Lewis: curing people of Christianity

Thursday, July 30, 2009
    Commemoration of William Wilberforce, Social Reformer, 1833

Meditation:
    It is better to take refuge in the LORD
    than to trust in princes.
    —Psalm 118:9 (NIV)

Quotation:
    [Continued from yesterday]
    We know that one school of psychology already regards religion as a neurosis. When this particular neurosis becomes inconvenient to the government, what is to hinder the government from proceeding to ‘cure’ it? Such ‘cure’ will, of course, be compulsory; but under the Humanitarian theory it will not be called by the shocking name of Persecution. No one will blame us for being Christians, no one will hate us, no one revile us. The new Nero will approach us with the silky manners of a doctor, and though all will be in fact [compulsory], all will go on within the unemotional therapeutic sphere where words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, or ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ are never heard. And thus when the command is given, every prominent Christian in the land may vanish overnight into Institutions for the Treatment of the Ideologically Unsound, and it will rest with the expert gaolers to say when (if ever) they are to emerge. But it will not be persecution. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident, the intention was purely therapeutic.
    ... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”, in God in the Dock [1970], ed. Walter Hooper, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1994, p. 293 (see the book)

Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, I have confidence in You alone.

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