The Adversary's Narrative

What follows is a literary device in the tradition of C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters. It is theological imagination, not reportage. It does not claim access to demonic intent. It dramatizes the structural consequences of a theological system rendered in first-person so that the architecture becomes visible in a way that flat description cannot achieve. It is not a statement about any individual Latter-day Saint, their motives, or their sincerity. The people inside the system are those for whom Christ died. They are the people Part Five is designed to help you love well enough to tell the truth to. The Adversary's Narrative is about a system. Part Five is about a person.

I. The Design Brief

I have studied the methods that do not work. Direct opposition has failed everywhere it has been tried. The martyrs multiplied. Persecution produced communities that could not be infiltrated. Philosophical refutation produced apologists who sharpened the faith against the argument. Every frontal assault produced, in the end, more clarity about what was being attacked.

The effective strategy is not opposition. It is duplication.

Christianity cannot be defeated from the outside. It is too well-armored. But it can be replicated from the inside, and replication is far more efficient than defeat. A system that uses the same vocabulary, the same emotional register, the same family culture, the same language of revelation and Scripture and Jesus and grace — but has surgically replaced the content — is more durable than a false religion and more dangerous than a frank heresy. A frank heresy is easy to identify. A near-truth requires a disciple.

The challenge set before me was this: produce a system that calls itself Christianity, uses Christianity's vocabulary, produces the warmth and moral seriousness that Christianity produces, and yet removes from it the specific elements that make the real Jesus accessible to the person inside. Keep the name. Remove the content. Lock the door from the inside and hang a cross above it.

The result, whatever its later embellishments, was built on five precise operations I will now describe.