by Os Guinness
“With the proviso that you add an afterword of your own,” he said, “you must publish the memos just as they stand. For several years now you’ve been arguing the case for the Christian faith and saying there was another side to the Church; that my facts weren’t all the facts. Now you must write about it to put these papers in perspective. But the papers must be published at once. It’s urgent that Christians should realize what’s happening.” And then he added cryptically, “We’ll see whether the Director is right or whether the Church can wake in time.”
He told me many things besides this, things which have weighed on my mind ever since, some of which I will discuss in the afterword. Finally, he said he would be leaving Oxford that night to go into hiding on the Continent. From there he would contact me after the public response to the papers was clear. He would be very interested to see the official response, but that was not his ultimate concern. It was the popular response that would prove decisive.
Also on the memory stick were some cartoons that were his own doodled commentary on the papers. The best one has been published too, for in a sense the seeds of his defection were nurtured by the comic perspective that lay behind them. There were no footnotes in the original papers. I have traced the references wherever possible and added them to the text for those wishing to delve more deeply into the thinking behind the papers.
I have followed the instructions given me to the letter, and with the cooperation of the writer am now presenting these papers to a wider audience so that, just as our source urgently requested, the papers can speak for themselves.
The last thing he said to me was this: “Maybe even the Doomsday clock has more time than the Western Church.” I think not, but we shall see.
Os Guinness
Oxford
MEMORANDUM 1
Operation Gravedigger
FROM: DEPUTY DIRECTOR, CENTRAL SECURITY COUNCIL
TO: DIRECTOR DESIGNATE, LOS ANGELES BUREAU
CLASSIFICATION: ULTRA SECRET
Warmest congratulations, both on your appointment as head of the Los Angeles Bureau and on your election to the Central Security Council. I have followed your steady rise in the service for some time. I have also consistently argued that Los Angeles deserves permanent representation on the Council. As you are well aware, not everyone takes this position. But we are confident that you will soon convince those who have reservations about you personally as well as those who fail to see the strategic importance of upgrading the L.A. Bureau. I say we advisedly. With the Director favoring it, your election was a formality and went through on the nod.
Naturally, it will be a wrench for you to leave Oxford. You may not miss the mist and rain, but what other place rivals its intellectual sophistication, its urbanity and wit, all wreathed in the smoke of endless pipes and washed down with sherry and port? Los Angeles has its own compensations, but my excitement for you goes beyond a question of place. Moving from Oxford to L.A. is more than a change of cities. It will mean a switch in strategies that you will find engrossing.
You are taking over in Los Angeles just when it is becoming crucial to our plans. Many people think only of the film industry and consider Hollywood’s greatest days to be over. They miss the point. Our sights are on the wider influence of what has been called the “Sillywood Revolution”—the combined power of Hollywood and Silicon Valley that is shaping the global infotainment of the future and creating the totally mediated world of “real virtuality.” L.A. has long been the entertainment (and porn) capital of the world. Soon it will be one of the most vital nodes in the world’s media networks and a bellwether city of the wired world of tomorrow. The old talk of the “Los Angelization” of the world was a little far-fetched, but the California connection will undoubtedly become one of our hottest centers of activity.
The Director himself has asked me to brief you on our top priority operation. You have three more months in England before you take up your new post. This will allow you to give the Operation your undivided attention, as well as to fit in some advance trips to L.A. It will take some work catching up on the background, which I will be sending you. Master the details, but don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. The big picture is what counts.
Operation Gravedigger
We are poised on the brink of a staggering victory, one of our most glittering prizes in history. Reports from all fronts of the modernized sector of the world indicate that, after 250 years of painstaking planning and successful execution, the payoff is very close. Operation Gravedigger is moving smoothly and inexorably toward its climax. Its goal—the complete neutralization of the advanced modern Western Church by subversion from within—is in sight and almost in our grasp.
I will be sending you memos from week to week to brief you on the Operation and the part your Bureau is to play. In this first memo, I will define the Operation, its objectives and assumptions.
I will also outline aspects of the Operation that will be examined more fully in subsequent memoranda.
The underlying strategy of Operation Gravedigger is as stark in its simplicity as it is devastating in its results. It may be stated like this: The Christian faith contributed to the rise of the modern world, but the Christian faith has been undermined by the modern world it helped to create. The Christian faith thus becomes its own gravedigger.1
The strategy turns on this monumental irony, and the victory we are so close to realizing depends on two elementary insights. First, the Christian faith is now captive to the very modern world it helped to create. Second, our interests are best served, not by working against the Church, but by working with it. The more the Church becomes one with the modern world, the more it becomes compromised, and the deeper the grave it digs for itself.
Having joined the Operation when it was well underway, my own contribution has all been in the execution, not in the planning. So my use of the word we in these memos is in the broad organizational sense. But as you will come to recognize, the very relentlessness of the way the strategy is being carried out betrays its mastermind. Only one mind is capable of such audacity of vision and sheer force of will. “The devil is in the details,” people say casually. If only they knew.
