The Screwtape Letters Changed My Life

I’m a secular humanist who used to sneer at religion. Now I stand up for it.

This essay originally appeared in the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe on June 29, 2025.

I grew up in a deeply secular household. My parents, expats from the Soviet Union, were always taught that religion has no place in a progressive society; certainly, they did not give religion a place in our home, looking instead to the tenets of progressive education to guide my moral development. As a result, I grew up attending a school founded by the father of progressive education himself, John Dewey, and I went through the first 18 years of my life under the tutelage of the spirit of secular humanism.

To say that my school was progressive is an understatement. My seventh-grade English textbook was called “Social Justice in a Democratic Society,” and that same year — 2009 — class was dismissed for a week so that all seventh-graders could participate in “Diversity Day” activities. The following year, my English class read Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s “Inherit the Wind,” a fictionalized account of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. Guided by Enlightenment rationality, we poked fun at the creationists who turned a blind eye to Darwinian evolution.

By high school, I had discovered a predilection for Nietzsche’s “The Genealogy of Morality,” believing that many of society’s shortcomings were the direct result of Christianity’s “turn the other cheek” mentality, which seemed to me to be the antithesis to the establishment of justice.

By 18, I had gone through 12 years of school without ever once having encountered religious texts, doctrines, or ideas in a positive light. Reared on the scientific method, I saw the universe as a series of models: Mathematics could explain the optimal number of people to date before settling down, and cost-benefit analysis could calculate whether having children was worth the carbon footprint. I aligned myself with atheist intellectuals — Sam Harris, Robert Sapolsky, Christopher Hitchens — whose frameworks I believed would help me best make sense of our complex world.

Around that same time, I was assigned books from the Old Testament in my freshman literature seminar and learned to look at the Bible as a collection of stories that had informed the development of literary history rather than as a religious text to be taken seriously. That same year, the election of Donald Trump caused me to roll my eyes once more at religious fanatics who were blindsided by some words written in an old book.

It might not have been until my early 20s that I first directly interacted with anyone who held religious sensibilities. I had met secular people from religious backgrounds, but I had never encountered anyone who believed any of the words printed in the Holy Bible or who spent their weekends at church or a synagogue. And I distinctly remember the first devout Catholic I had ever had a conversation with, because he did not strike me as your typical Catholic at all: He was raised by Buddhist parents in Hong Kong and converted to Christianity after becoming convinced that Christianity would bring him closest to “the Truth.”

I was puzzled. How could someone with whom I had just spent 30 minutes arguing about creationism possibly have any sort of stake in “the Truth”? But my new friend — who likely believed that I was going to Hell for my atheism — wanted me to be open-minded. As he saw it, I might never believe in the same version of reality that guided his day-to-day experiences, but I could certainly find value in many of religion’s moral teachings.

I was skeptical. My idea of religious morality had always come from Nietzsche — the philosopher who believed that religion was a system designed to glorify meekness and guilt while stifling human potential. What could religion possibly have to teach me about morality?

But my friend recommended that I read C.S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters” — a book he believed would speak to my English-major sensibilities — and I decided to humor him.

“The Screwtape Letters” is an epistolary novel written from the perspective of Screwtape — one of Satan’s senior demons — to his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon who is assigned an unnamed “Patient” to lead away from God and down the path of temptation. Though I went into the book with an open mind, I was initially unconvinced that I would find anything to relate to in its pages — my way of life was so vastly different, after all, from that of someone like C.S. Lewis, a devout Anglican convert whose world was populated by formal theology and Latin quotations. But the further I read, the more I forgot that the book had anything to do with God or the Devil or Christianity at all — Lewis was simply proposing a philosophy for how to live well.

In one letter, for instance, Lewis, speaking through the voice of Screwtape, explores the idea that doing nothing is worse than doing something actively evil, because it suggests an utter absence of purpose. How many times have we gleaned similar prescriptions from studies demonstrating the harm, for instance, of scrolling for hours on end through social media? In another letter, Lewis critiques the modern obsession with constant change and progress, arguing that such a fixation can lead to restlessness and dissatisfaction. Wasn’t I witnessing this very phenomenon at Columbia University, where students lost nights of sleep and popped Adderalls just to chase the latest thing to add to their resume?

And in my favorite letter, Lewis underscores the ideal of love as self-sacrificial, rooted in action rather than in fleeting “romantic” emotion. The strongest relationships were based not on passion but on commitment — and I had seen this play out in the loving household that I came from. These were not solely “Christian” beliefs — these were ideas that anyone could adopt to live a better life.

After finishing “Screwtape,” I grew fascinated by the development of religion in our society. I read Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine and began to see their ideas crop up in day-to-day life — even in many of the tenets of secular humanism that I had so deeply idolized from childhood. I didn’t believe that Eve had been created out of the rib of Adam or that Adam had been created in the likeness of God, but I sure as hell believed in something like sin — the idea that some actions, such as murder, were categorically immoral.

In abandoning religion, we — the secular rational humanists of progressive dogma — might be missing a large chunk of the puzzle of human existence. Religion, after all, is a set of narratives that grapple with morality — ideas that teach us to discern right from wrong. Today, when we are in desperate need of societal harmony, borrowing ideas from religious morality systems can help many of us avoid falling into depression, raise our children in stable two-parent households, and promote learning over violence. Such values are not arbitrary — they are ideas that have kept many societies from devolving into anarchy. They are the values that have upheld civilizations for centuries — and perhaps even made them possible.

I’m still far from religious, but I’ve come to appreciate the moral architecture that religion provides in a stable society — and I believe that it deserves a place in contemporary life. After all, are those of us who turn up our noses at religious people any better than the same religious people who reject evolution or believe in the afterlife? We secular humanists might have lots to teach creationists, but they have plenty to teach us. Perhaps true enlightenment lies not in rejecting tradition, but in rediscovering the wisdom buried within it.

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