Why C.S. Lewis’ Wrote an Anti-Theocracy Argument to an Atheist

Everyone is tempted to exploit power.

Photo by Thom Milkovic on Unsplash

While C.S. Lewis and J.B.S. Haldane both went by “Jack” and had very similar life experiences, their adult lives placed them on opposing philosophical sides. Lewis became a Christian author and apologist, while Haldane was a groundbreaking scientist and atheist polymath.¹

Haldane frequently and publicly criticized Lewis. In his review of the Ransom trilogy, “Auld Hornie, F.R.S.” in The Modern Quarterly, Haldane claimed Lewis used his fiction to advocate for a theocracy.

Democracy is in fact a possibility, but so far it has only worked rather spasmodically. Some of us want to make it a reality. Mr. Lewis regards it as impossible. “There must be rule,” says an aged and learned Martian, “yet how can creatures rule themselves? Beasts must be ruled by men, men by angels, and angels by the creator” (I translate several celestial words). As angels do not give most of us very explicit orders, it would seem that we should entrust our destinies to someone like Dr. Frank Buchman or the Pope, who claims to be divinely guided. If Mr. Lewis does not mean us to draw such a conclusion, what does he mean by this passage?

In practice these self-styled mouthpieces of higher powers will presumably transmit orders very similar to Mr. Lewis’s broadcast talks on Christian Behavior.

Haldane’s charge was that Lewis wanted to institute a theocratic rule in which the moral standards Lewis expressed in his broadcast talks² would serve as national laws. Haldane demonstrated himself to be an exceptional scientist, but he wasn’t a very deft reader, or at least he wasn’t a very charitable one.

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Lewis saw his remarks and composed a reply, but it was first published in 1966 after both men had died. The final page or two of Lewis’ response, “A Reply to Professor Haldane,” included in On Stories, was missing from the manuscript, but his argument remains sound.

In it, Lewis rejects much of Haldane’s interpretation of his books and the philosophy behind them. In particular, Lewis made it clear that he did not desire to live under a theocracy. In fact, he called it the “worst of all governments.”

If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point may be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely more because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.

And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt. A political program can never in reality be more than probably right. We never know all the facts about the present and we can only guess the future. To attach to a party program—whose highest claim is to reasonable prudence—the sort of assent which we should reserve for demonstrable theorems, is a kind of intoxication.

Lewis, however, made it clear that atheism is not a shield against theocracy. Those who reject God could become, in essence and without realizing it, the devil-worshiping scientists of the Ransom trilogy who sought to use the law to force their perspective on everyone else.

[W]e have the emergence of ‘the Party’ in the modern sense – the Fascists, Nazis, or Communists. What distinguishes this from the political parties of the nineteenth century is the belief of its members that they are not merely trying to carry out a program, but are obeying an impersonal force: that Nature, or Evolution, or the Dialectic, or the Race, is carrying them on. This tends to be accompanied by two beliefs which cannot, so far as I can see, be reconciled in logic but which blend very easily on the emotional level: the belief that the process which the Party embodies is inevitable, and the belief that the forwarding of this process is the supreme duty and abrogates all ordinary moral laws. In this state of mind men can become devil-worshippers in the sense that they can now honor, as well as obey, their own vices. All men at times obey their vices: but it is when cruelty, envy, and lust of power appear as commands of a great super-personal force that they can be exercised with self-approval.

In Lewis’ mind, all human-driven theocracy is bad because none of it is truly designed around worship and obedience to God. Lewis would agree with Haldane that the motivations behind implementing a theocracy are about power. He would simply assert that it’s not only Christians or other religious believers who can succumb to the temptation.

Lewis rightly recognized that all people, regardless of their religious or political perspective, are tempted to exploit power. This was why he advocated for democracy.³

In his essay “Equality,” reprinted in Present Concerns, he wrote:

Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I rejected slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

No men are fit to be masters or leaders of a theocracy, and that includes atheists who believe they are above the fray and able to make strictly rational decisions. In fact, as Lewis argues, they are especially included.

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1. Those are the generous descriptors. Walter Hooper, Lewis’ friend and secretary, called Haldane a “disillusioned Marxist and violently anti-Christian.”

2. Which became Mere Christianity.

3. Contrary to those who would quote him in their advocacy of Christian Nationalism.