Daily Inspiration Quote by Kenneth Scott Latourette

Latourette’s line does something sly: it shrinks Christianity without sneering at it. By reframing the faith as “recent,” he punctures the aura of timeless inevitability that religions (and their institutions) often trade on. The move is historian’s rhetoric: scale. Put the cross next to deep time and it stops looking like the default setting of humanity and starts looking like one powerful chapter in a much longer book.

The intent is partly disciplinary. Latourette, a major church historian, is reminding readers that even a tradition with two millennia of accumulated doctrine, art, and political muscle is still young against the span of human existence. That’s a corrective aimed at Christian triumphalism, but also at a certain Western habit of treating Christian history as a synonym for human history. By invoking “thousands of years,” he subtly widens the frame to include pre-Christian religions, Indigenous cosmologies, and the long prelude of human culture that doesn’t point toward Bethlehem.

The subtext is not “Christianity is insignificant,” but “Christianity is contingent.” If it emerged at a particular moment, in specific imperial and Mediterranean conditions, then it can change, fracture, hybridize, or even recede - which is exactly what modernity, colonial encounters, and secularization were making impossible to ignore in Latourette’s lifetime. Written from the vantage point of the 20th century, after world wars and amid global decolonization, the sentence doubles as a quiet warning: permanence is a story traditions tell about themselves. History tells different stories.