Satan desires to corrupt every aspect of a woman’s life—from her relationships and friendships to her self-perception, empathy, and even her motherhood. In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm discuss this battle with Tilly Dillehay, author of Dear Hemlock. Her new book—which is modeled after C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters—offers an eye-opening exploration of the struggles women face, shedding light on how feminine virtues can mask hidden vices whenever they fall for the Devil’s lies, as Eve did in the Garden. Rather than succumb to Satan’s deceptions, women must conquer them with a clear-eyed commitment to God’s Word. 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Would you like to learn about the demonic ministry for the absorption of women? You can read all about it in Tillie Dillehay's book, My Dear Hemlock, which really is a disclosure of the sins of women. Hope you enjoy the discussion. So Jason, we're here.

We're going to talk about this new book by Tilly Dillehay, My Dear Hemlock. I read this book, almost all of it, out loud and ever. So this is definitely a book for fans of the screw tape letters, if you're familiar with that. You can't tell a book by its cover, but you might learn something about the book from the cover. So here is on the inside of the book cover, you said, ladies, this book will give you the eyes to see the feminine vices that hide behind the feminine virtues.

What exactly did you mean by that? Well, that's just a lot of the, a lot of the things I think women struggle with that are sins, particular to women are kind of the flip side of some feminine virtue. And, yeah. So, yeah, let's just dive into this book. There's so, we could talk about this for hours, actually.

There are so many data points that I thought were so critical. I could tell this woman is a pastor's wife. Like, she's probably seen it and experienced some of it herself. That's kind of how it works, right? So, hey, just talk to us about the basic premise of this book and, you know, what drew you into such a thing like this?

Yeah, yeah. So I love the screw tape letters as so many people do. And I actually stumbled into using this device of the demon letter device. Several years ago, I was going to write a blog piece about a marriage topic that was kind of a little sensitive. And I wanted to to have some way of approaching it that would be very vivid with like a vivid illustration.

And I ended up deciding this really needs to be fictionalized for me to be able to approach it the way that I want to approach it. So that was the first Madame Hoekstraat to Hemlock letter that I wrote and I ended up doing five or six more blog posts in the same style and just really enjoying what it allowed me to do because I felt like it allowed me to go into the topics that I didn't really know how to approach another way. The fiction kind of gave me a screen to create details that would bring you in that kind of, it would give you the narrative that is so, I think, powerful in making a point about things that were really just Christian nonfiction, Christian living topics, you know. So I really enjoyed doing that. I put it down for a while and then brought it back a few years ago to finish out as a book.

I like how you began this woman, this subject with early marriage, and you trace her through the stages of life. She's a pretty normal woman. She's like every woman in a local church in a lot of ways. And then she dies in her 50s. Spoiler alert, I just spoiled the whole flow of the book.

But we're going to... Still by the book. But no, I just wanted us to see the framing of this. It just walks through really the challenging moments that the devil is always attacking women. Yes.

And I'm so glad that you spoiled it because I love to be able to talk about the ending with people, but I don't want to be the one to spoil it. I love that in Screwtape, he kills his patient at the end of Screwtape. His patient doesn't live nearly as long either. You only get him for maybe a year or so over the course of those letters. But he kills his patient in the way that I think a lot of people at the time were afraid of dying.

They were afraid of being bombed out in an air raid. And he kills his character in an air raid bombing. So when I was thinking about my character, thinking about women, what it is that they're afraid of, what do they worry about? And I think health issues and cancer are the kinds of things that women…that's kind of our worst-case scenario. And so, the challenge and the whole genre is so good for this, turning that into a victory, showing you how it actually is victory, how death really is gain.

After you've watched this woman kind of slowly achieve the kind of victories that God brings about in a normal Christian woman's life throughout marriage and parenting and just maturing over time. And then you bring her to the point where she achieves the final victory of dying and being taken to the Lord. So that was very deliberate, I guess, to choose that method of killing her in the book. Yeah. But you began this book really with the devil attacking a woman in her new marriage.

Right. I thought that was really helpful. Tell us about that. Yeah. So it was very, that was one of the reasons why this book even existed.

