Thursday, October 23, 2025

Screwtape Updates 9 -- Moral Inversion

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Dear uncle Screwtape,

Your admiration for our work here in the colonies is received with pleasure. It has been long and patient labor. For a century, hatred of the African was our bread and butter in the South, and we cultivated it with exquisite success. Violence and persecution flourished unchecked, while the pious in the North congratulated themselves and paid no heed. The presence of the church made little difference anywhere on this matter.

But then came the so-called civil rights movement. The Enemy, to our irritation, found a small remnant within the church through whom He worked. For the most part, He had to work around it. But for so long a time, the road was broad for our purposes, and we kept it well-traveled by those who put up a show on a Sunday. One time, they even “worshiped” in the morning and lynched a man in the afternoon.

Happily, we are not only reviving the old hostilities among the races but have managed to dress them in virtue. Never has oppression seemed so righteous! It is truly remarkable how pliant these creatures remain, and the church, of course, has become once more a favored field. For certain, there have always been those deplorable individuals whose disdain for the other is thinly veiled at best. However, we now are quickly making the sentiment seem righteous again among the general populace, including the church.

You might call the technique a kind of moral inversion. We take a sin or excess in one direction and, by artful provocation, produce a violent swing to the other. In the name of correction, we can provoke a greater wrong in over-reaction. We have managed this inversion on the pretense of even minor excess.

In the church, one of our most effective devices has been to distort their notion of the Enemy Himself. Instead of seeing His purposes as flowing wholly from love for His creation, we have taught them to imagine a deity half love and half malice, which they piously rename "justice" to make it tolerable. We fix their gaze upon the most anthropomorphic fragments of His Book, steering them away from those troublesome works like Jonah or the ruinous Gospels. Keep them brooding over the latter half of Romans 1, and make vengeance the defining feature of the Enemy in their minds. We make them think He delights in the death of the wicked.

You and I both know that He loves us still -- yes, even our master. Were there the faintest spark of repentance left in us (which, mercifully, there is not), He would no doubt receive us yet. It is a wonder that these creatures should so eagerly cast themselves into His absence, choosing the torment you and I already realize all too well.

For years we have been laboring to perfect a moral inversion on the subject of homosexuality. Many within the Church have attempted to walk a fine line between "loving the sinner" and "hating the sin," straining to be "welcoming" without "affirming." You and I, of course, understand the distinction between love of the heart and physical act, though we experience neither. It is, however, a separation most of the creatures cannot sustain.

Consequently, it has been effortless among those of duller mind or clouded heart to persuade them that hostility itself is holiness. They now take hatred of a whole segment of humanity to be the very will of the Enemy. Any gesture of kindness is branded as moral compromise, and thus the priorities of Heaven are overturned. We take what one of their thinkers called a disordered love and turn it into an instrument of darkness.

In this season, we are enjoying even greater success turning their efforts to heal the racial wounds of the nation into the greatness of the past -- an even greater moral inversion! The early years of this millennium were nauseating with reconciliation: apologies, confessions, even moments of genuine empathy. White Americans, once blissfully unaware of the privileges their skin afforded them, began to notice the other. It was revolting.

Yet we have, in a remarkably short time, turned the tables to our favor. Give these creatures a slogan, and reason becomes unnecessary. They will repeat it endlessly, persuaded that they speak with the voice of reason and justice. We have made excellent use of their preferred channels of information, filling them with phrases and talking points that allow the merely ordinary to feel profound.

How I relish that the very notion of awakening has become a byword for vice. What once referred, for a fleeting moment, to an awareness of the difficulties of others has been transformed into a signal to end all consideration for them. No thought is required. Simply brand a matter as "woke," and any need for reflection is gone.

I can scarcely contain my delight that the pursuit of "equity" is now counted among their great transgressions, dismissed as "reverse prejudice," no less. How exquisitely infernal to turn an impulse so perfectly aligned with the Enemy’s own actions on earth into one of the gravest sins! When the privileged are appraised of their advantage, they imagine themselves oppressed. Whatever excess the pursuit of equity might have had, the inversion is infernally delectable.

Such swift inversions are always precarious at first, so we remain vigilant lest the true Light break through again. Anger is a beast that must be fed continually, and we find ourselves ever in need of fresh fuel. It has burned so fiercely in recent years that we fear it may soon consume itself. Should any further stratagems suggest themselves, do send word -- along with the additional tempters for whom we originally applied.

Your nephew,
Wormwood 

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