When Faith Costs Something

It’s easy to say you believe in something when everyone around you agrees. The real test comes when they don’t.

This Sunday, November 1, the Church celebrates All Saints’ Day, and the Gospel from Matthew 5:1–12 gives us the Beatitudes. Where do you even start? Sheesh, you could build an entire life plan around any one of them.

As best I can, and with varying degrees of failure, I try to live out the first seven. But it’s those last two that have me thinking this week.

“Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,” and “Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you.”

Living in the proverbial Bible Belt, I’m not sure I’ve ever been legitimately challenged for my faith in any way that compares with what the early Christians endured, or what Christians living in parts of the world hostile to the faith still experience today.

But things are changing. The Christian West is increasingly losing the adjective that once defined it. Look across Europe and it’s not difficult to imagine a future where openly living our faith comes at a greater personal or social cost.

Then again, maybe I should put that potential future aside and ask how I’m meeting the Beatitudes’ standard right now.

Am I always willing to stand up for Christ when it’s inconvenient or socially unacceptable to do so? Not when my life or freedom is at stake, but when it might cost me a little popularity, a business relationship, or simply the comfort of fitting in. Probably not. And that bothers me. Especially when I look at what’s happening with younger generations.

We’re living in a culture covered in a thin TikTok veneer of self-promotion, where image often matters more than substance and sometimes vice is celebrated as virtue. Yet beneath all that noise, many young people are struggling to find something meaningful to hold on to.

A Harvard study found that 58% of young adults surveyed had experienced little or no sense of purpose or meaning during the preceding month. Another 44% reported feeling that they didn’t matter to others.

If those numbers don’t make your head spin it’s on too tight. And while the reasons are complicated, I can’t help wondering whether we’re failing to give these young people, especially young men, something authentic to believe in. Something worth sacrificing for.

But before I start pointing fingers at their generation, perhaps I should take a harder look at my own.

Am I just the Boomer version of what we so often accuse younger people of being? Another self-absorbed guy who puts on a carefully constructed facade when it’s convenient and socially acceptable?

Maybe the problem isn’t that young people have rejected Christianity. Maybe too many of us have failed to show them a Christianity worth taking seriously.

That’s an uncomfortable thought, particularly when I consider that my own reluctance to stand up for Christ may be part of the problem.

The saints we celebrate this Sunday weren’t perfect people. But they took Christ seriously enough to let Him change their lives, even when doing so came at tremendous cost. Their faith wasn’t simply something they professed when it was convenient. It was something they lived.

Perhaps that’s what those final Beatitudes are asking of us. Not to go looking for persecution or manufacture conflict, but to have the courage to live our faith authentically, even when it would be easier to remain silent.

We may not be able to reverse the secularization of the West. But perhaps, just maybe, if more of us were willing to live out those last two Beatitudes, we might begin to reverse some of the rot we’re seeing around us.

And that brings me back to the question I started with.

It’s not whether I’ll have the courage to stand up for Christ if persecution comes someday (though I pray that I will). It’s whether I have the courage to stand up for Him today, when the stakes are considerably smaller.

— Chris Teague