Temptation, Coming to a Conference Near You

How would a demon tempt people at a professional development conference?

Ben Dockery | Est. 4 minutes

Temptation, Coming to a Conference Near You

At last year’s Good Work Summit, I opened the day by sharing how I would tempt the room full of learners (if I was given Screwtape’s task). This year, instead of reading a letter to the event participants – I’m sharing in the newsletter.

The next time you go to a professional training event or listen to a sermon or (eh, eh, eh…still time) attend the Good Work Summit next week – you have entered the realm of spiritual struggle. Prepare to stand your ground. Be warned - awareness and armor will help you stay alert.

Dear Hamilton [1], 

Thank you for your inquiry. I understand the internship process can be trying, but we have all had to do it. Your goal is to develop as a tempter and learn how to better exploit human weakness. Mistakes are inevitable, but letting a client slip through your fingers by attending a conference to connect his work with his faith? That’s serious. We will let you try your hand a little longer before calling for back-up. 

The Danger of Development

With regards to your question about how to damage your patient's conference experience, there are ways to spoil the day. Professional development combined with faith development still leaves participants susceptible to pride. Since “work” is an area where church leaders often neglect the Enemy’s basic teachings – people feel defenseless in a task that occupies much of their life. Once they see His plan, we often never get such patient’s hearts back. The best hope is to make him proud of his new discovery.

Still, your priority should be to maintain your patient’s compartmentalized life. As much as we detest human attendance at church and Sunday rituals, we must always guard their minds and affections from applying truth to their Monday responsibilities. Fighting your patient one morning a week in church (and the occasional morning devotions) is far better than having to consider every hour and every place as a sacred invitation. Such is the danger of this event. 

Historical Context

I don’t recall if you have studied this in your curriculum yet, but you will learn that ancients operated with a belief that a god of any sorts would never get their hands dirty. Work was for lower beings—something to shun. To be god-like was to avoid labor. This was an enormous help to our cause. [2]

As this idea eroded, we established a spiritual caste system, a “bi-levelism” to borrow the old term. Only the clergy did God’s work. But, the Enemy’s “reformers” cracked the sacred/secular wall we had established through the Middle Ages. As our barricade broke, we adjusted. The next phase involved separating work and family. Production in factories made work a destination and profit triumphed over human dignity during the time history refers to as the Industrial Revolution. 

Our research departments today are reporting that modern advances in technology and generative AI prove to be new ways to distort the human’s view of work. We nearly convinced them to work like machines, and might convince them to escape their nature altogether. You must continually blind your patient to the mystery of being human - try exciting him around transcending his creatureliness – it could spill over into a million untold vices. 

Enough history - let’s return to your client questions. 

Techniques For The Day

When your patient hears stories of Good Work, it’s best to flood him with thoughts of quitting his job for a “greater cause.” He’ll soon be overwhelmed with the financial realities and distracted by future economic uncertainty. Events are good at making people leap to sign up for an idea only to fail to follow through. You want to stir grand future plans with no present action. [3]

Similarly, humans are often inclined to experience guilt when they have success at work. Since your client is in a season of prosperity, use his guilt to make him think his work is only a means to an end: giving money. I know this advice sounds contradictory since we detest clients who live generous lives. You’ll have to trust me. It is true we see humans used mightily by the Enemy when they catch a vision of generosity – it is normally a worst-case scenario. However, you have to temporarily set aside the standard strategy. In this instance, you must steer him to see his work as an instrumental good (all the goo feelings associated with giving can actually be selfish, our ultimate goal), but never let him see work as intrinsically good. [4] You can exploit his greed and financial fear later. At the conference, feeling guilt can keep him from connecting dots in his imagination.

Speaking of imagination, some at the event consider themselves experts at this ‘integrated life’ - ‘connecting faith and work.’ You could only wish you had a client like that! Experts do not think they have anything to learn, which is a major win for us. I’ve told past interns they can go ahead and phone the taxidermist when a client becomes an “expert” - while the client might look alive on the outside, they have died on the inside. Their imaginations have vanished, their questions ceased.

Given your patient signed up for the conference sensing a need to learn, you must curve his curiosity to the menial: Is the coffee locally sourced and do the lights enhance the speaker, etc. 

Final Distractions

The danger of a day like this is that this creature has set aside time/attention – the most sacred of human commodities. However, the packed conference schedule is an advantage. Use this to squelch his moments of reflection. When you can, interrupt with phone distractions - remember humans have shown little resistance to the buzzing phone alert. See to it that he can’t stay in the moment - that he can’t dwell - that he won’t ask a colleague what she has learned. 

Remember: The Summit event is likely to make the old appeals that the human Creator, their King, made work actually “good.” Good by original design. Good because their King was the first worker. Good because humans were designed to work and represent the Enemy on earth by their work. Good for the worker and those in society. You must counter all this Good-ness. Try negative news alerts or timely emails.

Let me conclude, your internship’s main goal remains undermining his faith and preventing the formation of virtue. Keep this in mind throughout the day. Even if he grows in understanding the Enemy’s view of work and human dignity, make sure he doesn't grow in knowing the Enemy himself. Don’t let him remember the great sacrifice and victory enabling the Enemy’s entire project.

Devilspeed,

Mr. Krow [5]

P.S. If he buys a book at the bookstore, be sure he does it to impress others and not for his own enjoyment or edification. Learning threatens our mission.

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[1] This is part of a series of letters in the style of Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, but applied to the workplace. You can read the first for more context. Lewis published his first book, Spirits in Bondage, under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. It was published in 1919 as a collection of poems written between 1915-1918 while he was serving in trenches of WW1 and a military trainee at Oxford. Clive was real, Hamilton was not.

[2] For a longer treatment of the church’s views of work, see Historical Developments in Vocation and the Theology of Work.

[3] Borrowed directly from Lewis. He argues that the devil pushes us out of the present The Point at which Time Touches Eternity.

[4] See chapters 5 & 6 in Your Work Matters to God, Doug Sherman and William Hendricks. (Navpress, 1988).

[5]  The tempter’s name is a puzzle we hope you can solve.