The New Gospel

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Every great human utterance reaches beyond what was consciously said into greater, more profound depths; there is always, hidden in what is said, a surplus of what is not said, which lets the words grow with the passage of time. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">CS Lewis was a prose writer of the first rank and it is impossible to understand his enormous impact on his readers if you extricate his arguments from their contexts and formulate them analytically.&nbsp; It is possible to do that, but in the process you divorce </em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">what he says</em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"> from </em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">how he says it</em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"> … [I intend] to show the extent to which the apparent cogency of his arguments depends on his rhetoric rather than on his logic. &nbsp; To see that, we immerse ourselves in his rhetoric—his linguistic facility, his engaging terminology, his apt examples, his brilliant analogies, his stirring images, his persuasive metaphors, his recurring wit, his clever turns of phrase, his unexpected reversals of familiar truisms and so forth … The net result is a freshness, an honesty, and a sense of excitement unparalleled in contemporary apologetic literature.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">He [Reverend Obadiah Slope] conceives it to be his duty to know all the private doings and desires of the flock entrusted to his care.&nbsp; From the poorer classes he exacts an unconditional obedience to set rules of conduct … With the rich, experience has already taught him that a different line of action is necessary.&nbsp; Men in the upper walks of life do not mind being cursed, and the women, presuming that it be done in delicate phrase, rather like it.&nbsp; But he had not, therefore, given up so important a portion of believing Christians.&nbsp; With the men, indeed, he is generally at variance; they are hardened sinners, on whom the voice of the priestly charmer too often falls in vain; but with the ladies, old and young, firm and frail, devout and dissipated, he is, as he conceives, all powerful.&nbsp; He can reprove faults with so much flattery, and utter censure in so caressing a manner, that the female heart, if it glow with a spark of Low-Church susceptibility, cannot withstand him; and when once admitted it is not easy to shake him off.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses.&nbsp; The broad masses of people are ... a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another ... The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning.&nbsp; This sentiment ... is not highly differentiated, but has the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood ... Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively ... It must present that aspect of truth which is favorable to its own side ... All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas.&nbsp; These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Using film, radio, posters, the press, and carefully staged rallies and marches by party members, Goebbels nurtured the myth of Hitler’s infallibility.&nbsp; He promoted as well the illusion that Hitler knew the hopes and struggles of every German, cared deeply for each of his people, and might intercede for them personally, much in the manner of the loving Christian God … Thanks to his [Hitler’s] undeniable [early] successes, popular adulation of Hitler soon took on the quality of a religious faith.&nbsp; Hitler’s position as a kind of secular god would later convince many members of the SS, and others as well, to carry out the extermination of the Jews without feeling that they had to consider ordinary laws and morals.</em></p>