C.S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis was one of the most widely read Christian apologists of the 20th century, whose Mere Christianity, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Screwtape Letters carried Christian ideas to millions of readers. An Oxford and Cambridge don, Lewis converted from atheism to Christianity partly through conversations with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien.

Lewis argued for Christianity through reason, imagination, and moral intuition. His 'argument from desire' suggested that human longing for transcendence points to a transcendent reality. His BBC radio broadcasts during World War II, later published as Mere Christianity, defended basic Christian beliefs common to all denominations. That same work grounds his social thought: he treated moral truths as objective and universally accessible rather than as private preference or cultural construction.

This conviction received its fullest statement in The Abolition of Man, where Lewis defended what he called the Tao, a shared body of natural law visible across civilizations. He warned that educators who taught values as merely subjective would debunk the very moral sense on which civilization depends, and that a scientific elite claiming to remake human nature would end by conquering rather than perfecting it. His political temperament was correspondingly wary of concentrated power. He defended democracy not because he trusted the common man's wisdom but because no fallen man could be trusted with unchecked power over others.

Lewis was especially suspicious of benevolent coercion. In his essay 'The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,' he argued that treating crime as sickness to be cured, rather than guilt to be justly requited, removed the offender's rights and handed indefinite power over him to experts and reformers acting for his supposed good. Such tyranny, he warned, could be the most oppressive of all precisely because it was well-intentioned. He likewise opposed theocracy, which he called the worst of all governments.

The Narnia series clothed Christian themes in fantasy for children. The Screwtape Letters offered satirical instruction in temptation. Lewis's science fiction (Space Trilogy) and works like The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed (on his wife's death) addressed suffering. He was not a systematic theologian or political philosopher, but he wrote about Christian faith with a clarity and imagination that kept his books in wide circulation; they continue to be read by believers and cited in accounts of conversion.