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: Fostering Anger
Indignation,
I am actually quite pleased by reports of your recent work. It appears you have much more ability than I gave you credit for. Keep this up, and I might even be prepared to give you a little free reign with this project.
You’ve no doubt noticed the loophole in my last message. Following those tactics, you can convince your targets to believe that all their fellow evangelicals are breathing the same fumes. a shallow faith that will only smother them. This begs the question of what you and your staff must do when they begin searching other markets (such as Catholicism or Eastern Orthodox markets) to see if they have the same tendencies. What happens if a target goes outward to find “the true church” and realizes that the church behavior they grew up with is just ordinary human fickleness? What if they decide to recommit to their churches and seek ways to be a counter-cultural example?
You can deal with this eventuality by using two tactics. Both are built on the essential principle that in the end analysis, what humans believe is more tied to what they have experienced and lived with than what they have studied and analyzed.1
First, encourage targets to react negatively against anything that even slightly smells like their subculture. Make them not only wary of the evangelical subculture’s atmosphere (the sappy, shallow protectiveness they’ve experienced since childhood) but also anything that uses the same vocabulary. Teach them to view any talk about “being set apart for God,” or “holiness” as just another evangelical cliché. Eventually (progress will come by inches at first), they will find they are cynical about not only the evangelical branch, but about the core of their religion.
Second, make their feelings into something more than cynicism. Make them think over and over again about the times they’ve experienced this shallow atmosphere.2 Have them ruminate on things like:
- The worship leader who couldn’t understand why anyone wanted to write anything other than Christian music
- The overbearing parent who put fantasy novels on the same level as witchcraft
- The Christian schoolteacher who always talked about how Christian films are the only thing worth watching anymore
Keep this going until these ideas move to the forefront of your targets’ minds. Make these memories the first thing they think about when they experience something even slightly similar to this attitude. Even the most restrained targets can only have their worst memories teased and revisited so many times before their pain blossoms into bitterness.3
Given your recent progress, I assume you already know where to take their thoughts from there.
In any case, feel free to contact me for advice.
Infernal Regards,
Malice
Vice President of the 8th Circle of Hell
(Global Initiatives Branch)
Editor’s Notes:
1. For more on this, see chapter 5 on the “relational aspect” in Cultural Apologetics by Paul M. Gould.
2. Shallow church culture teaching is a recurring theme not only in recent discussions about the increasing number of non-religious millennials but also in Baby Boomer accounts why they left Christianity after childhood. For examples of artists with this experience, see Rumours of Glory by Bruce Cockburn, and Gilliam on Gilliam by Terry Gilliam (edited with Ian Christie).
3. See Francis Schaeffer on “Love is the Final Apologetic.”
Cover Photo by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash
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