Screwtape shows Wormwood how to transform a minor trespass into a major sin:
Success here depends on confusing him.
If you try to make him explicitly and professedly proud of being a Christian,
you will probably fail; the Enemy’s warnings are too well known.
* Enemy = GOD
If, on the other hand, you let [the idea of ‘we Christians’] [drop out altogether]
and merely make him complacent about ‘his set’,
you will produce not true spiritual pride but mere social vanity //which, by comparison, is a trumpery, puny little sin.
[What you want] is to keep a sly self-congratulation /mixing with all his thoughts
and never allow him to raise the question ‘What, precisely, am I congratulating myself about?’
[The idea of belonging to an inner ring], of being in a secret, is very sweet to him.
Play /on that nerve.
Teach [him], using the influence of this girl /when she is silliest,
[to adopt an air of amusement at the things () the unbelievers say].
[Some theories //which he may meet in modern Christian circles] may here prove helpful];
theories, I mean, that place [the hope of society] /in some inner ring of ‘clerks’, some trained minority of theocrats.
It is no affair of yours [whether those theories are true or false];
the great thing is to make Christianity a mystery religion //in which he feels himself one of the initiates.
From The Screwtape Letters
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis