High Church party

The High Church party is a faction within the Church of England whose customs, especially in worship, become a target of demonic manipulation in Screwtape’s letters. Its significance lies less in a developed portrait of the faction than in the way its differences from the Low Church party are made to serve as a test of whether religious variety produces charity or partisan hostility.

Place Within the Church

Screwtape describes the congregations available to the patient as party churches and advises Wormwood that, if the patient cannot be kept away from the Church, he should at least be made intensely attached to a party within it. The scheme depends not chiefly on doctrinal disagreement but on turning affiliation into a source of malice. In this account, High Church identity is one side of an internal division that can distract believers from the substance of their faith.

Customs and Partisan Conflict

The letters locate the division in visible and verbal differences. Screwtape contrasts people who say “mass” with those who say “holy communion,” and points to disputes over candles, clothes, and other matters he calls indifferent. He observes that the disputants may be unable to state clearly the theological distinction they are supposedly defending. The details matter precisely because they are concrete and repeatable: ordinary language and practice can become markers by which one group judges another.

Screwtape’s account of the conflict is itself compromised by his purpose. He presents these differences as opportunities to cultivate hatred, not as a fair assessment of the beliefs or conduct of either party. The preface warns that Screwtape is a liar and that his portraits need not be wholly just; his tactical description therefore reveals the method of division more securely than it establishes what High Church members are actually like.

The Counterfactual of Charity

Screwtape invokes a teaching attributed to Paul about food and other nonessential matters: a person without scruples should yield when the conscience of another is at stake. Applied to church practice, this would require a High Church believer to refrain from gestures such as genuflecting or crossing himself if those actions troubled a Low Church believer. Conversely, a Low Church believer would refrain from treating the other’s practice as an invitation to idolatry. The reciprocal example turns ceremonial difference into an occasion for consideration rather than a contest over status.

Screwtape claims that only the devils’ “ceaseless labour” prevents the variety of usage within the Church of England from becoming a source of charity and humility. The irony is central: the factional quarrel he recommends depends on believers neglecting the restraint and regard for conscience that could make their differences spiritually beneficial. The letters thus present the High Church party not as a fully characterized organization, but as one participant in a conflict whose moral outcome depends on how religious distinctions are used.