Memorandum from Below - Toward a Successful Apostolate

 Submitted to Happy Jack anonymously by a person in deep-cover.

Memorandum from Below

[CONFIDENTIAL: This memorandum is for operational use only. To avoid it falling into the Enemy's hands, destroy it immediately once read. The strategies herein depend entirely upon remaining unrecognised.]

Notes Toward a Successful Apostolate

by Slubgob, Junior Tempter

I am permitted (with some hesitation from my uncle Screwtape) to outline the broad contours of our present strategy for the modern age, now that brute unbelief is unnecessary and, in many places, inefficient.

Outright atheism and diffuse spirituality serve us well enough among the masses. But for those still tethered to institutional religion, a more subtle approach is 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 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?"; not "What has been received?" but "Who decides?"

The Church is still here, of course, but 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, praise its humility.

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 among the particular vices, given its role in the broader strategy I have outlined above. As I noted, sex serves as our masterstroke in relocating trust from nature and revelation to psychology and personal experience. But lust itself operates in ways worth examining more closely.

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 itself, 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. He can expound at length on the dangers of sexual libertinism, but grows uncomfortable when the conversation turns to his own attachments.

More valuable still is the way we have made sexuality the central battleground of orthodoxy for both camps. The progressive believes that sexual inclusion is the test of whether one has truly understood the Gospel's radical love. The traditionalist believes that sexual teaching is the test of whether one has remained faithful to revelation. Both invest this one area of moral theology with disproportionate significance.

This ensures that nearly every ecclesiastical conflict becomes about sex eventually, crowding out attention to the other vices. It allows both sides to ignore their own sins by focusing relentlessly on sexual morality, where they can position themselves as enlightened or faithful, respectively. And it makes conversation across the divide nearly impossible.

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, hookup culture, 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 interior life unchanged, his lust merely driven underground where it festers in shame.

We have made lust simultaneously invisible as a vice and hypervisible as an identity marker. The progressive cannot see his own lust because it has been baptised as authenticity. The traditionalist cannot address his own lust because admitting struggle would seem to validate the progressive's critique.

As my uncle says: Get them arguing about sex, and they will forget about everything else, including sex itself.

On Pride and Envy (Our Master Virtues)

My uncle insists that pride must not be presented as arrogance anymore. That was effective once, but the modern age has refined the vice considerably.

Today, pride thrives best when experienced as moral seriousness. 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. He need not claim to know everything; it is sufficient to insist that no one else ever really did.

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 mere cultural prejudice, that one stands on "the right side of history." If history itself is moving toward one's conclusions, then resistance can be dismissed as fear or moral failure. Repentance becomes unnecessary; one is already ahead.

But 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. 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.

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.

Pride also manifests as what they now call "consciousness" or "awareness." Every advantage someone else possesses becomes evidence of injustice requiring their enlightened intervention. The progressive resents institutional authority he does not possess and envies those who exercise it without sufficient deference to his moral insights. The traditionalist resents the certainties he imagines the past possessed and envies those who seem to navigate modernity with less anguish. Both have transmuted envy into a kind of vigilance, a moral alertness to others' failings that never resolves in admiration or emulation.

The classical response—"I want to become like that" has been replaced with "They should not be allowed to have that." Virtue in others becomes insufferable. Sanctity becomes suspicion. And all of it is experienced as justice or zeal, never as the resentment it is.

The beauty of this arrangement is that each side's excess validates the other's suspicions. Both become convinced they stand above the confusion, defending the faith against its enemies. Once everyone believes this, obedience becomes impossible for all.

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. To assent is not fidelity, but fear of thinking for oneself. The progressive frames this as liberation from oppressive authority; the traditionalist frames it as faithfulness to an authority he happens to interpret.

Pride does not shout anymore. It reassures. It tells the progressive he’s on the right side of history. It tells the traditionalist he is part of the faithful remnant. And it tells both that the institutional Church, in its present form, cannot be trusted to guide them.

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 vigour. He speaks endlessly about justice, equity, and redistribution. We encourage this, provided it remains theoretical. The critique must never mature into an examination of one's own comforts, habits, or dependencies. Thus, avarice is transformed from a personal vice into a sociological grievance, safely externalised and harmless to the soul doing the analysing.

