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What Would
C.S. Lewis Say to Osama Bin Laden?
by
Joseph Loconte
Editors'
Note: Joseph Loconte is the William E. Simon Fellow on Religion
and a Free Society at The Heritage Foundation. He recently gave
this address at the Trinity Forum, a leadership academy largely
supported by Evangelicals, whose purpose is to help young leaders
engage in the key issues of their personal and public lives in the
context of faith.
For
some liberal commentators, September 11 became an opportunity to
portray religion as an engine of wickedness, their hostility arising
because they construe the history of Christianity and all religion
as oppressive. Loconte spars with that idea and then asks the really
haunting question: How should Christians respond to evil? He looks
to C.S. Lewis for the answers.
The terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11—and what they represent—demand from
all sensible, civilized people clear thinking about some big moral
questions. What do we mean when we call anything evil? Isn't religion,
itself, a reliable source of wickedness? Does the Christian faith
really have a satisfying answer to the problem of evil?
These are not,
of course, new questions. The first reason to turn to C. S. Lewis
is his clarity and persuasive power. There are great assets in our
Christian, evangelical churches today: creativity, risk-taking,
a passion for truth and a deep concern for those outside the community
of faith. Nevertheless, there is much we still have not learned
about how to speak Christian truth effectively to a seeking but
skeptical world.
Believe me,
I am among those who have a lot to learn, and my remarks today are
really meant to get us all thinking together about how we who call
ourselves followers of Jesus might do a better job of representing
Him in our worlds of work and friendships and family.
A second reason
to turn to C.S. Lewis is that he himself lived and wrote during
a period of wartime, in which great evils were enveloping all of
Europe and threatening Great Britain. His Christian arguments were
not merely academic, but at least partially forged during the midnight
hours of German fascism, of the death camps, of another murderous
ideology that had countless thousands in its grip. The fact is that
Christian truth, lived out in real human experience, produces real
insight—wisdom that endures.
What would C.S.
Lewis say to Osama bin Laden? We're going to try to answer that
question indirectly: We'll look at two major ways that many leaders
in America and elsewhere have been responding to the events of Sept.
11. We'll then offer two Lewis-like
critiques of those views. And finally we'll explore how the Christian
story accounts for and ultimately overcomes this kind of evil.
First Response
of Public Leaders: We
marginalize religious belief as the engine of extremism.
One
newspaper columnist called the terrorist attacks "the ultimate faith-based
initiative."
More seriously,
Andrew Sullivan wrote an article for the New York Times magazine
in which he linked Middle Eastern fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism.
Actually he joined them at the hip.
"If you take
your beliefs from books written more than a thousand years ago,
and you believe these texts literally, then the appearance of the
modern world must truly terrify....." Sullivan writes. He properly
denounces Islamic intolerance toward unbelievers and Crusades and
religious wars of Europe. But then he comes to a strange conclusion:
"It seems almost as if there is something inherent in religious
monotheism that lends itself to this kind of terrorist temptation."[1]
Belief in God
is the breeding ground for bigotry, violence, mass murder?
Anthony Lewis,
a New York Times columnist, takes the argument one step further.
After 50 years at the Times he retired last December, and
was asked in an interview what were some of his big conclusions.
Are you ready?
"One is that certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people
who are sure they are right, like Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft."[2]
Moral and religious
certainty—monotheism, for example—is the real enemy of
decency and humanity? It lends itself to the terrorist temptation?
That seems to be the studied conclusion of Andrew Sullivan, Anthony
Lewis, and other liberal public intellectuals.
The Lewis
Critique: We must frankly face the sins that stain the Christian
church.
Lewis is brutally honest about the way in which religion can be
used and abused for selfish purposes. "Of all bad men, religious
bad men are the worst," he wrote in Reflections on the Psalms.
"Of all created beings the wickedest is one who originally stood
in the immediate presence of God."
