I’m enjoying C S Lewis’ clever book The Screwtape Letters (paid link) again. I last read this as a teenager, and it's extremely smart, really pastorally insightful, and full of wisdom.
For those who don't know, it is a fictitious correspondence between a senior devil (“Screwtape”) and a junior devil (“Wormwood”). The junior is being given advice in how to lead a young man (“the patient”) away from Christ (“the enemy”) and into hell (to serve “our father below”). The wisdom comes in the way Lewis puts his finger on all the subtle decisions and attitudes of heart that can lead us away from following Christ. And it’s often not the obvious; indeed, Wormwood is frequently advised that something he might think helpful to his cause is less helpful than he thinks.
I was particularly struck on Chapter VII. The book is set near the start of World War II, and Wormwood has been wondering if it would be better for “the patient” to become an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. Either will do: “All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged.”
But then there's this paragraph:
Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the “cause”, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more “religious” (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here,
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
This is full of wisdom. We live in an age when people press all kinds of political causes into being a Christian cause. Without making any comment or judgement on the causes themselves, we have the American right, environmental stewardship, various attitudes to the state of Israel and to the Palestinian people, and a Christmas carol service organised by Tommy Robinson. Listen to people campaigning for or against any of those causes, campaigning in the name of their religion.
How readily something moves from being a perceived outworking of someone’s faith, to this being the main thing and their faith a tool to serve the cause.
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