Love & Passion Quote by Lynn Johnston

Domestic hypocrisy has rarely been rendered with such clean, Sunday-morning lighting. Lynn Johnston’s line lands like a throwaway memory, but it’s really a small indictment: the parents opt out of obligation while outsourcing it to their children, then presumably enjoy the moral dividends of “being a churchgoing family” anyway. The joke isn’t only that adults are tired. It’s that authority often means getting to redefine duty as something that happens to other people.

Johnston, a cartoonist, works in the cramped square footage where family life and cultural institutions collide. The humor is observational, not grandstanding: a bed, a church, kids shuttled between them. That specificity matters. It evokes a particular late-20th-century North American normal where church is less a personal conviction than a weekly performance - one that parents can quietly skip while insisting the children keep up appearances. The kids, meanwhile, learn the real catechism early: rules are flexible for the powerful, rigid for the small.

Under the gag sits a generational story about religion as habit and social insurance. Sending the kids to church can be framed as “good for them,” but Johnston’s phrasing exposes the convenience: parenting as delegation, faith as routine, and morality as something measured by attendance rather than belief. It’s a cartoonist’s version of a raised eyebrow - not anti-religious so much as allergic to sanctimony. In one sentence, she captures how institutions persist: not always through fervor, but through family logistics and the quiet, lopsided enforcement of tradition.