Daily Inspiration Quote by E. Stanley Jones

The line cuts against the lazy inheritance model of faith: the idea that religion is a family heirloom you automatically receive with the furniture. E. Stanley Jones, writing as a Methodist missionary and evangelist in the early 20th century, is aiming directly at cultural Christianity - the kind that functions as social identity, moral respectability, even nationalism - rather than lived conviction. His intent is pastoral and polemical at once: to unsettle the complacent churchgoer without sounding like he’s attacking the church itself.

What makes it work is its blunt reset of categories. “Born” signals accident, geography, and bloodline; “Christian” (for Jones) signals decision, transformation, allegiance. The sentence is structured like a small theological trap: it grants the comfort of a familiar phrase (“Christian home”) and then withdraws the conclusion people smuggle in. It’s a rebuke, but also an invitation to agency. Faith isn’t a birthright; it’s a response.

The subtext is sharper than it looks. Jones is also protecting Christianity from becoming an ethnic marker - a move that, in his era, mattered in both American mainline churches and colonial contexts abroad. If Christianity is merely what your parents are, it’s indistinguishable from class, tribe, and habit. By insisting on personal commitment, he’s trying to keep the tradition from collapsing into costume.

In a time when “Christian” could mean “respectable,” Jones narrows it back to discipleship. The discomfort is the point: if belief costs nothing, it’s probably just belonging.