Creativity Quote by Paul Kantner

Kantner’s line has the crackle of a backstage heckle aimed at Sunday-morning respectability. Coming from a musician who watched America preach righteousness while waging wars and policing bodies, the jab lands because it flips “Christian” from a membership badge into a moral verb. He’s not litigating theology; he’s calling out brand loyalty.

The intent is less to flatter non-believers than to indict the way institutional identity can substitute for ethics. “Try to be good people” is the quiet fulcrum: effort over affiliation, practice over proclamation. Kantner’s punchline also trades on a familiar cultural contradiction in the U.S., where Christianity is often performed as a public signal - voting bloc, lifestyle marker, cultural dominance - while the hard parts of the Gospel (humility, mercy, solidarity with the powerless) get treated like optional add-ons. His phrasing “probably better Christians than Christians” isn’t a logical argument so much as a provocation: if your faith doesn’t make you kinder, what is it doing besides organizing your tribe?

Context matters: Kantner’s Jefferson Airplane era was steeped in countercultural suspicion of authority, including churches that aligned with empire, racism, and moral panic. The subtext is generational and political: a refusal to let “Christian” mean “in charge.” It’s also a defense of secular conscience, insisting that decency doesn’t need a sermon to be real - and that the loudest believers may be the least transformed.