Friday
Reader Brendan Murry has alerted me to a Garrett Epps Atlantic article that uses C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters to critique Attorney General William Barr’s advocacy for an all-powerful presidency. As indicated by both his words and his actions, Barr believes that the executive branch should take precedence over the legislative and judicial branches. Epps sees him in league with Lewis’s Devil.
The University of Baltimore law professor says that Barr wants Trump to have dictatorial powers with no accountability:
At [the government’s] center is one individual, the president. Congress cannot call a president to account by effective oversight, nor can it require a president’s subordinates to explain their decisions…The courts cannot step in when the president uses his authority to circumvent or negate the constitutional authority of Congress. And the courts cannot examine whether his actions comport with statutes—statutes he is bound by oath to “faithfully execute.”
What this means, in practical terms, is that the president is not accountable to anyone at all. There are not three co-equal branches; there is a president who is the source of authority and two subsidiary agencies, called “Congress” and “the courts,” which exist to facilitate presidential decisions. The president is not above the law; the president is the law.
For those of us who grew up believing in constitutional checks and balances—well, Barr thinks we’re wrong. Applying a Lewis dichotomy, Epps says the attorney general chooses force over principle. America’s principles include a vision of men and women as equal before the law and having an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Barr, on the other hand, believes that people like him should be able to impose their vision on others. Forget about celebrating America in all its racial, ethnic, and religious diversity.
In Screwtape, the Devil teaches a lesser demon how to corrupt humankind. The key, he says in Letter VII, is getting people to abandon God and worship materialist “Forces”:
If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls ‘Forces’ while denying the existence of ‘spirits’—then the end of the war [against God] will be in sight.
Epps writes,
That image—of those who worship force while denying spirit—has haunted me ever since; it epitomizes the dilemma of a human society in moral free fall because it has, without knowing it, abandoned belief in its own pretended first principles.
In the age of Donald Trump, we are seeing a legal incarnation of Screwtape—the lawless legalist who worships the law as force but denies the existence of its spirit.
Epps ends his article with a dire warning:
Like Screwtape’s materialist magician, Barr, the lawless legalist, embodies force without spirit; constitutionalism without liberty; democratic form without self-government. For two generations, he and people like him have been working to bring this vision to reality. They are on the verge of victory.
That Barr sees himself as religious, caricaturing progressives as godless secularists wreaking moral havoc, doesn’t negate Epps’s point. In fact, later in Letter VII Lewis anticipates how some will misuse God to achieve material ends. His observation applies to those rightwing faith leaders, along with former Texas governor Rick Perry, who regard Trump as God’s anointed:
Let [man] begin by treating [his political agenda] as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the “cause,” in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favor of [his agenda]…Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours — and the more “religious” (on those terms) the more securely ours.
Then, in a dig that shows where such evangelical Trump fanatics as Jerry Falwell, Jr., Patty White, Pat Robertson, and Franklin Graham may be headed, the devil tells his interlocutor,
I could show you a pretty cageful down here.
The Rev. William Barber refers to such Christians as heretics because of how they ignore Christ’s admonition to support the poor, the sick, and the oppressed. Religion aside, however, it’s enough that they are perverting the Constitution to impose their will upon the rest of us.
