Two Sinners at an American Chapel

Love, we have been told, is slow to anger; it is, as a result, slow to forgive, for it will not be in a hurry to assume that there is anything to forgive; and if there is, it will not be in a hurry to make a business of forgiving. … The good manners of the City of God are supernaturally instinctive; the instinct of the new way of life should warn us of any approaching danger of pomposity or guile, and the danger is subtle. The new way—forgiveness, humility, clarity, charity—is there; it is the old man on the new way who is the tempter, and who beguiles us away from it while we think we are walking on it. … Rejoicing in other people’s iniquity, one way or another, is a not uncommon fault.

—Charles Williams, The Forgiveness of Sins, pp. 161-162

It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are always very ‘spiritual,’ that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism. Two advantages will follow. In the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself. … I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment’s notice from impassioned prayer for a wife’s or son’s ‘soul’ to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.

—C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters III

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The Prayer of the Leftist

God, please, protect us from Drumpf. He’s an idiot—how could anybody vote for him! Racist, sexist, childish—rrgghhh! I am so angry with the people who voted for him! Bunch of backwoods morons and CEOs and white supremacists, overjoyed to finally have somebody who’s as evil as they are in the White House. And now we’re completely screwed. I never thought I’d live to see this kind of fear and animosity ruling America. Those stupid bastards! He’d better get impeached.

Who knows if he’d even notice, though. Guy’s got the attention span of a tossed salad. I am so scared of what he might do with our nuclear arsenal. Or his own twitter account—imagine the disasters he could manage with a few stupid, unretractable words to Xi Jinping or Salman Saud.

Just when everything was going so well, too. Obamacare was just implemented. We were all set to have our first female President. We’d ended … well, okay, we hadn’t ended the War on Terror, but we were close! We were doing better than we ever did under Bush, anyway! And now health care’s gone and education’s going, racism among the police is only going to get worse, everything the government does is going to favor big businesses at the expense of the poor. And they aren’t going to let any immigrants in no matter how badly they need refuge, just because their skin is brown! These people are disgusting! And they’re my neighbors, my relatives! How can I ever forgive them for this?

They don’t deserve to be forgiven. The only right they really seem to believe in is the right to bear arms; they deserve everything that gets taken from them by this administration. They’d better not come crying to me when the tables are turned, because I’ll look them right in the eye and say You did this.

The Prayer of the Nationalist

Lord, thank You for Donald Trump. Thank You for giving us a President who’s going to put America first, instead of constantly bashing our country and values and traditions. A President who’s pro-life, unlike that baby-killer Hillary. One who’ll defend traditional families and—well, he isn’t perfect, but he hasn’t done anything those nutjob liberals don’t expect us to praise other people for doing, and then they get mad, and even expect us to be, when he does them? Idiots.

Hardly surprising. All they can do is whine! They’ll moan about police violence against blacks, but with the way liberals are about guns, what do you expect? Nobody can defend themselves against the government without a gun. Or if you want to defend American lives overseas, or even come to the defense of countries or ethnicities that are being battered by foreign oppressors—like, say, the Coptic Christians in Egypt being screwed over by the Muslims—they instantly start screaming about imperialism! Or racism, since as far as they’re concerned everyone they don’t like is racist. Doesn’t matter if your closest friends are minorities, doesn’t matter if you married one, it doesn’t even matter when minorities flat-out tell them they’re wrong. They’ve got their religion of socialist politics, and their faith is blind. Except to Christians—oppression never matters if it’s oppression of Christians, like in Egypt or Indonesia or Pakistan.

They want a perfect world to come out of a microwave, without ever getting their hands dirty. Not any dirtier than a retweet. That’s why they all work in white collar jobs and despise anybody who’s less educated than they are. Real, hard work is embarrassing to the likes of them.

All they can do is talk about what’s wrong with America. No gratitude for how good they’ve got it here. No respect for the sacrifices other people made to give them such a nice life. They’re all talking about running away, moving to Canada! Good riddance is what I say. Oh, you don’t like America, you self-righteous jackasses? Well, there’s the border! See if you find anywhere better!