Screwtape starts a podcast

I have wondered recently if Uncle Screwtape got my number, dialed it, and pretended to be an edgy ­podcaster promising cultural renaissance.

Lately I’ve started to consume a lot of “new media,” content that isn’t overtly Christian but is friendly toward the faith. It’s the kind of thing I can imagine C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape advising Wormwood to do: “Be sure your patient fills his leisure time constantly listening to podcasts and reading stimulating think pieces, which prattle on about culture, politics, and religion, all the while blunting his appetite for the Enemy’s real presence and ongoing work in the world.” These articles and podcasts might best be described as “heterodox.” It’s not bad material, but neither is it rooted in God’s Word.

I realize now that I was looking for something. The last decade of political and cultural life has bewildered a lot of people. I’m no exception. Donald Trump shocked the world by winning the 2016 election. I’m a white guy, basically apolitical, who didn’t like Trump but eventually grew annoyed by the rage of the never-Trumpers. A few years ago in the bottom of Wheaton College’s library, I found myself holding a glossy new book called 12 Rules for Life. I later discovered Jordan Peterson’s library of YouTube recordings.

In short, like many men my age, I found resources on how to be a man in the modern world. The only problem? Peterson was a secular prophet, intentionally dodgy on the question of God. He, and others in his wake, were culturally Christian but avoided the reality of the risen Christ.

Fast-forward to 2024 and it seemed like more Americans were describing themselves as “politically homeless.” I supposed that fit the bill for me, too. I didn’t know where to put myself ideologically. And clearly, millions of others floated in the same boat, including a new army of independent media pundits and online entrepreneurs.

Many people in this brave new world are sharp, accomplished, media savvy, and establishment-skeptical if not totally anti-establishment. The age of globalism and democratic optimism didn’t deliver, they say. The end of the Cold War didn’t usher in universal peace and prosperity. The old way of doing government and politics, among both Republicans and Democrats, has failed. Enter Trump, Washington’s swamp drainer. Enter Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. Enter creative figures like Matt Taibbi, Megyn Kelly, and Walter Kirn, heralding an optimistic new age.

Every big political movement explains itself in theological terms. There’s an enemy (the globalists, the elites, the technocrats) and a cosmic victim (the everyday man, the working class, “ordinary people”). When we supplant the elites, when the government hypocrites either self-destruct or the strong man calls their bluff and beats them, the golden age will blossom. We will be saved.

Screwtape would have approved that message. He chalks up the human appetite for a grand story to a deeper, spiritual longing: “So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven.”

Over the last year, I’ve felt myself adopting this kind of framework, as if the ultimate enemy is a global syndicate of thought police and technocratic freedom haters. Such a syndicate seems plausible these days, of course, and what happens with the global order does matter. But this attitude of suspicion and dissent, of believing that the hunt for cosmic evil ends in the D.C. swamp, misses something crucial. It forgets that humans aren’t our ultimate enemies. We all have one common enemy, and in the words of Gandalf, “He does not share power.”

For me, supplanting Christian orthodoxy with edgy heterodoxy entailed drifting from my faith and distracted me from the deeper spiritual disease that infects us all. I do have an enemy, but governments or worldly powers are not the ultimate foe. They can be co-opted for evil, but they are symptoms, not causes. As Paul wrote, our real battle is against “the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

At one point, Uncle Screwtape advises his nefarious nephew to downplay the existence of the demonic. Better that modern bipeds forget about those pesky demons who are always trying to tempt, befuddle, and vex them. I’ve realized that my change in media diet distracted me from the real battle. I let heterodoxy hedge out orthodoxy, and my devotion to Jesus took a blow as a result. Screwtape would be proud. But I’m onto him now.

—Peter Biles is a novelist and culture writer from Oklahoma and a graduate of the World Journalism Institute