The Needletoe Letters
A Parody of The Screwtape Letters
by
Robert M. Price
Copyright 2011 Robert M. Price,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 9781456601140
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Dedicated to Julian Hayden,
Great friend, generous patron, and amazing mind.
"Doctors declare that in heaven a thousand angels can stand on the point of a needle."
(Swester Katrei, German mystical work, 14th century)
I
My dear Wiltwing,
Imagine my surprise (I do not say “delight”) to learn of your requested transfer to my division. You must pardon me if I suspect it was for reasons other than the affection due an uncle from his… distant… nephew. The word is that you rather failed to keep your last few charges safe in their cocoons of blithe believing. I gladly admit that you probably should not have been so soon assigned to our Moroni division, where the absurdities we must keep them believing are so titanic. Sacred underwear! How I would love to know whose mischievous invention that was! But then no one would claim credit for it then and no one is likely to do so now.
It may surprise you, though, to learn how little responsible for your shortcomings I hold you. Truth to tell, the quality of angelic education is simply not what it once was, and, frankly, given the waning quality of angelic oversight, the roaring success of atheism and secularism in our day comes as little surprise. As you are now under my supervision, an agent of the Bull-head Cherub division dedicated to oversight of the Evangelical Protestants, I trust you will have the patience for a bit of on-the-job training. It is remedial in character, but better to get one’s training late than never.
Looking over your reports from case files past, I notice at once a major point of confusion. Whoever told you, my boy, that our task was to influence our charges to do good and benevolent deeds? Of course we do not discourage good deeds, but in and of themselves they do us no good. What matters to us is that the little fleshlings feel proud of what they have done, for it is not morality but rather religious feelings that nourish us. Animalistic passions are alien to us and cannot benefit us. It is the expenditure of a more refined emotional substance that strengthens us like milk for a baby. Indeed, had you been more adept at eliciting such feelings, you would already have found renewed strength and would scarcely require the coaching I now offer.
But, you will say, are we not tirelessly engaged in moral exhortation? What of the conscience and the indefatigable use we make of it? I fear, dear boy, you fail to get the point. Our strategy here is to create a vicious circle to keep the mortals suffering from pious guilt. We make great demands for a sanctified life together with tall promises of enabling such behavior. But the pitiful limitations of our human charges seldom make it possible for them to follow through on their tearful resolutions to repent. And when they do momentarily “overcome,” when for a shining instant it appears to them that they have made the breakthrough to the “victorious life,” they will almost immediately “backslide” into default mode, which we have taught them to regard as “sinful” though it is only the inevitable distraction from the unseen and imaginary by token of the pressing demands of the visible world. And so their momentary “victory” lives on in memory primarily as one more pointing finger of rebuke, the high water mark from which they have declined.
And the greater and more frequent these maneuverings, the stronger and fatter we grow! Follow my avuncular counsel, Wiltwing my lad, and you will soon see the truth of the matter.
Yes, I think you overestimate the importance of the moral sphere, vital as it undoubtedly is. At least its equal is the intellect. Our best creative writers and inventors have been constantly busy spinning new rationalizations to feed our charges, I mean basically excuses to reassure them that they are justified in believing the very things they want most to believe. The improbable convenience of this arrangement never seems to dawn on them, I am happy to say. I mean, most of them do not even think to question the luck of being born in the section of the vast earth where the “true” religion prevails! After that, you might suppose we have but little to do. But in fact, the implausibilities of the creeds we feed them are so strong, and there is such a barrage of them in a typical Sunday sermon, coming fast and thick between invocation and benediction, that sooner or later even the take-it-for-granted believer begins to wonder—like a child beginning to doubt Santa Claus. We have to be ready with a counter-argument. And they need not be very cogent (how could they be?), seeing that the believer is not looking for the truth but for reconfirmation of what he already dearly wants to believe.
Wiltwing, I lay considerable stress on this, the cognitive side of their faith and of our task protecting it, for one simple reason: of all the religious sentiment served up to us on the banqueting table of heaven, the tastiest as well as the most nourishing morsel is the delicious Sacrifice of the Intellect, and of this delectable treat there seems to be no dearth.
Your affable uncle,
Needletoe
II
My dear Wiltwing,
I am so pleased to see that your new charge has “become a Christian.” You be sure he speaks of it that way whenever he tells others of his conversion: how sweet it is, that scent of arrogance when Evangelical Protestants imagine they hold the copyright on the word “Christian.” To anyone outside the fold (including him until just now), it would seem the most outrageous so to eliminate from the ranks of the true faith whole populations of Catholics, Orthodox, and other tribes he has never even heard of. And the irony of it is equally rich! Your “born again Christian” is quite content to consider his flavor of the faith to be the one and only “apostolic” Christianity, the only truly biblical Christianity—despite the fact that no one ever heard of the whole “Jesus as personal savior” business until the aftermath of Luther’s Reformation, when the German Pietists dreamed it up! How it tickles me to see them hand out whole Bibles on street corners, as if they were bloated evangelistic tracts—when their “personal savior” gospel never occurs once in its pages! You will do well not to allow him ever to notice how neither Jesus nor Paul or any other biblical writer ever speaks in such terms.
What a brilliant invention, this “personal relationship with Christ”! I believe it was the work of Roodweb, the famous Seraph. At a single stroke it mires the believer in a morass of childish suggestibility, making him heed neurotic whims from his imaginary playmate named “Jesus.” And it redoubles his evangelistic zeal, since now it is not only pagans, Jews, Hindus, etc., who “need” his gospel, but huge portions of the world’s avowed Christians as well. Oh they may devoutly receive the communion wafer every week and believe in a long creed of stipulated contradictions, but if they don’t have a daily chat with “Jesus,” they are not to be considered Christians at all! It is rich, I say!
All the more so since your “born-again” believers somehow fail to recognize their own mirror images in other sects and cults, which, if they know of them, they happily rail against. Suppose your man is a Baptist or a Presbyterian, and he hears of those Pentecostals whom we have taught that one must “speak in tongues” or one is not “saved.” He will (they do) condemn the belief as heresy, failing all the while to see how close he is to the very same belief: only one particular flavor of spirituality marks genuine Christianity! Ah, me! One might as well ridicule the belief of Flying Saucer cultists (you know, that’s our Exidor division) that the Mother Ship will beam them