Secret documents. Infernal forces talking about their plans to corrupt humanity. C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters uses these elements to tell a dark, clever satire about temptation. It’s inspired many imitators – books like Randy Alcorn’s Lord Foulgrin’s Letters and Richard Platt’s As One Devil to Another.
So, why did I decide to do my own Screwtape project? And why did I decide to release it as an e-serial instead of a proper book?
This self-conducted interview will hopefully answer those questions and others.
What is the Ekron Initiative?
The Ekron Initiative is a series of memos, directed from a demon who manages of the larger departments in hell, to an underling who’s been given a new project. The underling needs to convince American evangelical Christians to take a certain view of creativity – something that will keep them fighting each other, keep them from cultivating people who make nuanced art, connect “Christian” with “cheesy” or “sentimental.” The memos start in the 1960s, around the period that American evangelicals were starting to remake themselves through new leaders like Billy Graham, and continue up to the 2010s.
What inspired you to start this project?
It was rooted in a series of articles I wrote in 2016-2017 for The Odyssey Online. I was very interested in the question of what was Evangelical Christianity, probably because I’m not quite native to it. I spent most of my childhood in Germany where my parents were doing missionary work, and didn’t move to America until I was about 10. So, I’ve been aware of many evangelical circles and involved in them – homeschool, Christian colleges, youth retreats and Christian rock concerts – but never quit native to them.
I was also interested in why evangelicals has struggled to produce really high-quality artists, and why so often what it’s best-known for is Christian bookstore bric-a-brac. So, I was reading a lot of writers like Steve Turner, Francis Schaeffer and Makoto Fujimura, to get a sense of what drove these problems.
I wrote five or six articles addressing the common problems that various experts had highlighted.
Five Reasons Protestants Don’t Understand Artists
How Christian Entertainment Ignores Evil
How Protestants Often Ignore The World Around Them
Why Christians Fear Secular Entertainment
Doesn’t God Value Art And Beauty?
When Is Doomsday Preaching A Bad Idea?
Writing those articles was good experience, it helped me think things though, but they didn’t get much traction. As you can probably tell from the titles of those first three articles, I was pretty angry when I wrote them – angry and blunt about problems that had been going on for years, which had made lots of other people angry too. But, that anger isn’t an effective way to convince other people to see your perspective. I didn’t realize I had to take a gentler tone until the last two articles – a piece on what Genesis teach us about God’s view of creativity and a final piece on the dangers of poorly handled end times theology.
During the period I was writing those articles, my college awarded Os Guinness an honorary PhD. The campus library put his books on display and I saw The Gravedigger File (later republished as The Last Christian on Earth). Reading that gave me some ideas on applying the Screwtape style to talk about big cultural events and issues.
A few months later, I was taking a business writing class, and did a mock Screwtape letter, “Memo from One Demon to Another.” I published it through the Odyssey Online and decided, “you know, writing more of these could be a great way to explore those ideas about evangelicalism and identity in a creative way. Maybe people will feel more invited into a conversation if I discuss these ideas through a story.”
How did the project change over time?
I initially planned the Ekron Initiative to published as a book. That consensus from the readers who looked at the first draft was that it was on the short side – there were about 17 letters then, and they were all under 3 pages each. The totla book was something like 15,000 words, not even the size of Christmas gift novellas.
Another reader observed that I had to refine the approach more – the “what God calls good, demons call disgusting” angle wasn’t quite clear, I had to make the main character more convincing. Another reader suggested that I have more footnotes throughout the memos explaining the various references.
All these comments helped, but I wasn’t sure how to expand the project without making the core concept feel implausible. So, I let it the manuscript sit for a while.
By 2021, I was contributing content for Fellowship & Fairydust, which publishes serial stories. I decided if the project wasn’t big enough for a book, there was no reason I couldn’t make it an e-serial. So I revised it, added a couple of extra memos, and submitted it. A few extra memos have been added since then.
What new topics did you add?
Mostly memos dealing with evangelicalism’s place in American history.
My 2016-2018 reading gave me a great foundation on where evangelical views of creativity have been, what the core blind spots are. What I hadn’t read was much about how evangelicalism have evolved in Americay.
I understood the key traits scholars use to define evangelicals (things like Daniel Bebbington’s quadrilateral) but not how modern American evangelicals grew out of the fundamentalist movement, how periods like the Jesus Movement and the Reagan-era culture wars redefined evangelicalism. When you realize how much Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness is informed by the decade it was published in, and how much Peretti defined what Christian fiction has become since then, the historical context opens up new layers.
