Which Dick?

I’ve been rereading “That Hideous Strength” and in the second chapter, this conversation hit like a sledge hammer. The inner ring you seek, will strangle and castrate your soul.

“Besides: I haven’t yet told you. Dick’s going to be there. He came up in time for dinner last night and got busy at once.”

Studdock’s mind darted hither and thither in search of some safe way to conceal the fact that he did not know who Dick was. In the nick of time he remembered a very obscure colleague whose Christian name was Richard.

“Telford?” said Studdock in a puzzled voice. He knew very well that Telford could not be the Dick that Curry meant...

— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

Last week, I used satire to expose the hypocrisy of Missouri legislators who execute rape-conceived children while protecting rapists. The response was swift—I was called demonic for naming what their policies actually do. I’m not sorry for using hyperbole in satire. That’s the point.

This essay is a companion piece to my article about evangelical women’s worship of Ishtar. That piece examined how women mistake the goddess for Christ. This is the male perspective: why men reach for the inner ring, grasping for Baal while thinking they’re grasping for truth.

Mark Studdock appears ordinary at first—young, married, ambitious—but Lewis shows us a man already captured before the story begins. Mark is disaffected by Jane’s career pursuits, indifferent to children, sexually selfish. He wants the inner ring more than he wants his marriage. He’s postmodern in the worst sense: unrooted from tradition, disconnected from his wife, desperate for validation from institutions that view him as useful material, not as a person. The crisis isn’t that Mark gets seduced by Belbury—it’s that he arrives already hollowed out, ready to be filled with whatever passwords grant him access.

The crisis of the postmodern progressive man hasn’t changed much from 1945 to 2025. Whether he’s married and disaffected by his wife’s career, or unmarried in a poly relationship caring little for his partners’ pursuits, he has no interest in children and his sexual appetites are selfish. What he wants is the inner ring. How do I learn the language, the passwords, of the temple guards?

For Mark, Curry (as in curry favor) is the way into the inner ring of influence and power at Belbury and the N.I.C.E. Institute. For Lewis, each word carries multiple meanings. He didn’t accidentally choose “Dick” as the password. In 1945 Britain, it meant Richard, yes—but also “clever dick” (the annoying know-it-all), “private dick” (the detective fumbling for clues), and the cruder anatomical meaning Lewis absolutely knew from boarding school culture. Every meaning serves the scene: Mark is trying to be the clever dick who knows the answer, playing detective to figure out the clues, while being metaphorically emasculated by his inability to answer. The question has no real answer—knowing “which Dick” proves nothing except you’ve learned to play the game. Lewis is showing us the inner ring operates through humiliation disguised as initiation.

Christian readers sanitize Lewis at our own peril, much like we sanitize the Bible at our own peril. A working-class reading of the Bible—one that knows what bodies actually do, what men actually want, what sin actually costs—is often truer than the sanitized, lifelong-churchgoer reading that skips over the uncomfortable parts.

St. Augustine knew this. He lived as the ultimate sinner before his conversion—sexual license, intellectual pride, Manichean heresy, the works. His intimate knowledge of sin made him the greatest explicator of sin the Church has known. He could write about concupiscence not as abstract theological category but as lived reality—the way desire captures you, the way pride blinds you, the way you rationalize evil while committing it. He knew how the rubber bands go on, one at a time, until you can’t remember what it felt like to be whole.

This is why God converted him. This is why Paul—chief of sinners, persecutor of the Church—had to meet Christ on the Damascus road. The men who know sin intimately become the most dangerous witnesses against it. They can’t be fooled by the passwords, because they know what the passwords are covering. Augustine could see through every intellectual justification for sin because he’d used them all himself.

When Augustine read Scripture, he read it as a former addict reads an intervention—recognizing every evasion, every rationalization, every step toward destruction, because he’d walked that path. The polo-wearing men who grunt at ballgames but cower from their wives’ disapproving stares never see what Augustine saw, because they’ve never needed to see it. They’ve never had the rubber bands tight enough to cut off circulation. They think their carefully maintained respectability means they’re whole men, when they’ve already been castrated by the very comfort they’re protecting.

In 2006, I was driving to Dallas, Texas with a college dean who was kind enough to help me deliver academic papers at a conference. No one had provided me this opportunity before. One step of entering into the academy isn’t simply the ability to write. I’ve always had a nascent skill in that area. After all, I’ve been an avid reader my entire life, consuming books since my first librarian convinced me to read more than picture books. Once I moved on from pictures to words, it took little time before I moved onto chapter books and then mythology and Tolkien before middle school. I had no guidance. I had no mentors. I was a child, unmoored from expectations of adults. It was understood I was uncommon, but little was done to develop my reading for a purpose.

By the time I made it to high school, I had read every book the teachers had assigned the other students. If teachers went out of their way to assign me something new, I finished it within hours. Though there was no gathering of that growing body of knowledge, I spent hours at the library, even into high school.

In college, I was like a cannonball, set loose in the stacks of knowledge. No one had set me a target before and I wasn’t set on one now. I blasted through everything I came into contact with. Psychology? What was this? Religion? Fantastic. Philosophy? People reasoned? As a discipline? I was dumbfounded. It was like an all-you-can-eat buffet for a man starving for discipline. Not for knowledge. Discipline. I had knowledge.

None of my college professors understood that. So they failed me. F’s. D’s. Just like in high school. But occasionally, one or two noticed that the interest I showed wasn’t a child pulling apart a toy, but a man learning how to construct a theory of knowledge for the first time in his life.

Then, one day, finally, I, who was only a young man, who remained undisciplined at everything, found myself leaving too soon from college, having finally started to realize that this was where I belonged but I hadn’t yet learned the last lesson. So I set off with my very young family, a wife and a young son, to seminary. I thought seminary would be the catalyst to finish my growth into an academic.

It was. But it was the type of catalyst that is exothermic, creating an intolerable chemical burn. I left seminary with nothing but ash in my mouth.

Three years later though, I was in that car with Dr. Moyers, riding to Dallas. Life had changed, suddenly. The discipline I hadn’t quite developed before seminary had developed at MSU. The excellence I was working toward showed in every effort. The ability to read and write was now a disciplined skill (though Dr. Finch still couldn’t understand my working-class use of language and grammar). To be fair, I was raising my second child by then and Grammarly didn’t exist.

In that world, I spent a lot of time reading Marx, Engels, Fish, Derrida, and the other postmodern and Marxist theorists. Honestly, I spent a lot of time trying to understand what they meant. As smart and as well-read as I was, I often used the “big words” like lacunae as well as anyone else, but I’m not sure we knew what it really meant to be a deconstructionist or a reader response critic. I think there was a lot of pretense in our pretending. Like Mark Studdock, we were all sure we knew exactly who “Dick” was. It was absolutely vital we knew “Dick” and could explain “Dick” in great detail.

The game was life. The pretense was life.

For the first time, I was on the inside. My life was going in the right direction. Professors were writing recommendations for me. My thesis had been nominated for Thesis of the Year at MSU (it would win later that year). The dean was taking me under his wing. The assistant dean was pointing out how smart I was to the other students. I could pretend that I was still faithful, but going to one of the most liberal churches in Springfield. I was getting my revenge on Southern Baptists for kicking me out of their seminary (doing my first investigative journalism work unknowingly), and my boys were doing well. I was even preparing my admission paperwork for universities like Notre Dame, University of Chicago, and Baylor.

As I was sitting in the car, driving into Texas for the first time, I looked up at this massive blue sky that spread across what seemed to be a horizontal plane that seemed to dip below the horizon in both directions, and said, “The sky really is bigger in Texas.”

And Dr. Moyer, without missing a beat said, “It’s not.” Or something similar. I don’t remember. I just remember, it was quick, cold, and dismissive. It lacked my sense of adventure, openness, and romance.

It also signaled to me that I had made a major faux pas.

The warmness that started the trip never really returned.

I won’t say he was like Curry in That Hideous Strength. But Dr. Moyer was a graduate of Brandeis. He taught my Sunday School class and he was kind. But he was not a sentimental man. He was an expert in languages, Hebrew if I remember correctly. I never took him for Hebrew. I took him for other courses.

If he could see the sky, maybe he could see it with his grandchildren. But it was not a moment he could share with a grown man who had grown up on everything from Spider-Man to Dracula to David and Goliath. I knew that David and Goliath were absolutely real because I had read Spider-Man and I could tell the difference between the two.

I could see the sky was bigger, not because I could read Hebrew but because I had lived in poverty in a library. I realized I couldn’t “code-switch” because I couldn’t pretend the sky was a sacred canopy like Peter Berger. I also couldn’t forget my roots like many of the progressives in my classes who loathed their working-class backgrounds. I thought being working-class was a boon, not a curse. You don’t muck shit in a pig barn to buy a 1962 Ford T-Bird all summer and not learn the glories of hard work. Pushing a broom up and down a hot farrowing barn, castrating pigs, and picking up the deads and dropping them in a bucket with a wet sound sticks with you.

