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 1984]
Subject: Cultivating Attitudes about Evil
Deception,
As I noted briefly in my last missive, one of our opposition’s most irritating skills is the way they take the foulest actions and use them to point toward their agenda.
- A delinquent teenager on trial for possessing drugs becomes a poignant picture of “sin’s effect on people.”
- A man telling his weekly therapy group about his third drunk driving incident becomes a story of “how anyone can realize their mistakes and start healing.”
- Worst of all, a would-be revolutionary slowly suffocating on a cross becomes the ultimate symbol of “sacrifice and divine mercy.”
Artists, working in crafts where some kind of conflict is key to creating interesting stories and compelling drama, can be especially good at this.1 They can create characters that suffer horribly, but ultimately triumph. Even when these characters don’t necessarily win, the tales at least give humans new perspectives about their problems. The humans’ capacity to learn about growth, even from stories about spiritual con artists stealing artificial limbs or missionaries-turned-apostates, defies explanation.2 In such cases, even artwork that seems hopeless pushes away from the despair and cynicism we work so hard to propagate, sometimes destroying decades of careful work.
Therefore, it is vital you divert your targets’ attention from the lighter side of struggles and totally onto the greasy details. Get them to focus entirely on the darkness in a difficult story, not the ever-present potential for ideas like “hope,” “perseverance,” or the grim figure they call “redemption.”
Suppose, for example, your targets read a scene of sacrificial love, such as a man jumping in front of a gun to defend his family. Before they begin thinking things like “how powerful love is,” jump in and suggest these sort of thoughts:
- “Look at the blood pouring down his chest!”
- “He looks so gross lying on the ground dead.”
- “I can’t stand the idea that things like this could happen to me. Why must I be reminded of something so uncomfortable?”
We know full well why the Ex-CEO sometimes wants to remind humans of these things. We know exactly the conclusions he would have them reach.
But teach your target to miss these conclusions completely. Convince them to only see the gore and visceral emotions in these scenes. Do whatever you can to distract them from the elements he wants them to see. A healthy misunderstanding of their sacred text’s teachings about whatever is lovely3 is always reliable in this case. The Ex-CEO would remind them that the loveliest story is the Passion story. They can easily be led to think that lovely means something sans pain, sans blood, and therefore sans sacrifice. Soon, your targets will find it hard to enjoy any story that describes anything worse than a child scraping his knee at the playground.
Then your targets will feel that as “good followers” they cannot describe anything truly evil in their artwork. Granted, a few will manage to produce compelling work even under these new limits. They will be artists who naturally enjoy writing tales about small-picture evil (the trials of living in suburbia) or evil from the distant past (Mennonite settlers struggling to make it in the American territories).4 However, even they will soon find not being able to mention evil makes for mediocre art.
Infernal Regards,
Malice
Vice President of the 8th Circle of Hell
(Global Initiatives Branch)
Editor’s Notes:
1. For more on the necessity of conflict in art, see chapter 3 in Imagine by Steve Turner.
2. “Spiritual con artists” appears to be a reference to the short story “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor, while “missionaries-turned-apostates” appears to be a reference to the novel Silence by Shūsaku Endō. Much like Graham Greene and Fyodor Dostoevsky, O’Connor and Endō are frequently cited for their ability to write dark stories with surprising spiritual insights.
3. See Philippians 4:8-9: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things” (NIV).
4. Mennonite and Amish settlers have been a favored topic of historical romance novels marketed to evangelical readers at least since Beverly Lewis’ The Shunning was published in 1997. For more on Amish fiction and evangelical culture, see chapter 4 in Reading Evangelicals by Daniel Silliman and chapter 6 in The Evangelical Imagination by Karen Swallow Prior.
Cover Photo by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash
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