by Os Guinness
The third stage is subversion (or “winning over”). This is the stage through which we work to win the hearts and minds of key leaders of the Church and, through their “radical” or “daring” (read “revisionist” and “unfaithful”) new ideas, to rattle and unnerve the faithful who are committed to the old ways of seeing and doing things. Behind this move is the recognition that the Church’s morale and will to resist depend on its loyalty to the Adversary and to certain of his symbols, such as his Word or his sacraments. These are the flag and emblems of the Christian nation, and it is loyalty to these that we have to undermine.
We will never subvert all Christians, of course, but we do not need to do so. All we need is a passive acceptance of the corruption by the general body of Christians on the one hand and a positive allegiance to it from a carefully cultivated counter-elite on the other. Without such a counter-elite, we could never hope to win, let alone establish, our own rule. More on that later, but as you see when you cross the Atlantic, such Christian leaders as the current Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in America are a dream for us.
The fourth stage is defection (or “bringing over” individual Christians). This is the stage through which we keep up sustained propaganda efforts that have been specifically designed to make the most of notorious defections from the Christian side (counter-conversions, if you like). The high tide for this sort of brain drain in Europe was during late-nineteenth century (it has been one of the factors in the current shortage of serious Evangelical thinking ever since). But we are working on a new wave of defections in America today, when headlines such as “Thousands of atheist de-baptisms” and “Former Fundamentalist Denies the Authenticity of the Bible” are making a splash again.
Do not overrate such defections, however. Like that of defectors and émigrés in the recent Cold War, the value of counter-conversions and anti-testimonies rapidly diminishes with time. Today the shock headline; tomorrow the old bore and the chronic refugee. It is the enduring lies of the Enemy that we are battling.
The final stage, which still lies ahead, is liberation (or the “taking over” of the whole Church). This is the stage at which the degree of our influence will become absolute and the secret operation will become public—through coup d’état. The Church, in short, will become completely unfaithful to the Adversary while still pretending to be in his camp. That, obviously, is our supreme objective and the one we are actually approaching in this momentous generation.
Subvert Strength Rather than Attack Weakness
The second principle behind Operation Gravedigger takes the first principle even further, and it has proved to be most effective. The Church’s most crucial weakness is found at the point of her most conspicuous strength.
The tactic is as old as time: A person or a group’s strong point often becomes an unguarded point. This, as any English schoolboy knows, is amply illustrated in military disasters from the fall of Croesus’s “impregnable” Sardis in 549 B.C. to the fall of Singapore in 1942. (The British Empire’s mightiest naval base fell ignominiously to “little men on bicycles” who easily stormed the notorious 15-inch guns that were facing the wrong way.5) Each was unguarded at its strongest point. But there is something less obvious and more important to us: A person’s true strengths are not only likely to be left exposed; they can easily be turned inside out and made into real weaknesses.
Inversion, or turning things inside out and upside-down, is, of course, the heart of the revolution we are out to promote. The relative is made to bear the weight of the absolute, and finite people and things are given the place of the infinite (the “creature rather than the Creator,” as their handbook puts it).6
What happens when one strand of reality is singled out and stretched too far is hardly surprising. Wider reality springs back and has the last laugh. Pressed too far, for example, reason becomes rationalism and rebounds into mysticism; or freedom becomes anarchy and rebounds into authoritarianism. We thus become masters of irony and connoisseurs of the art of the side effect, the unintended consequence and the unknown aftermath. Reality rebounds, and things turn out the opposite of what they seem and what people expect. Strength becomes weakness; love becomes pornography; pleasure becomes boredom; and so on.
We have had classic successes with this tactic in the lives of individuals. You might call it the “Samson Syndrome,” because you see the cycle so clearly in the namesake. Trace the line from Samson’s early promise, to his extraordinary exploits, to his careless delinquency and ultimate downfall. Samson could become prodigal only because his strength was prodigious. When his gifts became his master, they were the key to his undoing. Et voilà, strength turned to weakness. “All men that are ruined,” said Edmund Burke, “are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.”7
We have sometimes pulled this off with whole nations, but it usually takes longer, and in the mid-eighteenth century time was what we lacked. What if, through an authentic revival, the Christian faith were to gain a decisive influence in Britain, America and the English-speaking world at the very time when those places (through modernization) were gaining a decisive influence in the world? In one leap, the Adversary would have been around the world with a new freedom and power, and centuries of work would have been undone. There was no time to lose. We had to put out the fire of Western revival where it started, before its sparks could be carried to some dry corner of the world less easily dealt with.
Our long-term objective was clear: to work out the best way to turn the Church’s strengths into weaknesses and turn their sudden advantage into a disadvantage. Once we found this, we could parody their own approach (“perverting” rather than “perfecting” their strength in weakness) and use it to plan our boldest operation.
