Christianity And

Christianity And is Screwtape’s name for the temptation to make Christian faith conditional on an added fashion, cause, or intellectual program. Its danger lies not simply in the accompanying interest, but in the reversal by which Christianity becomes valuable as a means to something else. Across his examples, Screwtape describes a strategy of substituting novelty for durable commitment and fashionable judgment for direct moral discernment; his account is also part of a deliberately unreliable demonic correspondence, not a neutral theological authority.

Definition and Strategy

In his letter to Wormwood, Screwtape contrasts Christianity And with a community whose members have differing individual interests but remain joined by a common Christian faith. The tempter’s preferred alternative is to make a person a Christian with a difference: to append the crisis, the new psychology, a new social order, faith healing, psychical research, vegetarianism, or spelling reform. These examples range across politics, intellectual fashions, personal practices, and minor reforms. Their variety is the point: almost any interest can be presented as the qualification that makes faith distinctively current.

The method trades on a horror of sameness. Screwtape advises turning the wish to belong to a particular fashion into dissatisfaction with the ordinary continuity of Christian belief. The proposed supplement can retain Christian colouring while drawing attention away from faith itself. In this scheme, a Christian identity is recast as a distinctive position within a passing movement, rather than a commitment that can persist through changing enthusiasms.

Novelty Against Rhythm and Permanence

Screwtape presents the desire for absolute novelty as a distortion of an ordinary human pleasure in change. Human life unfolds successively, so people need change; he argues that God has balanced this appetite with a love of permanence. The resulting union he calls rhythm: seasons are different but recur, and the Church’s spiritual year moves from fast to feast while returning to familiar observances. Change and repetition can therefore coexist without either becoming an absolute demand.

Christianity And exploits the pleasure of change by detaching novelty from that recurring pattern. Screwtape imagines people being content with snowdrops in January, a morning sunrise, plum pudding at Christmas, and children’s seasonal games, until tempters train them to demand uninterrupted difference. The distinction is not between change and no change, but between change held within a durable rhythm and novelty made into an end in itself.

That demand, Screwtape says, diminishes pleasure even as it increases desire. Novelty yields diminishing returns, and the pursuit of continual newness costs money; it can therefore feed avarice, unhappiness, or both. As desire grows more rapacious, it consumes innocent pleasures sooner and pushes people toward pleasures the Enemy forbids. Screwtape extends the diagnosis to the arts, claiming that the demand for freshness draws artists of both popular and prestigious kinds toward excess. The fashion changes, but the mechanism remains: a natural enjoyment of change is converted into appetite that cannot be satisfied by recurrence.

Fashion as Distraction

For Screwtape, intellectual fashions are useful because they direct attention away from the dangers a generation actually faces. The tempters encourage public alarm about a vice people are least likely to commit, while directing approval toward a virtue close to the vice they want to make prevalent. He compares the result to people rushing with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, or crowding onto the already endangered side of a boat. Fashionable vigilance can thus feel morally energetic while leaving the real danger unattended.

His examples turn on historical reversal. Enthusiasm is made the fashionable target when people are becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when emotional excess is the danger, the outcry shifts to the understanding. Cruel ages are steered against sentimentality, idle ones against respectability, and lecherous ones against Puritanism. When people are becoming slaves or tyrants, Liberalism is made the bogey. The labels are not presented as reliable diagnoses of virtue or vice; in Screwtape’s account, their strategic value lies in how fashion assigns attention and approval.

The most far-reaching version of the tactic is to make aversion to sameness into a philosophy. Screwtape connects this operation with evolutionary or historical ways of thinking that teach people to ask whether a choice is progressive, reactionary, or in accord with the movement of history, instead of whether it is righteous, prudent, or possible. Questions about the future become a vacuum: people do not know what is coming, and what comes depends in part on the choices they are making now. While thought circles around an unknowable future, the tempters have an opening to bend action toward their purpose. Replacing the descriptive word unchanged with the emotional word stagnant further turns persistence into a reproach and the Future into a promised land reserved for favoured heroes.

Faith Turned into a Means

The expression’s religious and political stakes become explicit when Screwtape discusses Christianity’s relation to social justice. He does not want Christian belief to flow into political life if it might help establish a just society. Yet he does want people to treat Christianity as a means, preferably to their own advancement, but, failing that, even to social justice. His recommended sequence begins with valuing justice as something God demands, then shifts toward valuing Christianity because it might produce justice. The faith has been made instrumental: its truth is no longer the reason to believe.

Screwtape presents a Christian writer’s defence of a version of Christianity on the ground that it can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilizations as evidence of the same slippage. The phrase works by making some other benefit, rather than truth, the stated warrant for belief. In this account, even a good social end can become a distraction when it is made the condition or purpose for which Christianity is accepted. The danger is not that moral concerns are irrelevant, but that faith is reduced to a tool whose worth depends on an outcome external to it.

Prayer, Feeling, and the Limits of Screwtape’s Account

Elsewhere, Screwtape’s instructions show how the same displacement can occur in an individual’s spiritual practice. He advises Wormwood to turn a recently reconverted patient away from serious prayer by making him distrust the repetitive prayers of childhood and seek something wholly spontaneous and informal. A beginner may then try to manufacture a devotional mood instead of attending to the object of prayer. The danger, as Screwtape describes it, is a shift from prayer directed toward God to self-observation: judging prayer by whether it produces feelings of charity, courage, or forgiveness. He also urges the tempter to exploit the believer’s mental images of God, encouraging attachment to the image rather than the reality those images imperfectly represent.

His discussion of spiritual dryness sharpens the contrast between feeling and commitment. Human emotional and bodily life moves through peaks and troughs, he admits, and a period of numbness is not necessarily the tempter’s achievement. Screwtape claims that God may withdraw the conscious sweetness and ease of early religious experience so that a person must carry out duties by will when they have lost their relish. A person who no longer desires obedience but still intends it, even when God seems absent, is therefore in greater danger to Hell than one carried along by pleasurable religious feeling. The principle complicates the language of novelty: spiritual life is not measured by uninterrupted freshness or emotional intensity.

The letters themselves require caution. The book’s prefatory warning says that Screwtape is a liar and that his statements should not automatically be treated as true even from his own perspective; it also notes that Hell, like Earth, has wishful thinking. His theories of fashion, prayer, and spiritual change are therefore best read as satirical instructions that expose the tempter’s aims and assumptions, not as an impartial account. Their central irony is that Screwtape tries to turn faith into a passing fashion while his own account repeatedly reveals the durability of what he hopes to undermine: truth, moral responsibility, and commitment that persists when feeling changes.