"Practically speaking, your religion is the story you tell about your life"
About this Quote
Religion here isn’t treated as a vault of doctrines so much as a narrative technology: the way you stitch your days into something that feels coherent, purposeful, and worth enduring. Coming from Andrew Greeley - a Catholic priest who was also a sociologist and novelist - the line carries a cleric’s pastoral realism and a researcher’s eye for how people actually live. “Practically speaking” is the tell. He’s bracketing theological purity in favor of lived religion: not what you can recite, but what you reach for when your plans collapse, when guilt needs a container, when joy demands a language bigger than “good.”
The subtext is gently destabilizing for institutional faith. If religion is “the story you tell,” then belief is less a membership card and more an interpretive frame, and that frame can be Catholic, secular, therapeutic, nationalist, consumerist. Greeley implies there’s no neutral ground; everyone narrates. The question is whether your story is generous, honest, and sustaining - or brittle, self-flattering, and punitive.
It also doubles as a critique of performative piety. The measure isn’t public signaling but private plot: who’s the villain in your autobiography, what counts as redemption, what you think you’re owed, what you think you’ve been spared. For a clergyman in a late-20th-century America drifting from deference to institutions, the line works as an invitation: stop arguing abstractions and listen to the lived storyline beneath them. That’s where conversion, doubt, and meaning actually happen.
The subtext is gently destabilizing for institutional faith. If religion is “the story you tell,” then belief is less a membership card and more an interpretive frame, and that frame can be Catholic, secular, therapeutic, nationalist, consumerist. Greeley implies there’s no neutral ground; everyone narrates. The question is whether your story is generous, honest, and sustaining - or brittle, self-flattering, and punitive.
It also doubles as a critique of performative piety. The measure isn’t public signaling but private plot: who’s the villain in your autobiography, what counts as redemption, what you think you’re owed, what you think you’ve been spared. For a clergyman in a late-20th-century America drifting from deference to institutions, the line works as an invitation: stop arguing abstractions and listen to the lived storyline beneath them. That’s where conversion, doubt, and meaning actually happen.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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