Daily Inspiration Quote by E. Stanley Jones

Respectability is the quiet tyrant Jones is naming: not open disbelief, not philosophical doubt, but the polished instinct to keep up appearances. In one clipped phrase, he frames “the ordinary church” as less a sanctuary than a social mechanism, where the biggest sin isn’t scandal but looking messy. The verb “suppressed” does the heavy lifting. Something living, volatile, and probably necessary is being pressed down - not by doctrine, but by manners.

Jones’ target is the performative moral economy of religious communities: the unspoken rule that faith must present as competence. “A desire to appear better than we really are” isn’t just hypocrisy; it’s a defensive strategy. If the congregation is a stage, confession becomes brand damage. Vulnerability reads as failure, so people trade honesty for polish. The subtext is that respectability doesn’t merely hide problems; it blocks the very processes religion claims to offer - repentance, healing, transformation. You can’t be forgiven for a self you never admit exists.

Context matters here. Jones, a prominent Methodist missionary and revivalist voice in the early-to-mid 20th century, worked in settings where Christianity competed with modernity’s promises of progress and propriety. Churches, eager to look rational and “upright,” often domesticated the unruly parts of spiritual life: grief, doubt, desire, anger, ecstasy. Jones is pushing back against a bourgeois Christianity that confuses moral cleanliness with spiritual health. The sting is that the church’s respectability isn’t a side issue; it’s an obstacle to the very truth-telling it was built to demand.