In Envy: A Big Problem You Didn’t Know You Had, Mike Fabarez sets out to expose envy as a corrosive sin that quietly erodes the Christian soul. On its own terms, the book is thoughtful, sincere, and pastorally competent. Fabarez brings the problem close to home, operationalized as envy through familiar church dynamics—such as a pastor’s resentment toward “the pastor across town.” As pastoral counseling, the book succeeds.
But on the terms that matter most today—culturally, politically, and morally—it is strangely evasive. Fabarez treats envy as a private spiritual defect at precisely the moment when envy has been elevated into a public virtue and a revolutionary force.
This is no small oversight. Envy is no longer a “hidden sin.” It is a central engine of modern ideological movements that openly reject Christianity because it is said to justify inequality, sanctify injustice, and pacify moral outrage by promising rewards in a mythical future rather than justice in the present. Fabarez never engages this critique. In doing so, he misses an opportunity not merely to defend Christianity, but to defend the moral legitimacy of unequal outcomes in the real world.
The modern charge against Christianity is blunt: it teaches people to suppress envy by spiritualizing inequality. The poor are told not to resent the rich. The unsuccessful are told not to covet the successful. Discomfort with disparities in wealth and status is labeled sinful, while justice is deferred to heaven. From socialist, Marxist, and revolutionary perspectives, this is not virtue—it is ideological anesthesia. Heaven becomes a moral IOU, an unprovable promise invoked to excuse inequity now.
Fabarez never answers this charge. Instead, he inadvertently reinforces it.
Throughout Envy, Fabarez envisions a heaven in which rewards, honors, and distinctions are distributed according to faithfulness and obedience on earth. There will be crowns, varying degrees of honor, and differentiated status. For believers, this is orthodox theology. For skeptics, it is hollow compensation: an unverifiable afterlife reward system invoked to quiet dissatisfaction with the present order. If one doubts scriptural authority—as Fabarez’s critics do—this vision of heaven does nothing to justify why inequality should be tolerated, much less defended, here and now.
That is the book’s central and most intriguing puzzle. Fabarez is willing to defend unequal rewards in heaven while declining to defend unequal rewards on earth. He moralizes envy without explaining why many of the things people envy—wealth, status, success—are often legitimately earned. He condemns resentment without distinguishing it from justice-seeking. And he never confronts the far more dangerous idea now dominant in elite culture: that envy is not a vice at all, but a moral insight.
Ironically, Fabarez already gestures toward a deeper truth. His definition of envy is more demanding than simple coveting. Envy, as he rightly treats it, includes the conviction that others should not possess what we desire. That moral judgment—once institutionalized—becomes a justification for stripping others of goods they rightfully hold, whether wealth, status, or even childhood itself.
My own research on child labor and child welfare reinforces this point. Child labor did not persist primarily because of impersonal economic forces, but because adults—often parents—found it useful. In the absence of modern welfare systems, children became a form of private insurance. Their labor secured adult stability at the cost of healthy development. This was not altruism under constraint; it was an institutionalized system that unfairly advantaged adults over children. Too many parents were—and remain—willing to sacrifice the long-term flourishing of their children for short-term security. This is envy translated into structure: resentment of one’s own vulnerability redirected downward onto those least able to resist.
It is one thing to caution against envy as a personal vice. It is another to recognize when social and economic structures produce outcomes—child labor, welfare failures, intergenerational exploitation—that demand collective moral and political responses. Addressing those realities requires both moral discipline and evidence-based public policy, not the dismissive conflation of all criticism as envy.
One further point helps explain why Envy has landed more softly than it should have. Despite the importance of its subject, the book has not enjoyed the reach or influence of Fabarez’s more successful works, such as Raising Men or Ten Things You’re Wrong About Heaven, Hell, and Salvation. Those books confront questions where Christian doctrine collides directly with modern confusion—about masculinity, authority, judgment, and the afterlife—and they do so with unmistakable cultural urgency.
Envy, by contrast, remains inward-looking. Fabarez underestimates the intense interest in envy among economists, historians, and political scientists who see it not merely as a feeling, but as a principle organizing contemporary moral claims. For readers like me, envy is not simply a temptation of the heart; it is a theory of justice in disguise.
To be fair, Fabarez is not unaware of the implications of his argument. In the book’s final chapter, he confronts critics who bristle at his claim that inequality will persist even in heaven. He insists—correctly—that eternal life does not entail a flattened moral landscape. Heaven, in his account, is a perfected order, not an egalitarian leveling project.
That move is revealing. Fabarez is plainly willing to justify inequality when it is grounded in divine choice and moral differentiation. He affirms that God distributes gifts unequally, rewards faithfulness differentially, and orders creation hierarchically. In this sense, he implicitly concedes that inequality itself is not unjust—and that demanding sameness is not a biblical virtue.
But this only sharpens the omission. Fabarez defends inequality where it cannot be empirically tested—in heaven—while declining to defend it where the critique of Christianity is fiercest and most politically consequential—on earth.
Criminalizing envy, morally speaking, is not a bug of Christianity. It is one of its most important civilizational contributions. But that argument must be made in the real world, not deferred to the next one. Envy gestures toward this truth. It simply never brings it fully to earth.
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