One of the many crucial points where religion and politics inextricably if not explicitly meet is in The Screwtape Letters (1942) by C.S. Lewis. Here, Screwtape, a senior devil giving instructions to a junior devil (his nephew, Wormwood) says the following:
The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that oneself 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.” (Chapter 18)
C.S. Lewis did not write about politics very much, but it would be difficult not to see a connection between the philosophy of hell to the philosophy of capitalism, which, by its own admission, is all about competition.
Capitalists are not likely to put things quite so brutally as Screwtape does here—at least, not in public. What capitalism adds to this philosophy is a quaint, but ardently insisted upon frisson, which is that this competition will bring about the maximum possible good for the greatest number.
Screwtape would laugh out loud at that. One might divide capitalists into the naïve ones, who believe the frisson, and the cynical ones, who know it is rot but do not care. And I think that capitalism has mostly been cynical, rather than naïve. As time goes by, the cynicism becomes more obvious, more brash, more contemptuous, and the naïve capitalist must turn cynic or drop the damnable capitalist ideology altogether.
Karl Marx himself, hardly a naïve individual, admitted clearly that capitalism had unleashed tremendous forces of production. But the tremendous wealth generated came at the even greater cost of human misery.
And it is one of the peculiar contradictions of capitalism that once you say a better way must be found, you are mocked for your naivete. Apparently, anyone who opposes predatory cynicism is obliged to conceive of human beings as angels. But capitalism, while mocking this alleged naivete, expounds a practice wherein apparently, the greatest good for the greatest number will be found by placing naked and untrammelled self-interest before all. You may as well say that the best way to get where you want to go is to put a brick on the accelerator of your car and take your hands off the steering wheel.
Christianity is the long revolution against the zero-sum game that Screwtape proposes is built into the nature of reality. The final triumph of Christ is the final defeat of this ideology in theory and practice.
So can Christianity still maintain its traditional doctrines about a hell of eternal torment?
I think not. That is the Good News. Hell is the first and last bastion of the zero-sum game. Christians who still believe in hell as an eternity of torment or an eternity of annihilation are still clinging to the zero-sum game. Nor can this game be defended by saying that within the traditional doctrines nobody is damned because of lack of room in heaven. For as long as it is believed that the creation of humans must entail the risk of hell for each one of us (and that the risk was needed to make salvation meaningful) the inevitability of hell for some is built in, and therefore, so is the zero-sum game, the principle of hell. Christ’s sacrifice becomes inadequate for salvation. Instead, the agony of the damned becomes necessary to the bliss of the saved. To believe in hell, therefore, is to take one’s orders from it, to be living under the same power that runs capital.