Daily Inspiration Quote by Abigail Van Buren

Van Buren takes a scalpel to the pious fiction that “spiritual” automatically means “beyond money.” By comparing religion to water, she starts with a shared premise: the raw thing feels elemental, abundant, morally hard to hoard. But the moment it gets piped, it becomes infrastructure, billing, and—most pointedly—power. The joke lands because it’s not really about whether religion should cost anything; it’s about how institutions turn a supposedly free public good into a managed utility, then act offended when you notice the meter running.

“And the Piper!” is the sting. It names the human apparatus behind the pipeline: clergy, administrators, broadcasters, building funds, political lobbies, the whole ecosystem that lives off access. Van Buren’s wit isn’t atheistic so much as consumer-protection minded: once someone positions themselves as your sole distributor of meaning, they can charge you for connection and call it devotion.

The context matters. Writing in mid-20th-century America, Van Buren watched religion become both big business and a civic credential, with churches expanding alongside suburbs, television ministries rising, and faith increasingly braided into public life. Her line echoes a perennial American suspicion of toll-collectors—especially ones who claim moral exemption from scrutiny. It’s a reminder that the cost isn’t just monetary. Pay for the piping long enough, and you may forget the water was ever free.