I am an immigrant, a Christian from a Muslim background who came to America in search of religious freedom. I have spent years observing the Church in America. And I have to admit, much of what I have witnessed over the years has deeply concerned and grieved me. What is happening in America, both within the Church and in the broader political landscape, has left me heartbroken.
Evil has become so normalized that we have stopped recognizing it as evil.
One thing that has become increasingly evident to me is how easily Christianity can become entangled with the comforts, ambitions, wrong political ideologies, and values of the world. We can become so preoccupied with preserving our way of life, worldly influence, material comforts, and cultural standing that we gradually lose sight of what it means to follow Christ.
This is why I find the writings of Charles Habib Malik (1906–1987) particularly relevant to our present moment.
Malik was a Lebanese Orthodox Christian philosopher, theologian, diplomat, and statesman. He earned his doctorate in philosophy from Harvard University, served as Lebanon’s ambassador to the United States, and played a significant role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He also served as President of the United Nations General Assembly from 1958 to 1959.
In Christ and Crisis (1962), Malik reflected on the relationship among Christianity, civilization, culture, and politics. He understood that the greatest danger to the Christian faith does not always come from external persecution or opposition. Sometimes, it comes from within, when Christians become so comfortable with the world that they gradually lose sight of the very One they profess to follow.
Malik’s reflections on abundance, spiritual complacency, and the temptation to trust human progress rather than God deserve our attention today.
I encourage you to read the following passage carefully and reflect on what it reveals about the state of the Church today.
Christ and Crisis
Charles Habib Malik
Chapter VII
I pass on to another domain in which our faith is tried. There is considerable softness and complacency unbecoming of a Christian. I do not mean Christians should not enjoy to the full the benefits of industrial civilization, especially as industrial civilization itself has arisen only in the bosom of Christian civilization. The creator of a thing is fully entitled to enjoy it. But we can be bewitched and beguiled by what we enjoy; we can become too dependent on it. And that is absolutely unchristian; that is idolatry; that is worshipping the creature rather than the Creator. It was not only the ancient Hebrews who constantly relapsed into idolatry; this seems to be an incurable trait in original human nature. Thus the sense of abundance could kill our faith; we may be tempted into feeling that we do not need faith; and then we cease to live by faith. And that is not just, for the just shall live by faith (Hab. 2:4; Rom. 1:17; Gal. 3:11; Heb. 10:38).
There is not enough spiritual tension, not enough self-stretching towards the end which is far away, not enough eschatology; while this is an age in which everything is eschatological, everything speaks of the end. People are quite satisfied with the world, and they seek and get more and more of the same kind of thing. There is not enough radical revulsion against the world and all its values, not enough reaching out with David towards God, not enough despair of the world, not enough passage to the other side. This worldliness, this trust in man and progress, this self-satisfaction and self-congratulation, this relaxed rest in culture and civilization and human values, is most inimical to the health of the spirit. It is like taking a Turkish bath and balmily relaxing all over, and forgetting God. This is sloth and covetousness, and I ask you to read Saint John Chrysostom on what happens to man when he is overcome by these afflictions.
We thus tend to think that this very culture and civilization in which we enjoy ourselves and take so much pride has created itself; that it subsists by itself and is self-sufficient. We thus lose sight of how much it owes Christ. There seems to be an inexorable fall in the nature of things, namely, that left to itself for long, without crisis and without judgment, the creature tends to forget the Creator. Man apparently cannot act except after God has acted; he cannot approach God except after God has approached him. This is perhaps the most original of all sins: the slothful inertia of being whereby the source and ground of all being is forgotten. Apparently as a creature you must fall in this original inertia; otherwise you would be the Creator himself! Trial, temptation, suffering, chastening, death, the Cross, these then appear to be necessary in order to remind us who we are.
The life of slothfulness and satisfaction and relaxation is certainly a life of death: try it and see what I mean; it makes you forget God, it causes you to tend in the end towards nothingness; for nothingness is exactly that where God is forgotten. Whatever the value of a relaxation of tensions in the international order, such a relaxation is disastrous in the order of the spirit. Nobody understands the mysterious depths of man and God who does not understand what James meant when he shouted: “Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness” (James 4:9). In mourning and affliction we come much nearer to God than in laughter, and that is why they that mourn are called blessed, seeing that their reward is the comfort of God (Matt. 5:4).
