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'The Loser Letters': The Kingdom of God for the Millennials

The Loser Letters: The Kingdom of God for the Millennials

- Anand Nair

Drawing on CS Lewis' classic The Screwtape Letters for its structure, Mary Eberdstadt's The Loser Letters is young adult-fiction in the epistolary format. The protagonist AF Christian is a young woman who has lost her faith and has become a card-carrying atheist, and is now writing letters to the icons of the New Atheist movement so as to correct their fallacies and inadequacies in argument, so as to strengthen the atheist movement. 

Drawing on a wide variety of arguments, with sources as wide ranging as Thomas Aquinas and Alvin Plantinga, Eberdstadt makes the theistic argument accessible in the millennial lingo, with her characteristic wit and snark. In showing how ideology permeates the modern lifestyle of unbridled hedonism, materialism and radical individuality (things which are taken as axiomatic now in our culture), Eberstadt has drawn an intellectual map of sorts starting from the Protestant reformation in showing how today's youth are left in an overbearing void left by the inability of culture to acknowledge the truth of God and the spiritual and moral responsibilities it is inextricably tied with, leaving them in a helter-skelter life so as to anesthetize oneself from this void. 

Eberdstadt's A.F. is also given an intellectual dignity in that she follows where her arguments lead, i.e. she lives life exactly by the perverted Epicureanism that materialism eventuates at. In this it differs radically from other young adult fiction, in that it shows the protagonist facing drastic consequences for her actions and irreparable damage because of her moral failings, unlike other young adult fiction which asks protagonist to 'live it up' and 'live unapologetically and on their own terms', all of which are a direct inheritance of the individual worship inherited from the thought of the romantics. 

As the plot progresses, AF realizes the objective existence of vices and virtues, and the implausibility of defending such a view without referring to a lawgiver. In this there is a turn to a sort-of Felix culpa (grace by fall) and we are led to a Kafkaesque building where the unintelligibleness leads to a profound realization (analogically similar to how Pascal intended to demonstrate God's existence). 

In a genre which more often that not is lost in a morass of addictive pleasures, which finds itself attracted to the endless possibilities and vices which youth affords (and which the wise know better to avoid), and which seems to eulogize the culture which is precisely the cause of many of the problems of its inhabitants, Eberdstadt doesn't give in to the cosmic pessimism of a Leon Bly, but rather offers a normative and hopeful alternative to build towards the Kingdom of God for the millennial generation, without which as Henri De Lubac pointed out 'all other kingdoms are sure to perish'.

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