C.S. Lewis never wrote about politics very much, but in the eighteenth letter of The Screwtape Letters he has his devil, Screwtape, say the following:
The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. ‘To be’ means ‘ to be in competition’.
This philosophy could be seen as what has always been the dominant politics of the world—or the sin of pride in its structural or corporate manifestation—whether the rulers were soldiers, priests, hereditary aristocrats, or business people. Capitalism, with its “war of all against all,” its social Darwinism, is the locus of the Devil’s philosophy in the current age.
Many Christians simply accept Churchill’s dictum that history is “just one damned thing after another.” Whatever he meant by that, they see it as an essentially meaningless and contemptible series of events and eagerly await the Christ to come back and wipe it all out, taking us to heaven. They are disappointed in life, and want it to be punished. And for what they imagine to be their admirable otherworldliness, they think they shall be rewarded with a new world that has no connection to and very little similarity to this one.
What is a resurrection? It is a rebirth, a new person, but a person not entirely discontinuous with the old person. It is the old person who has died but is transfigured and reborn. Otherwise, there is no resurrection, but simply the death of one person followed by his or her replacement by another who is entirely someone else.
Thus it is, I believe, with the new Earth that is destined to be born.
The Christian’s approach to history should not be that of an unloving parent troubled by a chronically and seriously sick child, hopefully counting the days down to when that child shall die and the parent be presented with a healthy replacement. The parent wants the child to be saved, not replaced, and this is what we should want for the world—not just for the individuals within it.
Much of Christian eschatology, unfortunately, is simply a disguised desire for genocide, geocide, even.