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: Indignation, Overseer of Ekron Initiative (American Evangelical Division)

Date: [Exact Date Redacted, Circa 2014]

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

Subject: Creating Isolation

Indignation,

I can’t help but be perplexed by your last message. Your question can be summed up as, “How do we convince targets to forget the communal aspect of their faith?”

The way you phrased the question suggests that you believe your targets see their faith as a communal relationship, something they can only develop if they are connected both to the Ex-CEO and to other followers. 

The fact is most of your targets do not see their faith this way at all. They are Americans. The average American sees church as just another social club, like the spa or yoga club. America’s great heroes are individualists, entrepreneurs who rejected the community’s warnings and shed community to pursue their own ideas. Add these beliefs to other factors (such as the breakdown of families) and it should be clear that most of your targets see their faith as solitary. Their faith is “a personal thing” that has little to do with fellow followers.

Seeing as most of your recent work has been in other contexts, I suppose it is understandable that you made this mistake. Fortunately, you already have various tools for convincing your targets they don’t need the larger Company. With careful manipulation, you’ll find it’s quite simple to slowly move them further and further into isolation. Eventually, they will not only move further away from their fellow believers but also further away from their master.

A particularly helpful tool is to play on your targets’ cliches. In recent times (centuries by their reckoning), humans have come to see artists as lonely figures. They believe true artists diverge from society to keep their craft pure. The new stereotypical artist longs to emulate the sickly Amherst girl¹ writing poetry while languishing in her upstairs bedroom. Artists less interested in poetry may prefer to imitate that reclusive author writing novels about restless youth in his Cornish compound, rejecting all publicity as crass commercialism and preserving their “anonymity-obscurity.”²

Play on this image. Nurture it until your targets believe being true to their talents means they must be lonely. Encourage them to see themselves as “Christian mystics,” living solitary lives while still producing radical work. Convince them that work created in total isolation (even at the expense of spiritual health) is somehow truer and better.

Move them away from the community, and it won’t take long before they begin moving away from their master as well.

Infernal Regards,

Malice

Vice President of the 8th Circle of Hell

(Global Initiatives Branch)

Editor’s Notes:

1. Apparently a reference to Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), poet known for such poems as “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” and “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died.”

2. Apparently a reference to J.D. Salinger (1910-2010), author of Catcher in the Rye. Salinger wrote on the dust jacket of Franny and Zooey that a “writer’s feelings of anonymous obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.”

Cover Photo by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash