I was flipping through my copy of C.S. Lewis’s God in the Dock last night after being referred to his essay on vivisection by the Andrew Linzey article I blogged about yesterday. But I also read his very interesting essay “Meditation on the Third Commandment,” which deals specifically with the role of Christians in politics.

Lewis is responding to calls at the time to form a “Christian” political party and he points out several flaws in the idea. Any Christian party, Lewis argues, would have to confine itself to “stating what ends are desirable and what means are lawful, or else it must go further and select from among the lawful means those which it deems possible and efficacious and give to these its practical support.”

But if the party does the former, it’s not a proper political party since everyone agrees in the desirability of certain ends (freedom, security, a living wage, etc.) and all Christians should agree that certain means are lawful or unlawful (by which Lewis means moral or immoral). To get into the field of politics proper is to make claims about which means are the best for acheiving the desired ends.

But if this is the case, then the “Christian party” will be impaled on the second horn of Lewis’s dilemma. Any Christian party that promotes certain means will be identifying Christianity as such with a particular political program. Since any party has to adopt some program it will inevitably have to attach itself to unbelievers who share that program in order to be effective. So, what you’ll actually end up with, Lewis says, is a Christian-socialist party, or a Christian-conservative party, or even a Christian-fascist party.

Whatever it calls itself, it will represent, not Christendom, but a part of Christendom. The principle that divides it from its brethren and unites it to its political allies will not be theological. It will have no authority to speak for Christianity. … But there will be a real, and most disastrous, novelty. It wil be not simply a part of Christendom, but a part claiming to be the whole. By the mere act of calling itself the Christian Party it implicitly accuses all Christians who do not join it of apostasy and betrayal.

The problem is that in choosing among means to acheive politcal goals we are often tempted to grant them a kind of divine imprimatur:

All this comes from pretending that God has spoken when He has not spoken. He will not settle the two brothers’ inheritance: “Who made Me a judge or divider over you?” By the natural light he has shown us what means are lawful: to find out which one is efficacious He has given us brains. The rest He has left to us.

It seems to me that both our Christian Right and our Christian Left could stand to remember not to claim that God has spoken when he has not spoken. Just the other day I read from the omnipresent Jim Wallis, apropos of a new group he and some other left-leaning evangelicals have launched to agitate for intervention in Darfur, that “what God requires of us couldn’t be clearer.” But if Lewis is right, this is a pretty presumptuous claim to make. We shouldn’t append “Thus saith the Lord” to our human political judgments.

There is a problem with Lewis’s account though. He suggests, as an alternative to a political party, the formation of a “Christian Front” or “Christian Voter’s Society” that would “draw up a list of assurances about ends and means which every member was expected to exact from any political party as the price of his support.” Maybe at the time he wrote he could assume that all, or nearly all, Christians would agree about “what means are lawful.” But there are now, and probably were then, Christians who disagree about which means are licit and illicit. Christians disagree about whether innocent life may ever be intentionally taken, whether torture is always wrong, whether homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and so forth. There is an ethical pluralism among Christians far beyond what probably existed in Lewis’s time. He assumes that the “natural light” makes it clear which acts are intrinsically wrong, but many of us are a great deal less confident about that.

Of course, this only strengthens his main point. If Christians can legitimately differ over such things, the claim of any one party to be the “Christian party” is further undermined. It does, however, make difficult a united Christian witness on the issues of the day.