C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters: How a Movie Version Could Help Us Understand Modern Evil

Heaven help us--some of our modern population still has yet to understand evil, why it exists and what it can potentially do. As they do that--the blame for the increasing ills in the world seems to frequently get turned around and blamed on that person's concept of God. Of course, that's Rule #1 in the concepts of how evil works. But it's more complex and insidious than even that as C.S. Lewis reminded people. While Lewis was one of the best Christian allegorists of all time, his "Narnia Chronicles" always gets the most readership and analysis about what he was trying to say and showing people what to look for in their faith. Perhaps the only reason his better work of "The Screwtape Letters" doesn't get mentioned first is because it shows exactly how evil works in all its insidious ways--hence getting some people steamed it exists. Sure, taken at surface level--it looks like a how-to book for any person (i.e. terrorist or leader) who wants to impart evil onto the world without being noticed. But Lewis was smart enough to realize that every person has to understand the enemy if you want to understand the world to the fullest.

For those who haven't read it--it deals with a minion of Satan himself (Screwtape) who writes a series of letters to his nephew (the famously-named Wormwood) who's currently trying to bedevil the life of a man living in WWII England. These letters give a rundown of exactly how to tempt Wormwood's "Patient" to the dark side. The most haunting aspect to it is that it shows exactly how most people in the world's past (and our present time) end up losing their sense of meaning and faith by micro temptations rather than anything large in the case of the most heinous crimes we generally think of first. Today, we can see little temptations in the world that frequently turn into a behemoth--whether that be something you watch in the media or buy or just accidentally encounter. It can frequently start in political thought, too, or a particular situation that arises in the world that indirectly affects people. Everything small eventually connects into a larger worldview that can affect someone's core principles.