January 2026
Most people wake up on Monday morning and go to work without ever asking whether it has anything to do with meaning. They go because it pays the bills, because it is expected, because the alternatives feel worse. Modern life is organized in such a way that this is rarely questioned. Work is treated as neutral, as necessary, as something outside the realm of moral reflection, something you do in order to live, not something that actively shapes what the world becomes.
Day after day, people spend their time, strength, discipline, and attention keeping systems running that they have never been asked to evaluate ethically. They produce. They deliver. They optimize. And at this point, many will object: I don’t have a choice. I have to work. I have to survive. That may be true. Necessity is real. But necessity does not make a thing morally neutral. It only makes the question harder, and therefore more important.
Very few are ever confronted with a simple, but dangerous question: What is it you are actually building? Not who you are as a private individual. Not what you believe or feel. But what the world is shaped into through your actions. Who benefits from your labor? Who bears its consequences? And what larger project are you, consciously or unconsciously – financing with your life?
These questions are uncomfortable because they cannot be postponed to leisure time or answered with good intentions alone. They do not disappear simply because the system is large or because someone else would do the job if you refused. In a culture that insists morality is relative, such questions are often dismissed as naive, unrealistic, or even cruel. Why burden yourself with responsibility when the machine will continue regardless? Why trouble your conscience when opting out seems impossible? But this resignation is not neutrality. It is surrender. And it reshapes the world just as surely as deliberate action does.
Who, exactly, are we loyal to?
One would think that questions like these would be taken seriously in places where meaning, morality, and responsibility are said to stand at the center. One would think that institutions tasked with forming conscience would dare to ask not only what people believe, but what they actually do. Not only sin as private weakness, but sin as structure, system, and work. Yet even here, there is often silence.
Pride, lust, and greed are preached against freely, but rarely Mammon, as he actually operates in the world. Because Mammon is not primarily a love of money. Mammon is also loyalty. It is the question of whom you serve six days a week, which systems you strengthen through your discipline, and what consequences your work has far beyond the reach of your own conscience. It is entirely possible to hear a full sermon about greed and then return straight to work in an industry built on violence, deception, or exploitation without a single word being spoken. It is possible to confess sin on Sunday and spend the rest of the week building systems that manufacture sin on an industrial scale.
There is no confrontation. No guidance. No questions. But the tithe, the church will take.
Perhaps that is precisely why the silence is so complete. It is far easier to speak about individual sins than about collective structures. Easier to warn against desire than to ask whether an entire congregation is bound to Mammon through work, debt, profit, and loyalty. Easier to offer forgiveness than to risk consequences.
Christ’s path was never confined to one hour a week. It demanded the whole life. The first Christians were not known for their sermons alone, but for how they lived, worked, shared, and carried one another. Faith did not only shape their prayers; it reshaped their economy, their community, and their loyalties.
What if the church once again dared to do the uncomfortable, not as an institution issuing commands from a distance, but through leaders who actually knew their people? Leaders who understood that transformation takes time, that transitions are slow, and that fear and dependence are real forces. A priest who does not simply say stop or repent, but who walks with people long enough to see their strengths before confronting their weaknesses. One who says: You are good with people, build on that. You make things happen, don’t sell that strength cheaply. You don’t have to change everything today, but you don’t have to stay where you are forever.
What if a priest said: This man in the congregation is honorable. He needs work. Hire him.
Then the church would not merely shepherd souls. It would shape society.
Christ’s path is not for weak men. And it is not for comfortable institutions.
-From the work surrounding The Fall