We, as people
of faith, sometimes forget that the founder of Christianity reserved
his harshest criticism for the religious leaders of his day. The
Pharisees, Saducees, the Scribes—in the pecking order of respectability,
no people were more outwardly religious. But their hearts were like
stones, their inner life like a whitewashed tomb. The people who
should have been the heroes of the parables of Jesus, the religious
professionals, turned out to be the villains (parable of the Good
Samaritan).
And Lewis was
the first to admit that many of the world's greatest evils have
been committed by Christians, or by people claiming the mantle of
Christian faith. In the Screwtape Letters—the fictional
correspondence between a senior devil and his young protégé—Lewis
attacks the self-righteousness of modern-day pharisees in the church.
"The fine flower of unholiness can grow only in the close neighborhood
of the Holy," advises Screwtape. "Nowhere do we tempt so successfully
as on the very steps of the altar."[3]
Yet we must
also explain the triumphs of the Christian gospel.
We must not make the mistake of believing that it was the secular
enlightenment that civilized Christianity. This confuses the baby
with the birth mother. No force in human history has proved more
potent than Christian faith at both restraining evil and inspiring
moral heroism.
Listen to Lewis
in an essay from God in the Dock: To Christianity "Europe
owes the salvation...of civilized agriculture, architecture,
laws, and literacy itself...This same religion has always been
healing the sick and caring for the poor; that it has, more than
any other, blessed marriage; and that arts and philosophy tend to
flourish in its neighborhood. In a word, it is always doing, or
at least repenting with shame for not having done, all the things
which secular humanitarianism enjoins."[4]
Those who would
marginalize religion from public life have forgotten that the single
most important civilizing force in America has been Christianity—robust,
muscular, Bible-thumping Christianity.
In the early
decades of the 19th century, the battle against slavery
was for decades led almost exclusively by Christian dissenters.
In 1834, evangelical businessman Lewis Tappan helped launch the
American Anti-Slavery Society, which became the nation's most important
organization devoted to abolition.
Charles Finney,
the leading evangelical revivalist of the 1830s, made Oberlin College,
his preaching base, a hotbed of anti-slavery rhetoric and a center
for the underground railroad.[5] Or take Harriet Beecher Stowe, daughter of New
England minister Lyman Beecher, and author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Drenched in Christian imagery, that novel awakened and ignited anti-slavery
sentiment and made the Civil War almost inevitable.[6]
Attempts to
muffle Christianity's public voice are not new.
In 1854, more
than 3,000 New England clergymen signed a petition opposing passage
of the infamous Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which would have extended
slavery into the northwest territory. U.S. Senator James Mason,
from the slave state of Virginia, denounced the ministers as "the
most encroaching, and...arrogant class of men."[7]
Christian ministers
as "the most encroaching and arrogant class of men." Sound familiar?...
It was the same
argument leveled at the Reverend Martin Luther King, a Southern
Baptist minister. Yet it was King's deep Christian convictions that
not only fueled the Civil Rights movement, but kept it from turning
violent. "The church must be reminded that it is not the master
or the servant of the state," King said, "but rather the conscience
of the state."
To paraphrase
Andrew Sullivan, if you rely on no source of moral authority but
yourself, the idea of the church speaking to the conscience of the
state must truly terrify.
But it shouldn't
terrify if we merely pay more attention to the full record of Christianity's
engagement with culture. Back to C.S. Lewis. "If you read history
you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world
were just those who thought most of the next...It is since Christians
have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become
so ineffective in this."[8]
A Second
Response to the Events of Sept. 11 We
minimize or relativize evil by looking for its "root causes."
Feminist poet Robin Morgan blamed the Sept. 11 attack on "a complex
set of circumstances, including despair over not being heard."[9]
Katha Pollitt,
writing for the Nation magazine, excused the attacks by insisting
that the American flag "stands for jingoism and vengeance."[10]
On Nov. 10,
President Bush addressed the United Nations General Assembly in
New York City. "We must speak the truth about terror," he said.
