Faith & Spirit Quote by Christy Turlington

Turlington’s line lands like a clean break from the ornate machinery of religion: not a rejection of faith, but a refusal to outsource it to specialists. “So much of religion is exegesis” is a quietly devastating diagnosis. Exegesis is what happens when belief gets routed through commentary, footnotes, authorities - an endless interpretive industry that can feel less like devotion than gatekeeping. She’s naming the way spirituality is often mediated by people who are rewarded for making the simple complicated.

Then comes the pivot: “I would rather follow in the footprints of Christ than all of the dogma.” It’s a model’s phrasing that does real work. Footprints are physical, intimate, and traceable; dogma is abstract, institutional, and often punitive. The subtext is ethical impatience: if Christianity can’t be recognized in behavior - compassion, sacrifice, proximity to the vulnerable - what’s the point of defending doctrines like property lines?

Context matters here. Coming from a celebrity whose public life depends on image, the appeal to “footprints” reads as a bid for authenticity, a way of locating moral seriousness outside brand-friendly platitudes. It also echoes a late-20th-century drift toward “spiritual but not religious,” where people keep the figure of Jesus while side-eyeing the structures that have historically spoken in his name.

The intent isn’t to win a theological argument. It’s to reclaim moral agency: fewer intermediaries, less doctrinal performance, more lived imitation. In an era when religion is often experienced as culture war posture, her sentence argues for a faith that can be measured in steps, not statements.