One of the great joys of teaching is celebrating and sharing the creative work of my students. This year after we studied Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, I asked students to write their own devilish epistle. This student’s letter imitates both Lewis’s insight and his playful tone as they imagine what hellish tactics are at work in their own world today.
My dear Scurvyweed,
Congratulations on graduating from the academy. As your newly appointed
administrator, I am delighted to inform you that I have the perfect patient for your first tempting. This era of humanity is at its best for our purposes, so I expect much from you.
Your first patient will be a fourteen year old female. At first thought, you may think that children are a waste of time, but as progressivism and the internet are flourishing, we believe that the youths are the most vulnerable to our temptations.
I will illustrate for you the two main ways that will be vital for securing the patient’s soul. The first way will be her “journey of self-discovery.” As teenage girls always feel uncomfortable with themselves, they are extremely susceptible to specifically the belief that they can escape themselves by changing their gender. I believe this will be your best course of action for this patient. I want to draw your attention to something the esteemed tempter Screwtape mentioned at your graduation speech, specifically that we have made it so that much of human language is a smudge and a blur. No one knows what words mean anymore. You must ensure that your patient continues to entertain this.
Therefore, the less she thinks about what a man or a woman actually is, the better. This temptation of changing your gender is in direct conflict with the Enemy’s idea of how the world works, and that is why it will be most important that this succeeds.
Now this can’t be forced all at once. This works best by slow indoctrination. Make sure she stays in a progressive school where the queer agenda is normalized and where both the teachers and students are likely to talk about it often. She will subconsciously start to realize that it’s “trendy” to change your gender, which at the end of the day will be her main motivation, whether she knows it or not. These foolish children will do anything they can to feel liked or accepted.
As for the second way, again, remember Screwtape’s speech. The word “democracy”will be most important. It does not matter what this word even means. And the patient certainly mustn’t know what it means. But children these days are obsessed with being “activists” and “democrats.” All they know is that it’s apparently the right thing to be, but they do not actually know what this entails. Your patient must spend as much time on the internet as possible to cultivate this obsession. As children are so idiotic and malleable, so long as you put the right people in front of her, she should very soon fall prey to their ideologies. In this case, the right people will be these so-called “influencers.” These influencers talk about democracy and other beliefs as though they are fact, without actually saying anything coherent. She will start to idolize these people, and therefore will start to do and say the same things that they do.
There is one more thing I would like to mention. This girl’s parents are of traditional beliefs. This is the best thing for us, for her rebellious tendencies will make her see them as narrow minded and xenophobic. The more her parents push back on her incoherent beliefs, the more she will want to rebel. I hope you see how easy a situation this will be for you, and I very much look forward to the coming months to see how you progress.
Your brilliant administrator,
Froglob