The Screwtape E-mails

In tribute to C.S. Lewis who famously explored the tactics Satan uses to corrupt human beings in his classic book The Screwtape Letters I have searched through the various realms of the earth for modern-day communications between devils. It seems they are in step with technology; for I was able to hack my way into the sent mail folder of Screwtape's e-mail account. Just remember, be careful what you send over e-mail; God and His enemies are watching!

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

RE: help

So you have finally come to ask me for help! I knew it was just a matter of time. Frankly, I'm surprised at how well you have done so far with your subject. I read her entire file with interest, but next time you really must remember to send it in Word format. I can't tell you how annoying it is to read around all those little "&nsp" characters and such.

You have a solid foundation to work with: Her concept of Father is completely whacked. With the various vermin known as mother's boyfriends, and the long absences between them, and then that odd relationship with her biological father, there is hardly a chance of her finding any comfort in that despicable metaphor of our Enemy as a loving Father.

You can get a lot of mileage out of this. Keep her thinking of God as a distant figure Creator if you must but very little more. Even though she marks on her tests in Bible class that he is more than a Watchmaker God, you must keep her heart from believing that he cares about the details of her life. The moment a person starts believing this, things tend to happen that would make your scales curl.

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

RE: fwd: college

Ah, now I see why you were seeking my assistance. Where were you, Wormwood? How could you let her enroll in that Christian college? Now she will have daily interaction with certain repulsive doctrines ... unity in Christ despite diversity in doctrine, the sovereignty of God and other such rubbish.

Still, Nephew, the battle is not lost; you may claim the victory yet. She could be surrounded by Christians, with her head full of doctrines, and never have any of them reach her heart. Keep her distracted boys, chocolate, ice cream, homework, part-time jobs whatever it takes to keep her from prayer, and from contemplating the various declarations of the faithful around her.

It made me ill to read the journal entries you forwarded to me. She is far too inquisitive; writing as though she is sending instant messages to our Enemy, with this disgusting air of trust that there are actually answers to her questions, and that everything must make sense! All this honesty about her thoughts and feelings you'll have to work on that. Within one year, I want to see this journal reduced to one entry per month or less, with little actual reflection. Never allow a shortage of urgent tasks in her schedule to keep her from this relationship she has begun. Distract, distract, distract. Entertain, amuse, numb, capture!

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

RE: re: prayer

So she has a prayer partner. This makes it rather hard to avoid prayer, doesn't it? But surely you know that you can still keep her from contemplation. Since you are so inexperienced, I will let you in on some tried and true techniques: First, keep her mind on how she must sound or appear to the others who are praying with her; this way, the words she chooses will not be prompted by anything but a desire to impress or influence the others. Encourage her to use flowery (but meaningless) words, believing that they denote piety.

Second, whether she prays in a group or alone: As soon as she has requested something from God, prompt her to think about how she herself can bring about the results she desires. Before she can even get to the next supposed request, she will be secretly plotting how to change the world on her own, completely forgetting that foolish notion of trust in our Enemy's sovereignty. For example, if she begins to pray for her relationship with a classmate whom she finds annoying, lure her into fantasizing about various things she could say to him to put him in his place. Next thing she knows, her prayer time will be cut short and she'll be picking up the phone to call him!

Better yet, take the fact that Enemy is omnipresent, and spin it into something like: Since He can hear my very thoughts, I don't need to have a specified prayer time, do I? This, combined with the ideal of praying without ceasing (a phrase from the Bible that she has surely heard several times in her classes already), will keep her lips quiet. Meanwhile, continue to keep her busy, busy, busy!

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

RE: re: outnumbered

You are reaping what you have sown. You fell asleep on the job and let her get into that enemy-infested place known as a Christian college; now you must fend off your pristine, goody-two-shoed cousins left and right. Don't back down now: Remember your subject cannot now see what you see. She doesn't know which of her professors and classmates is in that Company. She is trying, in her blindness, to decide who to believe. Seize this opportunity! Make your case; make her an offer she can't refuse.

She's an idealist. We shall use that against her. When dealing with her type, you must take care to get her away from seeing things in terms of black-and-white, right vs. wrong, good vs. evil. If she perceives a clear dichotomy and can choose what seems right, it will be difficult to deter her from her the side she has chosen. Two words to live by: Analysis paralysis. If you keep the right answer always out of reach, she will spend her life lukewarm, eventually settling for what looks good enough or not bad. Try to keep her in the company of heartless intellectuals, for whom every issue is very complex. Don't forget to expose her to the famous, lauded writings of those who have gone to Hell before her. Use especially those wonderful puppets of ours who agree with many of the principles of Christianity without accepting the ridiculous demands (like surrender, worship, and sacrifice) found in the Bible.

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

RE: Another idea

Why don't you hook up your subject with a nice intellectual, moral fellow? He'll give her all the attention she desires, and he'll agree with most of those dogmas she hears in class. Keep her focused on the goodness of his actions, and assist her in noticing the constant failure of Christians to live up to their own ideals. Soon you will have her believing that the old mores are unnecessarily restrictive, and she will do even those things she now thinks she'll never do. (What a glorious day that shall be!)

You have already woven a pattern of delightfully dysfunctional dating relationships in her life. One fellow after another, never a season without suitors to contemplate whether she has an identity of her own. It will be easy to keep her infatuated with this feeling of love, accustomed to being the object of someone's affection. All the warm fuzzies that will come from this experience will further motivate her to justify partaking of various forbidden fruits. Your colleagues have produced an ample supply of men who are ready to flatter a girl for the benefits it will get them.

Here's the key: These creatures overestimate their own strength, and that is their weakness. So far, your subject has avoided impurity. It won't be hard to convince her ego that she has avoided bad deeds by her own strength and virtue. In a word: Confidence. Boost her confidence in her own strength, and she will soon be boldly entering situations she previously would have eschewed, certain that whatever she chooses to do will be the right thing.

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

RE: re: Victory!!

Well done! In record time, you have made your subject almost certainly ours! You talked her right out of that nonsense about her body being the temple of the Holy Ghost; you even led her away from thinking that her identity is more than her corpus. You numbed her mind with ambivalence until she experienced herself only as a center of physical pleasures and pains; after that it was a snap to lure her into her first sexual experience. She walked right into your net, her soul completely cut off from its origins.

Ah, yes, and her journal shows not a hint of remorse, just that beautiful numbness that tells us you have toughened up her little conscience! You have her in a place where she doesn't even allow herself to see the whole story!

Do continue to be cautious. There is a great chance that with this leap of non-faith, she is destined for the place we have prepared, but you must remain on your guard. Remember their adage, confession is good for the soul. At all costs, do not let her tell anyone of her deed! Let it be her (and his) little secret, to their (and our) delight. You can't risk having one of her pious little friends convince her that what she did was wrong! That could send her right into the camp of the Enemy with repentance and renewed, perhaps sincere, efforts at godliness.

If she does start to show remorse, pile on the guilt to create secrecy, spin secrecy to create paranoia, and use the paranoia to cause her to interpret every smile as a sign that the Christians around her must be judging her the next thing you know, she will be avoiding church altogether and finding comfort in the company of people closer to Hell than herself.

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

RE: re: backfire

You fool! Letting her confess her deed, and to a minister! He filled her head with the Enemy's propaganda about receiving forgiveness. He looked at her as though she had done nothing that he himself might have done. You are many steps behind, my nephew.

Admittedly, you were the victim of some poor timing with this pregnancy thing. The Enemy has always had one up on us in that he can create life. But we have the power to destroy it! And I am sure I don't have to explain to you how you can pull her into our clutches forever if you can manage to convince her to take that first little step, which is now politically endorsed and publicly funded, politely known as "terminating a pregnancy."

She has found comfort in private pardon for a private sin; but you will have plenty of opportunity to redeem yourself once she faces the prospect of having the entire world know about her secret deed. Seize the moment! Guilt; shame; a seared conscience, and some of that stubborn pride which makes us so strong these will be your primary defensive tools against the sugary comforting messages of the Enemy. They will also be your offensive weapons to lead her right where we want her to go.