I wanted to write about marriage especially, but also other things. And the marital stuff, I wanted to make it so clear that the demons care about those everyday private moments in a marriage, like the way that you speak to your husband when he walks in the door at the end of the day. Common courtesy is one of those early things that the demon is writing about, and she's saying, for a new marriage, you want to get them into these habits that will be helpful to you for the rest of her marriage. One of them is just don't allow her to give him the common kind of courtesy she would give anyone else who came into her home. A hello, a kiss hello, a napkin handed over at the dinner table, a kind word, and a thank you.

There's a whole section about just thanks and how you want to get the patient, the demon is saying you want to get the patient into a frame of mind where she's not going to praise anything about her husband until she can look at him and approve of everything about her husband. So as if it would be somehow dishonest for her to say, thank you so much for taking the trash out or thank you for going to work and coming home to me today. That because she also sees that he's dropping his socks on the floor, you know, she thinks, I'm not going to say thank you because that implies I approve of the socks on the floor when they actually have nothing to do with each other. And what you, the demon is saying, what you want to train in her is this kind of posture of silent ingratitude that you can then spread to the rest of all life, because that's the attitude you can bring her to even have towards God himself. Until I approve of everything you've placed in my life, I will not open my mouth in thanks.

And the inlet to that is that, you know, the demon is working on her to think that she married down. She's so pretty, she's so talented, and now she realizes, I really could have been something If I wasn't married to an ordinary man, just one second, you know, ordinary men typically are the best. Okay. Amen. The steady man is so overlooked by the young women.

I don't know what it is. Older women get it, but younger women, somehow they just overlook that, what a gift that is, to have a man who does what he says he's going to do. And yes, in this case, and I've seen this with young marriages where you can just tell the girl, and it's like, you don't even know what it is that got planted in her mind as some, as the basis for the superiority over her husband. But you just, you just know, if, if she gets this settled into her mind, it could wreak a lot of havoc in the marriage for her to decide this. Like, oh, I somehow married down because my husband is just a man who wants to live a normal life.

He's not bent on fame and glory. He wants to just go to work, raise his family, and come home and be happy. Tilly, tell us about the pocket mirror and how an enemy might use it. Yeah, so there's a chapter on the pocket mirrors speaking of, this is these are screens, These are our phones that we carry around with us. And the demon says these things that the humans carry around with them, they're basically mirrors.

They show themselves, they show them what they love, they show them only things that delight and entertain them. So they're like little mirrors and they gaze into them for many, many hours of every day. And you want to encourage that in your patient because what the mirror does for her is it picks her up out of the road of time. And God the enemy, you know, the demon calls God the enemy, the enemy wants her to live in his time, to step one step after the other down the road of time. Sometimes it feels laborious when things are hard, sometimes it feels easy, but he wants her to experience every moment.

The mirrors will actually invite her to kind of lift her feet up off the road of time where she will lose time. She'll lose large chunks of time. She's rejecting the reality of his time, the way that a good old faction drug addiction would, the demon says. So he's saying you want her to lose time in this way because it's inviting her to reject reality basically for a period of every day, for hours of every day. You said the internet disembodies and removes them from time.

Yes. Yeah. They become avatars of themselves, basically bumping into each other for muted versions of fellowship that's not real fellowship or fighting that's not real fighting. Yeah, this whole thing about the mirror I thought was really helpful that takes you off into cyberspace, not your life, but some other life out there that doesn't exist for you in real life. You deal with this in a couple levels.

You also talked about gardening and babies and things like that. Why do these demons hate gardening and babies and accomplishing things? What is that all about? These are the kinds of things that you could be. You could be a little bit soapboxy with a book like this.

Just choose random things that you love and make sure the demons hate them. But I think in that letter, I was explaining that There are certain kinds of activities where you do lose track of time, and the demon is explaining to the other demon, it's not bad for her to lose track of time. Losing track of time in the pocket mirror is one thing, but the kind of losing track of time that she experiences in the garden is not the kind you want as a demon. She experiences every one of those moments. She's fully present and she's constantly reminded in the garden of things about the enemy.

It's almost impossible for her not to be aware of miracles as she watches a sugar snap pea rise up out of the ground day after day after day, turn into a blossom, and then grow a sugar snap pea out of the snout of the blossom. Like, it's miracles. It's magic. And the patient is also pregnant while she's doing this gardening. So the connection between this life that's growing inside of her, that she knows how it got there, she knows that she's kind of, she's part of it, she's participating in it, but it's also completely beyond her.

