"Here, you can walk into a bookstore and pick up a Bible or Christian literature and learn. Over there, they are lucky if they have one Bible for a whole village"
About this Quote
The line trades in a blunt geography of privilege: "here" as abundance, "over there" as scarcity, with the bookstore as a quiet symbol of modern freedom. Michael Scott frames religious knowledge not as revelation but as access - something you "pick up", something you can "learn". That phrasing demystifies faith into a kind of information economy. The Bible becomes both sacred text and everyday commodity, sitting on a shelf like any other self-improvement purchase. It is an unsettling, effective move because it exposes how easily people in wealthy contexts confuse availability with devotion.
The subtext is a moral nudge aimed at an audience presumed to be comfortable, perhaps complacent: you have infrastructure (printing, distribution, disposable income, literacy), and you treat it as normal. "They are lucky" quietly indicts the systems that turn spiritual material into a lottery. It also leans on a familiar rhetorical lever in missionary and humanitarian discourse: contrast to spark gratitude, then responsibility. The simplicity is strategic. No statistics, no policy prescriptions - just a vivid, countable image: one Bible for a whole village. That concreteness creates emotional traction where abstract inequality might slide off.
Context matters because the quote’s power depends on a Christian-centered worldview. It universalizes the Bible’s importance, which can read as compassionate or culturally narrow depending on the listener. Either way, the intent is clear: shame the ease of "here" into action for "over there", using scarcity as the argument you can’t casually browse past.
The subtext is a moral nudge aimed at an audience presumed to be comfortable, perhaps complacent: you have infrastructure (printing, distribution, disposable income, literacy), and you treat it as normal. "They are lucky" quietly indicts the systems that turn spiritual material into a lottery. It also leans on a familiar rhetorical lever in missionary and humanitarian discourse: contrast to spark gratitude, then responsibility. The simplicity is strategic. No statistics, no policy prescriptions - just a vivid, countable image: one Bible for a whole village. That concreteness creates emotional traction where abstract inequality might slide off.
Context matters because the quote’s power depends on a Christian-centered worldview. It universalizes the Bible’s importance, which can read as compassionate or culturally narrow depending on the listener. Either way, the intent is clear: shame the ease of "here" into action for "over there", using scarcity as the argument you can’t casually browse past.
Quote Details
| Topic | Bible |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Michael
Add to List



