C.S. Lewis on Politics and Social Engagement

Throughout Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis makes a handful of comments on Christians and social engagement, with particular reference to political matters at times. In this post, I’d like to draw attention to a few of these.

First, without condoning any sort of complacency with regards to political involvement, Lewis admonishes us to keep things in perspective. Is politics the answer to the dilemma which humanity faces?

I do not mean for a moment that we ought not to think, and think hard, about improvements in our social and economic system. What I do mean is that all that thinking will be mere moonshine unless we realise that nothing but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make any system work properly. It is easy enough to remove the particular kinds of graft or bullying that go on under the present system: but as long as men are twisters or bullies they will find some new way of carrying on the old game under the new system. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society. That is why we must go on to think of the second thing: of morality inside the individual.[1]

Second–and I rather enjoyed this section—Lewis talks about the role of “the Church” in political activism.

People say, “The Church ought to give us a lead.” That is true if they mean … that some Christians–those who happen to have the right talents- should be economists and statesmen … and that their whole efforts in politics and economics should be directed to putting “Do as you would be done by” into action. If that happened, and if we others were really ready to take it, then we should find the Christian solution for our own social problems pretty quickly. But, of course, when they ask for a lead from the Church most people mean they want the clergy to put out a political programme. That is silly. The clergy are those particular people within the whole Church who have been specially trained…. [W]e are asking them to do a quite different job for which they have not been trained. The job is really on us, on the laymen.[2]

He then goes on to spell out what he believes “a fully Christian society would be like” according to what we find in the New Testament. For what it’s worth, Lewis envisions the following things:

All able individuals would be working. There would be no societal “freeloaders.”
Yet, at the same time, he says, “We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic.”
Finally, he notes that its “family life” and “its code of manners” would be “rather old fashioned.”[3]

You may find yourself like only parts of that vision. If so, Lewis guessed as much.

My guess is that there are some Leftist people among them who are very angry that it has not gone further in that direction, and some people of an opposite sort who are angry because they think it has gone much too far.[4]

And so, finally, he diagnoses “why people who are fighting for quite opposite things [e.g., we might think of some Christians who are politically conservative and other who are more progressive] can both say they are fighting for Christianity.” He says,

Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing. That is just what one would expect if Christianity is the total plan for the human machine. We have all departed from that total plan in different ways, and each of us wants to make out that his own modification of the original plan is the plan itself. You will find this again and again about anything that is really Christian: every one is attracted by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the rest.[5]

And this brings us to “the real snag in all this drawing up of blueprints for a Christian society.” Lewis says,

Most of us are not really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says: we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party. We are looking for an ally where we are offered either a Master or–a Judge. … And that is why … a Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian.[6]

And, here, we come fully circle–we come to the place where we began. As Lewis concludes,

And so, as I warned you, we are driven on to something more inward–driven on from social matters to religious matters. For the longest way round is the shortest way home.[7]

Of course, this is not an excuse for political complacency. “That does not mean, of course that we can put off doing anything about society until some imaginary date in the far future.” Rather,

It means that we must begin both jobs at once-(1) the job of seeing how “Do as you would be done by” can be applied in detail to modern society, and (2) the job of becoming the sort of people who really would apply it if we saw how.[8]