Nothing must threaten lifestyle, status, or consumption. One may rage against billionaires while jealously guarding upper-middle-class security. One may share articles about climate justice from the airport lounge. One may advocate for the poor in terms that ensure the poor remain elsewhere. Moral outrage is ideal; it feels virtuous and costs nothing.

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 work to ensure it becomes spiritual consumerism, an aesthetic project that substitutes for actual detachment. He collects sacramentals as others collect experiences. He curates tradition as others curate progressive credentials.

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." The progressive identifies calls to simplicity as psychological harm; the traditionalist justifies his expenditures as investment in civilizational preservation.

In this way, we preserve Mammon without ever asking anyone to bow to him explicitly. They need only insist that their comforts are earned, necessary, or conducive to the good work they fully intend to do - someday.

Lust destabilises authority. Greed stabilises compliance. That is why my uncle considers it our safest vice: universally practised, rarely confessed, or rarely recognised as worship.

On Wrath (Our Most Productive Emotion)

My uncle speaks of wrath with particular satisfaction, for it is the only vice that makes the faithful feel positively righteous while indulging it.

The secret is to ensure that anger is always experienced as moral clarity. We teach them to be furious at injustice, oppression, hypocrisy, then quietly expand the definition until fury becomes a constant state.

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. Wrath is performed and rewarded in real time.

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 recognise, at the parishioner who asks inconvenient questions about doctrine, at the bishop who lacks sufficient enthusiasm for the current cause. The traditionalist rages at liturgical abuses, at Novus Ordo parishes, at the compromised hierarchy, and at other traditionalists deemed insufficiently rigorous. Both have cultivated an exquisite sensitivity to betrayal.

Whether the rage is aimed at institutional corruption or institutional innovation matters little. What matters is that patience becomes complicity, charity becomes enabling, and forgiveness becomes injustice. The faithful may continue to recite that they should love their enemies, but "enemy" now includes everyone who disagrees about prudential matters.

We have convinced both sides that their anger is holy. The progressive believes his rage is righteous solidarity with the oppressed. The traditionalist believes his rage is righteous zeal for the faith. Neither recognises that wrath has made them useless for the Enemy's purposes, no matter how theologically correct their positions might be.

Wrath keeps them fractured. And convinced it's everyone else's fault.

On Gluttony and Sloth (Our Most Misunderstood Assets)

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, justice initiatives. He is always organising, always speaking out, always identifying the next issue requiring attention. Prayer becomes another task to manage. Scripture becomes content to consume in bite-sized social media posts. Virtue becomes a performance to document.

The traditionalist fills his time differently but just as effectively. He has liturgies to attend, devotions to maintain, online arguments to win, and ecclesiastical minutiae to master. He knows the proper vestment colours for obscure feast days but has no time for silent prayer. He can debate rubrics but grows restless in adoration. His inner life is replaced by an exhausting schedule of outer observances.

This connects to what my uncle calls the gluttony of entitlement: 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.

The progressive consumes spirituality itself: podcasts about justice, books on liberation theology, conferences on inclusion, practices borrowed from various traditions. Always hungry for the next framework, never nourished because consumption is not communion. The traditionalist does the same with different content: apologetics videos, theology lectures, analyses of ecclesial decline, acquisition of beautiful objects for prayer. The appetite is identical; only the menu differs.

We cultivate spiritual restlessness in both. The progressive senses that 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, and stability for novelty.

They have endless energy for battles they've chosen, but none for demands they find costly. The progressive has vigour for political activism but exhaustion at the thought of daily prayer or confession of actual sins. The traditionalist has a passion for liturgical precision but grows tired when asked to show mercy to those he deems less faithful.

We encourage therapeutic language: "I'm burned 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. Keep them consuming. Keep them curating their spiritual identity, whether prophetic, progressive or faithful traditionalist.

Just never let them be still. Never let them feast.

On the Complementary Nature of the Two Factions

My uncle wants me to emphasise this point, as it seems to confuse younger tempters: 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. The progressive points to the traditionalist's rigidity and concludes that doctrine must be flexible. The traditionalist points to the progressives' innovations and concludes that the institutional Church cannot be trusted.

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 idealised 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.

This is why we encourage the conflict to continue indefinitely. 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. This serves us beautifully. 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

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 while 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 or anyone who disagrees with them now.

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