Damon is an apprentice devil tasked with learning to undermine and weaken the Church of England and wider Anglicanism. Lucius is a senior devil mentoring apprentices, overseeing the work on all denominations. Lucius refers to the Church of England as the ‘English Patient’. Lucius is particularly keen to encourage the Church of England’s peculiar ecclesionomics, bloated ecclesiocracy and unaccountable episcocrats. Lucius draws on C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, published in 1942. These letters are published by Lucius for the benefit of new apprentices. – Lucius. 

Church Reports

Dear Lucius

You may have recently seen the news from Lambeth Palace that there will be more reports coming out on sexuality, safeguarding, female clergy and how to be nice to people who can’t accept women.  I am a bit frustrated that all these reports are delayed. I mean, they take years to come out. And when they do, they say very little, so it doesn’t give us much to work with in exploiting potential weakness and developing our strategies for further subversion.  There is also an annoying tendency for the reports to welcome responses, with similarly long, elastic-like times to make representations and submissions.

What can we do about this tactic of the enemy? The trouble with all their ‘jam tomorrow’ talk is that the punters in the pews – our English Patient – eventually forget what all the fuss and scandal was about in the first place. So, we are being robbed of our opportunity to make mischief. Do you have any thoughts on how to combat this? I worry that all the scandals just get swept under the carpet or forgotten.

It’s surely our job to bring these things into the light (if you know what I mean?!). But our English Patient seems to prefer the darkness to the light, and is very much at home there. Is there anything in The Hades Handbook for Harming Religion that could help me here? I sometimes think that the English Patient has its very own copy and is now implementing selected chapters. Perhaps that’s why I feel so powerless at the moment?

Your Servant, Damon

Dear Damon,

I share your frustration here, but am going to counsel patience once more. Yes, it is true that the Church of England is run by Comms and PR people these days. So, the whole life of the English Patient is geared towards creating a good impression. This means that anything negative that could undermine appearances has to be masked or eliminated. So all the bad news is swept under the carpet.

The Good News (our version) about their bad news is that it is good news for us. By being so besotted with image and brand, they lose all sight of truth and honesty. The church leadership quickly develops forked tongues and adopts a serpentine language that slithers through debates and all manner of difficulties. This gives the speaker a sense of mastery. And as it is initially effective, they are soon fluent in the kind of slippery rhetoric you might expect from some slimy snake-oil salesman.

Church leaders these days sound like politicians. Too many policies, but very few principles. Too many promises but almost none are delivered. Too many reports, but never any action.  Too many excuses, but never taking any responsibility.

From our point of view, this could hardly be better. The English Patient becomes exhausted with all the verbiage and disenchanted with what the church leaders say. The beauty of this is that we don’t have to do much. If the church leaders can no longer be believed or trusted by their faithful, we can think about retiring somewhere nice in due course.

The folk in the pews now know that bishops don’t speak truthfully. So we can afford to let them carry on brushing scandals under the carpet, delaying their reports, and in general acting against truth and justice wherever possible, because they don’t like how it might make them look.

A church that acts like this is doomed, because honesty is the casualty every time. And we seriously don’t have to do much more here than help and encourage church leaders, with their Comms and PR executives, to carry on with this strategy. They are doing a superlative job in undermining the English Patient. Trust and confidence in the leadership will continue to be eroded whilst appearances and vanity are prioritized over truth and justice. (Not that I want to see the latter triumph – don’t get me wrong!).

It’s just that church leadership tells many white lies daily, and quite a lot of dark grey ones every single week. And increasingly, some whopping big lies are told to justify the unjustifiable, or just to get the church out of another mess it got itself into, and some hypothetical media storm. Paradoxically, the media are so used to the lies the church tells every day that they’ve got bored with the whole charade. This is another victory for us – delivered through yet another own goal scored by the opposition.

Just keep calm and carry on. There is little more damage you can do to the English Patient than it isn’t already doing to itself.

Your Mentor, Lucius.