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Five New Screwtape Letters… (#4)

Mar15

IV.

My Dear Wormwood,

Your patient is wrestling with the questions of sex and sexuality—this is very good for us. Obviously, the field for now is in our favour. Not only do the questions create anxiety in the patient and place him in a position of intellectual conflict with the doctrine of the church, but our work in the areas of acceptance and prejudice have created a situation where he feels both ashamed of the church (or, rather, of his idea of the church) and that the most “Christian” thing to do is something no Christian in history has ever considered—the reworking of that burdensome Christian sexual ethic.

Of course, since you and I lack bodies, all these sexual activities are merely expressions of the human material nature—we must remember that sexual intercourse is nothing more than raw material for our use. Once again, the Enemy has given them bodies, given them desires through their bodies, and withheld the fulfillment of those desires. But then He saddles them with various restraints on their bodily desires, especially those pertaining to the procreative act. You and I well know that these desires can’t be fulfilled, but you mustn’t let your patient think that! From our perspective, it does not matter so much which desire the human creature experiences, what we want to do is corrupt it. We do this by suggesting that the only satisfaction for the desire is consummation of a sexual wish. We do this also by fostering the creature’s sense of “personal freedom” so that the restraint of desire feels like grave indignity.

Once again, you must do one of two things. On the one hand, you can make your patient into a prig by having him adopt the traditional Christian teaching but adopt it with a dose of un-charity. Don’t let him think about the nature of desire or the fulfillment of desire in his idea of God. Let him be proud that he is “heterosexual,” and work up in him that vague sense of taboo regarding any nonstandard sexual acts, especially those labeled “homosexual.” This way, while he will be doctrinally secure, he will be so full of pride as to be useless in the Enemy’s service. On the other hand, you can drive your patient, by means of the vaguenesses of our doctrines of acceptance and prejudice, into such a muddle-headed state of thinking that he slowly drifts from any practical devotion and obedience altogether. Combine this with a sense of ‘progress’—that of moving toward some undefined but socially desirable advancement in ‘theology’—and the work will almost perform itself. He will feel that he is doing a Christian thing, while slowly moving away from any real alignment with the church.

Ruinous to our cause would be any real study of what the church means by chastity. This should be easily enough done, since the church itself is embarrassed about its theology and therefore few teach its actual doctrine. If he were to be exposed to the ideas that his body does not belong to him—that no bodies belong to anyone!—that restraint of desire is demanded at every level of life, that chastity, rightly understood, is a virtue both within Christian marriage and outside of it, that the highest fulfillment of sexual desire is not found in any acts of consummation but in encounter with the Enemy, that the Enemy promises pleasures better than sexual intimacy to His creatures—if he were allowed to study these doctrines, then our case would be most certainly dire. Fortunately, we have arranged for them to be conveniently misplaced.

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape

Previous Letters:

Five New Screwtape Letters… (#3)

Mar8

III.

My Dear Wormwood,

I spoke in my last letter about your patient’s wider, non-Christian circle. I am pleased to hear that some of his dearest childhood friends are reactively, emotionally, and uncritically anti-Christian. This is very good for us. You must ensure that every opportunity to spend time with them is encouraged, and you must create in your patient a sense that he is “really himself,” around them. At the same time, magnify in his mind the various incongruous elements of his life in the local church—the out-of-date music, the aging congregation, and their neglect for whatever “issues” of the day seem important to him. Keep him from reading his Bible, and make the local news seem far more relevant. In this, and other ways, ensure that his focus on eternity is lost through distraction with the present.

What his angry friends don’t realize, but which Slimtrumpet and others have been labouring for years to create in both of them, is a sense of prejudice against the church. Prejudice does immense work on our behalf, for by it the case against the ‘church’ has been decided well in advance by many humans. We have accomplished this by highlighting through our Media Arm all the failures of the present church. (And I should acknowledge the excellent tempting work of that department which has orchestrated many of these media events.) The more images of the church as a failure that can be brought to their minds, the less likely they will be to give any real consideration to the church’s actual claims. This is a marvellous work of distraction. They, of course, are prevented from seeing the church in its eternal aspect, but more importantly they must not be allowed to think about the fact that a church which is full of humans will contain all the failures and foibles of humans. Importantly, they must not be allowed to think about the actual consequences of the Enemy’s claims about salvation. If once they do this, their prejudices may begin to crack, and we will be in danger of losing valuable souls.

Now, as regards your patient, prejudice is useful because it can be used to create shame in his sense of membership with the local church. Rather than attending to the real people and real spirituality of the community—as well as his part of obedience within and prayer for that community—you can bring to mind these scandalous evidences. Here’s an idea: see if there is an opportunity where one of the other churchgoers might commit some minor offence against your patient. Then slip into his head the thought, “I guess the church is just like I expected it.” Now thinking has stopped, and prejudice has begun, and we are on a winning track.

Additionally, prejudice can be made to further cripple the patient’s willingness to speak about his faith with outsiders. Enmeshed in our media-driven story about the nature of the church, you can keep him perpetually tongue-tied, so that at the first mention of an abuse or a reported wrong in the church, he loses all confidence. Keep his attention on that embarrassment, and he won’t have a chance to remember that the church claims to be a place of forgiveness, that he himself fails, and that the life he claims to have found is something he truly wants to share with his friends.

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape

Additional Letters:

Five New Screwtape Letters… (#2)

Mar1

II.

My Dear Wormwood,

I am pleased to hear that your patient has become a trenchant rule-follower. I am even more pleased to learn that his local church is filled with people who signal their public piety by their state of compliance. This is very good for us, and also allows an opportunity to think about the power of acceptance. Of course it would have been just as good if it had gone the other way.

