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 1979]

Subject: Developing Attitudes to Secular World

Deception, 

I spoke in one of my previous messages about how to convince your targets to sort actions into important things and mundane things. 

You have accomplished this objective extremely well. Now, it’s time for the next step. Convince your targets to have ambivalent feelings about that pile of things they believe are “secular.” Give them a cloying dread toward all things they consider secular, a fear that even the briefest touch will corrupt them forever. It won’t take much effort for them to forget one of their central duties is to be “salt and light,” or as some put it, “to be in the world but not of it.” You may even make them forget that their leader’s greatest enemies were profoundly religious people so obsessed with avoiding “secular things” that they isolated themselves from truth.¹

You may think this is a step backward. After all, this tactic means that at first, your targets will avoid all kinds of traps in our most popular domains (erotica, politics, crime, etc.). Ultimately, though, choosing to totally avoid the secular world will drive them into “holy huddles.” Little do they know that shallow faith, arrogance, and short-sightedness thrive in those environments. We have many time-tested techniques for turning the overly sheltered faithful into Pharisees. 

The results will be extremely pleasant (for us). Your targets won’t just feel obligated to only create “holy art,” but they will also be extremely nervous about creating or sampling any art that strikes them as secular. They will entirely miss the mythologies, fairy stories, and other artwork that seem pagan but hint of the Opposition.

You may remember how the previous generation of targets discovered highly problematic ideas from “pagan art.” I still shudder when I think of the young Irishman who read the sentence “Balder the Beautiful is dead.”² We wanted him to see the story as a tragedy; the god dies, after all. He, however, saw the point was that the story promised Balder will rise again. Certain ideas entered his brain, things I wish every day had never sneaked in. You know, of course, what this human’s love for “the dying god rising again” motif led to. The man not only joined the opposition, he became one of its great champions! Even today, thousands read his little tracts about “echoes of grace” and “true myths.” 

We must avoid that kind of situation at all costs. Teach your targets to see nothing in secular art and they will begin turning inward. Once they turn inward, our work is more than half-finished.

Infernal Regards

Malice

Vice President of the 8th Circle of Hell,

(Global Initiatives Branch)

Editor’s Notes:

1. Several scholars have listed this sacred/secular division as a key difference between Baby Boomer/Generational X and the Millennial/Generation Z Christians. See chapter 5 in You Lost Me by David Kinnaman and Aly Hawkins. For more on seeing culture as something to cultivate rather than combat, see Culture Care by Makoto Fujimura. 

2. Apparently a reference to C.S. Lewis, who cited reading “Balder the Beautiful is dead” as a line that interested him in dying god myths. Lewis cited this interest as a key turning point in his religious formation, convincing him that pagan mythology can have ideas that point toward God. For more details, see any major Lewis biography or his essays on mythology in God in the Dock and The Grand Miracle.

Cover Photo by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash