Faith & Spirit Quote by Malcolm Muggeridge

Muggeridge lands the knife by calling credulity a "sin" rather than a mistake. That word choice matters: he isn’t diagnosing a harmless gullibility; he’s accusing a culture of moral laziness, the willingness to outsource judgment to whatever offers comfort, belonging, or a clean story. The line is built like a trap. It starts with a familiar conservative lament about secularization ("stop believing in God") and then swerves into the darker punchline: disbelief doesn’t produce hard-nosed rationality, it produces ideological and commercial possession.

The subtext is less theology than media ecology. As a journalist who watched the twentieth century manufacture consent through propaganda, advertising, and mass politics, Muggeridge is pointing at a new kind of authority: not priests, but platforms; not creeds, but slogans. "Believe in anything" is his indictment of a public trained to treat conviction as an aesthetic choice and to confuse information volume with knowledge. It’s also a rebuke to the self-flattering modern myth that shedding religion automatically upgrades you to skepticism.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Muggeridge had firsthand exposure to the century’s grand delusions - utopian communism, personality cults, the moral theater of mass movements - and later became openly Christian. That biography gives the line its combative edge: he’s not merely nostalgic for faith, he’s warning that humans are meaning-making machines, and if you don’t choose your altars carefully, someone else will choose them for you.