Wit & Attitude Quote by Annie Dillard

A trapdoor opens in the space between “mercy” and “mission,” and Dillard drops us through it with the clean snap of a joke that isn’t kidding. The exchange is structured like a parable, but it runs backward: the priest’s answer, meant to reassure, detonates the entire project of evangelism. If ignorance exempts, then knowledge endangers. The Eskimo’s final question is devastating because it’s morally literal, refusing the priest the luxury of abstraction. It’s not “Why share truth?” but “Why increase my liability?”

Dillard’s intent is less to mock faith than to expose the ethical self-contradiction embedded in certain theological systems: salvation framed as information transfer turns preaching into a kind of spiritual colonialism, where contact itself becomes contamination. The priest speaks from an institutional script that assumes disclosure is automatically beneficent. The Eskimo punctures that assumption with one plain, prosecutorial line, revealing the asymmetry of power: the missionary can leave; the convert must live inside the new accounting.

The subtext carries a critique of how Christianity has historically traveled: as both compassion and conquest, offering metaphysical rescue while rewriting local worlds as “sin.” Dillard, an American writer attentive to nature, doubt, and the costs of certitude, uses the brevity of the dialogue to mimic the missionary encounter itself: quick, confident answers meeting a question that the system can’t metabolize. The wit lands because it’s logically airtight, and the cynicism lands because it’s historically plausible.