TSL Chapter 16 -- Party Churches

Summary

Screwtape is annoyed that Wormwood has not exploited The Patient's mild dissatisfaction with his parish church. If Wormwood can't stop him from going all together, he can -- at least -- make the man a church-hopper until he becomes (in Screwtape's words) a "taster" or "connoisseur" of churches.

The purposes of this is manifold: to weaken the physical organization itself, to encourage factionalism, and finally to make the man a "critic" of the word rather than a receptive student.

Uncle Screwtape has even done the legwork for Worms: he's got out the map and checked out the two nearest churches, and both have faults that could be nurtured into full damnation!

Screwtape describes the Vicar who waters down his sermons until they are repetitive, soporific, and only surprise his congregation in how insincere they are. The second church has "Fr. Spike" who is a shock-jock of the pulpit. But Spike "really believes" and so might be dangerous yet.

What it comes down to is that the target should be encouraged to attend a "party church" which is to say one filled with partisan alliances, where "my-teamism" is more important that doctrine. Screwtape reminds Wormwood that without their efforts the Church of England "might have become a positive hotbed of charity and humility."

It's been what? Like a week?

Why did I go a week without writing this up? Well, for one thing I've been busy, but for another thing it didn't upset me -- which is to say, it didn't present any horrifying element of cosmology, but also that it didn't irritate me by tweaking one of my sins.

I find myself more irritated with sermons, in-general, when they seem especially relevant to me. This one didn't so much. I've never been either a church-hopper (I have, for long, long stretches been not-a-church-goer) or a doctrine partisan.

CSL accounts for what might describe me: indifference -- but if I were truly indifferent, I doubt I'd be as troubled by doctrine as I am. So it may be that we've reached a chapter (or a set of chapters -- the next one felt a bit flat to me as well), where I might engage intellectually but not so much emotionally.

Take That, Church of England

My indifference to Chapter 16 might also be that it's a bit of a shot at an organization I don't have any personal connection to. Yes, it's broadly applicable, but CSL has already made it known in earlier chapters that he's mostly unhappy with the quality of preaching and singing in his parish churches and I'm sure that anyone paying attention can find innumerable incidences of hypocrisy in whatever church they might attend.

So, yeah -- I'm sure these are all valid criticisms, but they don't make for a very coherent whole. On one side the Patient is instructed to be an open learner and not a critic, on the other hand, the teachers are revealed to be buffoons. Clearly the lessons both of these men teach should invite valid criticism from their congregation.

I think Lewis undercuts himself by advising us to be receptive students on one hand and then exposing those teaching us as insincere and even (in one case) unbelieving.

Party Church

I think the idea of factionalism "within" a church is much more fertile ground. While I don't have a huge amount of experience with factionalism within a church, I've seen enough Karate schools in my youth to know that schisms within an organization are sources of great drama and can be hugely destructive to the mission (in Karate, it's when a high-placed student goes off to another school). I've never experienced this in Church and I wonder if there are such factions simmering just below the surface in my church (I see no evidence of that), but since we're a human organization, I'd be hard pressed to wonder how we couldn't be.

I suspect that a focus on intra-congregation drama would have been both more meaningful and more engaging, than a shot across the bow at the CoE.