Art & Creativity Quote by Lionel Blue

The line lands with an almost disarming candor: Blue isn’t praising doctrine, he’s confessing to being ambushed by earnestness. In a setting that often risks feeling dutiful or performative - religious instruction classes, with their whiff of syllabus and supervision - he meets Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and, crucially, “the sincerity of the traveller” overwhelms him. Not Bunyan’s theology, not the allegory’s neat mapping of sin and salvation, but the palpable interiority of someone actually trying to get somewhere.

That choice of emphasis is the tell. Blue, a clergyman who spent much of his public life translating faith into broadcast-friendly speech, is signaling what kind of religion he trusts: not the confident, institutional kind, but the vulnerable, first-person kind. “Traveller” frames belief as motion rather than possession. It hints at doubt, fatigue, wrong turns - the spiritual life as itinerary, not identity badge. Overwhelming sincerity is also a backhanded critique of religious environments where sincerity is scarce, where piety can harden into social code. The classroom is about instruction; Bunyan’s protagonist is about urgency.

Context sharpens the effect. Bunyan wrote from imprisonment; his pilgrim advances through fear, temptation, and stubborn hope. Blue’s memory suggests that what converts (or reconverts) isn’t argument but the encounter with a believable voice. The subtext is pastoral and mildly subversive: if you want faith to feel real, stop polishing it into respectability and let it sound like someone on the road, meaning every word.