Faith & Spirit Quote by Jerry B. Jenkins

Religion, in Jenkins's telling, isn't the villain; the victory lap is. The line pivots on a neat, unsettling inversion: faith begins as reaching, yearning, petitioning - and curdles the moment someone decides they got there. "Succeeded" is the loaded word. It smuggles in the logic of achievement and certification, turning the ineffable into a finished project. Once the search becomes a conquest, God stops being mystery and becomes property.

The second clause sharpens into social psychology: "he cannot abide anyone else's claim". Jenkins isn't diagnosing theology so much as status anxiety. Competing testimonies threaten the believer's hard-won certainty, so difference gets reframed as error, heresy, even danger. It's a critique of exclusivity that doesn't require cynicism about spirituality; it requires noticing how quickly identity forms around being right. When belonging depends on a particular narrative of access to the divine, another person's equally sincere narrative reads like sabotage.

As a novelist associated with evangelical fiction, Jenkins is also writing from inside the house, not lobbing stones from across the street. That insider position matters: the sentence works like a moral check on triumphalism, the temptation to treat grace as a credential and doubt as a defect. Subtextually, it argues that the ugliest conflicts in religion often come from certainty masquerading as devotion - the human urge to turn a private encounter into a public hierarchy.