Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert McAfee Brown

Prayer, Robert McAfee Brown suggests, isn’t failing because people are faithless; it’s failing because it’s unfamiliar. The “foreign land” metaphor is a quietly devastating diagnosis: modern believers often approach prayer the way they approach any intimidating culture - with a camera-ready curiosity and an exit plan. Tourists don’t belong; they consume. They skim the surface, rely on a guidebook of clichés, and retreat the moment the experience demands patience, vulnerability, or fluency.

The intent here is pastoral, not scolding. Brown isn’t mocking people for leaving early; he’s naming the social psychology of religious life in an age of mobility and choice. If your spiritual practice is one option among many, prayer becomes a destination you sample, not a habitat you inhabit. The subtext is about commitment and embarrassment: “uncomfortable and out of place” hints at how prayer exposes incompetence. You can’t optimize it, quantify it, or perform it convincingly on command. So the tourist moves on to places where competence is easier to fake - productivity, entertainment, even activism.

Context matters: Brown, a mid-to-late 20th century theologian known for public-facing Christianity, was writing into a culture where institutional religion was losing its monopoly on meaning, and spiritual life was becoming individualized. His image lands because it borrows the vocabulary of modern freedom (travel, choice, novelty) to show its underside: perpetual movement becomes a defense against transformation. Prayer, in this frame, isn’t a retreat from real life; it’s a kind of residence permit that most of us never apply for.