C. S. Lewis on the Dangers of National Repentance

I love to write diatribes critiquing the present state of evangelicalism.  If you have been tracking with me for any length of time I’m sure you’ve picked up on that.

And then I come across this little bit of writing by C. S. Lewis.  It comes from an essay entitled “Dangers of National Repentance”, which is in his book God in the Dock.

When we speak of England’s actions we mean the actions of the British Government.  The young man who is called upon to repent of England’s foreign policy is really being called upon to repent the acts of his neighbour; for a Foreign Secretary or a Cabinet Minister is certainly a neighbour.  And repentance presupposes condemnation.  The first and fatal charm of national repentance is, therefore, the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the more congenital one of bewailing–but first, of denouncing–the conduct of others.  If it were clear to the young that this is what he is doing, no doubt he would remember the law of charity.  Unfortunately, the very terms in which national repentance is recommended to him conceal its true nature.  By a dangerous figure of speech, he calls the Government not ‘they’ but ‘we’.  And since, as penitents, we are not encouraged to be charitable to our own sins, nor to give ourselves the benefit of any doubt, a Government which is called ‘we’ is ipso facto placed beyond the sphere of charity or even of justice.  You can say anything you please about it.  You can indulge in the popular vice of detraction without restraint, and yet feel all the time that you are practicing contrition.  A group of such young penitents will say, ‘Let us repent our national sins’; what they mean is, ‘Let us attribute to our neighbour (even our Christian neighbour) in the Cabinet, whenever we disagree with him, every abominable motive that Satan can suggest to our fancy.’

C. S. Lewis is speaking of something which was a trendy sentiment among the young intellectuals of England right after World War II; namely that England ought to repent of her role and her participation in World War II.  He is saying that young people who say that England ought to repent are really denouncing others, though they think that they are denouncing themselves.  They refer to England as “we” rather than “they”; thus it becomes okay for them to say any bad thing they want.  Since they are identifying themselves with England, the normal considerations of charity which usually apply to others go right out the window.

But the same argument could be easily transferred and applied to some young fool like me who likes to be critical of certain aspects of evangelicalism.

When a man over forty tries to repent the sins of England and to love her enemies, he is attempting something costly; for he was brought up with certain patriotic sentiments which cannot be mortified without a struggle.  But an educated man who is now in his twenties usually has no such sentiment to mortify.

In other words, if I were older and had been involved in evangelicalism all my life and then attempted to critique it, I would be doing something very costly to myself, because I would have been brought up with sentiments that cannot be mortified without a struggle.  But because I am younger and have not been involved as long, I have less to lose.

C. S. Lewis then goes on to make the point that as Christians we must forgive our enemies, and this means those people whom we are truly tempted to hate.  For the young intellectuals of his day, there are two enemies:  “Colonel Blimp” (I am not sure who or what he is refering to here) and “the business-man”, usually the father of whoever is speaking.  These intellectuals say very little about forgiving these enemies, yet they go on and on about forgiving the Germans and Russians while being honest about the sins of England.  Because they are not willing to face up to their need to forgive “Colonel Blimp” and “the business-man”, all their talk about forgiving the Germans and Russians is just a bunch of hot air.

The takeaway for me here is that unless I am willing to find and face up to the real enemies in my life that I need to forgive and the real sins in my own life for which I need forgiveness, then my candor towards the vices of evangelical Protestant-dom is a rather inexpensive virtue.

One last quote:

Is it not, then, the duty of the Church to preach national repentance?  I think it is.  But the office–like many others–can be profitably discharged only by those who discharge it with reluctance.  We know that a man may have to ‘hate’ his mother for the Lord’s sake.  The sight of a Christian rebuking his mother, though tragic, may be edifying; but only if we are quite sure that he has been a good son and that, in his rebuke, spiritual zeal is triumphing, not without agony, over strong natural affection.  The moment there is reason to suspect that he enjoys rebuking her–that he believes himself to be rising above the natural level while he is still, in reality, grovelling below it in the unnatural–the spectacle becomes merely disgusting.  The hard sayings of our Lord are wholesome to those only who find them hard.

The truth for me is that there is a part of me that actually enjoys writing these diatribes.  I suppose that I would be a lot more credible in these critiques if it was something I found hard; that is, if I was older and had been brought up in evangelical Protestant-dom all my life, and only now begun to see the problems and to turn away at great cost to myself.  But I am younger and don’t have as much to lose.