The libertarian C.S. Lewis?

The Discovery Institute has an online book on “C.S. Lewis and Public Life” that I came across the other day. In particular this chapter where Gilbert Meilaender discusses Lewis’ views on the role of government.

Lewis, Meilaender points out, saw “omnicompetent government” as inherently antithetical to Christianity:

Christianity, with its claims in one way personal and in another way ecumenical and both ways antithetical to omnicompetent government, must always in fact . . .be treated as an enemy. Like learning, like the family, like any ancient and liberal profession, like the common law, it gives the individual a standing ground against the state. (from “On the Transmission of Christianity” in God in the Dock)

Meilaender argues that Lewis had an “Augustinian” view of politics in that he distinguished sharply between virtue and justice. The task of the state is to maintain justice, but it’s too blunt an instrument to inculcate virtue.

To ask of sinful human history more than it can give is often the quickest way to achieve less good than is possible. We can make comparative judgments of better or worse, just as Augustine admired the ancient Romans more than those of his own day, but we cannot transform our communities into the City of God. An obvious conclusion follows, and Lewis states it clearly: “The practical problem of Christian politics is not that of drawing up schemes for a Christian society, but that of living as innocently as we can with unbelieving fellow-subjects under unbelieving rulers who will never be perfectly wise and good and who will sometimes be very wicked and very foolish.” Lewis does not, therefore, expect much from the political realm.

More important still, he thinks it would be a mistake for us to use its power in our efforts to achieve moral goods that go beyond that justice which government exists to provide. Whether we lack or possess political power, it will be equally true that “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” Good ethics and good politics are therefore not the same. The political realm seeks not virtue, only justice. If Lewis is hesitant to recommend the use of political power in service of morally desirable goals, that does not mean that no social transformation or improvement of our communities is possible. It means only that our efforts to promote good ethics should not make use of political power. Thus, the sharp distinction between ethics and politics becomes a distinction between the social and the political. [footnotes omitted – ed.]

This led to some positions that some of Lewis latter-day admirers might find alarming:

Lewis not only makes this distinction, he clearly seems to think that the social is in one important sense more fundamental than the political.”The law must rise to our standards when we improve and sink to them when we decay.” That position governs Lewis’ judgment, for example, about both sexual conduct and sexually explicit literature; although he believes that “masturbation, perversion [i.e. , homosexuality], fornication and adultery” are wrong, he realizes that many of his contemporaries no longer regard such conduct as morally evil. Because, in his view, laws will necessarily reflect the mores of a people, the law cannot be expected to continue to support his own moral judgments on these matters and attempts to make it do so are likely to lead only to confusion and hypocrisy. He suggests that the law might rightly still concern itself with adultery because it is an instance of injustice, when promises on which others have depended in significant ways are broken, but not because adultery is an instance of sexual immorality.The law must concern itself with injustice, not with forms of sexual wrong-doing that, however wrong, are not unjust.

It makes you wonder where, if anywhere, Lewis would feel at home on our political spectrum.