Others in your situation have not only led their subjects to slaughter their young, but also morphed them into some of our most beloved activists, who lead dozens of their fellow humans into the very same act. Now that is efficiency!

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

RE: re: unexpected

What part of secrecy do you not understand? In two months time, you have let her tell her parents, her roommate, her closest friends? And she tells her story with a nauseating form of contrition mixed with optimism. The sheer number of words in her journal should warn you: she is starting to wake up! Surely you were not naive enough to think these people would condemn her and send her into hiding. They are all trained to think that they are frail, mortal, capable of doing, and therefore no better than her what did you expect them to say to her? Every person she has told about her pregnancy has given her one more morsel of encouragement, one less reason to hide in shame for her deed. You may have been up all day watching carefully for the Enemy's principal messengers of comfort, but did you forget that He can speak just as easily through whatever humans He chooses?

All this comfort, combined with the lifelong indoctrination by her mother against abortion, have made my suggested course virtually impossible. As I see it, you have two options (both grossly inferior):

First, you could convince her to keep and raise the little brat, and then you would go on to make both of their lives miserable. This has some potential, but it will require almost constant work on your part. Starting immediately, you would need to isolate her from potential friends and family who would otherwise offer to help her with tasks, chores, child care, finances, etc. She must drop out of school and move to a place with little social support. Later, the kid can go to day care or to shady neighbors while she works, where he can learn all kinds of fabulous antics; your subject will inevitably become sleep-deprived, irritable, inefficient at work, perhaps even resentful and abusive.

Alternatively, you could persuade her to give the child away to an adoptive couple. This act in itself will not make her ours, but the reasons you give her for doing it could bring her a significant way toward condemnation. She could choose this route just to spite the father of the child. Even better and I think this just might work, given her idealism and guilt she could see adoption as penance for her sin. Every time she feels a pang of loss for her son, you can remind her that she did something wrong, so that she welcomes it with a bitter "that's what I deserve for my intemperance." See how far from grace and forgiveness this could lead her? The odds are good that if you take this route, she will soon find herself another unplanned pregnancy, beginning the cycle all over again; compounding the guilt; helping her to disparage those around her.

Whatever route you choose, I don't want to hear from you again until you have rectified this situation. You have been terribly sloppy, and you are making me look bad.

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

RE: (no subject)

I told you not to write as long as you were performing so miserably, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't be seeing and hearing about your failure every week for the past half-year! In case you didn't notice, you negligent amateur, last week she sent the following drivel over e-mail to one of our Enemy's champs:

I have come to see that I can never give my child those things that I believe most that every child should have particularly two loving parents, a full-time mom and a Christian family. So, really, the greatest thing I can possibly do for him is to entrust him to the couple I have hand-picked. It is a sacrifice of love; keeping him when I can't provide for him would be selfish. Meeting with them has helped me realize that he is a very great gift to them, as well!! Without my decision, they would not have this child to love.

This was followed by a first-hand account about receiving you-know-who as Savior, and new-found peace. Don't think I didn't hear about you cowering in the corner when that little transformation occurred!

You have disgraced me as your mentor! Not only has this girl resisted your pathetic attempts to lure her into our camp, she is nourishing another life which she plans to hand over to some of the Enemy's followers, thus putting another one of your colleagues behind from the start! On top of that, she is spreading a message of grace and new beginnings with everyone she meets! The depression and confusion I helped you cultivate in her are now reduced to specks, as she describes a newfound sense of purpose and responsibility.

I have given you some of the best advice and most successful techniques; there is no one to blame but yourself. Don't you dare try to account for your failure by saying she was too strong, or the Enemy was too vigilant. If we can't win battles over little wrecks like your subject, we can't win the War! And we shall. We shall! We shall!

We must.

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Abuse & AddictionPornography and Cybersex, Sexual Abuse

Parenting ChildrenTalking About Sex

Parenting TeensSexual Activity, Crisis Pregnancy, Homosexuality

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