Ben Shapiro’s Book Club | The Screwtape Letters
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Hey, hey, welcome. This is the Ben Shapiro Show. So folks, here at Daily Wire, we have something called Ben Shapiro's Book Club. It's exactly what it sounds like. I read books with you. Well, one of the books that I read with you over the course of the last year and a half or so was The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. Here's a bit of our discussion.

C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters is all at once a deep rumination on religion, a high comedy rooted in the hilarity of both humanity's flaws and Satan's foibles, a tragedy about the nature of death, and a tale of redemption and everlasting life. There is so much to unpack here, we're going to do all of that in just one second. First, let's turn to some thoughts from the community. Edward says, Ben.

How in your life do you find that balance in loving others and yourself so you can objectively give yourself credit for accomplishments without being selfish or arrogant? This is an important lesson people can use in not just everyday life, but also the workplace. Well, you know, I think that people tend to

mislabel humility or misdefine humility as telling lies about yourself and that's not true. When the Bible suggests that Moses was the most humble person who ever lived, that didn't mean that Moses didn't know what he had or who he was. What it means is that he attributed his qualities to God because it was God who was the source of those abilities. So when you do what you're supposed to do in life, that's not really

You at all you're just doing what you're supposed to do You don't get extra credit for doing the things that you're supposed to do You do blame yourself for failing where you're supposed to succeed also you have to surround yourself in life with a group of people who are willing to tell you when you're wrong and you have to be willing to hear that group of people so don't surround yourself with an echo chamber you have to allow enough criticism in to actually allow you to better yourself while preventing people who wish to tear you down from from doing so and there are a lot of people out there who are like that Ramona says

Has this book been insightful for you at all? I miss your Jewish teachings and wish that would be a new show of yours. I appreciate all that you do. God bless. Well, maybe we'll be doing some more of that sort of stuff next year. The book is fantastic. I mean, I love C.S. Lewis. I love pretty much everything C.S. Lewis writes. Most of what he writes is applicable across religions. Obviously, his specific defenses of...

Christian theology, his apologetics for Christianity. I disagree with a lot of that stuff, but when it comes to his overall take on the Bible and religion, I very much agree with an enormous amount of that. Charles says,

I totally agree with this, obviously. Religion doesn't just provide the communal gathering place for people of like mind. It also provides an aim to shoot for. You have to be shooting for that highest goal as a community, or you're not going to have anything in common. Religion is one of the biggest intermediary institutions in life.

And there are many sets of institutions in life ranging from the very lowest level, the family, all the way up to the national government or even to sort of humanity writ large. But maybe the chief intermediary institution outside of the family is in fact your religious community. Without engagement with religious values, it's going to be very difficult for America to regain her footing, which is why I think that there will be in fact a revivification of religious values. I think the spiritual emptiness that has been provided by

modern secular theology is really garbage and people are paying the price. I think it's one of the reasons why you're seeing a mental health crisis in this country, why you're seeing high levels of suicidal ideation, chaos among the young. You refuse to allow people a system of rules when you immediately dismiss time-tested wisdom. What you end up with is not freedom. What you end up with is libertinism, which eventually devolves into nihilism. Alrighty, so let's talk about The Screwtape Letters. It is a spectacularly good book.

One of the beautiful things about Screwtape Letters is it is a fictional encapsulation of much of C.S. Lewis's other work. If you've ever read Mere Christianity or Men Without Chests or any of his other essays, a lot of that ends up in the Screwtape Letters. And that's sort of how C.S. Lewis writes. I mean, C.S. Lewis famously writes the Narnia series. The Narnia series encapsulates a lot of his values in sort of a fantasy context. He does the same thing.

with regard to, he wrote a sci-fi trilogy that starts with Out of the Silent Planet, Perilandra. He does a lot of that sort of stuff. He takes his values and he sort of telescopes it into a fictional story for ease of use. Screwtape Letter is a little bit different because it's so obviously theology and obviously philosophy where it's a little bit more guarded in Narnia or Out of the Silent Planet. Here, he basically just says it straight up and it's very funny. One area where Lewis is often criticized is in not being funny enough. When you read Narnia, there's no humor.

in the Narnia books. But when you read C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, there's a lot of humor and very funny humor, actually. So Lewis himself described writing Screwtape Letters. He actually said it was tough. He said, though I'd never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment. Though it was easy to twist one's mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun or not for long. The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The work into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch.

It is wildly entertaining because he is, you know, obviously writing in the voice of one of Satan's minions. Now, I will say there's a bit of difference between sort of the Christian theology of Satan and the Jewish theology of Satan. So the Christian theology of Satan, which is that Satan is the opponent to God, almost a dualistic structure where Satan is responsible for evil in the world and is a rebel against God, fallen angel and all of this. Jewish theology is a bit different. In Jewish theology, all of the angels, including Satan,

are emissaries. The word in Hebrew for messenger is the same as the word for angel. The word is malach. And so whenever you see that in the Bible, a messenger, that also is an angel. So when it talks about angels visiting Abraham, it uses the word malach, which is also messenger. The idea being that angels are essentially, in Jewish theology...

sort of single forces in the world without will, whereas in the Christian theology, obviously Satan has a will of his own and he's rebelling against God, which makes him a really fascinating character.

Lewis opens the book with a couple of epitaphs, one by Martin Luther, "The best way to drive out the devil if he will not yield to texts of scripture is to jeer and flout him for he cannot bear scorn." And one by Sir Thomas More, "The devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked." Both of them are focusing on a simple fact of the matter, something that we seem to have lost in modern society, which is laughing at evil. And we've decided that it's very important to earnestly engage with bad ideas. You're not allowed to laugh at bad and damaging things anymore. If, for example, somebody says a man is a woman,

inherently hilarious idea because it's definitionally idiotic. If somebody says that and you laugh, you are now considered intolerant. Whereas before, you would have been able to just laugh at that and everybody would have moved on with their lives. Now, because we have decided that nothing is worth laughing at save religion, the only people who are not allowed to laugh are the religious because you're not going to laugh at your own religion, typically speaking, or if you do, it's going to be kind of

with a warm eye because you like your own religion, presumably, but you're not allowed to laugh at anything else. The only people who are allowed to be mocked in modern society are essentially religious people. Those are open for mockery. But as C.S. Lewis points out, mocking evil is a great way of dismissing evil because that's what mockery essentially is.

Gertrude Himmelfarb points out that religious Americans now find it difficult to transmit their own principles and practices to their children. Instead, they rely on non-judgmentalism, but laughter is inherently judgmental. And so religion ought to be filled with laughter, laughter at evil.

Screwtape Letters, if you haven't read it, or even if you have, it's written from the perspective of Screwtape to his nephew, Wormwood. Wormwood has been given the on-the-ground task of convincing a young man away from his incipient Christianity, and Screwtape is sort of middle management in hell. And it's his job to advise Wormwood on the best way to procure the young man's soul. And this gives Lewis extraordinary insight.

to sort of stick and move with Satan to make fun, to mock, to play with the entire idea. And what emerges is a great work of literature. So there are a bunch of large-scale arguments that Lewis makes in Screwtape Letters. The first one is that Satan's best weapon is the quote-unquote real world.

And this is right. I mean, if you talk to people who are secular, they'll always say that the spiritual world, God, is unreal. The real world is the material world. And then when you ask them about what's important to them, they'll talk about their feelings, which of course are inherently unreal in the same way the spiritual world is unreal. And this is a point that Lewis makes, is that the definition of real is capacious and changing on a regular basis from secularists.

So Lewis believes that man's draw to the divine can be rooted in reason, and that reason actually guides you toward something beyond yourself. It guides you toward the transcendent. That's an idea that I obviously agree with. I believe that the notion of free will, free choice in the universe, guides you toward the idea of there must be something beyond us, that if there's a logic to the universe, that guides you to the question of who is the chief logician, who made the rules, for example.

Lewis makes the same point. And then he says that the job of the secular materialist is to get you to focus on the thing. It's to get you to focus on the thing in itself. That's sort of the language of Bertrand Russell, a famous atheist.

And so Lewis says this, even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor, this is as screw tape, 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. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it real life. Don't let him ask what he means by real.

So just keep them focused on the immediate. Have them focused on the now. There's nothing that's done this more than the internet age where our attention spans have been reduced to the next 15 seconds. Sitting and ruminating on life leads you to higher ideas. If you can prevent people from doing that sort of stuff, you end up with a very materialistic society. So what exactly does reality mean? Well, according to Screwtape,

People ought to be taught that in all experiences which can make them happier or better, only the physical facts are real, while the spiritual elements are subjective. And in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them, the spiritual elements are the main reality, and to ignore them is to be an escapist. So the idea is that when you're thinking about death, that the only thing that is real is the death.

You're not supposed to look to the spiritual element of death. Or if you look at something that makes you very happy, you're not supposed to look to the spiritual element of what makes you very happy. Just focus in on the pure materialism of the thing. The goal is to enmesh mankind in the world. This is something that Catholic theologians talk about a lot. The idea that the spiritual world, if you can enmesh it in reality too much, then you can bring people away from the reality of something higher.

This means, for example, that you have to get people to stop thinking about death. Screwtape says, "...how disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death, which war enforces. One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless. In wartime, not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever." The material world, then, is the chief ally of Screwtape, because people desire not to think of God. God is a distraction. God has obligations. God has duties.

Screwtape says, "Human beings hate every idea that suggests him, just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a passbook." Passbook meaning like a checkbook. So the idea is that if you're not thinking about duty, and then you're forced to think about duty, you don't like it very much. The other thing that Screwtape tries to get you to focus in on is the future at all times. If you can focus in on the future at all times, then people will be very neglectful of the president. So, says Screwtape,

See, the idea is if you're thinking about the future,

then you're not thinking about the spiritual consequences of the things you do in the here and now. You're thinking about the material consequences of the things that you do in the here and now. And that allows you to do bad things in the name of a quote-unquote better future. Screwtape says the best thing you can do is convince people that their utopian thoughts are the things that are mandated by God. So on the one hand, you try to get people sunk in reality, and this drives them away from God.

On the other hand, Screwtape advises Wormwood that people should be led to examine their own emotions constantly. If you can be narcissistically checking yourself all the time, you're going to end up without God.

So if you feel wildly enthusiastic about becoming religious, then Wormwood ought to encourage people to wait for the anti-climax, right? Because you get enthusiastic about a thing, then you become less enthusiastic about the thing, and then you pounce. Quote, work hard then on the disappointment or anti-climax, which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. In every department of life, it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing.

So, in other words, very often in life, we engage at the beginning of a task with great enthusiasm, and then the enthusiasm wears away. This happens all

all the time with a variety of tasks. And once that happens, that is when you encourage people to look into being morose, look into being depressed, to reject the spiritual aspect of their duty, to stop trying to take joy in the spiritual aspect of what they're doing and instead focus in on the fact that it's just sheer drudgery.

So, for example, when it comes to prayer, human beings should be encouraged to seek a feeling of inspiration specifically because it's very hard to find. I mean, I pray three times a day. I've talked about this before. Finding a feeling of inspiration while you're praying can be really, really difficult. And so if you're constantly searching your feelings, I'm not inspired enough. I'm not inspired enough. Eventually, like, I'm never getting inspired. And you stop doing it. And that's the goal. Whereas the reality is that when you're praying, you should stop searching inside your own feelings all the time. You should focus on the doing of the prayer. And then when eventually you stumble onto the feeling, it's an incredible thing.

But at least you won't stop doing the thing when you lose the feeling. So if you focus in on the feeling, when the feeling goes short, you stop doing the duty. If you focus in on the duty, then eventually you come to feeling, is the case that Lewis is actually making. Screwtape says that the rule of thumb for seducing mankind away from God is to encourage people to be unselfconscious when considering sin. To be unabashed, unashamed. You should be very just out there and blasé about your sin. But to be...

self-conscious and awkward when you consider acts of faith. And this is modern society in a nutshell, right? The more you sin, the more proud you should be. You should engage in full-on festivals celebrating your sin. When it comes to going to church, you should be shy. I don't want to be judgmental. I don't want to make you feel ashamed.

I don't want to make you feel bad about the fact that I go to synagogue on a routine basis. I know my yarmulke makes you feel uncomfortable as a Jew because it might make you think that you're not being religious enough. But when it comes to my sin, man, I will tell you about my sins all day long because we can all be comfortable. We can be the boys when we're talking about our sins. Other roads to hell include depression and anxiety, Screwtape says. When people are depressed, they are more likely to despair that their actions and thoughts even matter. And so they sort of sink into a malaise.

This leads you to what C.S. Lewis calls grayness. If you're passionate about things, then very often you can find spirituality. But if you're gray about things, it's very hard to find spirituality.

He says, "The Christians describe the enemy as one without whom nothing is strong. And 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 over a knows-not-what and knows-not-why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that man is only half aware of them. It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the light and out into the nothing." I mean, is this a great description of the internet age, or is this a great description of the internet age? You spend all day on social media, consuming your time with absolute stupidities.

You don't feel anything good about it. It just feels like bleh. And then when you go outside in the sun, you still feel unenthusiastic. The goal of modern society is almost solely, apparently, to do the work of Wormwood here. The point that Lewis makes is that

you're able to get at people through art, through popular culture. He says,

As a result, we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist, making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important, and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. What follows you can easily forecast. That is the greatest description of internet porn that has ever been written, and C.S. Lewis is writing this in 1942. That you are setting up increasing expectations for what women are supposed to look like, what sex is supposed to be, what it's supposed to look like, and then people are engaging in it less and less.

You're making the demands nearly impossible, and yet you are satisfying those demands with the virtual. Again, C.S. Lewis is a man ahead of his time because here's the thing. Sin is always the same. This is the thing that people always say about the Bible, and it's so stupid. They'll say, oh, the Bible, it's archaic. The Bible's talking about things. Things have changed. You know what has never changed? Human nature. C.S. Lewis could have written this 4,000 years ago. It would not have mattered.

Human nature does not change. Human nature is the same as it was thousands of years ago. The only thing that has changed is that we believe that we have been able to overcome human nature, which of course is extraordinary arrogance and silliness. It turns out that all of the systems that we built to hem in human nature, all the systems that we built in order to channel human nature to its best available pursuits, we've exploded all of those in the belief that we have created a new human already.

Now, there are a lot of ideologies that say that you can create a new human. Marxism says you can create a new human, change the economic conditions, change the man.

Secular humanism says the same thing, that if you just get rid of God, then magically a new human being will flourish. Religion says no. Human beings are exactly the same as they were when Adam ate the apple with Eve in the garden. We're exactly the same and nothing has changed. The only thing that has changed is that we've built institutions and systems in order to channel us toward our better selves. And when you blow up all those institutions, what you end up with is something very, very bad, which is precisely what has happened. Screwtape also talks about how human relationships can undermine faith as well.

Because human beings have a really tough time living with each other. And so most sin is not between man and God. Most sin is between man and man. When he talks about the relations in marriage, for example, Lewis is right on the money.

He says,

This is true in virtually all human relationships, right? You say something and you say it in kind of a nasty way. And then when somebody gets offended, you're like, hey, what did I say? What did I do? Did I say? No. I'll read back the words that I said. It's like, well, no, the tone mattered an awful lot right there. By the way, this is one of the reasons why just a piece of Shapiro advice here. Try to have as many conversations via voice as you can and not via text. Text is open to misinterpretation. Voice really, really is not.

But we do have a double standard. We insist that everybody interpret us in the best light, and then we interpret everybody else in the worst possible light. And then his descriptions of men and women are also extraordinarily accurate.

This is one of my favorite sections of the book. He says, "A woman means by unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others. A man means not giving trouble to others. As a result, a woman who is quite far gone in the enemy's service will make a nuisance of herself on a larger scale than any man except those whom our father has dominated completely. And conversely, a man will live long in the enemy's camp before he undertakes as much spontaneous work to please others as a quite ordinary woman may do every day." In other words, women tend to be very helpful.

And if Satan can get a hold of them, then intrusive and invasive. And men tend to be very blasé, which means that they allow people their space. But also, if Satan can get a hold of them, then they are completely disconnected from other human beings and selfish. A sensible human once said, quote,

Screwtape also talks to Wormwood about the misinterpretation of the word love, how love has come to mean sexual desire, and how we have moved away from marriage as a duty-based relationship to the voluntarization of marriage.

Screwtape says, quote, In humans, the enemy has gratuitously associated affection between the parties with sexual desire. He has also made the offspring dependent on the parents and given the parents an impulse to support it, thus producing the family, which is like the organism, only worse. For the members are more distinct, yet also united in a more conscious and responsible way. The whole thing, in fact, turns out to be simply one more device for dragging in love. The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman there, whether they like it or not,

So in other words, family is a relation that is created by nature, but if we can reduce it, if the devil can reduce that down to the subjective feeling of love, then the minute that you lose the love, you lose the duty.

So, obviously this is what's happened with regard to marriage. This is how the slogan "Love is love" has ended up being a definition of marriage. And it has no boundaries. Love is love could include bigamy. Love is love could include polygamy. Love is love could include two brothers getting married. Love is love has no definition. Because, obviously, love is not, in fact, love. Love in the traditional sense meant duty. Love in the traditional sense meant familial relations between man, woman, and children.

If you redefine love as that subjective feeling within you, then love is love I suppose is true. The problem is that is a complete redefinition. It is a robbing marriage of its identity and then wearing it around as a skin suit. Screwtape also points out that one easy way to hell is to get people to disregard the individual human beings in front of them in the name of mankind writ large. This obviously is the project of the left, which is willing to completely run over its neighbors in order to pursue a better world for everybody else.

Screwtape says, "The great thing is to direct the malice of his immediate neighbors, whom he meets every day, and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference to people he doesn't know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary." There's something I say about people, you know, I always say that I'm sort of a not-people person, but that's actually not particularly true.

My thoughts about mankind at large are not particularly generous. I don't think that human beings are saints. I don't think that human beings are devils. I think that we are somewhere in between. When it comes to interpersonal, like day-on-day relations, I get along with... I love individual human beings. Individual human beings are great. It's the species that's a problem. And when you start to think that the human species is filled with joy and wonder, but the individuals who live next door to you are the worst people in the entire world, you can do some pretty terrible things to your neighbors. One of Screwtape's other tools, one of the tools that he likes to use as well,

is the human incapacity to understand the divine. So God obviously has to limit his power in our lives in terms of being right in our face all the time in order for us to have free will. This means a sort of unbridgeable gap between human beings and the divine. And so we have a picture in our head of what God is, and that picture is not real. And then when God doesn't manifest in the way that we think the picture ought to manifest, we get angry at God or we say that he doesn't exist. We think he's an old man in the sky who's a gumball machine, and you pray to him and he gives you what you want. That's not how God works.

So one of the big questions that you are supposed to not ask is really the nature of God because you're not really able to comprehend God. There are certain things you can comprehend about God. The idea that God is generous in creating humanity. The idea that God has bound himself to a particular logic of the world. These are things that Aquinas talks about or Maimonides. But the idea that you can know God at the most intimate level. Obviously, the Bible itself says that this is not the case. Moses in the book of Exodus says,

God specifically asks God whether he can see his glory, and God says, you can't see my glory and live. He says, you can see my back. The idea being you can identify what I am by sort of my actions in the world, but you can't actually see my face. You're not capable of understanding who God totally is.

attempts to delve too deeply into what God is, end up in what Screwtape calls "materialist magic." Quote, "If we can produce our perfect work, the materialist magician, the man not using but veritably worshiping what he vaguely calls forces while denying the existence of spirits, then the end of the war will be in sight." So the materialist magician in this world is the person who believes in larger forces like physics or global warming or evolution or disease as controlling our fates while denying that God has any say in the matter whatsoever.

It's sort of the notion that the environment is taking revenge on us. The world is taking revenge on us. It's sort of an animistic philosophy that separates us off from God. We'll get to more on this in just one second. First, you voted big government out and efficient government in. Well, now it's time to trim the fat on big wireless. If you're still on Verizon AT&T, AT Mobile, why? I personally use PeerTalk. I can tell you it gives me the exact same service on the exact same towers with better customer service because they're based right here in the United States, all for 50% of

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Screwtape also says that the notion of complete human autonomy apart from God is ridiculous. Screwtape laughs, "Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they own their bodies, those vast and perilous estates pulsating with the energy that made the world in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of another." Again, this is a pretty good point. We tend to think of our bodies as our own. Did you ask to be born? Were you asked about when you wish to die?

Do you have permission? Does your body take your permission every time you get sick or when you get cancer? The notion of complete bodily autonomy. That may be true from other human beings. It is not true in terms of godly duty. Screwtape also makes clear what Satan wants out of all of this. We want cattle who can finally become food. He wants servants who can finally become sons. Our cause, says Screwtape, is never more in danger than when a human no longer desiring but still intending to do the enemy's will looks around upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished and asks why he has been forsaken and still obeys.

That's what God wants. God wants our devotion. God wants us to understand that we can't understand the logic of the world. God wants what he wanted from Job, which is an understanding that we don't understand. That's what God actually wants from us.

And so the chief curative for devotion, for a devotion to a god that you can't fully understand, for screw tape, is moderation. And you see this a lot in the religious world. Well, I don't want to be too religious. I don't want to be too spiritual. I don't want to do too much. That's immoderate. Quote,

Right, and this is sort of the idea that you see on the secular left these days, that religion should be relegated to your house at best. It should be relegated to your church. You should never act out your religion in your everyday life. A truly religious person infuses their life with their religious ideal all the way through their life, from when they wake up in the morning to when they go to bed at night. The more they do that, the more religious they are, the better they've done. If you can limit religious life to certain aspects of your life, then religion loses its sway. So what exactly does it mean to reach sort of the ultimate goal? So Screwtape says,

the idea of acting in accordance with a higher will is the goal. He says, this indeed is probably one of the enemy's motives for creating a dangerous world, a world in which moral issues really come to a point. He sees as well as you do. Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the highest point of highest reality. So if screw tape can make you listen to your animal instincts, if screw tape can enmesh you in the material, if screw tape can make you feel gray, if screw tape can make you focus too much on your subjective emotions, then he wins. And the best way to fight all of that is active repetition of good habits.

This is true going all the way back to Aristotle, it is obviously true in Judaism, it's true in Christianity as well, that acting dutifully in the world is the best way to overcome all of these flaws in yourself. Now, the end of Screwtape Letters is tragic, obviously. You're talking about a man who has found a woman, he's gonna get married to her, you think they're gonna have a happy life, and instead his life is cut short in a bombing raid in World War II. And so that's supposed to be the tragic ending, but the whole point of Screwtape Letters is that if you believe in a spiritual world, there is no sad ending, there is only a happy ending.

From the perspective of the divine, the young man has now gained access to something higher. Quote, you die and die and then you are beyond death. How could I have ever doubted it? It's a beautifully written book. It's got wonderful pieces of advice, even for people, by the way, who are not totally religious in how to act better in your inner world, how to treat other people better, how to have better relations with your spouse.

But when it comes to the spiritual world, there's so much good advice in here. So much good advice. Okay, let's take a look at some of your questions. Pam says, is our culture experiencing a strong demonic influence? I mean, you'd be hard-pressed to say no.

So I am, as I say, a believer in the Jewish tradition. And so the idea of demons is pretty controversial in the Jewish tradition. There's sort of a debate within Judaism about active demonic forces in the world. But you'd be hard-pressed to say that it is not demonic in the either traditional or the colloquial sense to say that young children should be ushered into a world of gender confusion and sterilized. I mean, to say that it's not demonic is beyond me by any definition of the word demonic that you choose to use.

