Faith & Spirit Quote by Sydney Carter

Carter’s line is a small defiance dressed up as a jig. “Scriptures and creeds” are the heavy furniture of religion: authorized texts, polished formulas, institutional certainty. He doesn’t just predict that they might be questioned; he makes disbelief sound almost inevitable, the kind of “incredible” that comes from modern life rubbing against literalism and rigid doctrine. The sly twist is that he refuses to let that collapse be the end of the story.

The sentence pivots on “but.” Faith, for Carter, isn’t a filing cabinet of propositions. It’s kinetic: it “will still go dancing on.” Dancing implies risk, improvisation, and community - a practice you do with your body, not merely your assent. He’s rescuing belief from the courtroom (where creeds are cross-examined) and putting it back on the village floor (where meaning is made collectively, imperfectly, joyfully). There’s also a quiet rebuke to religious gatekeeping: if faith can outlive the official language meant to contain it, then institutions don’t own the sacred.

Context matters. Carter, an English poet and folk musician best known for “Lord of the Dance,” wrote in a postwar Britain drifting from church authority while still hungry for spiritual idioms. His genius was to translate Christian imagination into folk vernacular - motion, rhythm, refrains - without pretending doubt wasn’t in the room. The subtext is pastoral and political at once: modernity may shred the paperwork, but the human need for transcendence doesn’t vanish; it changes tempo.