Wheaton College, C.S. Lewis & Bad Jackie: On preferring the nightmare to reality - The Diigo Meta page

• 25 Jul 12
  

  Todd Suomela

  "When someone defensively prefers the nightmare to the evidence, then we know — we know — that he enjoys the nightmare. We know that it serves some emotional or political need for him — a need so great that reality itself cannot stop him from trying to meet it."

  evangelical religion critique belief evil other evidence rationality fear

  • The last time we discussed this simple test, Xeno reminded us that C.S. Lewis also wrote about this in Mere Christianity. Lewis urged all Christians to apply this test to ourselves as a prophylactic against the soul-destroying corrosion of Bad-Jackie-ism:

    The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

  • American evangelicalism has fallen in love with its own nightmares of Satanic baby-killers, desperately wishing — and then pretending, and then almost believing our own pretense — that we are on the side of righteousness against superlative evil.

    We need that nightmare to be true. We want it to be true. We’ve forgotten who we are or who we might be without it.

    And we’ll fight to cling to this nightmare, reality be damned, even if clinging to the nightmare means we will never again be truly awake. Even if clinging to our imaginary horrors fixes us forever in a universe of pure hatred.

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