A Fall Beyond Belief
Now that the final phase of the Operation is beginning, a wider distribution of information is natural, and the Operation will soon be downgraded from “ultra secret” to “top secret.” This is not to be taken as a sign of relaxing urgency. The art of “controlled leaks” has become a finely tuned instrument of state policy, but incidents such as the disclosure of the Pentagon Papers show how leak-prone classified information still is. Governments have long lamented that the ship of state is the only vessel that leaks from the top and not the bottom. Now, with the invention of emails and photocopying, the vessel is holed irreparably.
Our own record over security leaks is unrivaled and will remain so. But there are several on the Council who query whether the enemy still has the capacity to profit from any disclosure of the Operation. Most Christians are simply too lethargic to care. There is no question of our risking the strategy by putting this belief to the test, but at the same time the reasons for such a belief are compelling.
For one thing, there is a psychological reason. Even if the details of the Operation were leaked at this stage, the Christians’ most likely reaction would be disbelief. I will explain later why we are able to count on such a response, but it allows us to press forward, rather as Hitler was able to discount possible Allied reaction to news about Auschwitz and the Final Solution: “But they will never believe it.” You can take this complacency (or its opposite extreme, the credulity that believes in any and every conspiracy) as a measure of our success so far.
In any case, most Christians would never take the trouble to make sense of these papers. “Christians,” as that crusty old philosopher Bertrand Russell used to quip, “would sooner die than think—in fact they do.” That is all too true. If sections of their handbook, such as the l
etter to the Romans, had been addressed to an American Church, they would be rejected as “far too complicated and intellectual.” Everything in America has to be said in one-page summaries or in camera-ready form for PowerPoint presentations. Longer than that, and they are lost—and we are safe.
The Director was the first to maintain that even if this material were leaked, it would not cause a stir. I have learned to bow to his judgment. With sales up and serious thought down, and with marketing triumphing over mission, Christian publishing and reading are approaching the point where inspiring reflection and reformation will be beyond the Bible itself. The conspiracy-prone fringe and the complacent majority are as bad as each other. The former cannot see clearly because they only see red; the latter do not read seriously, so they cannot see at all.
There is also a strategic reason for our confidence. The Operation is moving into a phase that is almost irreversible. History tends to mock the finality of judgments such as “irresistible” and “irreversible,” yet such claims are not far off. Your role in Operation Gravedigger is not to be a theoretician, let alone historian, so I will spare you a lengthy historical overview. However, to give yourself some simple historical back-bearings, it is useful to chart the development of the Operation against the course of the first and second phases of modernization.
The Darkest Hour Just Before Dawn
I call the Industrial Revolution, “Modernization, Phase One,” and the Information Revolution, “Modernization, Phase Two.” Obviously, the former was centered on production and was symbolized by the factory, whereas the latter is centered on communication and is symbolized by the computer. What matters for us is that when the Industrial Revolution took off in England in the mid-eighteenth century, we were caught unawares, and for a time the situation threatened to get out of control.
The reason was that the technological advances accompanied a massive spiritual awakening that swept Britain and the American colonies under the leadership of John Wesley, George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards (the first two, incidentally, were both Oxford men—a lamentable stain on the record of your former Bureau).
This period of spiritual awakening coincided with rapid economic, social and technological progress, as well as a new burst of European influence around the world. And not long after, it was followed by one of the greatest periods of reform in human history—even temporarily reversing the age-old human habit of slavery (though, thankfully, we are now back to the norm and there are more slaves today than when the abolitionists started). In other words, the “power of the Spirit” and the “power of steam” combined to form a devastating partnership. They created the danger that the newly energized Christian faith would be welcomed as the leading contributor to what the rest of the world would see as one of the greatest advances in human history. That we could not afford.
The threat that we faced was partly fulfilled in early nineteenth-century England and America. The Evangelical faith of the heirs of Wesley and Whitefield grew so strong (especially as inspired by the example of William Wilberforce) that it was actually described as “the single, most widespread influence in Victorian England”2 and “the rock on which the character of the nineteenth century English was founded.”3 At the same time, the first half of the nineteenth century in the U.S. has been called the “Evangelical Century” because of the striking Evangelical contributions to education, philanthropy and reform.
That dark hour in the mid-eighteenth century was our Dunkirk, and it forced the Council into the radical rethinking from which Operation Gravedigger was launched. We could not forestall such a momentous convergence of spiritual revival and social revolution—at least not in the English-speaking world. But if our counter-offensive succeeded, we could channel that power so that it would eventually become self-subverting—and on a scale never seen in history so far.
Now, more than two centuries later, we are well into the Information Revolution. The development of computers and the Internet has shifted the emphasis from production to communication—from a technology of muscle to one of mind—and the lead society today is no longer Britain but the United States.
