Faith & Spirit Quote by Peter Jennings

Jennings is doing something that feels almost quaint now: drawing a hard, clean line between curiosity and belief. The sentence is built like a preemptive correction, a small act of reputation management. "Don't be confused" assumes an audience ready to project motives onto him, to read any sustained attention to religion as endorsement, conversion, or a secret inner hunger. He shuts that down before it starts.

The craft is in the double use of "driven". Religion is framed not as revelation but as a force field that moves people, institutions, elections, wars, grief rituals, national myths. A journalist can be "driven" to cover it the way they are driven to cover money or power: because it organizes the world, not because it saves a soul. The line also subtly defends the legitimacy of skepticism. He's saying: I can take your beliefs seriously without sharing them. That's a plea for a civic middle ground that has gotten harder to occupy in an era where "objectivity" is treated as either impossibly naive or secretly partisan.

Context matters: Jennings came up in mainstream broadcast news, where authority was performed through restraint. Declaring personal faith on air would have complicated the posture of the neutral narrator; declaring no faith could be read as contempt. So he chooses a third route: respect without confession. The subtext is a warning against the category error Americans often make with religion coverage: confusing attention with allegiance, reporting with testimony.