"During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school"
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War didn’t just move Lionel Blue’s body; it rearranged his spiritual furniture. Evacuated as a Jewish child into non-Jewish households, he meets Christianity not as an abstract “other,” but as the air in the room: said at the table, taught in class, embedded in everyday moral language. The line’s quiet power comes from its plainness. “Encountered” is doing careful work here, suggesting contact without conversion, exposure without surrender. It frames Christianity as something you bump into when your own community’s protective shell has been shattered by history.
The context is Britain’s wartime evacuation program, which scattered children for safety while also subjecting them to the majority culture’s assumptions. For a Jewish evacuee, that could mean hymns in assembly, prayers before meals, Christmas as the civic calendar, and the soft pressure to assimilate as gratitude. Blue’s phrasing sidesteps melodrama, but the subtext is about vulnerability: when you’re a guest in someone else’s home, their rituals can feel like hospitality and erasure at the same time.
Coming from a clergyman, the sentence also hints at an origin story. Blue later became famous as a Jewish voice in Britain’s religious broadcasting, often empathetic toward Christian neighbors while refusing to blur differences. This memory explains that posture: intimacy with Christianity formed under duress, yielding a faith shaped less by insulated identity than by forced proximity, negotiation, and the complicated education of survival.
The context is Britain’s wartime evacuation program, which scattered children for safety while also subjecting them to the majority culture’s assumptions. For a Jewish evacuee, that could mean hymns in assembly, prayers before meals, Christmas as the civic calendar, and the soft pressure to assimilate as gratitude. Blue’s phrasing sidesteps melodrama, but the subtext is about vulnerability: when you’re a guest in someone else’s home, their rituals can feel like hospitality and erasure at the same time.
Coming from a clergyman, the sentence also hints at an origin story. Blue later became famous as a Jewish voice in Britain’s religious broadcasting, often empathetic toward Christian neighbors while refusing to blur differences. This memory explains that posture: intimacy with Christianity formed under duress, yielding a faith shaped less by insulated identity than by forced proximity, negotiation, and the complicated education of survival.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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