All those people who are offended by my satire last week—Have you ever picked up dead pigs in 107-degree summer heat on a corporate pig farm? Have you ever felt hot oil splash into your mouth from your car when you changed your own oil? Have you eaten a sandwich when your hands were filthy from hard work? Have you ever been willing to say no to the inner ring?

A few months after this car ride, my life collapsed. I was forced to choose between my family, specifically my son, and my career. I could have chosen the inner ring, prestige, college career, and achievement.

I chose him. It cost me academically, financially, and even socially. We left that liberal church when we were condemned. We lost friends for choosing him again and again. They always chose themselves. They always knew exactly who Dick was. They didn’t have to play a game of pretend.

Christian men are often looking for the inner circle. Whether it is being elected as a Deacon, Elder, or Knight of Columbus, some of these organizations within a church don’t act as chances to serve but as gnostic clubs little different than the Lion’s Club, Optimist Club, Rotary Club, or Masonic Temple. We all know the ones—the men who use these positions to increase their business’s visibility in the community or to gain power over the pastor’s family. In fact, in some churches, there is plenty of cross-pollination by design just as there is between Belbury and N.I.C.E. As you move further down the interlocking rings of hell, the rings grow tighter around your neck until they finally sever your brain from your heart, your soul from your mind.

This is Mark’s moral conundrum. This was my own moral conundrum when I was studying Marxism and being patted on the head for it and being invited to conferences to deliver papers on deconstructing biblical passages as if they were word games with the pretense that I was still a conservative.

And this is the moral conundrum faced by our Republican Senators and Representatives. They are invited into one inner ring at a time. When they fulfill the role, guess at the right password, they gain entrance into the next new inner ring. The new spiritual band is placed around their neck. It’s so small, they don’t notice it. It doesn’t feel like compromise. It feels earned, as if it is their right to have it. Little by little, their behaviors change. Their allegiances shift. For some of our political representatives, the change happens quickly. Their souls are so atrophied, it doesn’t take a lot to cut them off.

It is similar to how they use rubber bands to castrate calves. You wrap it around and around until their nuts fall off. These men run around the state thinking they are breeding bulls, virile with power, but their balls were left in Jeff City, feasted on by the demonic powers there.

Lewis recognized this body horror by giving us a talking head, removed from the body. Paul talked about this in Galatians when he told the Judaizers to go castrate themselves. The body and the soul are connected. What you do to your body, you do to your soul and what you do to your soul, you do to your body, even, and especially if you can’t see it.

All these materialist Christians, walking around with their Gnostic beliefs, think that if they are blessed by God to be handsome and strong, then God must be blessing them. God allowed his own son to die. God allowed Job to be covered in boils—a righteous man. God allowed Isaiah to be cut in half. Jeremiah to be thrown down a well. The list goes on and on. Your physical strength will fade. Everyone’s does.

But your moral strength? Is it aligned now with God? Are you doing the courageous thing now? Or have you already made your deal with Baal, castrating yourself, offering your own testicles on his altar so you can climb the steps into his Capitol building to enter into his temple? Do you serve Baal on Mt. Carmel or are you Elijah, mocking Baal’s priests who self-flagellate to prove their worthiness before Baal?

Mark Studdock has to make a choice that will impact his life, his marriage, and his children. I first read That Hideous Strength right after I chose to leave the academy. I was a recovering Marxist when I went through the Space Trilogy for the first time. I was removing those rubber bands. It was painful. I was walking down the steps.

I remember that was when I first started to take care of my health too. Focusing on my health. Funny how being a man will lead to that. Those were good years with the boys. They were tough years because they were lean. I had a lot to unlearn.

My anger now is no longer aimless or misdirected. I’m not a cannon misaimed. I’m directed artillery fire.

God finally honed me.

He brought me through poverty, sin, collapse, ash, success, my own near-death, and failure. Maybe one day He will send me to the foundry to recast me into a bell for worship. I don’t want a mansion here or there. I want to adore and worship.

Until then, like my days as a Marxist, I aim my anger at power, but now I see the issue clearly: power doesn’t corrupt abstractly—it wraps rubber bands around good men’s souls, one ring at a time, until they’re spiritually castrated while thinking they’re still whole. My investigations and satire are attempts to cut those bands off before the damage is permanent, before their balls fall off completely and they’re left walking around Jeff City thinking they’re still men while the demons feast on what they’ve lost.

Because they are dying—spiritually. And that will lead to a physical death that is far worse than any description of body horror I can imagine.

Don’t believe me? Read the after-death experiences of people who recount going to Hell.

I spent time with my boys, having adventures with them. I wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t always present. I wasn’t always loving. But I was David. I never had to pretend to be Dick.