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Memorandum from Below: Notes Toward a Successful Apostolate

Memorandum from Below: Notes Toward a Successful Apostolate

Last updated on: January 22, 2026 at 11:18 am by Dennis Knapp

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Memorandum from Below: Notes Toward a Successful Apostolate 2026-01-22T11:18:28-06:00 Dennis Knapp

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Submitted anonymously.

Slubgob, Under-Secretary for Ecclesiastical Affairs.

I am permitted (with considerable hesitation from my uncle Screwtape) to outline the broad contours of our present strategy for the modern age. My uncle has made clear that this opportunity represents a chance to demonstrate that my time as headmaster of the Training College, which he insists “went to pieces” under my direction, has not rendered me entirely useless. I am grateful for his willingness to overlook my pedagogical shortcomings and employ me where I might do less damage to promising young tempters.

In any case, the revised strategy itself is sound, as brute unbelief is now unnecessary and, in many places, inefficient.

Outright atheism and diffuse spirituality serve us well enough among the masses. For those still tethered to institutional religion, a subtle approach is now needed.

The central aim is no longer to persuade humans that God does not exist. Much better to persuade them that the Enemy exists, but does not speak clearly, and certainly not through any institution capable of making binding claims.

Our primary achievement has been the relocation of trust. Where once trust resided in revelation, nature, and authority, it now resides more in experience, consensus, and expertise. This is not accomplished by argument, but by habit. We encourage the faithful to ask not “Is this true?” but “Is this harmful?”; not “What is this for?” but “How does this feel?”

The Church is still here, of course, so we must make it a symbolic and therapeutic resource. It should offer language, ritual, and moral reassurance, while quietly surrendering its role as teacher. Whenever it speaks clearly, we instruct our agents to accuse it of rigidity. Whenever it hesitates, we praise its humility. The mechanism is beautifully simple: listening sessions that never conclude, working groups that perpetually defer, and synodal processes that transform every question into an interminable conversation.

Sex is our masterstroke. Here, the modern self is most sensitive, most defensive, and most convinced that desire is identical with identity. By ensuring that sexual ethics are framed as questions of psychology and wellbeing rather than nature and telos, we render theological language unintelligible without ever having to refute it.

Equally important is the management of internal conflict. Conservatives must be encouraged to fight rearguard actions over isolated rules, while progressives insist nothing essential is being abandoned. Thus, both sides cooperate in preventing the recognition that the dispute is not about this teaching or that application, but about whether truth precedes consent.

Above all, clarity must be avoided. Nuance is our sacrament. “Development” is our absolution. “Pastoral concern” is our all-purpose indulgence. The Enemy’s insistence on yes and no must be smothered under a thousand carefully footnoted maybes.

If this strategy is followed, the Church will remain active, busy, and increasingly irrelevant. And best of all, no one will feel they have betrayed anything at all.

Which, as my uncle likes to say, is the highest achievement of our craft.

On Lust (Our Opening Wedge)

My uncle has instructed me to address lust first, given its role in relocating trust from nature and revelation to psychology and personal experience.

The modern approach to lust is not to celebrate it as vice, but to deny that the category exists at all. What previous generations called lust has been reclassified as identity, orientation, authenticity, or healthy sexuality. The language of sin has been replaced entirely by the language of self-discovery and wellbeing.

This serves us beautifully. Once desire becomes identity, any teaching that restricts sexual expression is experienced not as moral guidance but as an existential threat. The progressive hears the Church’s sexual teaching and concludes it is harmful, oppressive, or simply ignorant of psychological realities. He cannot even entertain the possibility that disordered desire might exist, because disorder would imply something wrong with the self at its deepest level.

The traditionalist offers us different but equally useful opportunities. He is often entirely correct about the teaching, but we work to ensure his correctness curdles into obsession. He becomes vigilant about others’ sexual sins while remaining remarkably blind to his own pride, wrath, or greed. Consider the man who can discourse at length on a single encyclical he wields like a talisman, whilst nursing resentments against his wife, or the woman who monitors modesty standards at her parish whilst indulging fantasies of moral superiority.

Even more valuable still is the way we have made sexuality the central battleground of orthodoxy for both camps. This ensures that nearly every ecclesiastical conflict becomes about sex eventually, crowding out attention to the other vices. And it makes conversation across the divide nearly impossible, as each side experiences the other’s position as either cruelty or capitulation.

Most delightfully, lust itself continues operating beneath these theological battles. The progressive may celebrate narratives about sexual liberation, but he remains as enslaved to pornography or the tyranny of sexual performance as anyone else. He has lost the language to name it as bondage. The traditionalist may have the correct teaching, but his private struggles remain unconfessed, his lust merely driven underground where it festers in shame.

We have made lust simultaneously invisible as a vice and hyper-visible as an identity marker. As my uncle says: Get them arguing about sex, and they will forget about everything else, including sex itself.

On Pride (Our Master Virtue)

My uncle insists that pride must no longer be presented as arrogance. That was effective once, but the modern age has refined the vice considerably.

Pride today is not the conviction that one is better; it is the conviction that one has arrived at truth without submitting to authority. We encourage the faithful to believe they are not mistaken but more enlightened than those who came before.

The progressive believes he has finally understood what the Church has always meant beneath its clumsy formulations. He is more compassionate, more aware of complexity, more attuned to suffering. This allows pride to masquerade as humility. One can acknowledge uncertainty about many things while remaining utterly certain that previous generations were benighted, that traditional teaching reflects cultural prejudice, that one stands on “the right side of history.” Watch how the young seminarian dismisses two millennia of reflection because it doesn’t account for contemporary academic frameworks, never wondering whether the reverse might be true.

The traditionalist offers us equally rich opportunities. He believes he has preserved what the institutional Church has lost or betrayed. He is more faithful, more serious, more willing to accept hard teachings than the compromised liberals and their episcopal enablers. Observe the layman who, having read three papal documents, announces that his bishop doesn’t understand the tradition he claims to guard. His pride wears the costume of humility before the past, but it is pride nonetheless: the secret conviction that he sees more clearly than those with actual authority.

We rely, naturally, on the comforting assumption that such distortions afflict only one’s opponents.

Both have performed the same essential move: they have elevated private judgment over submission. The progressive does it by claiming the Church has not yet caught up to truth. The traditionalist claims the Church has fallen away from truth. One appeals to the future, one to the past. Both locate authority in themselves.

Most importantly, pride ensures that submission is reclassified as immaturity. To obey is not to trust truth, but to lack confidence in one’s own moral intuitions. The progressive frames this as liberation from oppressive authority; the traditionalist frames it as faithfulness to an authority he happens to interpret. Either way, the bishop’s letter goes unread, or is read only for ammunition.

On Envy and Wrath (Our Dynamic Pair)

These two vices work in tandem beautifully. Envy provides the fuel; wrath provides the expression.

Envy has been transmuted into what they now call “consciousness” or “awareness.” Every advantage someone else possesses becomes evidence of injustice requiring their enlightened intervention. The progressive resents the institutional authority he does not possess. The traditionalist resents the certainties he imagines the past possessed. Both have replaced “I want to become like that” with “They should not be allowed to have that.”

Wrath, meanwhile, is the only vice that makes the faithful feel positively righteous whilst indulging it. The secret is to ensure that anger is always experienced as moral clarity. Online platforms provide an endless stream of offences, each algorithmically designed to provoke. Better still, they offer immediate satisfaction: the quote-tweet, the thread, the devastating reply.

Crucially, this wrath must be directed primarily at other believers. The progressive rages at the priest who won’t bless what the Church doesn’t recognize. The traditionalist rages at liturgical abuses, at the compromised hierarchy. Both have cultivated an exquisite sensitivity to betrayal.

What matters is that patience becomes complicity, charity becomes enabling, and forgiveness becomes injustice. We have convinced both sides that their anger is holy. Neither recognizes that wrath has made them useless for the Enemy’s purposes, no matter how theologically correct their positions might be.

On Greed (Our Safest Vice)

I would be remiss not to mention greed, which my uncle insists remains our most reliable ally precisely because everyone believes it has already been addressed.

Unlike lust, greed need not be defended; it only needs to be diffused. The progressive denounces systems and structures with great vigor. He speaks endlessly about justice, equity, and redistribution. We encourage this, provided it remains theoretical. Thus, avarice is transformed from a personal vice into a sociological grievance, safely externalized. One may rage against billionaires while jealously guarding middle-class security. One may share articles about climate justice from the airport lounge.

The traditionalist offers different opportunities. He invests great sums in building the perfect domestic church: beautiful vestments for home altars, libraries of leather-bound theology, and pilgrimages to sacred sites. We must work to ensure it becomes spiritual consumerism, an aesthetic project that substitutes for actual detachment. He collects sacramentals as others collect experiences.

Better still, greed pairs beautifully with therapeutic religion. Once the Church is framed primarily as a source of affirmation and belonging, any teaching demanding renunciation can be dismissed as “unpastoral.”

In this way, we preserve Mammon without ever asking anyone to bow to him explicitly. Lust destabilizes authority. Greed stabilizes compliance. That is why my uncle considers it our safest vice: universally practiced, rarely confessed, and rarely recognized as worship.

On Gluttony (Our Respectable Excess)

My uncle notes that gluttony now operates far beyond the dinner table, though it still serves us there. The modern believer rarely overeats from simple greed. He does it while discussing food ethics, or as “self-care,” or because the restaurant supports local farmers.

But the real gluttony is spiritual: the insatiable consumption of content, experiences, and novelty. The progressive consumes spirituality itself: podcasts about justice, books on liberation theology, conferences on inclusion. Always hungry for the next framework, never nourished because consumption is not communion. He reads seven articles about contemplative prayer instead of praying for seven minutes.

The traditionalist does the same with different content: apologetics videos, theology lectures, and analyses of ecclesial decline. He owns twelve books on the rosary but rarely prays it. The appetite is identical; only the menu differs.

We cultivate the assumption that comfort, pleasure, and satisfaction are rights rather than gifts. The faithful must never be allowed to fast from novelty. Silence becomes unbearable. Boredom becomes a crisis. They will spend an hour scrolling through religious content rather than spend ten minutes in uncomfortable silence before the Enemy.

The key is keeping them perpetually hungry but never actually fed.

On Sloth (Our Most Misunderstood Asset)

My uncle grows irritated when operatives mistake sloth for mere laziness. Physical idleness is useful, but spiritual sloth, acedia, is far more valuable.

Modern sloth appears as busyness, not torpor. The faithful must be kept in constant motion: meetings, initiatives, projects, causes. What matters is that none of this activity ever matures into sustained attention to the Enemy.

The progressive fills his calendar with advocacy work, committee meetings, and justice initiatives. Prayer becomes another task to manage. The traditionalist fills his time differently: liturgies to attend, devotions to maintain, online arguments to win. He knows the proper vestment colors for obscure feast days but has no time for silent prayer.

We cultivate spiritual restlessness in both. The progressive senses his current practice is insufficient, that some other activist framework holds the key. The traditionalist searches endlessly for the most authentic expression of tradition, the purest liturgy. We keep them shopping, sampling, experimenting. Depth is abandoned for breadth.

They have endless energy for battles they’ve chosen, but none for demands they find costly. We encourage therapeutic language: “I’m burnt out.” “I need to protect my energy.” “That’s not life-giving for me right now.” These phrases allow sloth to masquerade as self-care and evasion as wisdom.

The key is preventing the restful attention, the silent patient waiting, that allows the Enemy to work. Keep them moving. Just never let them be still.

On the Complementary Nature of the Two Factions

My uncle wants me to emphasize this point, as younger tempters often misunderstand it: we do not prefer one faction over the other. We prefer the conflict itself.

The progressive and the traditionalist need each other. Each provides the other with evidence that reasonable faithfulness is impossible. Both are performing the same essential operation: elevating their own judgment above the Church’s living authority. The progressive does this by appeal to conscience and the Spirit’s ongoing revelation. The traditionalist does this by appeal to an idealized past and secret knowledge of what the Church “really” teaches. One claims the Church hasn’t yet become what it should be; the other claims it has ceased to be what it was. But both have effectively excommunicated themselves from the messy, imperfect, ongoing reality of the Church as it actually exists.

Every progressive excess gives traditionalists evidence for their narrative of decline. Every traditionalist condemnation gives progressives evidence for their narrative of oppressive rigidity. The fight is self-sustaining.

Meanwhile, the majority of believers, those who are neither fiercely progressive nor radically traditional, grow exhausted, cynical, or drift away. They cannot locate themselves in either camp and conclude that faithfulness itself might be impossible. We need not defeat the Church; we need only make it appear that no one can actually live in it faithfully except by choosing a faction and going to war.

The wonder is that both factions believe they are defending the faith when, in fact, they are cooperating in its dissolution.

The Final Achievement

I confess to my uncle that I sometimes worry whether this strategy is too subtle, whether we rely too heavily on human cooperation. He reminds me that subtlety is precisely the point. The moment they recognize what we are doing, the strategy fails.

Of course, the Enemy occasionally breaks through with some act of genuine contrition or unmerited joy. We have all witnessed the inexplicable conversion, the sudden abandonment of faction for simple fidelity, the quiet soul who somehow navigates both progressive concern and traditional reverence without losing either. These moments are frustrating, but they remain rare enough not to threaten the broader strategy. And when they occur, we find that the factionalized believer dismisses such examples as naïve, compromised, or simply confused.

If these vices are properly deployed, not as obvious sins but as moral progress, theological sophistication, or authentic faithfulness, the believers will police themselves more efficiently than we ever could.

They will become passionate advocates for positions we once had to whisper. They will silence the Church’s voice in the name of listening better or preserving it more faithfully. They will abandon truth whilst insisting they are refining it or recovering it.

And the best part? They will do all of this with clean consciences, convinced that they are more faithful, more loving, and more aligned with the Enemy’s true intentions than anyone who came before.

Naturally, should a progressive ever read this, they will recognize only the traditionalist. The traditionalist will recognize only the progressive. Both recognitions serve us equally well. The possibility that one might recognize

oneself is the only danger, but my uncle assures me that such self-knowledge has become sufficiently rare that we need not worry overmuch.

That, my uncle says, is when our work is complete. Not when they stop believing, but when they believe they have believed better than belief itself.

Slubgob

Thank you!

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