Like it is totally outside her or what she understands. And so just the, if you want to make materialists out of women, you don't want them gardening. You don't want them having babies because it's impossible for them to totally overlook the supernatural when they're growing life. Yeah, it's beautiful and it's earthy and it's actually real. You know, the real...

I guess I have a sense you've seen women drift off into this unreal world, you know, where they're maintenance, they're Instagram accounts all the time, and they're really off in space. They say they're homeschool moms, but they're actually somewhere else. Right. So there's so many things that you talked about in this book that I want to try to deal with, but you talked about empathy and these two ditches. And I thought, you know, this really has to do with the way women relate to women, how they comfort one another, how they think about one another.

And talk about this bifurcation, these two ditches of empathy. Yeah, so this is, I'm borrowing a lot here just from some of the work that Joe Rigney has done. This was just me trying to apply it to kind of women counseling women, women advising women, women offering sympathy and help to other women. And just the ditch being, and this is what he says, just you want the empathy to be tethered to the truth. And that's where we really get wrong is when we sit down with each other and decide that the way you feel and the way even I feel for you is going to be the most important thing in this conversation.

And it's going to be more important than what's true about your claims that you're making about another person. Because a lot of the time, that is how it goes with other women. You sit down and she's telling you about what happened with her husband, or what happened with her mother-in-law, or what happened with her sister. And so there's usually a lot of the time there is a third party, but even if it's just her, it's her and her body or her and her, just a hard time, you can speak even just the truth of scripture. And there are some women who will react, even just the encouragement from Scripture, and some women will react with, why can't you just let me be here for a while?

Let me sit. And who don't actually want to be helped out of the quagmire that they're in, they want you to jump in with them. But the opposite ditch, so that is a ditch, and I think that's probably the most common ditch. But I think there is another ditch that I've also been on the receiving end of, and it is the Job's Comforter. To me, those are the two ditches, because the Job's Comforter comes in and says, I have an explanation for the suffering, because there is no such thing as innocent suffering in my framework.

So whenever I sit down to counsel with someone, I'm listening, but I'm really listening so that I can find the explanation for why it is that God allowed this, because I'm not willing to accept the terrifying reality that sometimes God will bring suffering and no one sinned to cause it or they did not sin to cause it. You know what I'm saying? So when you meet with a person who has no category for innocent suffering, it can be very draining of life, you know, to go to them for help because there's no help available. Yeah. I couldn't wait to get to the chapter on parenting.

And this totally cracked me up. The tempter's in charge of humans in charge of children. That's the pamphlet she wrote, right? She's talking about her little pamphlet. Yeah.

And you're, you're dealing actually, you know, with sort of the American problem with authority. So tell us about that. Yeah. Yeah, it was tough. It was tough to write anything about parenting because it is such a broad and wide, it's such a topic that it's almost like don't touch it if you only can spend one chapter on it.

But I thought if there's one thing that I wanted to talk about in parenting, it is the problem with authority that my generation is experiencing in our parenting. We don't understand the role that authority has to play in giving our children a joyful and safe childhood even. So we have a lot of ideas, but not a lot of them are founded on scriptural principles. So yeah, the demon is just saying, you have this little person that's living in her home, and this little person thrives in a world that has limits and in a world that is shaped around what God says is true and what God says is good and not good, and yet the little child is born with a desire for autonomy. So that's gonna clash with the reality that the enemy is placed in this world.

And you want the mother to constantly move and shape her life around what the child says, is it wants, basically, you want, you want her to bend at every point to the child's, you know, desires. And you, what you will get is anarchy in the home. And you'll get children and parents who are both miserable. You mentioned gentle parenting and that kind of let me out because I just reviewed and endorsed a book on gentle parenting from a man who's a pastor in our network, and he's going to actually come and give a message at our conference, raising children in Babylon, right? But yeah, so you use that terminology of gentle parenting and things like that.

There's a real problem with sort of the underlying philosophy and worldview that, I mean, every parent should be gentle for sure. Who's against being gentle? Well, there's actually a very corrupt version of gentleness of parenting. And I think I like the way you described that. I just encourage people to read that part because you unfold that with all kinds of really...

In this form it's hatred of children. It's a selfishness that won't tell them, here's what's going to happen, because you're just not willing to shoulder the responsibility of it. Yeah. And the poor children suffer. Yeah, the demon says, a concerted attack on authority gives us victory on so many other fronts.

I thought, wow, the Fifth Commandment, you know, that it might be well with you. It's a victory over success, actually. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about wine night. On wine night, This is chapter 19.

It's a girl's night out and there's like this Trojan horse in wine night with all these actual non-Christians, but it's so fun. Yeah. She says that On a night like this where she's the patient that still has these old friends from before she became a Christian. She has these old college friends and they're worldly. They get together for Mommy's wine night and she'll go.

She still has her foot in two worlds because she's got relationships in the church now, but she also has these old relationships outside the church. And on these nights, she will, if you use humor, the demon says, if you use humor as a Trojan horse, you can sneak any ideas that you want to in with the humor, as long as it's a brand of humor that happens to agree with one of your patients. So hatred of children, hatred of spouse, the idea that you just have to tend to yourself at all costs, these are things she may not even agree with, but she will begin to verbally agree with them at a wine night if you get her in a certain position. So yeah, just the, these are just, it's a picture of what worldly influence looks like and how it can cause people to change their minds about things through the, I guess, peer pressure. Yeah.

And she's feeling disconnected from the people at church because she just feels so inadequate. And so she gravitates toward this Trojan horse called laughter. Yes, she can sort of soothe her wounded pride because it's wounding to her pride to be around these healthy church ladies. She knows that she's not there. So the other worldly people make her feel a little bit better about where she's at, but it's stunting her growth.

Okay, church hopping. I love this chapter because I've seen this, I was going to say a million times, probably not a million. But I've seen it, the eight to ten rule, sort of, and what you say is the demons say, go after the woman. To create Church hoppers, Don't go after the man, go after the woman. Can you tell us more about that?

Yeah, yeah, she says, you know, if you, you may think that because a church is a theological institution that you change a man's theological position and go after that position, you'll get him to change churches, and maybe you can just keep doing that to get them to be hoppers. But the fact is, when a man thoughtfully changes a theological position, the leave-taking is not the kind you want. It could be very healthful leave-taking, where they don't burn any bridges. You know, they take church membership even more seriously after it's all over. But if you really want to create, like destabilize a family in church, go after, throw a bone among the women.

It doesn't have to be anything big. It can be who got to bring the thing to the potluck or whatever. It can be whose son was asked to do such and what. It doesn't have to be a big deal. He said, the most entertaining thing in the world is watching a man try to create a theological reason for leaving a church that his wife already decided to leave a year ago over hurt feelings.

I thought that was so right on. We know nothing about that. Yeah, right? Never seen that happen. Not in our church.

Yeah, church hopping. You talked about the dangerous household. What's a dangerous household? Yeah, so the dangerous household to the demons is a Christian home where the man is doing what he ought to do. And the woman is doing what she ought to do.

And there's, there's an aroma that results that spills over onto the children and onto anyone who walks in their door, anyone who comes in from the outside even. And it mobilizes people on the enemy lines. And there's some kind of an aroma around it that you know makes it difficult to even enter those homes. You know how much you hate that smell. We don't know exactly what that smell is made of, but research is working on it.

It has to do with the soup pot. It has to do with freshly made beds and kind words between spouses, but we don't really know what it is yet. Yeah. And it has, and in the center of it is actually a husband. Right.

I forget the language you used. I wrote it down, but he's a husband that's presiding over his household. That's the dangerous household right there. So, boy, there's so many things I'd like to talk about. We don't have the time.

Anybody who's listening, read this book. There are tremendous insights into your own heart, not just everybody else's heart. These things reside in men as well, but there are particular sins of women, and it's so unpopular to talk about the sins of women, but they do exist. Men and women are different, and the devil does attack differently. And it's really important to note that.

And pastors need to note that as well. So, I guess a pastor's wife just put us on notice. Thank you. Yeah. Tilly, thank you so much.

I really appreciate you cutting out the time out of, I'm sure, is a very busy life right now. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me on. I've enjoyed it. Thanks so much.

Yeah, we have too. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope you can join us next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com.