Kate, ask a question. Kate, let's go. I recently listened to an episode of Young Heretics where Spencer Clavin talks about the resurgence of Christianity after World War I amongst writers like C.S. Lewis and his contemporaries. And my question is, do you sense that there is a resurgence of religiosity happening now? I am an example of someone who sort of lost my relationship with

at the Catholic church. I'm 34 now. I have two kids and my husband and I have been bringing our children back to church. Um, and I don't think I'm an anomaly, especially looking around at the other families in church on Sundays. So what do you think?

I agree with this. I mean, I do think a religious revolution is on the way. Now, typically speaking, throughout human history, it's taken some sort of vast external shock in order to jog people back into religious adherence. So World War I, obviously, is that sort of shock. You see in the Great Depression that there was a big return to church. A society which had gotten pretty dissolute in the 20s in the United States suddenly became a lot more religious in the 1930s. Right now, in the aftermath of COVID, when people are seeking community,

when everybody's existence was virtual and they were very unhappy, you could see that sort of thing happening. I'm not sure because COVID was so shielded from sort of its worst effects, except for obviously people who died or the families of people who died,

Because so many people were shielded from the worst effects by governments that just expended fire hoses of cash on people. I think that the sort of crisis of faith that falls upon a society when it reaches rock bottom has not happened yet, which suggests that rock bottom will happen. And when that happens, there will be a crisis of faith. But I think that you are starting to see a burgeoning movement of people who are spiritually unsatisfied with what has been offered, this sort of materialist mentality.

haven of libertinism and people are not happy with it, particularly those of us who are still having kids and they're moving more toward religion. This is the other thing, is that as people have kids they have to figure out a system in which they want their kids to live. Secularism does not offer that system. Secularism offers no system. Secularism suggests that you ought to listen to the vague whims of children, which of course is precisely the worst way to raise a kid. Pat says, "Here's my response to the study question, which is primary in faith, reason or emotion?

I think the answer is neither reason nor emotion predominate in faith. Faith is a connection that is beyond reason or emotion. It's experience unlike any other. Faith can generate emotion and inspire the use of reason, but ultimately faith is beyond either of these processes.

Primary in the experience of faith is the concept of openness. No matter how much emotion one may feel about spiritual matters, or how much reasoning one engages in on theological questions, faith cannot be truly understood unless one is open to the acceptance of faith. Once a person humbly and gratefully opens his heart to the possibility of belief, faith comes as a gift at the perfect moment in that person's spiritual path.

When it cannot experience faith by wishing for it or simply setting an intention to believe, belief will come when the necessary preparation has been done. That's the best part of this response. That is correct. Just like any other good thing in life, you have to prepare for the good thing to happen in order for the good thing to happen. This is why I've suggested if you want to find your marital partner, get yourself ready for marriage and you will find your marital partner. If you want faith, get yourself ready for faith. Do the things that dutiful people do. Do the things that faithful people do and faith will come upon you. And there's a famous story in the Talmud in which a...

A non-Jew comes to Hillel, a pagan comes to Hillel, a famous rabbi, and says to him, can I be the chief priest, the high priest? And Hillel says to him, yes.

And everybody goes to Hillel and says, "What are you talking about? A convert cannot be the high priest in the temple by Jewish law." And Hillel says, "Well, by the time he figures that out, he'll be so deeply ensconced in the faith that it won't matter." And of course, that's precisely what happens. The person studies, becomes enmeshed in the faith, and then hits on the idea that he can't be high priest. He comes to Hillel and Hillel says to him, "But is your life better now?" And he says, "Yeah." So platonic lie there from Hillel. But the basic idea, which is that you have to prepare yourself for faith in order to accept the faith, is in fact true.

James says, what are some temptations Screwtape and his minions did not use you think would have been more effective? So, you know, C.S. Lewis talks about the...

effect of sexuality on the human psyche. But he talks about it kind of minimally here. He talks about it almost as an afterthought. The truth is it's become so predominant in Western life that the big gain that secular modernism made is that you can be who you want in terms of sexual identity, and that is the most important part of you. That it's completely shifted the nature of identity. That

Lewis doesn't address that. And I think one of the reasons Lewis doesn't address that is because reality still existed in 1942. By this I mean that the advent of welfare states and the birth control pill have basically attenuated the results of reality. It used to be that if you said, "I identify sexually as a profligate libertine, and I'm a woman, I'm going to have sex with a thousand men." Well, if that's the way that you were working things in 1942, the chances that you ended up pregnant were very, very high.

In 1965, the chances had reduced pretty radically, and so suddenly a new identity could be put center stage. And it's something that I think that, you know, because reality itself changed, because science itself changed reality, that's a temptation that is highly effective. In fact, it is the chief temptation of the left. It's the most important part of you is your sex drive. We can hand you complete satiation of your sex drive through identification, place that at the center of your identity, and you will have endless supply of sexual partners and

and you will be able to finally access the most passionate part of you. Now, that promise has turned out to be empty. People are deeply sexually unsatisfied in modern society, as it turns out. People are living in a virtual world without partners. People are, in fact, less happy. They've not formed traditional families, which are the locus of happiness throughout human history. But that is the temptation.

Grace says, my grandfather introduced me to Screwtape and Lewis, and from there to George MacDonald, from whom Lewis drew extensively. The letter on humility has always been especially thought-provoking to me, even as a 13-year-old when I first read it. Lewis noted genuine humility comes not from having a low opinion of one's own abilities or worth, but stepping outside the self to take God's true or balanced perspective, knowing myself to be no better than the next man cuts it both ways. This obviously is true and speaks to what we were talking about earlier with regard to humility. Claudio has a question about humility as well.

