C.S. Lewis and “Mere Politics”: Some Shrewdly Hellish Political Advice from The Screwtape Letters, by Steven Tucker

By Steven Tucker, Crisis Magazine, May 23, 2024

Steven Tucker is a U.K.-based writer whose work has appeared online and in print worldwide. His latest book, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science, examines the similarities between the ideologically corrupted sciences of the Soviets and Nazis and the equally ideologically corrupted woke sciences of today. He formerly taught in an English Catholic high school.

In an election year, can an over-focus upon the all-encompassing reach of modern politics pose a danger to a voter’s soul? C.S. Lewis’ Senior Devil Screwtape knew the answer to that one.

Each U.S. election year since at least 2016, a piece of sage advice from C.S. Lewis’ celebrated 1942 epistolary novel The Screwtape Letters has resurfaced online, in which the book’s narrator, a Senior Devil in Hell named Screwtape, pens instructions to his equally demonic nephew, a Junior Tempter named Wormwood, upon the general subject of politics. It contains guidance about how to ensure the future damnation of the particular human individual entrusted to Wormwood to corrupt and ruin (“the patient”) by ensuring he becomes engrossed in temporal public affairs of state, not private affairs of his own immortal soul: …

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