Brent Pollard
A Cancer Ward, a Streaming Service, and a Strange Suspicion
A previous biographical sketch on this site once noted, along with my work in the Lord’s vineyard, my fondness for anime. Perhaps the two should be mentioned together, as one helped carry me through a period that challenged the other. I came back to anime in 2010, in the middle of cancer treatment, when chemotherapy left me with long, slow afternoons that needed something to fill them. Sixteen years out from chemotherapy, anime has remained a faithful companion.
I mention this because the human mind is a connecting organ. So it was that, sitting alone with three quiet little anime, I began to suspect I was looking at an emblem of something the church has long known.
Three Cute Apocalypses
The first program followed two young women crossing a ruined Japan on an electric-converted Yamaha Serow. Mount Fuji smolders on the horizon, the sea has crept up over the cities, Tokyo lies underwater, and a clean little notch has been taken out of the moon. Across this wreckage, two adorable protagonists travel happily, retracing the journey an older sister once made on her motorcycle years before the unidentified apocalypse.
The second is Girls’ Last Tour: two girls crossing a dying planet. Cities exist in stacked layers. Resources are scarce; humanity is dwindling after a long war. The title gives away that there will be no happy ending. The protagonists’ sense of wonder is the only thing keeping the bleakness from swallowing the screen.
The third belongs to “School Live!” Cute girls, “School Living Club” activities, school uniforms, slice-of-life rhythms. Then the first episode ends, and the curtain pulls back, and the viewer learns the real reason these girls live at school: zombie apocalypse.
These three programs are not the problem. They are the picture. What they portray is something the deceiver has been doing to human souls since Eden.
The Tempter’s Real Target
Imagine, as in the Screwtape Letters, a senior devil instructing his apprentice in the fine art of ruining a human soul. If such a tempter were to leave behind a strategic manual, its first principle would not be dramatic sin. Dramatic sin wakes the Patient up. The senior devil prefers the unspectacular road: gradual, gentle, and with no warning markers.
What this means is that the tempter’s real target is not your behavior. It is your perception. He does not need you to commit specific acts; he needs you to lose the categorical sense that your condition is a calamity. Strip a soul of its capacity to recognize ruin as ruin, and you no longer need to drag it anywhere. It will arrange the wreckage into furniture and call the result home.
Paul names what is at stake: “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4.4). The issue is not what the world contains. It is what the soul can still see.
Renaming the Ruin
The deceiver’s first instrument is language. He works on words because once a thing has been renamed, it is more than half-tolerated. Cowardice becomes “tact.” Lust becomes “love.” Pride becomes “self-respect.” Sin becomes “struggle,” then “identity,” then “authenticity.” Confession becomes “vulnerability.” Repentance becomes “growth.” He does not need to convince you that virtue is wrong. He needs only to file virtue under a new name until you no longer recognize it.
This is the mechanism Isaiah indicts: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil” (Isaiah 5.20). And the relabeling rarely stops at vocabulary. It works its way down into the moral hierarchy itself. Slowly, what is trivial gets ranked as urgent, and what is eternal gets ranked as optional. Worship becomes inconvenient; entertainment, sacred. Sin gets dignified as “self-care”; sanctification gets dismissed as “repression.”
Peace, Peace—When There Is No Peace
Renaming is the front door of the deceiver’s craft. The back door is quieter and safer. It is the cultivation of false peace.
God has built into the soul a system of moral alarms—guilt, unease, the prick of conscience, the holy disquiet that drives a sinner to repentance. The tempter knows it. So his task is to disable the alarms one at a time without the Patient noticing. The Patient must feel “fine.” Not convicted, not hungry for righteousness, just settled. By the time the fire is well underway, no warning will sound.
Jeremiah saw this in his own day: “Peace, peace,” they say, “but there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6.14). That is the tempter’s perfected anesthesia. It is not the absence of trouble. It is the absence of the alarm that trouble would normally produce.
The writer of Hebrews calls the cumulative effect hardening: “encourage one another day after day… so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3.13). Hardening is what gradualism produces and what false peace seals.
At Home in the Wreckage
Here is the move toward which all the deceiver’s other moves converge. The Patient is not merely to be made passive in the face of his ruin. He is to be made comfortable in it. He is to set up housekeeping in the wreckage, hang curtains, learn the routines, and at last feel possessive of his own corruption.
That is the picture the cute apocalypses I referenced offers in miniature. The wreckage stays exactly as wrecked as it ever was. What changes is the inhabitant who has learned, through gentle banter and pastel design and slice-of-life rhythm, to find the wreckage cozy.
But the deceiver’s program is not confined to a screen. He invites the addict to call his addiction “the way I unwind.” He invites the angry man to call his rage “passion.” He invites the husband who has stopped praying with his wife to call the silence “our season.” He invites the church that has stopped weeping over sin to call the dryness “maturity.” Each of these is a wreck with curtains hung in it.
The deceiver does not need to drag a soul to perdition against its will. He needs only to keep redecorating the surroundings until the soul no longer perceives the surroundings as ruin.
Apocalypse and Renewal
There is a word for what the tempter is preventing: apocalypse. In its biblical sense, it means unveiling. Biblical apocalypse is the genre in which moral perception is restored—the veil lifts, reality shows itself, the soul sees what it has been standing in.
The deceiver’s mode is the structural opposite: anti-apocalypse, the patient’s thickening of the veil. The wreckage stays real; only the alarm is removed. The room is still on fire; the man no longer smells smoke.
If perception is the battlefield, then the gospel’s counter-strategy is a battle for perception: “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12.2). The renewing of the mind is the Lord’s apocalypse in miniature. It is the steady rolling back of the deceiver’s veil, until the soul once again sees ruin as ruin—and the cross of Christ as the only place where ruin is ever truly undone.
Awake, Sleeper
So the question this article finally puts to each of us is not what cute media is doing to our sense of evil. That is at most a downstream caution. The deeper question is the question every soul has to face, sooner or later, in the searching light of Scripture:
Where am I no longer alarmed, where alarm was once native? What sins do I now name with softer language than the Bible uses? What atmospheres have I grown so accustomed to that I have stopped asking whether they belong to a redeemed life? What have I learned to call peace that may, on examination, be the deceiver’s anesthetic? What corner of my life have I been quietly furnishing for years, never noticing that the walls were already on fire?
The summons is the same one Paul lifted from an old hymn of the church: “Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Ephesians 5.14). Those words were not addressed to the world. They were addressed to the church.
May God, in His mercy, lift the veil. May He restore to us the sense of catastrophe where catastrophe is real, the sense of glory where glory is present, and the holy alarm by which a soul still knows when something has gone terribly wrong. And may He keep teaching us, day after day, to see the only One in whose face the light of glory shines—the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom the wreckage of this world is at last truly made new.
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