Faith & Spirit Quote by Malcolm Muggeridge

A provocation disguised as diagnosis, Muggeridge’s line frames modern sexuality not as liberation but as liturgy: a set of rituals, taboos, confessions, and promises that rush in when older faiths lose their grip. “Ersatz” does the real work. It’s not just “new religion,” but a cheapened stand-in, a mass-produced substitute that mimics transcendence while shrinking it down to sensation, status, and private appetite. The barb lands because it refuses to flatter the 20th century’s self-image as rational and emancipated; it suggests we didn’t outgrow belief so much as relocate it.

Muggeridge, a journalist-turned-moralist who watched ideologies rise and rot (communism included), speaks from the vantage point of someone suspicious of modern cravings dressed up as progress. The 20th century is the age of advertising, cinema, and later television: machines built to turn desire into identity and identity into consumption. In that environment, sex becomes uniquely scalable. It can sell products, signal rebellion, grant belonging, provide a story about the self. That’s “religion” in functional terms: not metaphysics, but meaning-making.

The subtext is also a rebuke to institutions that ceded ground. As churches weakened or became cautious, the culture didn’t become secular in the clean, enlightened sense; it became devotional in a new key, demanding purity codes (of liberation), heresies (prudishness), saints and sinners, and endless testimony. Muggeridge’s intent isn’t prudery so much as warning: when transcendence is evacuated, something will impersonate it, and the impersonation will ask to be obeyed.