Chesterton and Screwtape on our Current Predicament

Ungrateful Iraqi Church fails to appreciate our help in destroying it.

Ungrateful Iraqi populace fails to appreciate our drones patrolling their skies and the New Oppressive Regime that is as oppressive as the Old Oppressive Regime.

Iraqis, being foreigners, are easily provoked by the absurd notion that we Americans don’t have the right to police their country for them. Lots of foreigners are stupid that way, which just proves we know what’s best for them and are their natural overlords. They need to realize that the People’s Democratic National Security State of Heaven (formerly known as the USA) has granted itself the right to establish a police state in any nation on earth it pleases, starting with itself. From the cracking down on the menace of Brits who make Twitter jokes, to draconian punishment for teenagers engaged in ungoodthink about the sacredness of homosex, to over-the-top police state reprisals against little kids, to thousands nervously gathering to have ‘fun’ in the heart of the Empire of Fear under the watchful Eye of the State to the Administration’s recent moves to strip us of both habeas corpus and religious liberty, to the latest bill to strip Americans of citizenship should it please the Dear Leader to do so (introduced by a Republican Defender of Freedom, doncha know (because the conflict is no longer left vs. right but Ruling Class vs. the rest of us) the evidence is everywhere that the US and the West are abandoning freedom for security and safety and that we are one bombing or three meals away from selling our souls to anybody who will promise to keep us safe, no matter how many chains we must don. It is, like all such foolish bargains, completely Faustian and will end only in chains, not in safety. But a culture, like ours, that is in full retreat from the gospel is a culture that is inhaling the spirit of suicide and bondage, even as it tells itself it is getting liberation.

Meanwhile, Jesus still offers us the Spirit of true freedom if we will trade our chains for the Him who is Truth. But as a general rule, history demonstrates we have to hug the cactus of our folly and endure a long penance before we see our stupidity. Catholics should begin our penance now, because the day will come when we need to be there to pick up the pieces, and can only do that it we have cultivate the interior freedom of Christ. A reader sent this along the other day, from the Prophet Chesterton’s What I Saw in America (written in 1922):

“It would be the worst sort of insincerity, therefore, to conclude even so hazy an outline of so great and majestic a matter as the American democratic experiment, without testifying my belief that to this also the same ultimate test will come. So far as that democracy becomes or remains Catholic and Christian, that democracy will remain democratic. In so far as it does not, it will become wildly and wickedly undemocratic. Its rich will riot with a brutal indifference far beyond the feeble feudalism which retains some shadow of responsibility or at least of patronage. Its wage-slaves will either sink into heathen slavery, or seek relief in theories that are destructive not merely in method but in aim; since they are but the negations of the human appetites of property and personality. Eighteenth-century ideals, formulated in eighteenth-century language, have no longer in themselves the power to hold all those pagan passions back. Even those documents depended upon Deism; their real strength will survive in men who are still Deists; and the men who are still Deists are more than Deists. Men will more and more realise that there is no meaning in democracy if there is no meaning in anything; and that there is no meaning in anything if the universe has not a centre of significance and an authority that is the author of our rights. There is truth in every ancient fable, and there is here even something of it in the fancy that finds the symbol of the Republic in the bird that bore the bolts of Jove. Owls and bats may wander where they will in darkness, and for them as for the sceptics the universe may have no centre; kites and vultures may linger as they like over carrion, and for them as for the plutocrats existence may have no origin and no end; but it was far back in the land of legends, where instincts find their true images, that the cry went forth that freedom is an eagle, whose glory is gazing at the sun.’

I think we are well into that test now–and that so far, we are failing it. But the story is not over yet and we have it in us–because the Holy Spirit is in us–to search and try our ways and turn again to the Lord. We cannot, however, do so to “save America”. If America is saved, it will be as a by-product of something deeper: the choice to repent, serve God and “save yourselves from this corrupt generation” as St. Peter told the crowd on Pentecost. As C.S. Lewis’ Uncle Screwtape says,

Certainly we do not want men to allow their Christianity to flow over into their political life, for the establishment of anything like a really just society would be a major disaster. On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. 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.

Try to use the faith to “save America” and you will get more of what we already have: a political class that cynically uses Christian jargon and shibboleths to manipulate Christians into supporting evil and pagan goals and the service of strange gods by promising “peace and safety” and delivering a police state and chains. Make your aim instead to serve God and always put your country and all other earthly things second (including father, mother, sister, brother and especially self–even if it makes you a pariah to your political tribe–you will discover the truth of Jesus’ saying: “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you as well.”