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 1998]
Subject: Rebranding Hard Truths as Unacceptable
Deception,
I am very impressed with the presentation you have sent me on your upcoming seminar “Art and Provocation: Eliminating Subversive Messaging.” You’ve accomplished a great deal of progress since we began this course some thirty years ago.
However, there is always room to refresh our memories about basic concepts. Attached is a brief touching on some matters regarding vocabulary and aesthetic psychology, which I recommend you look over as you refine your presentation. As usual, I will include my own success stories alongside practical advice:
The word “provocative” has dual meanings. On one level, provocative can mean something that shocks recipients in a dirty way, something scandalous (and if we’re lucky, perverse). Most of your targets know this definition.
On another level, “provocative” means something immensely dangerous. In these instances, provocative refers to something that makes our targets think, pushes them to reconsider their views. It provokes them to think because it is tough, something hard to grasp. We can only hope they miss these ideas entirely. Alas, they sometimes do listen, and once they grasp these ideas, they become twice as close to the opposition as they were before. You see, the Ex-CEO believes these ideas to be vital. They are hard because they are so dangerous to our cause.
I could give you many examples of dangerously provocative messages. My most recent experience happened just this past year, when I interceded in a situation in Texas. It was a church event, and the crowd seemed like prime targets: row upon row of Bible Belt boys and girls bred on a sense of religious security that conviction had never touched. One got the sense that the Ex-CEO himself could show up with fire and brimstone and they wouldn’t believe he was finding fault with them.
Then they entered a concert hall, waiting to hear some music from their favorite Christian musician. The musician came out, wearing an old white shirt and tattered jeans, a far cry from “the sort of thing people wear in church.”
No one left, and the musician started playing. The songs were not the material we approve of—the predictable melodies based on New Age meditation chords,1 the tired antiseptic references our targets call “Christianese.”
No, these songs were something else altogether. They had rhythm, and not a trace of faux piety. One song went off its way to break the stained images of an ethereal boy growing up perfect in Bethlehem. Instead, it imagined the boy doing the actions of a normal boy, a god-child who was also approachable, human and divine. I don’t need to tell you how this affected me. One rarely goes to a church expecting to hear songs based on solid theology. When it does happen, the effect is like whiplash.
Then there were the speeches. The musician kept stopping between songs to talk to the audience, and I don’t mean to give a tired altar call. He told the audience to their faces that they couldn’t follow their master and also live sheltered lives. “Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world, where you can live with your perfect little wife, and your perfect little children, in your beautiful little house, where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you,” he said. “Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved, and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken”2
In that moment, I saw years of hard-worn territory slipping from my hands. I recovered some ground in the parking lot after the concert. I mingled among the Christian mothers, suggesting things like, “well, it’s very well for him to say that, but he doesn’t know the non-Christians I live around.” Still, it was a significant setback and drastic steps were taken. Three months later, the singer ceased to be a problem.3
Artists can easily communicate these dangerously provocative messages in their work. Sometimes they can be quite clever about it. Note for example the children’s books by that Irish apologist I have mentioned in previous memoranda.4 His puerile stories at first seem nothing but charm and juvenile entertainment. Then one notices the central figure: a lion who bounds into the story when one least expects it, filling the characters and readers with that sense humans call “awe.”
Then the allusions to the opposition’s holy text come in. Slowly, readers realize who the lion really is. By the time targets drop the books, their views on the Ex-CEO may change drastically. We spend years nurturing images in their heads of a cruel judge or a distant clockmaker5 or a children’s story. Now, these stories give them new images and they associate him with descriptions like “protecting,” “actively involved,” and even that ultimate filthy word: “loving.” They could not be further from our agenda!
Other times, artists communicate these ideas boldly. Consider the Florentine artist’s painting of biblical figures in the buff, still hanging in Italy to this day.6 Some humans, thank hell, only see dated naked figures when they look at this. I only wish the Romans’ attempts to whitewash it had succeeded. Alas, centuries later, the painting still makes a statement that ugly, meat-laden bodies can also have some beauty to them. The viewers often come away talking about “the artistry of the human body,” and “how God formed and shaped us.”
Needless to say, it is imperative that we minimize these provocative messages. We desire a faith that ignores hard or difficult ideas, something we can use. Since provocative messages are similar to the attitudes toward evil I mentioned in a previous message, your tactics here will run very similarly. However, your tactics here will be broader.
Your goal is to guide your targets to avoid any ideas they find even moderately uncomfortable.
When they read an honest story about 1960s racial conflicts, their thoughts should skip the message and provide compelling dramatic details. Instead, they should focus on the one page where somebody curses.
When they hear a compelling album of songs inspired by fighting addiction, convince them to skip the thought, “What terrible pain, I’m glad God can help us overcome those things.” Lead them on immediate to something more preferable, something like “Why couldn’t they sing about something nice?”
I trust that you see the strategy.
The general effect will not only give your targets an ever-shrinking field of “good Christian art” they can create. It will also encourage desirable traits such as refusing to deal with personal struggles. Talking about pain and hard truths will become taboo. In the process, their thinking will move further and further away from dangerous ideas. The more we distract their thinking from these ideas, the less work they can do for the ex-CEO.
Ultimately, your targets will create a culture that is without hard truth, without difficulties, and ultimately without relevance.
Keep up your good work, Deception. You know the alternative.
Infernal Regards,
Malice
Vice President of the 8th Circle of Hell
(Global Initiatives Branch)
Editor’s Notes:
1. Former Zen Buddhist monk Ellis Potter cites the similarities between New Age Music and Contemporary Christian Music prior to 2000. See “On music and art” in Staggering Along with God: An Interview Biography by Ellis Potter.
2. Apparently a reference to Rich Mullins, a Christian musician known for the worship song “Awesome God.” Mullins made these comments and similar ones at a 1997 concert at Carpenter’s Way Baptist Church in Lufkin, Texas.
3. Mullins died in a car crash on September 19, 1997, just over three months after his Lufkin Texas concert.
4. Apparently a reference to C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series.
5. Deism, the belief in a non-interventionalist God, is often explained using the metaphor of God as a clockmaker who winds up the universe and lets it proceed. René Descarte is quoted describing “the cosmos as a great time machine operating according to fixed laws, a watch created and wound up by the great watchmaker.” See “Descarte’s clockwork universe” in William Harvey: A Life in Circulation
By Thomas Wright.
6. Apparently a reference to Michelangelo Bounarrotti (1475-1564), artist best known for his Sistine Chapel paintings and statue of David.
Cover Photo by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash
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