Church of England

The Church of England is depicted as a religious institution whose parish structure can draw unlike people into a common life, while its internal divisions offer opportunities for spiritual distortion. In Screwtape’s account, the decisive issue is not simply whether the patient attends church, but whether he receives worship with humility or turns religious choice and difference into grounds for criticism and factional hostility.

Parish Life and Receptivity

The patient has continued attending one church, and one only, since his conversion, although he is not wholly pleased with it. Screwtape treats this fidelity as potentially dangerous to Hell: if it arises from anything other than indifference, it keeps the patient within a stable parish rather than sending him on a search for a church that suits his tastes. He urges Wormwood to make him a religious connoisseur, evaluating churches rather than learning within one.

The parish principle matters because it is organized around a shared place rather than shared preferences. It can bring together people of different classes and psychological temperaments, creating the sort of unity Screwtape says the Enemy desires. By contrast, a congregation organized around affinity can become a club, then a coterie or faction. The distinction is institutional as well as personal: local belonging exposes worshippers to neighbors they might not choose, while preference-based belonging encourages them to select a community that reflects their own tastes.

Screwtape contrasts the patient’s desired role as a critic with the posture of a pupil. He concedes that critical judgment may reject what is false or unhelpful, but argues that the patient should not spend worship appraising and mentally dismissing what he dislikes. Instead, he should remain humbly receptive to whatever nourishment is offered. That receptive attention can make even familiar religious platitudes audible to the soul, and Screwtape warns that almost any sermon or book may become spiritually dangerous to Hell when received in this way.

Churches as Temptations

To persuade Wormwood to redirect the patient, Screwtape describes two nearby churches as promising options. At the first, the vicar has spent so long making the faith easier for a supposedly incredulous congregation that his own unbelief now shocks his parishioners. His services further narrow what the congregation encounters: to spare laypeople difficulties, he has abandoned both the lectionary and appointed psalms, circling instead around fifteen favored psalms and twenty favored lessons. Screwtape sees this routine as protection against unfamiliar scriptural truth reaching the congregation, though he doubts that the patient is yet foolish enough to be drawn there.

The other church is associated with Fr. Spike, whose opinions appear to swing between sharply opposed positions: from near-Communism to something approaching theocratic Fascism, from scholasticism to a denial of human reason, and from political engagement to the claim that every state is under judgment. Screwtape claims that hatred connects these apparent contradictions. Fr. Spike, he says, is drawn to preaching in ways designed to shock, grieve, puzzle, or humiliate his parents and their friends. Screwtape also identifies dishonesty in Fr. Spike’s habit of presenting an uncertain reading of an author such as Maritain as the teaching of the Church. Yet this account has a qualification fatal to Hell’s hopes: Fr. Spike genuinely believes.

Parties, Difference, and the Risk of Charity

Screwtape regards the fact that both nearby churches are party churches as an opportunity. If the patient cannot be kept out of the Church, Wormwood should try to attach him intensely to an internal party. Screwtape is less interested in genuine doctrinal disagreement than in cultivating hostility over distinctions that members cannot clearly explain. He points to antagonism between those who say “mass” and those who say “holy communion,” as well as disputes over candles, clothing, and other matters he calls indifferent.

The Church of England’s variety of practice could instead become a school of charity and humility. Screwtape invokes Paul’s teaching about food and other nonessentials: a person without scruples should yield when exercising a liberty might trouble someone with scruples. Applied to differences of church practice, the principle would require the low-church worshipper to genuflect and cross himself if that would protect a high-church neighbor from irreverence, and the high-church worshipper to refrain if those gestures might tempt a low-church neighbor toward idolatry. Screwtape insists that Hell’s persistent work has prevented such mutual accommodation. The practices that might have taught consideration instead become material for division.

Narrative Function and Limits of the Account

The Church of England is therefore shown through competing possibilities rather than as a single, uniform influence. Parish structure can sustain shared life across difference; worship can encourage humble receptivity; and variation in practice can call forth mutual consideration. But the same setting can be reduced to consumer preference, habitual restriction of what is heard, or party identity expressed through contempt for other worshippers.

These judgments are delivered by Screwtape in letters intended to instruct Wormwood in temptation, not by an impartial observer. The book explicitly cautions that the devil is a liar and that not everything Screwtape says should be accepted as true even from his own perspective. His descriptions of the churches and their clergy must therefore be read as part of his effort to exploit religious life, rather than as a neutral assessment of the Church of England. His most revealing lesson is the unintended one: the practices he wants to corrupt are capable of binding people together in charity, and he treats that possibility as a threat.