Hey, Ben, I love that you're covering a Lewis book. I'm a big fan of his, and I have this particular question for you. C.S. Lewis describes humility as the chief virtue of Christianity, and obviously he believed that God came in human flesh and died, resurrected for the sake of others, and that being the ultimate form of humility. And I'm curious if there is a

mirror image of that in Judaism.

Does humility play as important a role in Judaism as it does in Christianity? So the answer obviously is yes. I mean, when it comes to Judaism, one of the chief focuses of Judaism is humility. And this comes across in a wide variety of circumstances. So I mean, obviously on Yom Kippur, you are supposed to abjectly apologize to God for your sins and the sins of your community. Your arrogance is forbidden in Judaism. I mean, we don't all succeed with that. I don't always succeed with that, obviously.

When it comes to humility, the reason that Moses, the greatest Jew of all time, is described as the most humble man who ever lived is because anava, which is the quality of humility in Hebrew, is so important in Judaism. And all of the great rabbis are described as particularly humble. In fact, it's very controversial in Jewish law as to whether when you, for example, write a book, you should put your name on it because the idea is that that is an aspect of egoism, whereas if you were to just write the book and put it out anonymously, put out those ideas, then

maybe that is the best way to defeat the ego. The countervailing view is that if you actually have some ability to get the ideas in the public space because you're an active advocate for your position, then you should do so. But yes, Judaism takes humility unbelievably seriously. This is why when Maimonides ranks the types of charity, the top form of charity is giving somebody a job, but the second form of charity is giving anonymously. Specifically because when you give anonymously, you have to humble yourself because you don't get to take credit for the thing. Kate says...

On question five,

I think the advantage of the virtuous in this sort of targeting is the confidence given by real faith. They can laugh all they want. On the other hand, as Moore said, the devil cannot endure to be mocked. Austin picked the most impactful for me personally so far. I've enjoyed reading with DW this year. Cheers. I mean, there is no question that the devil cannot endure to be mocked.

Mockery is the one thing the left cannot allow. You cannot mock the left. Every joke, I mean this is why they're going after comedians, this is why they're trying to attack Dave Chappelle on stage. Any idea of secularism that is attacked, anytime you joke about their most highly valued priorities, they cannot laugh at it. Now, there's a difference between mean laughter and sort of warm laughter. So, for example, my business partner Jeremy Boring and I, we are not of the same faith obviously. Jeremy's a Christian, I'm a Jew. And what that means, we are constantly making jokes about each other's religion.

and our own religion. And the reason that we can do that is because we're very comfortable, number one, in the belief in our own religion, but number two, because we share a commonality of belief in the first five books of the Bible, at the very least, right? Judaism and Christianity share a lot in common, and so we don't feel that we're at odds in terms of values. If, however, somebody is making jokes, you can always tell because they're just not funny. People who make mean-spirited jokes about religion, they're typically not funny because they're not coming from a place in which, like the best humor is always coming from a place of warmth,

or at least absurdity. It's not coming from a place of meanness and nastiness. This is why Late Night has sort of fallen off the radar. It's because all of their humor is not really jokes, it's just critiques. A joke is not a critique. They're very different things.

Dustin says, "With it originally being published in 1942, do you think that the book's intended audience has changed over time or remained the same, and why?" Well, I mean, I think that the book's intended audience was people who were curious about Christianity but didn't know enough about it and wanted to learn more. I think now the audience is significantly broader than just people who are interested in Christianity. I think Lewis, like everybody else in 1942,

assumed a certain baseline of values that everybody shared because we're still living on the fumes of the Christian heritage in the West. But now, because all those values have fallen by the wayside, the book reads as a revelation rather than as an explication of things that most people already knew.

Jackson says, So which end letter are we talking about? So I'll have to check out what we're talking about here. Let's see. So there is an end letter at the very end of the book.

in which Screwtape proposes a toast, in which he talks about how hard it was to write Screwtape letters and all of that. I think that the significance is that when you tell when you have Screwtape proposes a toast, the devil never goes away, unfortunately. And so the devil is still there and he is still feeling his oats.

Trisha says,

of the Torah. So, again, as I've said, I think that a lot of the messages are completely on point with regard to the teachings of the Torah. There's some stuff here that is explicitly Christian about the power of Christ in people's lives, for example, that is not necessarily reflected in Judaism. Most of the broad points about human relations or the relations between man and God are very much on the money with regard to Judaism as well.

Kelly says, I've read the screw tape letters many times, so I was excited to see it as the December pick. To me, self-centeredness is a main thrust of the attack on the patients. This time around, I found myself noticing a viciousness towards women I hadn't picked up on before. Do you think this is also a central theme for the destruction of the patient or are current events influencing my opinion on the book? So when I read it, it doesn't read as vicious about women to me. It's just as vicious with regard to men. Men are seen as lustful and silly. I think that

In our society, it's become almost an article of faith that women are never to be characterized in any particular broad way, even though we're allowed to do that with men. And so anytime there's a critique in a book of women writ large, when we'd be perfectly fine taking the critique of men, then I think that that's sort of fallen out of favor. But the question is whether the critiques are well taken or not. And it is true that because women tend to be—here's a generalization for you—because women

were built by either God or evolutionary biology or both in order to be comforters and caretakers. By every available study, this happens to be the case. Women tend to be more comforting. Women tend to gravitate toward careers that focus on interpersonal relationships this way.

Because of that, this means that the way that women are humble is by quote-unquote serving others, to take the generalization that Lewis uses. The problem is you can overdo it to the point where you annoy people. And that's what he's saying. You can overdo anything. And if you overdo it, if you overdo men's tendency to say, I'm not going to get into your business. Freedom is me not getting into your business. You take that to its logical extent, you end up with Scrooge.

Kate says, if you wrote a letter from Screwtape, what would you address? What advice would you nudge a young American toward if your success in capturing their soul was on the line? Also, Screwtape admits that God truly loves humanity, only to walk it back later in letter 19. What do you make of this heresy? Is Lewis simply using the plot line to demonstrate the backstabbing nature of the relationships between his devils? Or do you think he is suggesting envy and even a level of admiration of God on the part of Screwtape? Well, I mean, Screwtape, I think, sees God as good at his job. It's really that Screwtape doesn't believe, because Screwtape is small-minded.

