Wormwood apparently asked whether the patient needs to stay ignorant of devils existing at all, and Screwtape explains hell’s current strategy: stay hidden, for now. It’s a real dilemma for them — believers in devils make bad materialists, and materialists lose the visceral terror direct belief could produce. Screwtape’s dream is something subtler: people who worship vague “Forces” — sex, some kinds of psychology, a generalized “Life Force” — without ever admitting they’re worshipping anything spiritual at all. In the meantime, he’s not worried about Wormwood’s patient catching on; modern culture already pictures devils as comic figures in red tights, which makes disbelief easy to maintain.
Then the letter turns to the question Screwtape had promised to answer: should the patient become an extreme patriot, or an extreme pacifist? His answer is almost indifferent — either works, because the goal isn’t the specific position, it’s what happens to a small, embattled group of people bound together by a cause. Any tight little circle united around something outsiders dislike develops, almost automatically, a kind of hothouse pride on the inside and defensive hostility toward everyone outside it — and because the cause feels impersonal and righteous, that pride never has to feel like pride. Screwtape openly wants the Church itself kept small for exactly this reason: not just so fewer people encounter God, but so the ones who do pick up the anxious, self-righteous posture of a small embattled club. He even name-drops the old factions at Corinth as a template that’s worked before.
But the real target isn’t patriotism or pacifism themselves — it’s the slow slide underneath either one. First, let the patient treat his political conviction as part of his faith. Then let it quietly become the most important part. Then, gradually, let Christianity itself shrink down into just a useful source of arguments for whichever cause he’s already committed to. The tell, Screwtape says, is when meetings, pamphlets, and movements start mattering more to a man than prayer and charity ever do. At that point it barely matters which side he picked. He’s already hell’s.
Nothing about this required convincing the patient that Christianity was false. It only required letting something else — a cause, a side, a “we” versus “them” — quietly become the thing he actually organizes his life and identity around.
Where This Shows Up Now
It’s when a political or social cause starts feeling more urgent and more clarifying than prayer does. It’s the particular comfort of a tight-knit group defined mostly by who it’s against. It’s noticing that your faith has quietly become a set of talking points in service of a cause you already believed in, rather than the other way around.
For Discussion
- Is there a cause, position, or group identity in your own life that’s started to feel more central than your actual faith?
- Screwtape says the tell is when meetings and movements matter more than prayer and charity. Is that a fair test to apply to your own life right now?
- What would it look like to hold a strong conviction about something — political, social, otherwise — while still keeping it clearly subordinate to your faith rather than fused with it?
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