Ten years ago, I published an article titled “Nikabrik’s Candidate.” In it, I looked at the gravitation of the conservative movement toward presidential candidate Donald Trump, and compared it to what I saw as a similar situation in C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian. The dwarf Nikabrik has decided that Aslan is never coming to save Narnia, and so he turns instead to the White Witch for help—with disastrous results.
All these years later, in the context of a second Trump presidency, I’m thinking again about Lewis and how his words might reflect our age. This time, my thoughts have gone to two different works of his: a different Narnia novel, The Magician’s Nephew, and an essay, “First and Second Things.”
Most Lewis readers, I believe, will be familiar with the simple but profound formulation that gives that essay its name: “You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.” It was a formulation that kept reappearing throughout both his published work and his private letters, suggesting that it was fundamental to his thinking. In fact, he went so far as to call it “a universal law.”
In 2016, despite warnings from many fellow believers, the vast majority of conservative evangelical Christians in the United States decided to ignore that universal law. They decided to put political influence—the weapons with which to fight—over the principles they were fighting for. In so doing, the movement ended up jettisoning every value it held dear.
Am I overstating the case? Consider the following.
The evangelicals I grew up with and worked with for most of my career regularly ranked the sanctity of human life at the top of their priority list. Today, I’m seeing many of them cheer for an administration that literally shoots first and asks questions later (if it gets around to it). An administration that rushes poorly trained, trigger-happy agents out into the streets and tries to downplay the ensuing shootings. An administration that bombs boats and kills people on mere suspicion of drug running, without checking for evidence. An administration that slashed humanitarian aid with the eventual and predictable result that thousands of children died, while joking about it.
Oh, and the abortion rate that so many of them believed he would drive down? That’s gone up.
The preservation of the family was also very important to the evangelicals I knew. Today they support an administration that routinely inflicts trauma on immigrant and refugee families. Under this administration, children are sent to prison, given spoiled food and dirty water, often denied adequate medical care, and sometimes separated from their parents.
I could give so many more examples. The movement I knew spoke out for the value and dignity of people with Down syndrome; where were they when the administration slashed the funding those people need to stay alive and well? The leaders I knew loved to quote Ronald Reagan’s tribute to the refugee who called out “Hello, freedom man!” to an American sailor. Now they pledge their eternal support to a president who ships refugees off to violent countries where they have no connections and few resources, and who flat-out refuses to take in any of the persecuted Christians the evangelical movement has long championed.
We can safely say that the conservative Christian list of priorities has changed. This was my fear when I wrote that piece ten years ago: that rather than enlisting a champion to fight for Christian values, evangelicals would be seduced by that champion’s values, such as they are. Their silence in the face of his appetite for death instead of life, for separation instead of unity, for rejection instead of acceptance, has fulfilled that reluctant prophecy.
“But we had no choice,” is the common response when any of this is brought up. “He was the only possible option. He was the only one who would defend us!”
And that brings me back to Lewis and The Magician’s Nephew.
In this second book of the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis places Digory, one of his young protagonists, in an intolerable position. The lion Aslan has requested that Digory bring him an apple from a far-off garden—an apple that, Digory discovers, could save the life of his dying mother if he took it to her instead.
If anyone could truly say, “I had no choice,” it is this desperate child. How could he not forsake the promise he made to Aslan, to save the life that is most precious to him? How could any loving son not give his mother the apple? Do we dare to say that the life of his mother was a “second thing” that he should not have put above everything else?
Lewis said just that—and as he himself had once been a child devastated by his mother’s early death, we can’t say he didn’t understand the gravity of the situation he created here. Yet he shows us that in this crucible, the “first things” at stake are the virtues Digory’s mother taught him.
She has instilled in him the value of “keeping promises—and not stealing—and all that sort of thing,” as Digory painfully recalls. He cannot sacrifice his integrity, not even for her sake, because she “wouldn’t like it.” And also because the Witch who tempts him to steal the fruit reveals herself as “false and hollow” when she suggests he abandon a friend to keep the theft secret, reminding us how one betrayal of our principles quickly brings another, and then another.
Only because Digory chooses first things over second things, however important those second things are to him, is he able to make the right choice when it seems that he has no choice. Had he not done so, Aslan tells him later, there would have again been disastrous results, for Digory and for his mother—as there will be for the Witch, who stole an apple for herself. “All get what they want,” Aslan explains. “They do not always like it.”
As evangelical Christians are confronted by the rising tide of shooting victims, torture victims, victims of starvation, and orphaned children created by an administration they supported in the name of life, faith, and family, they should take those words to heart.