Screwtape doesn't believe that God actually can be acting out of love. But deep down he suspects that God actually is acting out of love and he can't understand it. As far as which vice you nudge a young American toward, sexual liberation is the vice that is most obvious in today's day and age. It's always been the thing that human beings have been most prone to. And then also I would say the engagement in the virtual. The complete subsuming of all of your interests to engagement with things that don't exist.

the making of images. If you want to talk about idolatry, the worship of images online is obviously extraordinarily high. I think online pornography may be a form of idolatry, actually. Kathleen asked about my view of spiritual beings. Here's Kathleen. Hey Ben, I have a question for you about demons. Do you believe in them yourself? And if so, are they just a way to generally personify evil? Or are they individual entities with their own personalities?

So, I'm more of a rationalist along my Monodean lines. So, I tend not to believe in the idea that there are sort of demons who are haunting the earth and invading people. However, I don't think you have to believe in demons in order to believe that, for example, when you watch somebody who has a severe mental illness, this person is possessed. I don't think that that's like an external force that is taking over the person's body.

It may well be driven by a biological misfiring in the brain. In my view, that's precisely what it is. With that said, this is not the person. And having dealt with people who are in the midst of severe mental illness, I can tell you that when you're dealing with a person who has that, it feels like a demon. It feels like something has taken over the person's body and the person you love is not there. And it's extraordinarily difficult to deal with. And you can see why for the vast majority of human history, people characterize that as an outside force taking over the body because that's literally what it looks like.

Kaya says, "Hey Ben, I'm 15 years old from Utah. As an Orthodox Jew, what's your opinion on the devil? Do you believe such a being actually exists or is it a symbol? Do you think the Screwtape Letters would make a good movie? Thanks, I really enjoy your show." Screwtape Letters would be a difficult thing to turn into a movie unless you were from the perspective of Wormwood. Right, and it was just Wormwood trying to seduce the young man all day. Because the only character you actually see here is Screwtape. But the only interactions that happen are between Wormwood and the young man and the young woman. So you could theoretically do it that way, it would be interesting.

My opinion on the devil. So in the Bible, Satan literally means adversary. Satan means adversary. And so the way that Satan is portrayed in the Talmud and in the Bible, in the Jewish Bible, is not as an opposing fallen angel, fallen force who is now opposing God, but as actually a messenger of God who's specific.

supposed to do certain things. In fact, there's a famous rabbi in the Talmud named Rish Lakish, Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, who says that Satan, the angel of death, and the evil inclination are all one. So it's a name that we give for the adversary, and he's the accuser. I mean, if you read in the prophets, there's one particular area of the

a former high priest of having failed in his duty, sort of the lawyer for the other side. And in the same way that in our legal system you have a public defender who's set up and a prosecutor publicly funded to prosecute, Satan is sort of the prosecutor. It does raise the question of if angels exist and they are singular forces and they don't have any will of their own, they're not human beings, if they don't have any will of their own in sort of the Jewish view, whether if they have emotional states, and there seems to be some description of angels with emotional states in the Talmud,

whether Satan actually likes his job or not. It's kind of an interesting question for theological speculation. I would suspect no, by the way, is that if your job is to constantly be tempting human beings and you also work for God, that's a very different job than you get to sort of revel in the evil that you do in opposing God.

Mario says, do you think there's a danger of relieving ourselves of responsibility too much when we imagine our temptations externally the way they are in Screwtape? Or is it a helpful way to distance our will from our impulses when learning discipline? So I think that there is usefulness to actually externalizing the problems within you. The biggest problem is when we internalize the worst parts of ourselves and then suggest that that is core to our identity, which is exactly what we've done in modern society. So for example, when it comes to dealing with virtually all issues

sort of addiction problems. One of the things that we tend to do is externalize, right? There is a force. I'm an alcoholic means there's a force that works on me, on the real me, and that is alcohol. When the alcohol hits me, it turns me into a person that I don't want to be. Well, the alcohol doesn't have an attitude. The alcohol doesn't hit you. You drink the alcohol. It's your choice. But externalize.

Externalizing the problem is one way of fighting the problem. Because the problem is once you start saying that these things about me are the most important things about me, it makes it very difficult to excise those parts of you. People don't like to separate off from things that they see as a chief part of their identity.

David says, what is the nature of Satan and the demonic? It seems like the most practical way to talk about evil is with personified agents like in the screw tape lovers. What evidence do you see for Satan and demons as actual beings? So again, I tend to be more of a rationalist. And so the idea here that God extends forces into the world, which is something I do believe in, that those forces are malachim, they're messengers, and that we can call those angels. That I agree with. I tend to be less of a personified demon believer, for example.

Ray says,

So, you're right, but I think that the hardship of writing that is that presumably an angel would be upset when somebody fails. Screwtape is happy when somebody fails, and so he can write that as laughter.

An angel is presumably going to see every human failing as a tragedy. But you're right. I mean, it might be possible to write it in the way that a parent would write about a wayward child. But there comes a point with adults, obviously, where the child is no longer wayward, where it becomes willful. And then I think that the letters would presumably bristle with outrage, tragedy, and anger.

Jackson says, So the case for selfless is that you actually have divested yourself of your interests, which includes if people don't want to be around you.

then you go along with that as well. Unselfishness can become a vice in the sense that I'm so interested in giving myself. I'm interested in giving myself. I'm in your business. I want to give of myself. The most important thing is still give of myself. Myself is still part of the sentence there. Selflessness would not have myself as part of the sentence. It would just be, what do you need? How can I help? That's selflessness. Unselfishness is, look how unselfish I am. I want to give of me. It's about me and my feeling of unselfishness.

Charmy says, "The patient is the common Christian man that has understood what kind of prayers do you think the patient prayed?" Well, you know, I would assume the traditional Christian liturgy because that is what Lewis would have focused on and since he's being educated as a Christian, that obviously is Lewis's chief focus, I would imagine. Corey says, "What is a real-life example in the world today of when Lewis says, 'Men are not angered by mere misfortune, but by misfortune conceived of as injury.'" This is... Okay, so what's an example of this? Perfect example would be there's a financial crash.

