SOURCE: "Politics from the Shadowlands: C. S. Lewis on Earthly Government," in Policy Review, No. 68, Spring, 1994, pp. 68-70.

In the following essay, West discusses Lewis's views on government, political action, and public morality. According to West, "Lewis championed the time-honored idea of natural law—the belief that the fundamental maxims of civic morality are accessible to all human beings by virtue of their God-given reason."

Even before the film Shadowlands, C. S. Lewis was probably the most widely recognized Christian thinker of the 20th century. By the end of the 1980s, his works—including Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Chronicles of Narnia—had sold more than 70 million copies, an achievement that surely places Lewis among the best-selling authors of all time.

Lewis is most appreciated today for his superlative imagination and his lucid defense of Christian orthodoxy. But he also was a keen observer of social...