Few have described the modern opposition to Christian truth as compellingly as Paul Kingsnorth in Against the Machine. Kingsnorth describes modernity in a vision:
I saw a great wave of symbolic meaning. I saw it all as a rolling statement by those who controlled the levers of power in the post-Western West, a statement that said: We are the opposite of what we once were. We reject our ancestors and our history. We condemn our past and its legacy. We have redrawn our cosmic map. We are something entirely new—even if, as of this moment, we have no idea what.
In this modern world, the Christian finds himself locked in a perpetual struggle that James Davison Hunter termed the “culture war.” In many cases, Christians do not choose to become culture warriors but still face the question of how to fight for culture in a secularizing world opposed to their beliefs.
Christopher Rufo provides one model in his struggle against progressivism in higher education. Drawing insights from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, Rufo argues that conservatives must adopt the methods of their progressive enemies in order to win. In this example, he cites Alisky’s goal of becoming “dangerous” to the “establishment” and uses that model as a call for conservatives to apply for his fellowship program, where they will learn Rufo’s brand of activism.
But the Christian cannot fight in this way; the Christian is called first and foremost to love God and love his neighbor. Christians—biblically orthodox men and women who have been changed by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, who await the return of their King, and who travel through this world as pilgrims whose citizenship is in the heavenly realm—live differently, and fight for culture differently, than their secular neighbors.
Here, as in so many other areas, C.S. Lewis offers a better model: The Christian fights for culture through faithful, obedient living, trusting in the power of God to redeem a fallen world. Lewis depicts his vision of Christian culture war most clearly in That Hideous Strength and The Last Battle.
Published in 1943, That Hideous Strength is Lewis’s most complex novel. It functions on a cosmic level, featuring the descent of the governing planetary spirits to Earth, the “silent planet” that does not participate in the music of the spheres. It is also a novel about marriage, contraception, and authority; the protagonists, Jane and Mark, learn how to love each other rightly, and their marriage is healed. That Hideous Strength is also Lewis’s fictional counterpart to The Abolition of Man in that it puts the wrongness of modern science on full display. It is a thoroughly anti-modernistic novel. Dr. Elwin Ransom, a former Cambridge don and the representative of the embattled West, explains the modern condition and why they (the good community) cannot go to the East, which Merlin suspects would have held traditional values against modern incursion, for help:
You do not understand. The poison was brewed in their West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their mother and the Father in Heaven. You might go East so far that East became West and you returned to Britain across the great Ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus.
Against this globalist machine, Lewis pits a small community. Modernity, represented by the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), stands poised with the power and force of a corporation with a blank check from the government to rewrite the nature of English life. In contrast, the community of St. Anne’s-on-the-Hill comprises a former English professor, his wife, the wife of a petty criminal, an invalid, a gardener, a rationalist scientist, and a bear named Mr. Bultitude. Those tasked with defending the good are politically powerless. And yet, by the end of the novel, they triumph. Their victory comes not by raising an army, wielding magic, or launching a public awareness campaign (all methods that Ransom rejects), but through an unexpected route: living together in obedience to Ransom at St. Anne’s, and experiencing deliverance via divine aid. The skeptic Macphee tells Ransom, “I’d be greatly obliged if any one would tell me what we have done—always apart from feeding the pigs and raising some decent animals.” Ransom responds: “You have done what was required of you. You have obeyed and waited. As one of the modern authors has told us, the altar must often be built in one place in order that the fire from heaven may descend somewhere else.”
This conversation is a minor note in the novel’s conclusion, but it is Lewis’s depiction of the Christian method of fighting the culture war. A few men may be called to be like Elijah proclaiming the nonexistence of Ba’al. Even so, the power and the fire are a gift from above. Lewis establishes an almost invincible antagonist in That Hideous Strength, but it is nevertheless defeated by a small community of those who obey the commands they are given and wait for the Lord to act on their behalf. And He acts mightily in the chapter entitled “The Descent of the Gods.” Ultimate victory does not come through human hands but reflects spiritual victory that happens on a higher plane than humans typically encounter.
