I probably don’t need to tell you that C.S. Lewis was brilliant. We often think of him as a masterful defender of the faith or as the imaginative creator of Narnia, but I always stand most in awe of him when I witness his piercing insight into human nature. My favorite of his novels (for this very reason) is The Great Divorce. (If you haven’t yet read it, I highly recommend this audio version.) The second, more well-known book that prominently features Lewis’s deep knowledge of humanity is, of course, The Screwtape Letters.
In reading Screwtape once again, two of the demon’s temptation strategies struck me as being particularly relevant to what we’re dealing with as Christians these days. The first, you can read about in a previous post, “Screwtape on Internet Distractions.” Lewis may not have known anything about the internet, but he knew the danger of distractions, and though we’ve now taken that danger to a level beyond anything he could have anticipated, his insight remains helpful.
The second occurs when Screwtape is instructing the junior demon on the benefits of tempting his “patient” to immerse himself in a cause—in this case, either patriotism or pacifism—as a way of easing him out of his Christianity:
Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the ‘cause’, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours.
I have seen this happen. Don’t let it happen to you.
Don’t get me wrong. We live in a time where there are numerous noble causes worth fighting for, and we, as Christians, should not shrink back from engaging in politics, as we’re called to seek the good of our neighbor and there are many false and dangerous ideas currently gaining ground in our society.
But it’s precisely because there are such noble causes that this warning becomes necessary. Even if you’re on the right side of a godly cause, if you let it become the purpose you live for, and your Christianity merely a means to that end, it will eventually become ugly. A passion in its rightful place (i.e., engaged in to the glory of God) accomplishes much good. A passion that becomes your “all” ends up controlling and consuming you. This is how earnest people start compromising truth, then courtesy, then morality, then the very Christianity that stirred the passion in the first place. At that point, the plant has been severed from the root, and all is lost.
William Wilberforce, who led the fight against the slave trade in Britain, could not have been more dedicated to his great cause. Yet, if you read his book and his spiritual journals, you’ll find that it was his attention to his spirituality and his love of God and the specific truths of Christianity that filled the core of his being. This is the man who prayed,
Do Thou, O God, renew my heart, fill me with that love of Thee which extinguishes all other affections, and enable me to give Thee my heart, and to serve Thee in spirit and in truth.
By contrast, I once heard a friend say he was a Christian because he thought it was the best way to help the poor.
He is no longer a Christian. Nor is he doing great work to help the poor.
As Lewis said,
The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.
Don’t turn away from God—the very source of all that is good and true and beautiful—towards anything else that is good, true, or beautiful. He is not a means to an end. Serve your cause for his sake. Never the other way around.