Theocracy

A very interesting quote from none other than C. S. Lewis that we ran across this week. It is taken from an essay called "Lilies that fester" and he was speaking of the possibilities of a theocracy being established in "modern England." Of course, Lewis died before Middle Eastern theocracies were so much in the news, and before the powerful movement toward fascist theocracy had taken root so strongly in the United States.

I fully embrace the maxim ... that 'all power corrupts.' I would go further. The loftier the pretensions of the power, the more meddlesome, inhuman, and oppressive it will be. Theocracy is the worst of all possible governments. All political power is at best a necessary evil: but it is least evil when its sanctions are most modest and commonplace, when it claims no more than to be useful or convenient and sets itself strictly limited objectives. Anything transcendental or spiritual, or even anything very strongly ethical, in its pretensions is dangerous and encourages it to meddle with our private lives. Let the shoemaker stick to his last. Thus the Renaissance doctrine of Divine Right is for me a corruption of monarchy; Rousseau's General Will, of democracy; racial mysticisms, of nationality. And Theocracy, I admit and even insist, is the worst corruption of all.

He goes on to say he thinks there is no danger of theocracy in Western society (how little he realized) and that the real threat is from what we today call "political correctness." Ironic, that.