"Let us not tolerate...malicious lies that attempt to shift the
blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty."
The next day
in the New York Times coverage of the address, an article
entitled, "Leaders Seek to Discern Root Causes of Violence." The
president of South Africa claimed that the "fundamental source of
conflict in the world today is the socio-economic deprivation of
billions of people across the globe, coexisting with islands of
enormous wealth and prosperity." That sentiment was echoed in several
speeches that day, according to the Times report.[11]
You get the
point: poverty, globalization, US support for Israel—these
and other factors are cited as the "root causes" of Islamic rage.
But does this
really explain the systematic plot to turn commercial airliners
into weapons of mass destruction? Does it really explain the deliberate
murder of thousands of innocent people—men and women, young
and old, Jew, Christian, Muslim? Does it really explain the gloating,
gleeful images of Osama bin Laden upon receiving news that the Trade
Center Towers had collapsed?
Surely those
images are a window into the heart and conscience of Osama bin Laden
and his supporters. And what do we see?
The Lewis
Critique: Human
Nature and the Law of Nature
In the opening pages of Mere Christianity, Lewis argues that
God places his moral law—what Lewis calls the Law of Nature—in
the heart, or conscience, of every person. He agrees with Christian
thinkers through the ages who understood that conscience is the
anvil of virtue and character. "
The Moral Law
does not give us any grounds for thinking that God is ‘good'
in the sense of being indulgent, or soft, or sympathetic," Lewis
writes. "There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as
hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does
not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to
do."[12]
But, of course,
we don't always do the straight thing. Individuals can know what
is right, yet deliberately embrace what is evil. When wickedness
is chosen often enough, the moral senses come dulled, hardened,
rendered useless. As Lewis put it in A Preface to Paradise Lost:
"Disobedience to conscience makes conscience blind."
Do our physical
circumstances affect our choices? Of course they do. But they're
still our choices. Plenty of factors might encourage the
corruption of conscience, but none can be separated from the selfish
decisions of individuals. Unchecked, these decisions produce monstrous
egos—in this case unleashed by a perverted religion. (Bin Laden
imagines himself the representative of "true" Islam, rejects all
other varieties as apostacy, and sees himself as the key figure
in its eventual purification. How's that for an ego?)
We see this
process on vivid display in part two of Lewis' space trilogy, Perelandra.
It centers on Ransom—the hero of the story—and his
bloody, breathless fight with the un-Man.
"What was before
him appeared no longer a creature of corrupted will. It was corruption
itself to which will was attached only as an instrument. Ages ago
it had been a person: but the ruins of personality now survived
in it only as weapons at the disposal of a furious self-exiled negation."[13]
It is this process
of the corruption of conscience that Lewis calls the "ruthless,
sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self, which is the mark
of Hell." If this doesn't describe the bin Laden home videos, what
does?
The Curse
of the Inner Ring
Lewis would point to another "root cause" for bin Laden-style terrorism—one
that has nothing to do with economics or global politics. He called
it the almost insatiable desire to join "the Inner Ring." By that
he meant the deep, universal longing to belong to an elite group,
a secret society, a covert club of like-minded fellows.
The secret society
could be something as tame as the Sons of Italy—or as vicious
as the Al Qaeda terrorist network. But the desire to belong is the
key.
"This desire,"
Lewis says in one of his college lectures, "is one of the great
permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors
which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell
of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment, and
advertisement...Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire
is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first
day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are
too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that
will come to you of its own accord."[14]
This, apparently,
is the life that came to and seduced John Walker, the American who
joined the Taliban forces in Afghanistan. He's charged with fighting
with the terrorists against his American compatriots. How could
it happen? "Of all the passions," Lewis says, "the passion for the
Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very
bad man do very bad things."[15]
Lewis drives
this same theme home in his fiction, especially in book three of
his space trilogy, That Hideous Strength. Mark Studdock is
the university professor drawn into the prestige and power of the
N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Coordinated Experiments). They want
him to fabricate a story so they can consolidate their dark stranglehold
over the town of Edgetow.
