About a week ago, Parousian Amanda Pendleton and I had an hour long talk with Eric Freeman about abortion. If you don’t remember Eric, Eric wrote one of the two letters to the Daily Reveille criticizing Emily Byers for her column against abortion. Amanda and I talked to Eric for a while, tag-teaming on the pro-life position. Most of the argument centered on either of us trying to force Eric to give a definition of when humans had rights, something he was very reluctant to do. At the end of the discussion he left without conceding the foolishness of his position. In fact, I would say he left in nearly the same state of mind as he did when he walked up to the Students for Life table.
Similarly, I’ve been thinking about the final scene in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In that scene, Jefferson Smith collapses after giving a long and impassioned filibuster speech about the need for idealism and honesty in government. When he falls to the ground, no one seems to have been swayed and Mr. Smith seems destined to simply be dragged out of the Senate having wasted a lot of time.
Disregarding the end of the movie right after he falls, the question came to my mind, and it came again after the talk with Eric: was it worth it? Was it just another lost cause? If we don’t succeed in convincing people about the truth, then was it worth it? Have we really done any good or have we simply frittered away an hour of time with little more than a good story to tell our friends afterwards?
C.S. Lewis thinks we’ve done something worthwhile when we argue. Lewis has convinced a lot of people through his works of the truth so if anyone should place a high value on convincing, it would be him. But he doesn’t. Instead he has Screwtape in the first letter warn Wormwood against utilizing too much reason in his patient:
“Even a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences.”
That is, when we argue we force the people we’re arguing with to resort to reason. We force them to think about it. God, as “Logos” which means not only the “Word” but also “reason” and “logic,” then has the advantage. All logic points back to the truth. It might take a while and likely won’t happen immediately but we plant a seed that gives the turf back to Christ.
Screwtape then wants to avoid reason at all costs. So he advises Wormwood to push forth ideas not based on their internal merits but on their popularity:
“Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous- that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.”
You have probably run across this mindset. People want to be on the winning side and may not care so much for truth. As a sports fan, I see this a lot with the “bandwagon” mentality commonly shared by all sportswriters. But I heard it even in abortion arguments: “it’s not going to be overturned, so why bother about it?” People see a side as winning and so accept it as truth. In a larger scale, this might be behind the whole “progress idea.” People assume that because an idea is dominate or will be dominate that it must be truth.
So how do we contradict this? All of a sudden we seem to lose the power of reason to persuade. Fr. Sibley recommended using beauty and goodness when we lost reason as an evangelization tool, but the Screwtapes can easily say “look at the modern definition of beauty in that art museum” and “Mother Teresa can’t stem the tide of the poor. Most people are deciding to live for themselves anyway.”
I don’t have an easy answer. The simplest one would seem to try to make the argument that our side is the one that’s winning. I heard this at the March for Life last month as the speakers mentioned more than a few times that the younger generations are more pro-life and so will be the wave for the future. That might win us a few converts, but would they be real converts? Or have we simply played them more deeply into Screwtape’s trap so that when the tide turns we will have lost them again?
The best I can come up with (and that is a far cry from the best answer) is to try to challenge the mindset of “who will win.” Showing the mistakes that seem to have won out in the past only to have been reversed might show them at least that who’s winning now might not win it all. Think of the Bears tonight after the kickoff. They were winning but they didn’t take home Lombardi (Sorry, Angela). I don’t know if that method can win a conversion by itself but it may mess up Screwtape’s trap enough so that other methods of evangelization can succeed.
The other method Screwtape tells Wormwood to use to avoid reason is ordinariness and procrastination. He recounts a patient he had who once began to lean towards God yet didn’t go all the way. Screwtape managed to convince his patient that the thoughts he was having were too important before lunch and needed to be thought about later. Once out in the street, the ordinariness of the scene contrasted with the great beauty the patient had been contemplating before Screwtape’s interference convinced the patient that he had been foolish. Screwtape says,
“…they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things.”
The first lesson for us is to seize the moment when we have the chance. We may have a small window of time to succeed and we need to take. The second is the importance of the Parousian mission. It is against this mindset of Screwtape that finding grace in all things and the sacramental vision become so critical. If we can show people to find the unfamiliar in the familiar then we will have come a long way in rescuing people from Screwtape’s grasp. In fact, that might be part of the reason Christ himself came among us. Screwtape complains to Wormwood:
“Remember, he is not, like you a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh, that abominable advantage of the Enemy’s!) you don’t realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary.”
God was already reason and already has that advantage. In order to claim the ordinariness of the world, he came to a rather ordinary peasant girl and made her extraordinary and took an ordinary body and made it the body of God. Now what we have to do is to utilize reason and ordinariness knowing that they both can be used to point towards God.
Next Letter: Screwtape discusses the Church
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