This is how the Council’s thinking developed. To begin, the researchers and archivists were set to work on a full-scale re-examination and analysis of Christian beliefs and behavioral requirements. Despite the accepted wisdom that the ideal attack-point was faith, we insisted on starting from scratch and hunting for any new lines of inquiry that might have provided us with background on the problem at hand. Might there be some key flaw or potential stress-point we had overlooked in earlier studies?
The “burrowers” were magnificent. No lines of inquiry were overlooked. Personal files, subject files, method files, background files. They rechecked every last one. Never have they worked over anything with such thoroughness, but their findings were always the same. The crucial point of strain for Christians is ultimately their faith.
The job then was to crack the secret of the workings of faith. Or, as it is put in the trade, to analyze their handwriting—trade jargon for their habits and patterns of behavior. As you know, the philosophical strength of the Christian faith lies in its claim to truth, whereas the social strength of the Christian faith lies in its challenge to tension. It was at this second point that the break came. Let me explain.
Part of the root meaning of the word “faith” is “tension” or “tautness.” There, in two words, is an accurate picture of the faith required of Christians. And there, too, is the rub. Loyalty to the Adversary in a world liberated by us makes their lives a kind of “double wrestling.”8 Faithfulness to him has to mean foreignness in the world. As they were taught by him, they are to live in a way that is clearly distinct in terms of space (“in” the world but not “of it”) and in terms of time (“no longer” what they were, “not yet” what they will be). Their unenviable role, as one of them has put it, is to be “against the world for the world.”9 Let them try telling that to their next-door neighbors.
Such a high-wire balancing act would be precarious at best, even if the poise it involves were all that is required of them. But that is not the case, and here a further element is introduced. The Adversary has actually commanded them to be identified with the world. From his perspective, there are still a great number of positive reasons for their being in the world, the most basic of which is to seek to reclaim it for h
im.
Here is where we saw their ancient Achilles’ heel at its most exposed. If any of these “positive” purposes of cultural involvement could be overdeveloped, they would serve to obscure the growing negative side effects. For instance, if their desire to witness leads to cultural engagement, that engagement could lead in turn to the danger of worldliness. The price of contact would be contamination.
This cultural contamination could happen in any culture. How much easier, though, would it be to achieve in a culture that Christians regard as good because they themselves had contributed to its creation?
What the Council envisaged has worked out exactly. From the initial research to the present moment, no operation has ever gone better, and Operation Gravedigger is sure to become a classic in subversion through culture. The textbook procedure has been followed with such ease that you, with your philosophical training as a counter-apologist, would find it absurd. The Church contributed to the creation of the modern world. Soon she was committed to that world without reservation. Before long she was hopelessly contaminated—in the world and up to her neck.
We have moved easily through the standard levels of subversion, each level leaving the Church deeper in cultural captivity. First, we encouraged the complete identification of the Church with culture so that she could not see where one ended and the other began. This is the culture-blind level, the level at which we have neutralized her integrity.
Second, we developed this identification of Church and culture to the point where she had no strength to act independently. This is the culture-bound level, the level at which we have neutralized her effectiveness either to do anything distinctively different from the culture or to be seen as different by others.
Now we are approaching the culture-burnt level. This is the level at which it becomes apparent (too late) that, through her uncritical identification with culture, the Church has been badly burned and must live with the consequences. Our supreme prize at this level is the complete devastation of the Church by getting the Adversary to judge her himself.
Here you see the devilry of the Council’s design. To this point the focus has been on the Church’s being subverted as her cultural strengths are turned into weaknesses. But now, enter the Adversary. When we manage to see that his gifts, such as the fruits of culture, are subtly changed and become revered in his place—which he then calls “idols”—he changes too: from giver to judge. In fact, some of his most severe judgments in history have been against his own gifts and works once he sees they have been “idolized.”
The clearest precedents for this are found in their own records. It is most revealing to follow them through. Who killed a man for daring to touch the ark of his covenant, but carelessly let it fall into enemy hands when it was treated as a talisman? Who was most against the first Temple in Jerusalem (which he himself designed) once it was abused? Who attacked the rules surrounding the Sabbath that he himself had ordained? Or the Law that he himself had laid down? Who keeps reiterating the theme of destroying what he himself has built and uprooting what he has planted? When his own gifts and works are misused, no one is more against them than the Adversary.10
There lay the guarantee of our success. Under certain circumstances, the Adversary could be counted on to act as a sort of “agent extraordinaire” and do our work for us. All that remained was to find the most suitable gifts against which he would be forced to move once they were perverted. His own transcendence would then become subversive. There is nothing, short of himself, which he might not have to judge and destroy.
Here, in a stroke, is the beauty of subversion through worldliness and its infinite superiority to persecution. Persecution is the world’s drastic action to deal with the foreign body in its midst; judgment is the Adversary’s drastic action to deal with the foreignness in the midst of his body. But if the Adversary is to judge his own people, who are we to complain?
