Life & Wisdom Quote by Lemuel K. Washburn

Strip away the professional custodians of faith and Washburn is betting the architecture collapses fast. The question isn’t really about churches as buildings; it’s about churches as institutions, sustained less by divine inevitability than by the human machinery that keeps belief organized, legible, and socially rewarded. By framing it as a clean hypothetical, he dodges a sermon and lands a dare: if religion is true and vital, it should survive without its managerial class.

The line works because it borrows the cadence of common-sense skepticism. “How long” implies an experiment with a clock running, as if the church’s durability can be measured like shelf life. That’s a pointed inversion of religious rhetoric, which tends to speak in eternities. Washburn compresses the grand into the practical, and the practical becomes damning.

Subtextually, it’s an attack on clerical mediation: ministers and priests as gatekeepers who translate private awe into public obedience, who professionalize mystery, who turn a community of believers into a governed population. It also hints at the economics of faith - salaries, property, authority - suggesting churches persist because someone’s job depends on them.

Context matters: this is the kind of jab that flourishes in Protestant-heavy, anti-clerical American discourse, where suspicion of hierarchy runs hot and “priestcraft” is an old accusation. Washburn isn’t merely mocking believers; he’s interrogating power. If the sacred needs constant staffing to remain standing, maybe what’s being preserved isn’t revelation but an organization.