voting

Professor Kirk would be appalled at how the US electorate has behaved itself this year, and would shake his head in dismay saying, “What do they teach in schools these days?” The days of logic, critical thinking, and manly debates are long gone, and in its place we have a culture that has been taught for decades to follow its heart, do what feels right and follow their dreams…and now we have gotten what we asked for.

The Calormenes have invaded the free land of Narnia, and have persuaded the populace that Tash and Aslan are one and the same, “Tashlan”. Good is evil, evil is good (Is. 5:20). The Ape sounds an awful lot like our modern reasoning: “Tash is only another name for Aslan. All that old idea of us being right and the Calormenes wrong is silly. We know better now. The Calormenes use different words but we all mean the same thing. Tash and Aslan are only two different names for you know Who.” We no longer confess the name of Jesus as Lord, and so we should not be shocked that we are now overrun with the devils of Statism and Subjective Moralism. One Narnian put it like this: “People shouldn’t call for demons unless they really mean what they say.”

Our two main options for President present us with a tangled web of trying to figure out how much wickedness we’re willing to overlook, sidestep, explain away, to the point where we have Christians supporting both candidates trying to justify them as the lesser of two evils. We have bought the deception of the Calormenes and are willing to worship Tashlan, because we are no longer certain what the difference is between Tash and Aslan…or was there ever any difference?

Or, to allude to another favorite moment of Narnian history, our culture is almost lulled to sleep by the enchainment of the Lady of the Green Kirtle in Underland; we are just about persuaded that her land is the only land there is, and then all of our desire for freedom, goodness, beauty, and virtue are just the imaginings of infants. I want to be like Puddleglum, with his no nonsense common sense, and decidedly proclaim: “Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

Our United States are under the enchantment, and the only way out is to smell the aroma of burnt marsh-wiggle; i.e. reality. We have operated under the illusionary pretext that Christ can somehow be left out of the public sphere, and thus we are lulled into a slumber of passive acceptance of secularism’s “reality” (i.e. good is subjective, babies aren’t living, two men can be married, debt can climb higher forever). We need the unpleasant but very real smell of God’s reality, as described and defined by His Word. This, in other words, is repentance for our dreaming that we could build a utopia apart from confessing Jesus as Lord.

CLICK HERE TO READ MY TRIBUTE TO CS LEWIS

We have lost a sense of true nobility, the sort that King Lune of Archenland describes: “For this is what it means to be a king: to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there’s hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years) to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land.” Further, we should ask our elected officials Aslan’s line of questions to the first King of Narnia:

Can you use a spade and a plough and raise food out of the earth?

Can you rule these creatures kindly and fairly, remembering that they are not slaves like the dumb beasts of the world you were born in, but talking beasts and free subjects?

And you wouldn’t have favourites either among your own children or among the other creatures or let any hold another under or use it hardly?

If enemies came against the land (for enemies will arise) and there was war, would you be the first in the charge and the last in the retreat?

Aslan made Narnians to be a free people, but we see how often they failed to fight the tyranny and were often tempted to blur the line between good and evil, right and wrong. The charm, though, of Narnia is not that it is simply a make-believe idealistic place, but that it was a reflection of humankind’s continual fight against evil, tyranny, and wickedness. It is the memory that God made us to be free, and when we refuse to oppose evil in all its stripes, we will find ourselves once more enslaved to White Witches, Calormenes, Governor Gumpus’, and the like. But never forget, as you vote, liberty is a Christian virtue and cannot be ginned up in any other way than by humble submission to God and His Word. All other means will only wrap the chains of tyranny around us tighter.

Vote like a Narnian. Vote like a Hobbit. Vote like a man of Gondor or Rohan. Vote like a free man, a noble man, a man who values virtue. Oppose evil. Especially the evil of compromise & collusion. Finally, King Tirian, the last king of Narnia, has the right sort of pray we should be praying for our country: “Let me be killed. I ask nothing for myself. But come and save all Narnia.”

And he has an admonition for those who are fearful of heart and worried about the prospect of a Trump or Clinton presidency: “But courage, child: we are all between the paws of the true Aslan.”

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