By the middle portion of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, the man that the demon Wormwood is plaguing has settled into his new Christian life. Whereas the first parts of the book addressed conversion and he life of young Christians, this new portion of the plot allows Lewis to comment on the life of established Christians and the temptations they struggle with. And his comments are focused on perhaps the greatest danger for many Christians: apathy.
Screwtape, the elder demon, focuses on the internal mental and spiritual processes of his protégé’s subject, advising Wormwood to lull the man away from true godliness through weapons such as flippancy, skeptical intellectualism, and false pleasures. The piece of Uncle Screwtape’s devilish wisdom that hit me hardest begins with a discussion of the vague guilty feeling many Christians encounter. Lewis mentions that this uneasiness often causes people to shy away from truly talking to and listening to God, as it makes them face their uncomfortable feelings. The demon advises his nephew to exploit the feelings, but slowly: “The safest road to Hell is the gradual one.” What he says to back this advise up was powerful to me. He says that as the ignoring of God due to these feelings becomes habitual, humans are no longer distracted away from their spiritual life, prayers, and reading of the Bible by seemingly useful things. Instead, they eagerly shy away from such things, doing things that do not even give them pleasure. Screwtape laughs at the irony that such souls who eventually fall away from God go to Hell having lived life “doing neither what [they] ought nor what [they] liked.”
This depiction reminds me of my own actions, and of the actions of many today. We get on social media endlessly and pointlessly, refreshing our devices ad nauseam to catch some piece of worthless information. I have found myself late at night in bed, staying up for no reason whatsoever but feeling that the desire to check my social media accounts and text messages mindlessly outdid my desire to sleep. The same has happened with Bible reading. I tell myself I will read at a certain time, but other things that are useless in every way distract me. Seeing how my friends and other teenagers act on their phones, I am positive I am not the only one who struggles with this. And recently, I have been afraid that in this meaningless cycle of technology and laziness, I will lose sight of the “good works [that] God prepared in advance for me to do” and live my life to some small fraction of its usefulness and its joy.
I do not want to lose God’s joy in exchange for Nothing.
And, as Screwtape so aptly quotes, “Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind … in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them.”
Has a man ever so accurately described a time seventy years beyond his words? I could not think of a better way to explain the sickness of phone-idolizing apathy that 21st century teens and young adults struggle with.
How can we escape this apathy? As with all sin, only with God’s help and grace.
To make a short story long, I began reading The Screwtape Letters several years ago but quickly stopped reading it, as it scared me. I was in a time of serious doubts about my faith. I wondered if my faith was legitimate, I worried that God had not saved me, I felt that I had to do something, something more, to truly be saved. Now, after reading this book more extensively, I think I know why exactly I was afraid of this book. It seems to present temptations without any escape, as the advice for Christians in the book mainly comes from the perspective of the devil. I think that since I did not see a time where Lewis showed that God was there to help us, I worried that he actually wasn’t there for me. But now I see that just when it seems like change on our part is impossible, that the demons are too strong and too smart and will obviously overcome us, Lewis mentions God. Even if just in passing, it is powerful. “The Enemy,” says Screwtape, “will not allow you” to do certain things to one of His chosen. In Job, God tells Satan certain things he cannot do. Because Jesus overcame the world and the devil, no one can stand against us or condemn us!
I praise You, my Savior! Lord, please quicken my heart to Your voice.
