A Warning to New Christians and Converts

Beware of the return of the unclean spirit!

The Return of the Unclean Spirit

²⁴ “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless regions looking for a resting place, but not finding any, it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ ²⁵ When it comes, it finds it swept and put in order. ²⁶ Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there; and the last state of that person is worse than the first.” (Luke 11:24-26)

Many Christians have been puzzled by this strange warning from Jesus. If a demon has been cast out from a person, comes back to find them “swept and put in order,” why would it return with seven more spirits and cause the person to be in an even worse state than before? What does this mean? What lesson was Jesus trying to teach his disciples?

Many Church Fathers have interpreted this as a warning for new Christians who have been freshly baptized. After baptism, their house is “swept” from original sin, but if the new Christian does not fill their house with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and lapses back into their old life of sin, they risk opening themselves up to even worse spiritual attack than before they became a Christian.

Part of the reason for this is that as a baptized person, you have been made a bright and visible target to the demons as a child of God and The Enemy would like nothing more than to corrupt your soul and lead you into mortal sin to sever your relationship with God and jeopardize your eternal salvation.

The other reason is related to spiritual hypocrisy and backsliding as a new Christian. As a new Christian, you might be going to church and partaking in the sacraments and giving an outward veneer of righteousness. However, suppose on the inside you are still deeply enthralled in habitual sin. In that case, the problem is that you risk being Christian in name only and this is a spiritually corrosive form of hypocrisy.

As a new Catholic convert, I can directly attest to the spiritual danger of the “return of the unclean spirit.” As I have shared in my testimony previously, the primary impetus for my conversion to Catholicism was a crisis of conscience about my life of sin involving cannabis addiction and sexual degeneracy stemming from the underlying paraphilia that drove me down the transgender pathway.

After my Damascus road experience earlier this year, I experienced a profound spiritual transformation and was able to live a life of sobriety and chastity for the first time in my life. I thought I had been transformed completely. I felt that I had been completely healed. But then, about a month clean and sober, I suddenly experienced an intense spiritual attack in the form of overwhelming temptation. Unfortunately, I led my guard down and relapsed, not realizing the danger, not realizing that I would be opening myself up to even worse spiritual attack than before. And after I relapsed, I found it even more difficult to get free of my habitual sins than before.

I now see this as a clear example of Jesus’ warning about the return of the unclear spirit and I definitely found myself in a worse state than before. Part of the reason for it being a worse state than before my conversion was precisely insofar as I began to experience the cognitive dissonance of spiritual hypocrisy. Here I was sharing my testimony about the power of Christ to transform people’s lives and provide an answer to the restlessness of the heart that drives people into sin and addiction. Yet, inwardly I myself had not yet been completely healed and transformed. I felt like a total hypocrite: outwardly preaching the power of Christ to transform lives while still being ensnared in the same habitual sins that characterized my life prior to conversion. And whereas before conversion, I did not feel a great conflict in my worldview and value system, after conversion, living the same old life of sin created incredible cognitive dissonance that did not exist previously when I was not convinced of the soundness of Catholic moral teaching.

This sense of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy was unbearable. But I still continued to frequent the sacrament of reconciliation and partake in the Eucharist. But I struggled because I was confessing the same habitual sin over and over, seemingly not making any progress. But the Catholic Church teaches that the sacraments actually impart supernatural grace to help prevent us from falling back into sin. There were moments when I doubted this doctrine, as I did not feel like I was making any progress. Indeed, it felt like I was stagnating or, worse, moving backwards. And indeed, in the spiritual life, stagnation is, in a sense, moving backwards.

And I will be honest, there were moments when I was tempted to completely give up on Catholicism because chastity and holiness seemed so impossible, like I was fooling myself and it’d be so much simpler to go back to my previous worldview that rationalized masturbatory self-abuse as morally neutral. But I knew deep in my heart that it was not an ultimate solution because I could still recall clearly the crisis of conscience that led me into Catholicism in the first place.

And I knew from a lifetime of experience that a life of hedonism and pleasure, while temporarily satisfying, ultimately leads to a deep sense of restlessness as I habituated to the stimuli and developed a tolerance, leading to a need for more and more pleasure to chase the same feeling of euphoria. Hedonism seems appealing on the surface, but it ultimately leads to spiritual emptiness.

I knew this deep in my bones, and so I never gave up. And I continued frequenting the sacraments and began to spend a lot of time reading Scripture, praying (especially the Rosary), spending time in Eucharistic adoration, daily Mass as much as possible, pleading with God to heal me, to transform me, to divinize me, to make me more like Christ so that I could break free from my habitual sins and lead a life of holiness and sanctity that I knew God was calling me towards.

And yes, by the grace of God, I am back in a state of grace and feeling once more aligned with God's will. I know I will continue to experience temptation. But with my lesson learned, I now have a much more humble attitude about my capacity for sin, and in the future will be far more vigilant about the return of the unclean spirit. “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” Thanks be to God!

I wanted to write this post as a spiritual warning to other new Christians or Catholic converts: do not let your guard down! Do not be placated by the platitude that “we are all sinners.” Yes, nobody is perfect, and God’s mercy is infinite, but that does not give us a license for spiritual complacency. It is not a license to abuse the sacrament of reconciliation by failing to pray for genuine contrition for our sins. Yes, if you are stuck in habitual sin, you absolutely should continue to go to confession even if you know there is a non-negligible chance you will fall back into the same sin. But that still isn’t a justification for slacking off and resigning yourself to the idea that you will always be stuck in this habitual sin. We should always strive for freedom from sin.

We are, in fact, called towards a life of holiness. Jesus Himself said we ought to “be perfect as my heavenly father is perfect.” And St. John writes, “Those who have been born of God do not sin, because God’s seed abides in them…all who do not do what is right are not from God.” (1 John: 3:9-10). And St. Paul writes, “Should we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means!” (Romans 6:15)

Indeed, St. Paul constantly reminds us that we are “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11) and that we are a new creation in Christ, with our old, sinful selves dead and made alive in Christ, as new men with Christ living inside us, our bodies being temples of the Holy Spirit. “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” (Galation 5:1). “For God did not call us to impurity but in holiness.” (1 Thess 4:7).

I could go on, but the Apostles and saints continuously remind us that as Christians, we are called to a life of holiness rather than spiritual complacency. So if you find yourself a slave to habitual sin (“I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate”(Romans 7:15)), do not despair! Keep praying! Keep asking the Eternal Father to send you the gift of the Holy Spirit. Keep partaking in the sacraments. Keep asking Jesus, the Divine Physician, to heal your wounds, which form the root cause of your habitual sins. Healing is possible! Never give up hope!