"For many people, the reluctance to embrace Christianity is as practical as it is intellectual. They want to know what the benefits of Christianity are, or what's in it for them"
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D'Souza frames disbelief less as a collision of doctrines than as a consumer decision, a move that quietly shifts the burden from the skeptic to the skeptic's motives. By calling reluctance "as practical as it is intellectual", he implies that arguments about evidence or truth are often cover stories for a more self-interested calculation. The subtext is prosecutorial: if you ask "what's in it for me", you're already standing on morally compromised ground, treating faith like a loyalty program rather than a surrender of ego.
It works rhetorically because it anticipates the modern posture of spiritual shopping. In an age of wellness branding and self-optimization, the question of benefits is the cultural default; D'Souza leverages that familiarity to suggest that Christianity's critics are trapped in the very transactional logic the religion challenges. He's not merely defending Christianity's plausibility. He's challenging the legitimacy of the criteria by which people judge it.
The context is D'Souza's broader project as a polemical public intellectual: recasting Christianity as both rational and socially beneficial, while portraying secularism as motivated reasoning. The line aims at an audience tired of academic debates and eager for diagnoses of cultural decline. It also sidesteps a risk: if faith can be sold on "benefits", it begins to look like the same utilitarian bargain he’s criticizing. The provocation lands because it dares listeners to admit their price tag - and to feel uneasy about having one.
It works rhetorically because it anticipates the modern posture of spiritual shopping. In an age of wellness branding and self-optimization, the question of benefits is the cultural default; D'Souza leverages that familiarity to suggest that Christianity's critics are trapped in the very transactional logic the religion challenges. He's not merely defending Christianity's plausibility. He's challenging the legitimacy of the criteria by which people judge it.
The context is D'Souza's broader project as a polemical public intellectual: recasting Christianity as both rational and socially beneficial, while portraying secularism as motivated reasoning. The line aims at an audience tired of academic debates and eager for diagnoses of cultural decline. It also sidesteps a risk: if faith can be sold on "benefits", it begins to look like the same utilitarian bargain he’s criticizing. The provocation lands because it dares listeners to admit their price tag - and to feel uneasy about having one.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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