Echoes of an Earlier Glory
For anyone with a feel for history, Operation Gravedigger duplicates the dynamics of our monumental victory over the Church in its early days. I am sure that it will also prove to be as decisive. As you know, the fledgling Church grew at an alarming rate once it came free from the constrictions of its Jewish parentage—a bad example, I admit, of over-playing our hand with excessive persecution. After three centuries, the Church was actually bidding to become the powerful force in the Roman Empire, and thus automatically a powerful force for the whole world. We were naturally concerned—until we saw that one of the Church’s main strengths, its unique new stance toward culture, was also its Achilles’ heel—if it could be relaxed. The cultural challenge of the feisty early Christians would then slump into an amiable cultural compliance.
That is how we achieved our magnificent victory in A.D. 312 when Constantine won the battle of Milvian Bridge and went on to declare the Roman Empire “Christian.” It opened the door to one of the greatest subversions of all time. The Christianization of Rome led to the Romanization of the Christian faith and away from the way of Jesus. That was a fateful detour, and we exploited it with great relish right down to the eighteenth century, when the massive Enlightenment reactions to established churches made it a tricky card to play. Operation Gravedigger is a similar subversion through cultural captivity on a monumental scale today: The Christianization of the modern world is leading to the modernization of the Christian faith and away from the way of Jesus. Similarly, as we shall see, the Christianization of America has led to the Americanization of the Christian faith and away from the way of Jesus.
Operation Outline
I can only outline the Operation here, but I will take up the details in later memoranda. Your overall briefing will be divided into three main parts.
Part one covers the conception of the project. I have just dealt with this briefly here, but I will elaborate in a second memo.
Part two analyzes the rise of the modern world and the overwhelming pressures it brings to bear on the Christian faith. The three key pressures to be discussed are secularization, or the Cheshire-cat factor; privatization, or the private-zoo factor; and pluralization, or the smorgasbord factor. This second section will deal with concentrating pressures on the Church.
Part three will analyze what contamination by culture has meant for Christian institutions, Christian ideas and Christian involvement in the world. This section will deal with creating problems for the Church.
The stage we have reached is critical. New environments have challenged the Christian faith before, but it has never faced as massive a threat as it faces from modernization now. No age, no culture, no civilization has ever represented such immeasurable and unmanageable realities or carried such an unparalleled capacity to shape the lives of its members. In the spirit of modernity, the spirit of faith does not know what it is up against. Down the centuries the Church has been the most influential culture-shaping force in all history, but it has finally met its match.
The modern world has risen up through and reached beyond the Christian faith, and now it is essentially no longer Christian. Our progress will never be reversed. Their earlier authority can never be recalled. The father has produced a son; and now the son has come of age and will soon knock the father off his throne.
With the dawn of the computer revolution, the countdown of Operation Gravedigger has begun. You could hardly have been more fortunate in the timing of your promotion. Again, my congratulations. The prospect of working with you gives me great pleasure.
MEMORANDUM 2
The Sandman Effect
FROM: DEPUTY DIRECTOR, CENTRAL SECURITY COUNCIL
TO: DIRECTOR DESIGNATE, LOS ANGELES BUREAU
CLASSIFICATION: ULTRA SECRET
Your response to my memo was exactly what I had hoped. I anticipated the intense interest with which you responded to Operation Gravedigger, as well as your questions. Not for nothing does your dossier include the comment: “Loves philosophic jousting.” I also wanted to see how you would take my needling over
your intellectualism.
Some agents never succeed in adapting from counter-apologetics to cultural subversion, and a major reason is their snobbery. Once trained in the sophisticated methods of intellectual subversion, they consider other approaches beneath them and miss the chance to use simpler but equally effective strategies. European skepticism has proved to be a deadly weapon, but its use is extremely limited. Being groomed for the highest posts, as you are, you would do well to add to it a complete mastery of the approach I am outlining.
A Surprising Discovery
Let me pick up the story again and elaborate on a key contribution to our success so far—the Church’s extraordinary vulnerability to our approach. This is also the best reply to the questions you raised about the strategy. Your point is well taken that irony is not the exclusive property of either side, and that Philistines throwing parties should beware of Samsons who lean on pillars. Who had the last laugh in that case is therefore a moot point, and one that is not at stake here. As you will see, our Samson is asleep. Due to what we call the Sandman Effect, Operation Gravedigger proceeds while Christians sleep.
In the beginning of the project, when the Council had agreed on the main objectives and strategy of the Operation, they sent an outline of the plans to various central departments for preliminary testing and development. The Department of Intelligence and the Department of Propaganda and Disinformation were the top priority, since their respective roles in the Operation were recognized as primary.