced by national ones which were much less effective as support, but better at reconstructing society towards the goals of political elites.    

Postmodernism acknowledged a failure of all this centralized planning after WW1, but without seeking or finding a solution.  It lost its faith in the all powerful nation-state.  The state needed a new champion to enthrone it once again on high.  Then came C.S. Lewis, arguing for the local churches to provide a semblance of community for those now without it but looking for it.  Under Lewis' theology, the denominations would stop arguing about petty dogmatic differences and provide a unified front to remake those heathens inside and outside their state in the image of their state churches.

It is worth noting what type of church Lewis defended most: the English state church.  I don't know if he ever wrote anything critical of this Church-State symbiosis, but that he promoted one squarely within it is lesson enough.  Why was it good to take from the poor (the citizen-taxpayers) to give to the rich English State Church , with her materialistic buildings, expensive priestly garbs, pagan rituals, liturgical dronings, but only token help for the poor amounting to less than it took from them?  I doubt Lewis asked or answered the question.  While some libertarian-leaning quotes are easy to find within Lewis' writings, they are always just libertarian thoughts he limits to within the anti-libertarian state system, and not against it.

Lewis was really in a way like Marx.  Marx predicted an ideological battle he thought inevitable and sided with the side he thought would win.  Lewis thought similarly for his version of Christianity that would be obedient to the whims of the state.  There was power and money to be had, and Lewis' fame was spread by those who wished to maintain state power against the uncertainties that Postmodernism (or peaceful Christianity) might bring.  If Lewis had taken Christianity too seriously, he might have become a critic of the near all-powerful state, but then, where would he find rich publishing houses or state-licensed radio programs to spread his ideas?  If he had taken Christianity seriously, he would have been persecuted instead of funded.  So he criticized the Marxist state only to defend the Gunboat-Mercantilist state.  When Stalin made peace with Russian Orthodoxy, that church defended the Marxist state against the Capitalist state.  Both exchanged their religious support for the local nationalism and civic religion of each one's nation for mutual power and fortune.

When Lewis went to war for England in 1917, he was an atheist who believed in killing on the state's command.  With his supposed conversion in 1931, his beliefs on such fundamental questions of morality did not change. Although Lewis was not quite as bad as modern neoconservatives, they would follow him in conversion from statist atheism to statist Judeo-Christianity.[i]  A century of public education had dumbed down the Western populace to where they were ready to re-embrace the hypocrisy of state churches quietly mentioning "blessed are the peacemakers" while requiring that obedience to state authorities have complete precedence over and against individual conscience.  The state churches were more than willing to play their part, as they always had.  The younger denominations like the Baptists also wanted their piece of the plunderers' pie, to take their place in the pantheon of denominations which make up the modern civic religion, becoming de facto state churches themselves.

But at least Lewis had some consistency that was lacking in modern American Evangelicals.  Where Lewis accepted that his opponents in WW1 were no worse than he, as both were "doing their duty" to government, Evangelicals are intent to make out their state and their side of the wars as the one and only righteous side.  While Evangelicals demand that people obey and support "our government"—namely, the US government--they also require that everyone around the world obey the US over and above their own government, and those governments must also bow to the US .  Unlike Lewis, who was serious about not hating the victim, Evangelicals really do hate half the world they want to have killed.  Evangelicals have already accepted the civic religion of the USA as the One-World-Religion and are the enforcers of its gospel, which is called both neoconservatism and neoliberalism.

As bad as Lewis was on fundamental issues of morality, he seemed quite sincere, and otherwise humble.  He recognized pride as the central evil to be fought, and his writings are at least readable by intelligent people. His big mistake was to not recognize military pride as the most grotesque and evil pride, and instead he approved of it.  As he opened the crack in postmodernism for his religion, so unhumble and totalitarian American Evangelical Christianity took the crack of militarism in Lewis' Christianity to new depths of unrestrained human sacrifice to their god Molech[ii] that now passes for American patriotism.

Perhaps the worst of the inheritors of Lewis' philosophy of mass murder within American Evangelical Christianity is represented by Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, Rick Warren, Max Lucado, Ted Haggard, Bill Gothard,[iii] and such as represented by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE).  These have been the leaders in convincing Christians to pledge their allegiance to the cloth idol with the incantation created by the National Socialist movement that started in America.  If ever there was an organization for the promotion of Molech worship as popularized by C.S. Lewis, it is the warmongers and defenders of mass murder of the NAE and IBLP who have taken evil in the name of Christianity to a new depth of hell.