Conservative MAGA culture warriors deploying Jesus as their mascot who regard C.S. Lewis as their ally would be horrified to discover his (how did Bishop Barron describe it?) “vile Wokeism”. This is the kind of stuff the Cult wants banned in Florida:
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Thanks for writing this, Mark. I appreciate you.
The right in this country professes to be all about “free speech” and yet they are the only party passing Soviet style censorship banning the discussion of any and all history that runs counter to the state’s official ideology.
Very well put.
Unfortunately I can think of two dozen left-wingers who, if shown this quotation, would bring away from it “He described Asians as ‘Y#ll#w!’ and Native Americans First Peoples as ‘R#d”! I’m triggered!” and very little else.
(There is something of a cottage industry in writing off CS Lewis as a “privileged white male” – SHADOWLANDS didn’t help in this regard – ignoring the fact that he lost his mother at 10 to cancer, that he spent his early teens at a boarding school whose headmaster was a sadistic bully, and that he carried shrapnel from the World War One trenches in his torso for all of his life. Sure, it’s not up there with having to sit through an all-male “Ghostbusters”, but it’s not nothing.)
You can test this claim by posting Lewis’ quote on a secular politics website and then counting to ten.
Which is part of the reason why the MAGA Right have the traction they have… that a segment of the Left have become toxic and closed-minded. Other left-wingers (eg, Freddie deBoer, Nick Cohen) have pointed this out as well, and the Right wing’s proposed cures are no solution, but it’s not an imaginary problem.
Yeah. I’m aware that there is a hyper-Puritan Left. And their staggering numbers might fill a small conference room at Holiday in in Dubuque. But the right wing Freak Show has managied to badly toxify the US Church as well as provide the backbone for the gravest domestic threat to the US since the Civil War. Lewis is emphatically not their friend and, hyper-Puritan Leff notwithstanding, he is an ally toi sane Christian trying to bear witness to Christ against this obscene white racist cult that is eating at the Church like a cancer.
We could test this by booking the said conference room in Holiday Inn at Dubuque for you to give public readings from the Catechism of the Catholic Church on abortion, and see how far the hyper-Puritanical Left respects your freedom of speech.
You could explain to them that, being loyal to Pope Francis and not some RadTrad schismatic or Sedevacantist, you fully support a social welfare net, support gun control, and oppose the death penalty. Therefore the usual “pro-lifers are all right-wing neo-Confederate/ Randian hypocrites” gotchas don’t apply in your case. They might listen to you then.
One valuable lesson from Lewis is that we need to beware the Red Dwarves as well as the Black Dwarves, and vice versa; and that allying with the White Witch to take down Miraz is not always advisable.