And the financial crash is through no one's fault. 9-11 happens, there's a financial crash. It's nobody's fault. We're not made angry by that. 2007-2008 crash, we get very, very angry because somebody was screwing around with the financial system. Whether it was the government, whether it was Wall Street, whether it was both, we get angry about that. Now, the problem is it's very easy to conceive of misfortune as misfortune conceived of as injury.

This happens all the time. We misinterpret somebody's intent. Somebody does something, it hurts us. Instead of us saying that was an accident, they probably didn't intend that, we immediately go to, "That person wanted to hurt me." And then we get angry, and then we act out against that person. Or we do it on a societal level. We misinterpret the fact that, for example, there is inequality in outcome in daily life, and we say, "This is the result of a concerted plan to hurt me. Therefore, we must restructure the entire economic system in order to redress the injury." The perspective, as you see, of the progressive left when it comes to economics.

Emery says, what characteristics and limits define temptation in these screw tape letters? Well, I think that the characteristics that define arrogance tends to be a big one. Narcissism is a big one in terms of temptation. Always looking within, focusing on self. That would be, I think, the biggest one. That's why humility is the biggest quality, right? You're not focusing on yourself. You acknowledge what you are in the world, then you acknowledge that the qualities you've been given were given to you, and you acknowledge that the shortcomings are largely your own.

Zach says, what are your thoughts on the greater picture of society since many examples written through the book still hold true? Letter 17 over gluttony, for example. I mean, everything in 1942 but worse is my picture of modern society because, again, circumstances have changed and the mechanisms of sin have gotten more plentiful and people have fallen away from church and the moral strictures that we used to impose upon ourselves and our communities have fallen away in the name of nonjudgmentalism.

Lewis says, not necessarily about the screw tape letters, but a question about C.S. Lewis' trilemma. As Christ makes the claim that he is God, Lewis says there are only three things the claimant can be. Crazy, a liar, or what he claims to be. Do you believe this is a bad argument, or is there something that is missing from this proposition? So I get this a lot, right? As a Jew, up front, Christians should go to church. I'm a Jew. I don't believe the same thing that Christians believe. So the Jewish answer to the so-called trilemma, the crazy liar, or what he claims to be, is that

My perspective on what the Gospels are, the Gospels are written significantly after the time of Jesus, significantly enough that many of the Gospels are written well after Jesus had already died and in Christian view been resurrected, but in the Jewish view just died. And so the Jewish view of Jesus is that Jesus probably did not claim to be God, or the Son of God in the notion that he was an actual divine figure. In the Jewish view of Jesus, Jesus was a historical figure who lived, probably attempted to lead a rebellion, a well-founded rebellion against the Romans like many other people did

of the time was attempting to lead a spiritual corrective within Judaism, again, not unusual. You see many of the prophets doing this inside of Judaism, and then was killed by the Romans because they perceived him as a political threat. And so the idea here would be that the gospels got it wrong, right? That's the fourth possibility. Now, again, Christians aren't going to accept that because the gospels are literally to Christians gospel truth. That's where the phrase comes from. But as a Jew, obviously I don't agree with the gospels. That's the Jewish view. Doesn't have to be the Christian view.

Ian says, "Ben, something I found interesting is how much worse today's society is and how much easier it would be to bring them to hell. Screwtape discusses weak pastors and it makes me think about how it's only gotten worse today. Another thing I found fascinating was the discussion of laziness. Screwtape was telling War Mode to get the patients to focus on nothing and have them stare at the wall all night. I see that today and people aimlessly staring at their phones for hours on end." Yep. Yep. Turn off the phone is a big one. Everybody needs a Sabbath.

The Jewish Sabbath is absolutely correct. God nailed that one. The idea that you've got to turn off the phone, you've got to turn off the computer for a full day, Friday night to Saturday night, it is great. And by the way, I've advised some of my friends and colleagues that they should turn off their phone much more during the week. They should get Twitter off their phone. Things that are just time sucks, eating up your time.

You should avoid them. Cole says,

It is almost prophetic that he speaks of language games being played with the word democracy and how the devils must never let democracy be clearly defined so they may lead the people by the nose. He speaks of how democracy is used to cudgel people into a sense of togetherness or risk being labeled undemocratic or supremacist. I can hear Joy Reid lamenting our democracy right now. Is tyranny by the people an inherent defect of democracy and one that plagued the founding or is it a post-1950s phenomenon?

This, at least in part, addresses the overwhelming momentum behind diminishing our educational system, historical heroes, and military standards. I mean, all of that is true. Also, it is an inherent defect of democracy. It's something the founders talked long about. It is why the founders did not look for great men to be president of the United States, at least not after the very early iteration of Washington.

It is fair to say that basically between Madison and Lincoln, there were not a lot of great men who were presidents of the United States. Jackson might be the thing that was closest to a quote-unquote great man, Quincy Adams maybe. Certainly between Jackson, who leaves office in 1836, and Lincoln, you'd be hard-pressed to find a great man anywhere in that entire gamut.

That's also true, by the way, after the Civil War. After Ulysses S. Grant, you basically got a series of quasi-no-names all the way until the next quote-unquote great man, Teddy Roosevelt. And democracies tend not to move toward people of quality and virtue. They tend to move toward people who give them what they want.

And sometimes the people who we perceive to be great men are actually demagogues who are channeling that great men persona into something quite bad. This is why the founders believed in checks and balances. The idea of a great man who's going to lead us to a glorious future, you may as well have a monarchy if that's what you're looking for. If what you're actually looking for is a good man to do the work of government, then you're more likely to end up with a person who may, in fact, through crisis, end up being a great man.

Well, folks, hope you enjoyed it. If you did, head on over to dailyware.com slash subscribe and get a subscription right now. You can see all the rest of the episodes.