Tucker Screwtape

In 1942, with the world at war, an Oxford tutor wrote a book about traditional faith unlike any other ever published. It consists of missives from a senior devil in a demonic bureaucracy who is guiding a junior devil tasked with tempting one specific soul to achieve that man’s damnation. The senior devil is named Screwtape, and his letters are addressed to his nephew, Wormwood. C.S. Lewis’s brilliant conceit is that every one of Screwtape’s letters serves as a sort of mirror in which all moral categories are inverted. Thus Screwtape refers to God as “our Enemy above,” and to Satan as “our father below.” For this bureaucratic demon, Hell is a source of admiration, Heaven an object of horror. Damnation is desired, and eternal life with God is disdained. By experiencing an instinctive horror at these moral reversals, the reader is to intuit the right and the good.

Many decades later, in September 2024, America was treated to a Screwtape Letter of its own. Tucker Carlson, one of the most popular podcasters in America, hosted a “historian” on his show whose description of World War II involved a reversal of all obvious moral categories and historical facts. In this vile revisionist retelling of the war, Winston Churchill was cast as the “chief villain” of the episode and a “psychopath,” while Hitler was portrayed as a reasonable statesman who sought peace and understanding with England. Carlson’s interlocutor attributed the death of countless multitudes in German camps to an unfortunate lack of preparation on the part of Germany, and an overpopulation of POWs. Carlson, in turn, enthusiastically agreed with his guest’s characterization of Churchill and said his intention was to ensure that the guest would come to be seen as “the most important historian in the United States.” Unlike Lewis’s satire, this was done in all seriousness: Evil was really good, the heroes of history were actually villains, and the Holocaust, we are informed, never happened.

Screwtape lives.