C.S. Lewis and “Mere Politics”: Some Shrewdly Hellish Political Advice from The Screwtape Letters

Each U.S. election year since at least 2016, a piece of sage advice from C.S. Lewis’ celebrated 1942 epistolary novel The Screwtape Letters has resurfaced online, in which the book’s narrator, a Senior Devil in Hell named Screwtape, pens instructions to his equally demonic nephew, a Junior Tempter named Wormwood, upon the general subject of politics. It contains guidance about how to ensure the future damnation of the particular human individual entrusted to Wormwood to corrupt and ruin (“the patient”) by ensuring he becomes engrossed in temporal public affairs of state, not private affairs of his own immortal soul:

Be sure that the patient remains completely fixated on politics. Arguments, political gossip, and obsessing on the faults of people they have never met serves as an excellent distraction from advancing in personal virtue, character, and the things the patient can control. Make sure to keep the patient in a constant state of angst, frustration, and general disdain towards the rest of the human race in order to avoid any kind of charity or inner peace from further developing. Ensure the patient continues to believe that the problem is “out there” in the “broken system” rather than recognizing there is a problem with himself. 

Wise infernal counsel, perhaps. Yet the words are not actually C.S. Lewis’ at all. The whole thing is a proven Internet fake. With November’s presidential election looming, Screwtape’s supposed letter will no doubt be dusted down and made to go viral once again. Counterfeit though it may be, it is still worth asking the question: “Does Screwtape’s letter contain any truth to it nonetheless?” I should say it does.

Although many readers of his Christian apologetics and novels automatically presume otherwise, C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) was not actually a Catholic himself but an Anglican, an adult convert to the Protestant Church of England. Nor, as many likewise wrongly presume, was the noted Oxbridge don and Inkling colleague of such characteristically Anglo-Saxon writers as J.R.R. Tolkien actually English: he was born in Northern Ireland, then (as now) a hotbed of sectarian tension between Protestant and Catholic. 

Perhaps made wary by the fraught local politics of his upbringing, in adulthood Lewis rarely went out of his way to associate himself with specific political causes. In 1951, he was offered a CBE award from Britain’s then-Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, but he declined the honor on the grounds that many of his secular critics believed his promulgation of the faith was simply “covert anti-Leftist propaganda” wrapped up in holy disguise. Thus, for him to accept a CBE would only “strengthen their hands” by making it appear he was being rewarded by the Establishment for preaching their desired faith to the masses in his many books, articles, and radio programs. 

This does not mean Lewis had no interest in politics, however; it is more that his own specific expertise lay in the field of the politics of eternity. There is no need to concoct fake political quotes from The Screwtape Letters, as the real book contains several quite genuine ones, just not of a definite party-political line. 

In his very first letter to his nephew, Screwtape warns Wormwood against the false belief that “[rational] argument was the way to keep him [mankind] out of the Enemy’s [God’s] clutches.” Instead, thanks to the twisted way the demons had arranged human society down the centuries, political jargon had, by the time Screwtape was writing, become so debased that the average modern Westerner no longer primarily addressed any given policy or social issue by asking first and foremost whether it was “true” or “false” but, for example, whether it was considered “progressive” or “conservative” in nature.

Neither quality is innately good, in and of itself, at all times. Some things deserve to be conserved and some to be jettisoned and replaced. However, Screwtape and his ilk had managed to fashion such general principles into hard and fast dogmas for most human voters instead, which could often be highly damaging. Here, from his Letter 25, is how Screwtape’s general scam works, with specific regard to political progressives:

Once they [men] knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We [demons] have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective ‘unchanged,’ we have substituted the emotional adjective ‘stagnant.’

Thanks to such rhetorical sleights of hand, adjectives like “progressive” and “conservative” become mere shibboleths, with persons on either side of the political divide adopting causes simply because they appear to be ones the rest of their ideological “tribe” happen to have adopted collectively. 

A good current example would be the Western Left’s sudden embrace of Hamas on the “progressive” grounds of their desire to “decolonize” themselves from Israeli rule. Looked at logically, Hamas’ attitudes toward gay and women’s rights do not seem terribly “progressive” in their nature, but so they have been emotionally labelled by today’s warped political Screwtapes nonetheless: the illogical end result being banners bearing overt absurdities like “QUEERS FOR PALESTINE,” a place where all the queers in question would actually face immediate execution. 

Part of the problem is that mankind, unlike incorporeal demons or angels, lives trapped within time and cannot experience past, present, and future all as one single contiguous whole. Of these three discrete temporal elements, explains Screwtape to Wormwood in his Letter 15, it is the future which can most easily be exploited along political lines. As Screwtape observes, “nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past, and love to the present; fear, avarice, and ambition look ahead.”

After all, “the future is unknown to [humans], so that in making them think about it, we make them think about unrealities,” whether these be the unrealistic utopias they themselves hope to construct or the unrealistic dystopias they fear their opponents may construct in their turn. For Screwtape, 

we want a man hag-ridden by the future—haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth—ready to break the Enemy’s [God’s] commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other.

By such methods, humans fixated excessively upon the political future can be persuaded to commit almost any crime, no matter how colossal, by treating the ends as far more important than the means. Remember all those mass murders in the name of the (never actually to arrive) future paradise committed by despots like Robespierre, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, and Pol Pot, all of whom did believe sincerely in the genuine “social justice” of what they were doing.  

Christians also may face the very same dangers from too firm a focus upon the political future, writes Screwtape in his Letter 23:

About the general connection between Christianity and politics…we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means…as a means to anything—even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man…to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice…Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop…You see the little rift? “Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.” That’s the game.

Just think of all those South American movements of so-called “Liberation Theology” of the 1960s-80s, where Marxism fused weirdly with Catholicism, hoping to produce a political New Jerusalem many years before the End Times appearance of the desired real thing, on the spurious grounds that Jesus Christ was supposedly some form of early premodern “proto-Communist.” As well-intentioned as many of the politicized priests involved may have been, did they really end up doing more good or more harm thereby? (Clue: it was definitely the latter.)

Now that democracy has been successfully subverted like this, Screwtape’s modern-day letter currently circulating online may actually be correct in its forged advice. Making mankind obsessed with devising impossible solutions for wider political problems over which he actually possesses next to no meaningful influence is indeed an excellent way to make him neglect certain other, more private, problems he does have some personal influence over: those of his own soul. As Lewis wrote in his popular 1952 Christian apologetic Mere Christianity:

If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state, or a civilisation, compared with his, is only a moment.

The state is temporary, but the soul is immortal. As Lewis once had Screwtape put it elsewhere, “the real end [of obsession with collective political systems] is the destruction of individuals. For only individuals can be saved or damned.” 

Of course, this does not mean Lewis felt any given individual voter, Christian or otherwise, should necessarily retreat away from the world of public politics into the private desert-cell of the soul forever. It is just that, as he wrote in his 1945 essay Membership:

A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion; to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either come to regard it as the natural food of the mind—if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else—then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.

If so, what does it say about the current health of our own society that politics now obsessively intrudes its tentacles, unasked for, into almost every sphere of public and private life, even into those where, by rights, it has no rightful place, such as sports? 

Perhaps the ultimate utility of Lewis’ political outlook will have been brought home to him on the day he died, 22 November 1963, the very same day JFK was shot dead in Dallas. Of the two figures, only one possessed the worldly political power of a Caesar during life. Yet, on their shared day of demise, each one’s soul would have stood equally naked and alone before the Throne of Judgment. I wonder whose, ultimately, would have gained the more positive heavenly assessment?