This post touches on literature, spirituality, and inevitably, politics. While I have no interest in talking politics straight-up on this site, nearly all forms of media have some form of politics in it, and the passage I want to share characterizes a certain strain of performative spirituality very much present in a political faction in the United States.
I want to share part of a scene from C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce that I find perfectly exemplifies the average conservative-minded American Christian in 2026. Though Lewis was mostly writing about his fellow Englishmen, people are people, and he had an uncanny insight into the human capacity for stubbornness, hypocrisy, and insincerity.
For anyone who hasn’t read it, The Great Divorce is short novel (and “fantasy,” as Lewis himself termed it) written in first person. The narrator is a man who gets on a bus in “the grey town”—our experience of life on earth—and on that bus he and a number of others journey high above the town to the edge of Heaven itself. Presumably, the narrator has died. He and his fellow passengers are effectively ghosts. When they’re dropped off at a vibrant, massively expansive countryside, the narrator witnesses a number of conversations between what her terms Spirits and his fellow ghosts.
The Spirits are individuals sent to welcome the newly arrived ghosts, since they (the Spirits) once came from the earth, too, and personally knew one of the ghosts before they died. Think . . . Jacob Marley, but exalted, not condemned. The Spirits’ job is to try to convince the ghosts to accompany, on foot, and to leave their baggage behind—not to return to the endless grey town of the earth. It’s time to go up into the mountains and higher vistas and even “cities perched on inaccessible summits” that the narrator glimpses. All the ghosts are invited. They have but to assent, and go.
In chapter 5, the narrator witnesses the meeting between a Spirit and the ghost of a bishop. It’s important that this ghost was, on earth, apparently religious. But like most of the ghosts in this story, he is obstinate and just won’t accept what’s right in front of his face: Welcome, acceptance, forgiveness . . . everything. Salvation.
The Spirit calls the ghost what he is: an apostate, one who forsakes his religion, principles, or faith. The bishop-ghost doesn’t see it that way, of course. He won’t go with the Spirit unless the Spirit can assure him that there’ll be “scope for the talents that God has given me” in this so-called Heaven, and that he’ll still be free to inquire and question as he sees fit, and that God isn’t actually a “fact” but something one can just decide for oneself. Not an absolute, but an option. He wants to make sure he’ll still be allowed believe whatever he wants to, on an intellectual level, once he gets to Heaven. The Spirit tries to assure him that it’s all real, that Heaven is a place of answers, not further questions.
The bishop-ghost says:
“What are you suggesting?”
The Spirit answers, and refers to their time together on earth when they were peers:
“Friend, I am not suggesting at all. You see, I know now. Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment’s real resistance to the loss of our faith?”
They go back and forth some, and then the Spirit (who the bishop had once known as Dick) asks him directly:
“Can you, at least, still desire happiness?”
To which the ghost replies:
“Happiness, my dear Dick,” said the Ghost placidly, “happiness, as you will come to see when you are older, lies in the path of duty. Which reminds me. . . . Bless my soul, I’d nearly forgotten. Of course I can’t come with you. I have to be back next Friday to read a paper. We have a little Theological Society down there. Oh yes! there is plenty of intellectual life. Not of a very high quality, perhaps. One notices a certain lack of grip—a certain confusion of mind. . . .
“But you’ve never asked me what my paper is about! I’m taking the text about growing up to the measure of the stature of Christ and working out an idea which I feel sure you’ll be interested in. I’m going to point out how people always forget that Jesus . . . was a comparatively young man when he died. He would have outgrown some of his earlier views, you know, if he’d lived. As he might have done, with a little more tact and patience. I am going to ask my audience to consider what his mature views would have been. A profoundly interesting question. What a different Christianity we might have had if only the Founder had reached his full stature! I shall end up by pointing out how this deepens the significance of the Crucifixion. One feels for the first time what a disaster it was: what a tragic waste . . . so much promise cut short. Oh, must you be going? Well, so must I. Goodbye, my dear boy. It has been a great pleasure. Most stimulating and provocative. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.”
The ghost can’t accept what’s before him, what’s offered freely. He clings to what he pursued in life as a career cleric (which the Spirit calls him out on): “popularity, sales for your books, invitations, and finally a bishopric.” The bottom-line: The ghost wants to make sure he’s got status in Heaven, something to set him above others.
To me, this is, in the very least, the mindset of the flavor of the American Christian we see voting and cheering against the teachings of Christ. They’re missing the whole point. They got the memo from Christianity but never at some point—enough to know some of the verbiage—but never bothered to actually look at it, and have chosen instead to gorge themselves on the vile fan fiction their pastors and political leaders are selling in its place. I say selling, because they’re buying it, and not at cost.
And this, I think, is a generous interpretation. I guess I’m thinking about the people at least trying to go through the motions of what Christ called them to do, conveniently shuffling to the side all the stuff they don’t want to think about. To them, religion is a tool, a weapon, a piece of leverage, not *even* a set of beliefs.
This hypocrisy nothing new in history, but boy does it seems to have become an explosion lately.
Foreshadowed and Foresung 