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 1962]
Subject: Playing on Puritan Heritage
Deception,
You’ve no doubt learned that the first step to promoting new ideas is to connect them to concepts your targets already know. Fortunately, this program and your intended targets give you an exquisite opportunity to do that. You are standing not only on the foundation of our work with the fundamentalists who birthed your target audience, but also a foundation we built centuries ago under your predecessor. At the time, we were focusing on the Puritans, who became one of the first European Christian groups to arrive on the North American continent.1 Their influence is in the roots of many American movements.
Our organization’s attacks on the Puritans were, sadly, not always successful. However, your predecessor did successfully instill a great fear and resentment of the arts. You will find full details about this endeavor in my attached report “T.G. and Other Prudes,”2 so I will only give a brief explanation here.
Shortly after the Reformation, we successfully convinced the Puritans that all entertainments were foul evils which distracted them from following their god (that being the Ex-CEO). Novels were fiction and therefore lies, since they described events that never happened. Playing cards accomplished nothing practical, and was thus an idle waste of time – and after all, idle hands are our manager’s workshop. Stage plays were as deceptive as novels and anyway, they were invented by the pagan Greeks. For them, art held no image of the trinity.3 Art was pure frivolity.
Play on this attitude and half your work will already be done. Convince them the Puritans were correct, that beautiful art by itself does not point to their master or hold any value in his eyes. Soon, their artists will decide the only way they can excuse their work is by passing it off as something more “practical.” This “practical art” will mean things like comic strips or low-budget films that scream and groan with religious clichés as they attempt to encourage people to join the Christian cause.
I will send messages outlining other attacks and strategies at a later date.
Infernal Regards,
Malice
Vice President of the 8th Circle of Hell
(Global Initiatives Branch)
Editor’s Notes:
1. The first wave of Puritans immigrants to America gained a charter in 1629 from the Massachusetts Bay Company to colonize what is now known as New England. See chapter 1 of America’s Religious History by Thomas S. Kidd.
2. T.G. was the pseudonym for a Puritan writer who wrote a 1616 treatise condemning theater dramas as pagan and sinful. For more on Puritanism’s anti-art tendencies, see chapter 2 in Imagine by Steve Turner.
3. This appears to be a reference to The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers, where Sayers suggests the Trinity is the basis of all creative work. In her terminology, all creative work involves the idea that inspires the work, energy used to make the art, and the power or implied meaning. These three concepts (Idea, Energy, Power), reflect the image of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Cover Photo by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash
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