Vanity Fair

“Do not fear what you are about to suffer… Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.” — Revelation 2:10 (ESV)

Before they reach it, Evangelist meets them one last time, and what he says is not comforting — it’s honest. A hard town is coming, he tells them. You’ll be badly treated there, and “one or both of you must seal the testimony which you hold, with blood.” In other words: one of you is going to die here. Be faithful to death, and the King will give you a crown of life. Then he sends them in anyway.

The town is called Vanity, and it runs a fair that never closes — Vanity Fair, set up right across the only road to the Celestial City, selling everything: houses, honours, titles, kingdoms, pleasures, positions, bodies, souls — “and what not.” Every appetite has a stall. And the road to God runs straight through the middle of it, because, Bunyan says, the only way to avoid this fair completely would be to leave the world altogether. You can’t. You have to walk through it.

Here’s why this may be the most relevant station in the book for you. Vanity Fair is the world as one enormous marketplace, screaming at you to buy an identity. Everything is for sale and everything is telling you that this — this look, this status, this thing, this level of attention — is what will finally make you someone. Bunyan’s fair had streets of merchandise. Yours fits in your pocket and updates every time you refresh it. The pitch is identical: your worth is for sale here, come and buy.

Watch what happens when the two men walk through, because it’s the whole point. They cause an instant uproar — and they’ve done nothing. They just don’t fit. Their clothes are different (the garments from the Cross). Their speech is different — nobody can understand them. And most of all: when the sellers call, “What will you buy?”, the pilgrims put their fingers in their ears and answer, “We buy the truth.”

That’s it. They didn’t protest or preach or smash a stall. They just weren’t interested — and not being interested was the most offensive thing they could have done. The fair can handle enemies. What it can’t stand is someone who looks at everything it’s selling and quietly isn’t tempted. If you have ever chosen not to buy what everyone around you is buying — not to chase the thing, not to perform for the attention — you know the reaction Christian got. It’s not a shrug. It’s hostility. The people who are all-in on the fair experience your indifference as an insult.

It turns violent. They beat the two men, smear them with dirt, cage them, and put them on display to be mocked. And the pilgrims’ response — patience, no insults back, kindness for cruelty — actually wins a few people over, which enrages the mob further. There’s a trial, a rigged jury (Mr. Blindman, Mr. Hate-light, Mr. Malice, Mr. Implacable), and Faithful is condemned. They scourge him, stab him, stone him, and burn him at the stake.

And then Bunyan does the thing that changes how you read the whole book. The instant Faithful dies, a chariot and horses are waiting behind the crowd, and he’s swept up and carried “the nearest way to the celestial gate” — home before anyone. The one who lost everything actually won, and got there first. The world was completely certain it had destroyed him. It had promoted him. Christian, meanwhile, survives and walks on, which turns out to be the harder road, not the easier one.

This is the honest part the softer versions leave out: following God can genuinely cost you — friends, standing, and in some places much more. Bunyan won’t pretend otherwise. But he flips the scoreboard. What looks like losing everything, from the fair’s side, is winning everything from God’s.

One thing to do: pick one thing the fair is telling you that you need in order to be someone — one status, one look, one number, one item — and refuse to buy it on purpose, for a set stretch of time. Watch how it feels, and watch how people react to you not wanting it. That flicker of “wait, why don’t you care about this?” — from others and from yourself — is you learning to speak a different language in a town that only sells vanity.