Fortunately, I got a lot of free religious history education through reviewing books for the Evangelical Church Library Association. I read books like America’s Religious History by Thomas S. Kidd, The State of the Evangelical Mind, and several “where is evangelicalism now and how can it have a healthy future” books like Uncommon Ground. Friends and other connections exposed me to books like Reading Evangelicals by Daniel Silliman.
I also got immersed in a lot of artists that I hadn’t know about while I was in college – particularly musicians like Michael Been, Bruce Cockburn, T-Bone Burnett and Sam Phillips. Artists who hadn’t fit the Christian entertainment label and whose stories helped me see how much Christian entertainment is a subculture with particular brands and interests, and how sometimes the most interesting content addressing spiritual concerns comes from people who don’t fit its marketing parameters.
Did you find it difficult to write a demon’s perspective on the spiritual life?
Well, not as much as Lewis apparently did. He said in an afterword to a later edition containing “Screwtape Presents a Toast” and in an interview included in The Grand Miracle that The Screwtape Letters was the one book he didn’t like writing, because he had to really get inside the mind of a supremely selfish character. He also said he based its ideas about inner spiritual struggles on his own life, which requires a lot of ruthless soul searching. It’s
I had the advantage that I wasn’t talking about my individual temptations. I was writing a sort of reverse history of American Christianity for the last 50 years. That makes it a lot more like “Screwtape Prepares a Toast” or The Gravedigger File. You want the characters to be plausibly diabolical, but you lean more into satirizing the outside world than on satirizing your inner self.
I also either I liked my certain kind of dark and witty British comedy that has become a lot more popular since Lewis published The Screwtape Letters in the 1940s. You get a similar darkly witty tone in Blackadder and in darker Monty Python material.
But yes, the process of writing about the spiritual life in reverse becomes exhausting after a while.
You start the serial like a spy thriller, with a story about an unnamed person receiving secret documents. What inspired you to take this approach?
I researched a number of books that have imitated The Screwtape Letters, and found most took two approaches to set up. Their story. They either emulate Lewis’s preface where he says “I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands,” or they presented really contrived backstories.
The only book I found that gave a really compelling, plausible backstory was The Gravedigger File. Guinness starts the book presenting a fictional narrator who appears to be him when he was a BBC journalist in the ’80s, and a fictional writer he met during that period who gave him secret documents. So, I create an introduction by taking scenes and details from my life – a tourist hostel I visited in Beijing, seeing a pastor pray over a man in Asia who’d been attacking trees, my love for Chesterton’s book The Man Who Was Thursday.
Once I’d given the narrator some details from my life, I made him more fictional – someone who has done work for underground churches, the sort of character who might be trusted with secret documents. Then I added Zane, who’s completely fictional.
Curiously, I think the final result was the narrator comes across a bit like Frederick Forsyth and other British journalists who work for MI6 during the Cold war, which brings this back to Guinness again. He talked about how much John le Carre inspired The Gravedigger File.
Why do you think so many writers struggled to give plausible starts to this kind of story?
Well, the concept of humans finding letters by a demon is so strange that the more you try to explain it, the less plausible that becomes. In fact, we know Lewis had that problem.
Brenton Dickieson has published some great research showing that Lewis’ first draft of The Screwtape Letters tried to tie the story to his sci-fi novels. He had a preface where Elwin Ransom the space traveler and language expert from Out of the Silent Planet helped to translate Screwtapes Letters from a language called Old Solar into English.
It’s interesting to realize Lewis originally tried to connect The Screwtape Letters to his other books in a way that helps explain where the letters came from, and maybe that means you can read it as belonging to the same fictional universe as the Space Trilogy. However, from a storytelling standpoint, I think it’s a good thing Lewis didn’t take that approach. For one thing, he’d have to explain why Screwtape writes in Old Solar but when translated Screwtape’s writing makes him sounds like an early 20th-century British headmaster.
Lewis’ “I will not explain how I got these secret documents” is probably the most elegant way to avoid this problem. I hope my “start with real settings and add a spy plot” works in its own way, but we’ll see how readers respond.
Did the “start with the real word” approach bring any complications you didn’t expect?
Yes. In the first draft, I thought keeping the story plausible meant I couldn’t describe anything with much detail in the introduction – set up the story, get it going as fast as possible. In later drafts, I realized that the lack of detail just made things sounds bland. So, I added more description and background details to the introduction and later scenes where I establish how the narrator reacts to the memos as he reads them.
But, you’ll have to read the memos to see where that goes.
Click here to read the introduction to the Ekron Initiative and here to read the first memo.
G. Connor Salter 