Fellowship & Fairydust

Part of an ongoing web serial perhaps inspired by The Screwtape Letters. Unless otherwise noted, “the Ex-CEO” refers to God, “the opposition” to the side of the angels, and so on.

Read the previous installment here.

To: Deception, Overseer of Ekron Initiative (American Evangelical Division)

From: Malice, VP of 8th Circle of Hell (Global Initiatives Branch)

Date: [Exact Date Redacted, Circa 1960]

Subject: Utilizing Passivity

Deception,

The first thing you must understand about your target audience is that they are currently in a state of flux. They call themselves “evangelicals,” a term taken from terminology in the opposition’s sacred text¹ that is usually translated as “the good news.” The term gained new relevancy during that unfortunate period they refer to as the Great Awakening.²

Approximately two decades ago, Americans within the Protestant sector declared “the new evangelicalism,” a label to set themselves apart from the conservative wing that evolved in the 1920s. The older conservative wing was named after literature produced in the 1910s that called itself “a new statement of the fundamentals of Christianity.”³ Concerned about watered-down doctrine, the “quest for a historical Jesus,” and Darwinian scientific theories, the fundamentalists built their theology on five key points:

• The opposition’s sacred text is inerrant, true in absolutely every detail from its history to its descriptions of science
• The Ex-CEO’s son was born of a virgin mother
• The Ex-CEO’s son substituted himself for the humans
• The Ex-CEO’s son literally became alive after death
• The Ex-CEO’s son performed all the miracles mentioned in the opposition’s sacred text⁴

As you can surely see, these ideas would have been problematic to our cause if they spread around. Fortunately, coordinated campaigns by the 5th and 7th Circles kept this movement from spreading too far.⁵ The old strategies of unforgiving standards, miscommunication, anti-intellectualism merged with a refusal to admit misunderstanding, and a dozen other things that our targets gather under the label “legalism,” kept the fundamentals too busy fighting each other to launch any offensive tactics against our associates.

Events in the last two decades have somewhat dampened the good work we were accomplishing here. “The new evangelicalism” with its national associations,⁶ willingness to engage with outsiders and see their master as a transformer of culture instead of its opponent,⁷ threaten to destroy all the inbreeding we have accumulated.

However, all is not lost. My associates and I believe that with a firm hand, this movement can be stopped in its tracks. This will require many of our classic maneuvers – muddying definitions, obscuring attempts to create clarity, and injecting a liberal amount of chronological snobbery.⁸ These maneuvers have proved especially fruitful during the last one and a half centuries (more details can be found in the attached form, “Anti-Intellectualism: A Primer”).⁹

If all goes well, the evangelical movement will not only be too focused on internal strife to accomplish their goals, they will forget what set them apart from their predecessors in the first place. The most effective sins the only humans do not realize are repetitions of their own parents’ foibles.

Your work, suggesting new ideas about art, is particularly important within this venture. A particular highlight of fundamentalist behavior has been that their fear of culture makes it almost impossible for them to understand or encourage the artistic process. Their fears about “treating the Good Word as only metaphor or mythology” make them nervous about any conversation involving metaphor or mythic imagery. If talking about metaphor watered down their sacred text, can metaphor be trusted at all? This prevents them from appreciating or producing any art without overt religious messages. The “call to the altar” is the point of all art, and everything else is wasteful. Thus, for them, art is not something to engage with, but something to fear, something to fight. This means that few creatives thrive in their midst.

Just because your target audience has severed themselves from the fundamentalists does not mean they have fully exorcised its tendencies.¹⁰ Most of them recognize the traits they reacted against (the infighting, the fear of entertainment), but have not developed a systematic understanding of what they left and what they are trying to build.

Keep these details undefined and remember that fear need not be acknowledged to be powerful. A child who was taught to fear police when one will find it hard to be easy around a police chief when they are grown, even if they have forgotten when they were taught to be afraid in the first place. Your target audience has many biases and fears about the creative process that they have neither admitted nor realize they have. Play on these old chords and your work is half done already.

Infernal Regards,

Malice

Vice President of the 8th Circle of Hell

(Global Initiatives Branch)

Editor’s Notes:

1. Evangelical is from euangelion, a Greek word used in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, and in Paul’s epistles to describe “the good news of the coming of the Messiah, the gospel” (Entry G2098 in Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible).

2. For more on how the Great Awakening created the broad evangelical movement, see The Rise of Evangelicalism by Mark Noll.

3. The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth was a 12-volume work published 1910-1915, funded by Lyman and Milton Stewart.

4. Scholars refer to this as the “five points of fundamentalism.”

5. The National Association of Evangelicals was started in 1942. Scholars view this as a defining step in the modern American evangelical movement, along with Fuller Seminary’s founding in 1947 and Christianity Today’s founding in 1956.

6. In Dante’s Inferno, the fifth circle is for anger, the seventh for violence.

7. H. Richard Niebuhr refers in Christ & Culture to “Christ Against Culture” and “Christ, Transformer of Culture” as two out of five positions that Christians have historically held about culture. 

8. “Chronological snobbery” is a term C.S. Lewis uses in Surprised by Joy to describe the attitude that the current ideas are the most advanced, that anything no longer popular is out of date.

9. For more evangelicals and anti-intellectualism following the Civil War, see The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark Noll.

10. For more on evangelicals not understanding their connections to fundamentalist biases, see chapter 7 of Faith in the Shadows by Austin Fischer.

Come back next week for the next installment of this infernal serial.

Photo by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash