The Quiet War for the Soul, Part 2: Faith Without Roots — When Feelings, Image, and Comfort Replace Transformation

The most decisive battles for the soul are rarely loud. They are fought quietly—through attention, direction, and daily choice.

There’s a sentence that shows up again and again in conversations about faith.

“I just don’t feel it anymore.”

It usually isn’t said with anger, or bitterness, or rebellion.

It’s said almost gently, like an observation. As if faith were something you wake up one morning and discover has quietly slipped out of your hands.

Always remember and heed the warning God gives us through his prophet, Jeremiah, chapter 17 verse 9:

“The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?”

This verse disrupts the modern assumption that sincerity equals truth. It doesn’t deny emotion, but it does deny emotion authority. The heart is real, but unreliable, requiring formation, not blind trust. Here, “feel” is being used as a kind of authority, as if the feeling itself is enough to justify the decision that’s about to be made.

What’s striking is how rarely that sentence is followed by a question. We don’t often ask whether faith was ever meant to be sustained by feeling in the first place. We simply assume that if the emotion faded, something essential must be gone.

That assumption sits right at the heart of another strategy C. S. Lewis exposes in The Screwtape Letters—a strategy that doesn’t attack belief directly, but slowly replaces its center.

Lewis understood that faith rarely collapses because it is rejected. More often, it collapses because it is redefined.

In The Screwtape Letters, the demons are delighted when a person begins to equate spiritual health with emotional intensity. When prayer feels powerful, faith must be strong. When worship feels moving, God must be near. And when those feelings cool, as they inevitably do, the conclusion feels obvious: something is wrong.

Lewis saw this clearly. God does not keep His people in a constant state of emotional heat. He allows dryness. Ordinary days. Seasons where prayer feels flat and obedience feels mechanical. Not as punishment, but as formation.

Because love that depends on feeling is fragile. And faith that collapses without emotion was never rooted very deeply.

Scripture is surprisingly honest about this. The Psalms are full of spiritual longing that doesn’t resolve neatly. The psalmist in Psalms 42, rather than being led by emotion, interrogates it. Feelings are acknowledged, not obeyed. This psalm models mature faith: honest about inner turmoil, but anchored in remembered truth.

We already saw how Jeremiah warns that the heart is not a reliable guide. Hebrews 12:11 reminds us that discipline rarely feels good in the moment, even when it is producing something good beneath the surface: 

“No discipline is enjoyable while it is happening—it’s painful! But afterward there will be a peaceful harvest of right living for those who are trained in this way.”

Spiritual growth is framed as formative, not immediately pleasurable. This verse normalizes discomfort as part of God’s work, undermining the assumption that faith must always feel affirming to be faithful.

Lewis wasn’t anti-emotion. He was anti-emotion-as-authority.

Once feelings become the foundation of faith, everything else becomes unstable. Truth starts to bend toward comfort. Conviction starts to feel cruel. Obedience starts to look unnecessary. Faith becomes less about trust and more about experience.

And experience, by nature, must be constantly refreshed.

That’s where image quietly enters the picture.

Lewis shows the Enemy encouraging a version of Christianity that looks good on the outside—reasonable, polite, socially acceptable—but never requires repentance. It’s a faith that avoids extremes, keeps conversations safe, and knows when to stay quiet. A faith that manages appearances instead of confronting the heart.

This kind of Christianity isn’t hostile to God. It’s just uninterested in transformation.

Respectability feels like maturity. It sounds like balance. It avoids embarrassment and conflict. But it asks almost nothing of us. And because it asks so little, it threatens very little.

Lewis understood the danger: hell is perfectly content with moral people who never repent. Repentance disrupts. It humbles. It reorients. Respectability simply maintains order.

And order without surrender is easy to live with.

This is why faith without roots often feels peaceful—until it collapses. There’s no tension. No wrestling. No costly obedience. Just a quiet agreement to stay comfortable, agreeable, and unchanged.

But Scripture presses in where comfort resists: 

“And so the Lord says, “These people say they are mine. They honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. And their worship of me is nothing but man-made rules learned by rote.”—‭‭Isaiah‬ ‭29‬:‭13‬ ‭NLT‬‬

God exposes a form of faith that looks correct externally but remains disconnected internally. The verse diagnoses respectability without repentance, religious performance without relational surrender.

Lewis’s warning is subtle but sharp: when faith is built on feelings and image, it may look alive for a long time. But eventually, it has nothing left to sustain it when life stops cooperating.

God is not forming emotionally satisfied people. He is forming faithful ones.

Faith with roots doesn’t panic when feelings fade. It doesn’t need constant affirmation. It endures dryness, obscurity, and discomfort because it is anchored somewhere deeper than experience.

The Enemy doesn’t need to convince people that God is false. He only needs to convince them that God is optional, useful when comforting, ignorable when inconvenient.

And once faith becomes optional, it slowly becomes peripheral.

That’s the danger Lewis is naming, not loudly, not dramatically, but with the clarity of someone who has watched this happen again and again.

Faith doesn’t disappear all at once. It thins. It softens. It shifts its weight.

Until one day, there’s very little left holding it in place.

If this part exposes how faith loses its center, the next part turns outward, toward community, and asks a harder question: what happens when we are surrounded by people, yet never actually formed?