Faith & Spirit Quote by Malcolm Muggeridge

Muggeridge loads a hand grenade into a single sentence: if you drain a culture of transcendence, it will smuggle transcendence back in through the body. Calling sex "the mysticism of materialism" is a deliberately barbed paradox. Mysticism is supposed to dissolve the self into the infinite; materialism is supposed to keep us pinned to appetite and measurable fact. He’s arguing that modern society, having demoted God, doesn’t become calmly rational. It becomes devotional in a new key, turning eros into a stand-in for the sacred.

The subtext is less sex-negative than meaning-negative: the problem isn’t desire, it’s the cultural overclaim we make for it. When sex becomes "the only possible religion", it inherits religion’s burdens: salvation (self-actualization), communion (intimacy as ultimate belonging), ritual (the scripts of hookup culture, pornography, performance), and heresy (shame, exclusion, the policing of norms). Muggeridge’s phrasing suggests a society that can’t admit it needs awe, so it takes the nearest available portal and declares it ultimate.

Context matters. Muggeridge began on the left, grew disillusioned with ideological promises, and became a prominent Christian moralist in postwar Britain, later famous for skewering the sexual revolution’s cheerleading. This line reads as a critique of late-modern substitution: when traditional faith loses authority, desire doesn’t simply get liberated; it gets conscripted. The provocation is aimed not at private pleasure but at a public metaphysics - the way consumer culture turns bodies into both altar and product, then calls it freedom.