Remember, the human creature is constantly lonely and afraid. The Enemy has made it with appetites that cannot be quite fulfilled, itches that cannot quite be scratched by any earthly thing, and we must use this situation to our advantage. Of course, the Enemy tells him that the fulfillment of that loneliness is found in relationship with Him, an idea we find silly and abhorrent. Therefore we, for our part, must labour continually to encourage the animal to seek the solution to its loneliness in anything else—whether food, sex, purchasing power, a marriage, friends, work, etc. One of the most effective and subtle disruptions of this desire for belonging is to work on his sense of acceptance. Already, your patient has bound his Christian faith to a political position; now you must set the hook further by reinforcing this spiritual pride with a sense of acceptance and belonging in the church that promotes this position. In this way, you can utilize the animal’s natural sense of loneliness to cement his commitment to a position that is, spiritually speaking, of almost no importance at all.

But acceptance has additional benefits, and the vulnerability can be exploited in a number of delightful ways. Our philological arm has done another wonderful job at mangling the meaning of ‘acceptance’ in human minds. The Enemy’s acceptance is scandalously generous, opening His arms to sinners so far down in Our Father’s service that we thought their presence in his halls all but inevitable. It is an acceptance that extends what He calls salvation, but comes with an absurd set of burdensome conditions—like obedience, transformation, and radical love in community. We, however, working to adapt His “Love” to our purposes, have turned acceptance into something the human creatures now feel is a moral and civil obligation. Everyone must be accepted for everything no matter what, and, on our terms, to be accepted means that no criticism is allowed! See? We have kept the acceptance, but leeched away the obedience, transformation, love, and community. This has created a delightful state of misery and confusion among the humans.

How can you use this to your advantage? Right now, he is a Christian and part of a relatively small community of believers. Most of his ordinary relationships are with people safely in Our Father’s service. In the first place, you can manipulate his desire for acceptance in order to create a sense of alienation between him and the non-Christian world in which he lives. This will drive him from his animal loneliness to compromise on his convictions for the sake of a vague sense of belonging, or fitting in. (This is the same emotion you learned to work on when he was young, to make him choose one kind of socks or trousers or shoes over another, not because his mother had bought them, but because everyone else was wearing them.) On the other hand, you can confuse him. His head is filled with various, vague ideas about “God’s Love.” Make him think that what God means by Love is what his culture means by love, and the trick is nearly done. Now he will feel vaguely pious when he “accepts” everyone, and he will feel that his church is somehow “unchristian” when it does not “accept” everyone. Whatever happens, you must keep from his mind the thought of his own sin and that loathsome experience of encounter with the Enemy which inaugurated his “Christian” life. The moment he begins to reflect seriously on that event, all our work to disrupt his ideas of acceptance will go out the window.

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape.

Additional Letters:

Five New Screwtape Letters… (#1)

Feb22

I’ve had the occasion to teach a recent five-week course through C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. It’s been over 80 years now since the letters were first written, and they hold up strikingly well today. They are full of wisdom and insight, and continue to be spiritual beneficial for people seeking to understand the spiritual life.

Of course, when you’re saturating yourself in Screwtape’s thinking, you begin to wonder what he might write today. Over the years, many other people have tried their hands at imitation Screwtape Letters. I have hesitated to add my own meagre efforts to that list, but the reception of my class to these efforts helped me decide to share them here. Is it hubris to attempt to imitate Lewis’s voice? Likely. But you’ll have to let me know what you think. I’ll publish one each week for the next five weeks.

My Dear Wormwood,

Your recent letter is entirely too full of reporting on the general misery caused by the recent plague. What I mean is that while the number of deaths and the general state of fear are pleasurable to us, you display once again your continuing naivete regarding the spiritual responsibilities of our work. Our task is fundamentally the same as in previous eras of widespread disease and sickness: to use the material circumstances of the plague to create spiritual disruption. Remember: this may be new to the humans, but we have been here before, and have vast resources of experience in these matters.

The real question at hand is what to do with your patient within this state of general upheaval. I see two potential courses, both of which have to do with what I call a process of binding. In the first case, see if you can make the patient bind his sense of spiritual responsibility to compliance with various government regulations—where to meet, how to meet, what masks to wear, etc. Slip into his mind the thought that, “By observing these regulations I am being a good Christian.” But that is not the end of your work, because what you must do next is suggest to him that anyone who fails to fulfill these regulations is not a good Christian. Do you see what has happened? You have allowed him to substitute obedience to a political mandate for his obedience to the command love his neighbour. In the alternative case, you can similarly bind his rejection of various governmental mandates to his sense of spiritual maturity. The thought you must create here is this, “By rejecting these regulations I am being a good Christian.” Then you must suggest to him the uncharitable thought that everyone who complies with regulations—whatever they may be—are sheep, or fools. Whatever course you take, you must ensure that the patient is distracted from the obedient love of his actual neighbour, whatever that neighbour’s political position may be.

To us, of course, neither position matters, but the power of spiritual disruption is immense, for we can foster a spirit of contempt for one another that will be difficult to root out. We also have an opportunity to generate vast spiritual pride which has little to do with the Enemy’s actual work, and everything to do with the replacement of a first priority (obedience to the Enemy) with a secondary priority (obedience or disobedience to the government). With great pleasure, what you will find in the end is that, long after the plague has gone, the contempt and spiritual pride will remain, and we can utilize a lingering sense of grievance to aggravate the human creatures and keep them from advancing in the Enemy’s service.

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape

Additional Letters: