Aging & Wisdom Quote by Douglas Hurd

“Impoverishing” is the tell: Douglas Hurd isn’t arguing theology so much as social accounting. He frames spirituality as a form of civic wealth, something a society can quietly lose without noticing until the balance sheet looks grim. The opening hedge - “It depends on how it is done” - is classic politician’s throat-clearing, a preemptive concession to pluralism and the culture-war tripwire. He’s not calling for a return to clerical authority; he’s trying to rescue the word “spiritual” from sounding like coercion.

The deeper move is how he describes the change: “drifting.” That verb denies villainy and design. No conspirators, no militant secularists storming the gates - just a slow, frictionless slide into thinness. Drift suggests institutional neglect: schools that teach skills but not meaning, public life that prizes productivity over purpose, a consumer culture that gives constant stimulation while starving the inner life. The subtext is generational: “people grow up” implies the loss is baked in early, before anyone can choose otherwise.

As a late-20th-century British Conservative with a patrician, establishment sensibility, Hurd is speaking from a world where churches once doubled as community infrastructure and moral language was shared even by the not-especially-devout. His worry isn’t damnation; it’s deprivation - fewer rituals to mark grief and joy, less vocabulary for duty and transcendence, more loneliness disguised as freedom. The line works because it recasts spirituality as public ecology: remove it, and life still functions, but the air gets noticeably thinner.