"This was the
first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he
did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent
almost escaped his notice; certainly, there was no struggle, no
sense of turning a corner....For him, it all slipped past in a chatter
of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals,
which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad
things before they are yet, individually, very bad men."[16]
So if we're
looking for the root causes of mass murder, we must look inward:
in human nature, within the heart of darkness, inside the Inner
Ring of ambition and ego.
Lewis and
the Christian Story
We've looked at two deeply mistaken attitudes toward evil that circulate
among public intellectuals. And we've seen a Christian response
to both attitudes in the thinking and writing of C.S. Lewis. Ultimately,
the Christian view of evil contains at least three parts:
The first part
of the Biblical view is to recognize that evil exists—not just
"out there" but in here: It resides in each one of us. That's why
in his fiction Lewis takes great care to show us how "decent" people
can be led into great sin.
In a universe
created by a God of absolute moral goodness, we live now not as
nice people who need to be improved, but as revolutionaries who
must lay down our arms.
That's the first
part of the Christian response: to admit that evil is real and that
we—in thought and deed—are all willing collaborators in
wickedness. "I quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the
long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort," Lewis writes in Mere
Christianity. "But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in
the dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying
to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay."[17]
The next part
is to learn to reject evil, just as God rejects it. Go back to Lewis
in Perelandra:
The description
of the un-Man: "What was before him appeared no longer a creature
of corrupted will. It was corruption itself to which will was attached
only as an instrument." And then Lewis adds these lines: "It is
perhaps difficult to understand why this filled Ransom not with
horror but with a kind of joy. The joy came from finding at last
what hatred was made for."[18]
Here is a crucial
piece of the Biblical view of evil: learn to hate it, to resist
it, to do battle with it, to overcome it. In the Hebrew Bible, in
Psalm 97, we read this: "Hate evil, you who love the Lord, who preserves
the souls of his godly ones." In both the Old and New Testaments,
we find the idea of repentance—of turning away from evil, of
changing course.
You can't love
God and not hate what is evil.
Reflect for
a moment on Jesus in the gospels. What is he typically described
doing? He heals the sick, he makes blind people see, he restores
crippled limbs. But he also exposes hypocrisy, shames those puffed
up by spiritual pride, and even drives demons out of people.
And he raises
the dead. Read the gospels carefully: No one ever dies in the presence
of Jesus—and no one stays dead in his presence for very long.
In other words,
whenever Jesus encountered any form of physical, moral, or spiritual
failure—sickness, mental illness, deformities, demon possession,
even death itself—he confronts it and overcomes it. For the
Christian, these things are not just the "facts of life." They are
evil and unwelcome facts: They are foreigners, parasites, intruders,
rebels in God's universe. Yes, these things are a real part of our
everyday world, but they are not natural to this world—not
in the sense that God ever intended them to become part of his created
order.
There is a third
part to the Christian response to evil. Evil is real and resides
in us and in the world. God resists and opposes evil in every form.
But He also
redeems it. He redeems it by choosing to bear the consequences of
human evil Himself. The third part of the Christian view of evil
involves redemption.
In Lewis' The
Chronicles of Narnia, a group of English school children slip
into a secret world of enchanted woods and talking beasts, a place
called Narnia. In the early days, Narnia falls under the sway of
a powerful sorceress, who corrupts everyone she can in order to
extend her wicked rule. Opposing her is the great and noble Lion,
Aslan. Let's pick up the story where some of the creatures of Narnia—followers
of Aslan—along with two children—Polly and Digory—are
facing the consequences of Digory's compromise with evil.
