In the essay he touches on the fear that some then had, and many have today, that Christians wish to impose a theocracy - i.e. a government by the clerical elite ruling in accord with their interpretation of the will of the deity - on the rest of society.
Lewis writes,
The loftier the pretensions of the power, the more meddlesome, inhuman and oppressive it will be.Thus far I think Lewis is correct, as he almost always is, but then he says the following:
Theocracy is the worst of all possible governments. All political power is at best a necessary evil; but it is least evil when its sanctions are most modest and commonplace, when it claims no more than to be useful or convenient and sets itself strictly limited objectives.
Anything transcendental or spiritual, or even anything very strongly ethical, in its pretensions is dangerous and encourages it to meddle in our private lives.
Theocracy, I admit and even insist, is the worst corruption of all. But then I don't think we are in any danger of it. [Emphasis mine]Lewis is talking about the prospect of a Christian theocracy, and though he may have been correct that a Christian theocracy was not a real threat in 1955, there's a very real threat of both a religious and a secular theocracy today.
The religious threat is most pronounced in Western Europe and comes not from Christianity, which in Western Europe is not a significant political force, but from Islam, which is maybe a decade away from wielding decisive power in many European capitals.
The secular theocracy is a threat here in the U.S. where the left has sought to deify the state and convert it into an all-powerful vehicle for rule by the priesthood of our secular elites.
Lewis calls the rule by elites by the rather clunky term "Charientocracy," but what he means by that is essentially a secular theocracy.
He writes that the coalescence of two groups, the unofficial, self-appointed aristocracy of the Cultured and the bureaucrats who hive away in the bowels of our alphabet agencies - Lewis calls them "Managerial rulers" - will bring upon us this Charientocracy or secular theocracy.
Culture, exemplified, perhaps, by an Ivy-league education, "is a bad qualification for a ruling class because .... the things we really need in our rulers - mercy, financial integrity, practical intelligence, hard work, and the like - are no more likely to be found in cultured persons than in anyone else."
This is certainly true. It reminds me of the late William F. Buckley's quip that he'd rather be governed by the first 500 names in the phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.
In any case, when the state is elevated to a kind of national deity those who run the state will be tempted to exercise their power to control every aspect of our lives, just as the clergy in a religious theocracy would take it upon themselves to do.
Lewis didn't think worry about a (Christian) theocracy was very realistic, but today's secular theocrats are another story. We see the state worshipers aggrandizing their power with every executive order that by-passes the people's representatives in Congress and with every attempt to limit the rights of ordinary citizens guaranteed us by our Constitution.
Perhaps Lewis never foresaw a Charientocracy being identical to a theocracy in which the state was god, but we may well be in danger of seeing it in our own day.