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 2015]
From: Malice, VP of 8th Circle of Hell (Global Initiatives Branch)
Subject: Some Notes on Politics
Indignation,
Your last missive brings up an interesting point. In essence, your question is, “If we aim to convince young people that the evangelical subculture they grew up in is irredeemably anti-art, can we leverage political concerns?” This is an important question to consider as we near an election year.
To answer this question, I must go over some history you may not be familiar with. The European sectors you previously worked in produced Christian communities that often linked serving their master with social justice causes or what many Americans would consider “left-wing politics.”1
American evangelicalism comes out of the fundamentalist tradition, which reacted Christians promoting “modernist theology” alongside social justice. Fundamentalism had capitalism and anti-regulation concerns baptized into its fold from the start—the movement was, after all, kickstarted by the founder of Union Oil.2
The conflict between fundamentalism and social justice groups led to what one writer has called “The Great Reversal.”3 Before the 1920s, it was not unusual to see American theological conservatives promoting “progressive causes” like ending slavery or supporting women’s suffrage. After fundamentalism, theological conservatives were concerned with defending themselves against “the state”4 and protecting economic interests over social concerns.
This new attitude continued, in fact strengthened, in evangelicalism. Fifty years after Union Oil helped found fundamentalism, wildcat oil operators joined evangelicals in supporting the Cowboy Candidate.5 Social crises following the second World War left many evangelical targets craving a “return to normalcy.” As discussed in the “Jesus People” report in your files, the new cravings generated a renewed conservatism. The Great Reversal set itself up as the Great Behemoth, and has lumbered on ever since.
Evangelicals for the most part do not realize how much their political identity and religious identity are the product of choices made only a few generations ago. As you’ve seen, most evangelicals hold their conservative politics and their religious beliefs in the same hand, and have never been taught how separate the two.6 The unquestioned union of a certain brand of politics and faith has created many intriguing situations that we exploit.
As far as your area is concerned, the key result is it leaves artists who grew up evangelical in crisis. Artists do not fit the average conservative profile. Classical conservatism is bound up in concerns about maintaining tradition and solidarity. Classical liberalism is bound up in concerns about maintaining the individual’s freedom.7 Artists are typically lonely individuals who struggle to find communities that understand their perspectives. Erego, artists can be right-wing or left-wing, but they will in the philosophical sense always lean liberal. They care for the outsider because they spend most of their lives being the outsider.
Thanks in part to our efforts, neither fundamentalism nor evangelicalism has created a political ethic that allows for conservative theology mixed with a liberal sensibility that cares for outsiders. Thus, most artists have struggled fitting into the evangelical scene.
Those who are naturally gifted toward children’s entertainment (storybooks, “family films,” etc.) are generally able to find their niche, for their work is rarely provocative. Those who have talents in other directions generally find it more difficult. We have exploited this problem to great effect, as you can see from looking at previous messages and your own agents’ field reports.
What does all this mean for your targets? For starters, it means that if you keep them focused on their current concerns and off learning their history, you can drive a deep wedge between them and their evangelical churches. A few will take the time to read the history and see that there is more to being an evangelical Christian than watching Fox News and listening to Christian pop. Most will struggle to take this step because they have so little sense of what their tradition is—much less what it has been, and therefore no idea how to plot a new future way.
You may also have great success if you play on their natural arrogance. One particularly human trait is that when they are young, they believe they know everything. If they interact with different generations, they begin to realize their perspectives are more limited. They may even realize that some of their political views are more tied to age than they realize. Humans tend to be more liberal when they are young and become more conservative as they age.8 Once the young discover this embarrassing fact, they lose some of that arrogance we find so useful.
If the young go further and have many intergenerational relationships, their sense of perspective moves in directions we cannot control. The ideal of the lone maverick artist facing down the world is replaced by the image of an artist voluntarily tied to nourishing connections. This description sounds like it would constrict them, and we develop it into bitterness if they tie themselves to legalistic groups.
When artists become tied to a group rooted in the Ex-CEO’s ideas, they become damnably hard to reach. The network of relations, counselors and multi-generational perspectives creates a flexible shield. As it develops, this shield will warp with internal pressure and alter its shape to accommodate new perspectives. While the shield shifts to take on new information, the network repeatedly reinforces ideas that run counter to our aims. Hence, the shield becomes pliable but firm enough to withstand our offenses. Our attempts to add self-righteousness or anger bounce off of them almost as soon as they land. The network’s pliability and durability defy explanation.
Therefore, your priority is to discourage political history and any attempt to create civil intergenerational discussions about art, faith, and politics.
Within that context, you currently have free reign to use political concerns, biases, and strife however you can. I suspect pending events will create some enticing possibilities in this area.9
Infernal Regards,
Malice
Vice President of the 8th Circle of Hell
(Global Initiatives Branch)
Editor’s Notes:
1. For more on American vs European Christianity and its relation to political parties, see “A Tale of Two Evangelicalisms” by Joe Halldorf in Breaking Ground edited by Annye Snyder and Susannah Black.
2. The fundamentalist movement took its name from The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth, a 12-volume series on conservative theology funded by Lyman and Milton Stewart. Lyman Stewart was the founder of Union Oil. For more on fundamentalism’s early days, see chapter 11 in America’s Religious History by Thomas S. Kidd.
3. George M. Marsden uses this term in Fundamentalism and American Culture.
4. For more on evangelicals’ skepticism of state control, read “A Strange Love? Or: How White Evangelicals Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Donald” by Michael S. Hamilton in Evangelicals edited by Mark Noll and George Marsden.
5. Apparently a reference to 1979 presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. Kyle Meyaard-Schaap details in chapter 2 of Following Jesus in a Warming World how Reagan’s campaign appealed to wildcat oil drillers and also to evangelical Christian leaders, a union that laid the foundation for the Christian Right.
6. Mark Noll argues in chapter 3 of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind that evangelicals have struggled since the Revolutionary War to separate “the American way” from “the Christian way” because of how American republicanism and American Christianity informed each during the Revolutionary period.
7. For more on this point, and the possibility of a Christian “conservative liberalism,” see chapter 12 in Politics After Christendom by David VanDrunen.
8. Peter Hitchens refers to this phenomenon in his memoir Rage Against God.
9. See Testimony by Jon Ward for more on how the 2016 presidential election affected evangelical identity.
Cover Photo by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash
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