Lewis sets forth a similar pattern in The Last Battle. In the final book of The Chronicles of Narnia, the last king, Tirian, stands with two teenagers, a unicorn, a donkey, and a dwarf against the combined might of the Calormene invasion and the cultic power of Shift the Ape’s “Tashlan.” Tirian and his friends attempt to reveal the lie at the heart of Shift’s deception; they fail. Instead of victory, they are forced into a stable, surrounded by their enemies on all sides. And there in the stable Lewis unveils just what Aslan is doing in this final chapter of the Narniad. When King Tirian meets Aslan, “the Lion kissed him and said, ‘Well done, last of the Kings of Narnia who stood firm at the darkest hour.’” Tirian’s task is not to defeat the lies, turn back the invaders, or rescue his people. He attempts all these things, but the criterion of success is whether he “stood firm at the darkest hour.” Obedience and faith are how the Christian fights.
Lewis did not invent such an idea. Instead, he borrowed it from his favorite 16th-century poet, Edmund Spenser. Lewis loved Spenser, calling The Faerie Queene a collection of “hymns of life.” He thought that Spenser’s deep connection to reality pushed back against modernity’s mechanisms that disassociate people from reality. For Spenser, the Christian fights not with sword or with spear but with the Shield of Faith. Book One of The Faerie Queene follows Redcrosse Knight on his quest. Redcrosse has great strength, and he trusts in his strength for victory. He is prone to pride, which leads him first into Errour’s den and later into defeat at the hands of Orgoglio, the Gyaunt of Pride. In contrast to Redcrosse, Spenser presents Prince Arthur as the actual knight whose great strength could defeat the giant. Instead of defeating Orgoglio with sword or lance, Arthur wins the battle with his shield. While fighting, Arthur’s shield becomes uncovered:
And in his fall his shield, that couered was,
Did loose his vele by chaunce, and open flew:
The light whereof, that heuens light did pas
Such blazing brightness through the ayer threw
That eye mote not the same endure to vew.
Which when the Gyaunt spyde with staring eye,
He downe let fall his arme, and soft withdrew
His weapon huge, that heaued was on hye,
For to have slain the man, that on the ground did lye.
Arthur lies in a position of weakness: supine on the ground, separated from his sword. He cannot rescue himself. As the veil falls from his shield, the light of faith protrudes and causes the giant to drop his weapon. The virtuous Christian warrior does not win through strength of arms; such a victory would propel the warrior into the domain of pride. Instead, Christian victory comes about through humility, obedience, and faith. Arthur defeats Orgoglio because his weakness becomes an opportunity to magnify the grace of God through faith.
The Shield of Faith, though the mightiest weapon in Faerie, is by nature a passive weapon. It is often veiled, yet in the right moment faith shines forth and pride is dispelled. How does the Christian defeat the giant? Through faith in the goodness and power of God. Here is Spenser’s image of victory. Lewis expands this image into a working political theory in That Hideous Strength with eschatological application in The Last Battle.
The Christian life is one of ongoing faithfulness in small things: building homes, caring for children, studying scripture, praying, singing, preaching, living in community. A Christian community
takes its stand not according to ideological positioning, but according to actual positioning: on Earth, under the sky, surrounded by people who know where the sun rises in the morning, where they come from and who they are. … Neither left nor right not anywhere else, it’s a tradition that crosses all the modern divides, because it is older than all of them. It digs down, literally, to the root of the matter. (Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)
A few are called to great works of civilizational significance; for most, following God looks like learning to love neighbors at work and in play, seeking moments to share about the love of God, and seeking the good of the city. Such faithfulness looks like the kingdom of heaven. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.” This kingdom “is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” The Christian is not called to develop a battle plan to conquer culture; rather, he is called to the beautiful mundanity of faithful life under the sun. As Milton notes, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
In the midst of stories of knights, ladies, monsters, deadly sins, corporal acts of mercy, and Venus’s search for Cupid, Spenser offers a vision of how Christian victory occurs. David defeated Goliath not through his skill with the sling but through faith in the Living God. Christ defeated death through his submission to the will of the Father. For the Christian, to “trust and obey” is the route to victory.
