The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses

The idea that religion is a private, individual affair is a modern one and contrary to the New Testament’s worldview. Ironically, this individualist view of religion has developed in an age in which collectivism is on the rise—including at the university. Lewis identifies a few “stratagems” of “the enemy” (i.e., the devil) at work here. First, by banishing religion to the private sphere and then banishing privacy, modern society is in effect making religion impossible to practice. Second, there is a danger that Christians may react to this strategy by importing collectivism into Christianity. Third, on some level, privatizing religion is a legitimate reaction on the part of Christians themselves to collectivism.

Lewis posits a solution. There is a hierarchy of values: The collective life is at the bottom, participation in the Body of Christ is at the top, and “personal and private life” is in the middle (161). Collective life exists not for its own sake but to protect personal and private life. However, Lewis argues that there is a general human tendency to mistake the means for the end, with disastrous consequences. This does not mean that the means can be eliminated: It is probable that collectivism is a necessary evil. That said, Christians can best offset collectivism not with individualism but with a third option: “membership in the mystical body” (163).

The idea of membership is of Christian origin, deriving from St. Paul’s discussion of belonging to the church. For St. Paul, the church is Christ’s body on earth, whose members are distinct from one another in talents and functions. However, modern thought tends to interpret members as mere interchangeable units, which goes against what St. Paul meant and is the source of modern collectivism. Lewis sees membership as the antidote to isolation, on the one hand, and the anonymity of the collective, on the other.

For Lewis, membership in the body of Christ is different from equality in political society, as necessary as the latter is. The body of Christ is like a big family instead of an anonymous collective, with Christ at the head of a group whose members are truly diverse. By sacrificing some of their self-centered privacy, the members experience a “true growth of personality” by being related both to each other and to Christ (167).

Lewis now extends his argument by staking a “paradoxical” claim. Equality is a “fiction,” useful to secure social peace; in the church, members discover that they are in fact refreshingly unequal. Lewis posits that God created a world in which hierarchy and authority (“exercised with humility” [170]) and obedience (“accepted with delight” [170]) are built in. In this way, Lewis posits that hierarchy is more real than equality. Political equality is necessary because people are sinful and cannot be expected to exercise authority in a just and virtuous way, but on the theological level, people are not inherently equal but rather diverse. If humans have equality at all, they obtain it through God’s love, not through their own nature or merits.

This, argues Lewis, “introduces a new side of our subject” (171). By being joined to the immortal Christ, the members of the body of the church will share in his immortality. By contrast, nations and other social structures are temporal and will come to an end: The ultimate proof of the subordinate importance of the collective is that humans themselves will outlive it. This Christian attitude may appear to outsiders like individualism, but in reality, each church member’s identity is affirmed not in isolation but in union with Christ. Church members are not lone beings, but “stones and pillars in the temple” (173). For Lewis, people don’t start out with a personality of “infinite value”; they end with it, obtaining it by union with Christ, as God remakes them into the new persons they will eventually be at the end of time. Individuals will become truly themselves when they are united to God and find their destined place in his kingdom.