Daily Inspiration Quote by Lynn Johnston

There is a cartoonist’s economy in Lynn Johnston’s phrasing: “only a couple of times” lands like a shrug, but it’s a carefully aimed one. She doesn’t denounce church, doesn’t posture as a freethinking rebel, doesn’t even claim it never worked. She grants it two small wins, then lets the scarcity do the indicting. That restraint is the point. The line isn’t atheist triumphalism; it’s consumer-grade honesty from someone used to watching everyday institutions fail the people who keep showing up anyway.

“Felt enlightened” is the tell. Enlightenment is not comfort, not community, not obligation, not fear of consequence. It’s an internal click: clarity, perspective, maybe even moral courage. By choosing that metric, Johnston quietly questions what church is optimizing for. If a service mostly produces conformity, guilt, or rote reassurance, then it may be succeeding socially while failing spiritually. The subtext is a modern disenchantment: people aren’t necessarily rejecting faith, they’re rejecting the performance of faith that can feel like recycled slogans delivered on schedule.

Context matters with Johnston. As the creator of For Better or For Worse, she built a career on the intimate frictions of family life, where institutions (marriage, school, work, religion) are experienced less as ideologies than as weekly routines. The quote reads like one of her panels: mild on the surface, quietly sharp underneath. It captures a wider cultural shift too - not “church bad,” but “why am I here if it rarely changes me?” That question is harder for any institution to answer.