We are at the decisive stage in the course of Operation Gravedigger. Curiously, ever since the mid-1970s, American Evangelicals have attempted to come to center stage in the U.S. just as they did in England 150 years ago, but the difference is comically plain. They are not Wilber-forces but Don Quixotes tilting at windmills—and angry Quixotes at that. Not only have they failed abjectly to do what they set out to achieve, but they have also brought down around their heads the greatest anti-Christian hostility in American history, which will soon marginalize them for good.
In other words, we are almost home. The combined effect of all the forces of modernization unleashed over the past 250 years, and the Church’s succumbing to it, is about to ensure the success of Operation Gravedigger.
This prediction may strike you as sweeping and overconfident. But once I have outlined the entire operation, you will appreciate the powerful evidence on which it rests. You may still be doubtful that so complete a collapse can be achieved in so short a time. This reaction comes from a weakness in the “intellectualist” tradition in which you have been trained. I will pick that up later.
For the moment, simply savor the breathtaking prospect of the Church in checkmate. Our ancient knights and rooks are pressing deep into the defense that surrounds the Christian king. The Director has withdrawn into himself with a concentration and a stillness that can be felt. The present stage of the Operation is charged with high-voltage tension like the moment between lightning and thunder.
The Way of the Fox, Not the Lion
Although Operation Gravedigger is essentially simple and its impact obvious, its underlying assumptions are quite subtle. In planning the Operation, we found two principles especially important. The first was “the way of the fox.”
When Louis XIV went out to battle, he inscribed on his cannons, “ultima ratio regum” (“the final argument of kings”). There, in a nutshell, is the philosophy of realpolitik: the big stick and the big battalions—a style of thinking that lives on to this day in brash slogans such as “shock and awe” and “mission accomplished.” Unfortunately for the Sun King, the Duke of Marlborough carried an even bigger stick and commanded even stronger battalions.
It is not in our nature to make mistakes like that. We knew that open warfare against the Church could not succeed. It depends on the basic maxim, “If you don’t win, you lose,” and the late-eighteenth-century alliance of Spirit and steam had left us horribly outnumbered and out-gunned in the English-speaking world. The situation was different in France, of course—thanks to our skeptical friends such as Voltaire and to the oppressive corruptions of the Roman Catholic Church. But our first concern was Protestant England and its colonies, represented by its newly revived Evangelical wing. We could rely on some heavy artillery in the English-speaking world (such as the skepticism of David Hume from north of the border), but taking everything into account, an allout attack was not an attractive proposition. There was never any suggestion of open persecution, let alone a massacre on the order of the St. Bartholomew’s Day slaughter of the Huguenots in France.
The secret of clandestine warfare, by contrast, lies in the maxim, “If you don’t lose, you win.” Ever since Machiavelli, Western statesmen and politicians have been fascinated with the idea of combining the wiles of the fox with the strength of the lion. We have always used both to effect, but this time we knew victory lay in the way of the fox. If war (in Clausewitz’s dictum) is the extension of politics by other means, clandestine war is the extension of conventional war by other means.
As you will see when you read through these emails, neither persecution nor discrimination is an essential part of our strategy. They are too crass. There is a time for bringing out a Nero, a Diocletian or Mao Tse-Tung, but not today. They are too crude, and their hostility too obvious. In mid-twentieth century China, where modernity was hardly advanced,
there were no televisions, let alone cell phones and an Internet, to broadcast what Mao was doing in the Cultural Revolution. But even so, his heavy-handed persecution was horribly counterproductive. “The blood of the martyrs,” as Christians defiantly insist, “was once again the seed of the Church.”
The brilliance of seduction through modernization is that it succeeds when modernity is at its best, not its worst. The insights and technologies of modernity are devastating because they are so powerful, so positive and so beneficial. After all, who can argue against his own tools after they have brought such convenience and success?
We never use modern insights and technologies to deny or defy the Adversary openly. That would be blatant—we simply replace him. These insights and technologies of modernity work so well that Christians who rely on them have “no need of God.” As we shall see, they can run their lives, repair their relationships, grow their churches and reach their dreams without any practical need for the Adversary at all. We have come as close as we ever have to creating a world in which humans can truly live contentedly “by bread alone.”
Stages in Subversion
This strategy of subversion through worldliness has followed certain overlapping stages, some of which we are completing only in the present generation.
The first stage is penetration (or “worming in”). This is the stage through which our agents infiltrate Christian groups and organizations with a view to influencing and manipulating them over the long haul.
The second stage is demoralization (or “softening up”). This is the stage at which we work to ruin the fabric of the Church’s spiritual and social life through such things as deviant teaching and public scandals. As this happens, Christian morale sags and Christians slowly become incapable of simple, instinctive resistance. For example, it was recently said of the Christian right in America that “its leaders are too often found with their foot in their mouth and their pants down.” Every such scandal is hypocrisy exposed and, better still, it is discouragement deepened. “The thing now”—as Marx described his rather crude version of the tactic—“is to instill poison wherever possible.”4