By Stabigail Van Burnin

With, as always, apologies to C.S. Lewis and Screwtape.

Dear Stabby: Through no fault of my own, I have been assigned to one of the worst patients in the world: a young man who has been raised in a Christian household and who has kept up an interest in matters of faith and theology. He’s most of the way through high school and already advanced in the Enemy’s service beyond most adults. Where do I even start in the face of such a terrible beginning?

–Roasted

Dear Roasted,

First of all, no one wants to hear your whining about how unfair the situation is. Either you were assigned to this patient by random chance, or you weren’t paying sufficient attention to your superiors to influence them better in your favor. The first is just bad luck, the second is incompetence, and either way, no one cares.

The first thing to determine is whether your youth is really as advanced as you believe. Is he truly devoted to the Enemy, or is he merely loud about matters that he truly does not understand? Is he comfortable with the world in which he finds himself? When he is with friends who are not Christian, does he challenge them? Or even hold himself apart from them and refuse to agree with their worldliness? Or does he throw himself in with them wholeheartedly, pretending to be one of them, before going back to his family and his church, where he throws himself just as much into praising his God?

If it is the latter, then you truly have nothing to worry about: the wretched creature is merely imitating his surroundings, and once he goes off to college (I presume you ARE, at least, trying to get him into their colleges, the transformation of which is our resounding triumph of this century in that nation.) he will quickly fall away from any church and into your lap like the ripe — and dead — fruit that he is.

If, on the other hand, he complains that he is alone, and that he cannot find anyone with whom he can be honest: that he feels like a stranger in this world and longs for fellow-workers with whom he can share burdens and confide, then you will have a harder road, because you have a man who has actually begun to realize that loyalty to his God and to his own soul has a cost. This can, however, be fought on two levels.

The first and best is that of simple despair. Draw his attention toward the right kind of people: friends that hate all he stands for and yet are “nice to him,” or even better, “fun.” Draw his attention to how easily happy they appear and how they outnumber the people like him in this world we control. Never let him find like-minded people: if he runs into them, draw his attention to every defect of their characters (humans always have plenty), while downplaying those of the friends you want him to have. This way, when the crisis of faith comes (and it always comes, the Enemy foolishly allows them), he will have no support. In fact, his “friends” may even demand he abandon his faith in exchange for their support.

However, if this were going to work, you would probably already be seeing signs of it. Assuming you are not, then he is more tough-minded, your situation is worse. You have a young man who is already used to losing friends and being called a crank and a bigot for simply not agreeing with everything the popular people say. Therefore he knows that it is survivable. So the best thing in that case, as Undersecretary Screwtape once suggested, is to harp on his conscience and suggest that since he is being persecuted, he might as well dedicate himself to extremes of devotion that will turn him into one. Let him rail against all he comes in contact with. Never let him feel he has “done enough.” NEVER let him remember that the Enemy holds simple endurance to be a primary virtue; that, in the words of Milton, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Although it’s unlikely he’s ever heard of Milton; we’ve got that fellow out of most of their schools. In so doing, you will, at the very least, make his beliefs extremely unattractive to all he may come in contact with, and you may be able to drive him into a cult.

But whatever the course of action, you must work on his emotions and the dread that every human has of loneliness. Do not let him notice the extremes of loneliness that so many followers of Christ went through. Let him believe that if he were really pleasing the Enemy, he would feel better. The Enemy wants the humans to discover the facts of the world and His spiritual principles, to base their actions on those facts and principles, and allow the results of their actions to shape their emotions. We, of course, want to invert this: for them to found their actions upon their emotions, and to choose or declare facts and principles based upon those. Since such “facts and principles” are as watery and formless as the emotions upon which they are based, they are thus open to every manipulation we can devise. We are aided in this by the fact that all human children naturally begin life in this way, and most of them on some level long to return to it.

Stabby

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