CS Lewis Was a Red

by Mervyn Nicholson

Red Tory, that is.  The famous author and religious writer, C. S. Lewis, is revered by right-wing conservatives as a saint, their trophy intellectual, but ironically, he was not “conservative,” not in their way.  He was not right wing.  He was a “Red Tory”, a political type unfamiliar in the U.S.  Almost everything he says about capitalism is negative.  Given his rather liberal views on divorce, birth control, and homosexuality, he was not a recognizable “social conservative”.  Above all, he rejected right-wing political and economic ideology.  In Mere Christianity, Lewis bluntly states that “a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist.”

OK, Lewis was certifiably conservative in terms of religion. But not exactly.  He was a middle-of-the-road Anglican—he was not “conservative” in the current sense meaning “Evangelical” or fundamentalist—treating the Bible as “literal” or as magical (“inerrant”).  He emphatically was not a “literalist”; he was not an “Evangelical”.  He was committed to science: he had no problem with evolution.  Like other scholars, he recognized the creation narrative in Genesis as a folk tale.  He condemned looking for “signs” portending the “end of the world.”  He satirized revivalist religion in The Last Battle.  He proudly called himself a humanist. He openly admired Paganism (a word he capitalizes in The Problem of Pain and elsewhere).  He insisted that “If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong”, a notion not typical of evangelical (“one way”) Christianity, or even orthodoxy.  Lewis’s religion is not as orthodox as people think, but let’s look at what is certifiably non-conservative in what he had to say.

Lewis was not “conservative” in the American political sense: he was notan advocate for the “free market system.”  A Red Tory is “conservative” in the old sense: thus Lewis believed in community and mutual obligation, in tradition, in democracy, in diversity and tolerance.  Lewis believed in the common good and in “universal justice”; he believed that we must look after one another.  He was anything but a cheerleader for capitalism.  His references to capitalism (competition, profit, the accumulation of wealth, marketing, inequality, self-interest) are critical, often hostile.

Read more at https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/29/cs-lewis-was-a-red/