"You see, friends,"
Aslan said, "that before the new, clean world I gave you is seven
hours old, a force of evil has already entered it; waked and brought
hither by this son of Adam." The Beasts...all turned their eyes
on Digory till he felt that he wished the ground would swallow him
up. "Do not be cast down," said Aslan. "Evil will come of that evil,
but it is still a long way off, and I will see to it that the
worst falls upon myself...And as Adam's race has done the harm,
Adam's race shall help to heal it."[19]
The Climax
of the Christian Story: A Tale of Redemption
Jesus,
the God-man, somehow takes upon himself the evil of mankind, and
in his death and resurrection offers men and women a chance to escape
evil and all its deadly consequences. It's a story that seems to
be hinted at across the centuries in many cultures all over the
world. It's what Lewis calls the "good dreams": "those queer stories
scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies
and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new
life to men."[20]
Or as Jesus
himself described his mission in the gospel of Mark: "I did not
come to be served, but to serve and to give my life as a ransom
for many."[21]
We all know
what a ransom is: it's an exchange. In this case, the innocent life
in exchange for the guilty. The One who knew no evil, who committed
no sin, bears the sin—and the Divine Judgment of sin—for
each one of us.
The Christian
gospel is, at its heart, a rescue mission. And since Sept. 11, we
all know what a rescue mission is. If you're a New York City firefighter,
rescue missions are your business. Three hundred and thirty five
firefighters were lost on that day of evil. Among the surviving
firemen, we heard this near constant refrain: "When people run out
of burning buildings, we run inside them. That's what we do."
What they did,
in fact, captivated a skeptical world—a world weary of its
own unbelief. For countless thousands, the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon will remain a wicked nightmare. But
even in that evil, we all got a glimpse of the "good dream"—the
Christian story of redemption.
Jesus invites
men and women everywhere to become part of that story. And yet we
have a choice to make—for wickedness or for goodness, for corruption
or redemption. We can endorse the schemes of the Evil One, or accept
the grace of the Blessed One. One road leads to darkness and to
unspeakable despair. The other to courage, great hope and deep joy.
Back to Narnia: "Aslan
threw up his shaggy head, opened his mouth, and uttered a long,
single note; not very loud, but full of power. Polly's heart jumped
in her body when she heard it. She felt sure that it was a call,
and that anyone who heard that call would want to obey it and (what's
more) would be able to obey it, however many worlds and ages lay
between."[22]
Notes
[1] Andrew Sullivan, "This Is A Religious
War," the New York Times Magazine, October 7, 2001.
[2] Ethan Bronner, "50 Years of Covering
War, Looking for Peace and Honoring Law," the New York Times,
December 16, 2001.[3] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
(New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1961), 172
.[4] C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970),
147.
[5] George M. Marsden, Religion
and American Culture (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc., 1990), 63.
[6] Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity
in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, Michigan:
Eerdmans, 1992), 314.
[7] James Reichley, Religion in
American Public Life, (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings
Institute, 1985), 193.
[8] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity,
(New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1952), 134.
[9] Paul Hollander, "It's a Crime That
Some Don't See This as Hate," the Washington Post,
October 28, 2001, B3.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Serge Schmemann, "Leaders Seek
To Discern Root Causes of Violence," the New York Times,
November 11, 2001, B2.
[12] Lewis, Mere Christianity,
30.
[13] C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (New
York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1965), 156.
[14] C.S. Lewis, The Weight of
Glory (New York: Touchstone, 1980), 114.
[15] Ibid., 116.
[16] C.S. Lewis, That Hideous
Strength (New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1996),
130.
[17] Lewis, Mere Christianity,
32.
[18] Lewis, Perelandra,
156.
[19] C.S. Lewis, The Magician's
Nephew (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1983), 148.
[20] Lewis, Mere Christianity,
50.
[21] Gospel of Mark, chapter 10,
verse 45. The verse literally reads: "The Son of Man did not come
to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for
many" (NIV).
[22] Lewis, The Magician's Nephew,
149.
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