Faith & Spirit Quote by Gerald Vann

Vann aims his barb at a very modern kind of superstition: prayer treated like a vending machine with stained-glass branding. The line is constructed as a diagnosis, not a reprimand. By opening with "Some people think", he sidesteps pious scolding and instead exposes a category error. Prayer, in this mindset, becomes a transaction: I request, God delivers, faith is validated. When the delivery fails, the conclusion is not disappointment but fraud - the language of consumer complaint, not spiritual struggle.

The subtext is sharper than it first appears. Vann is warning that this "asking-for-things" model doesn’t merely misunderstand prayer; it turns God into a service provider and the person praying into a customer. That framing makes cynicism almost inevitable, because it reduces an encounter with the divine to an outcomes spreadsheet. If the only metric is "Did I get what I wanted?" then unanswered prayer becomes evidence of deception, not an invitation to rethink desire, timing, or the nature of relationship itself.

Context matters: writing as a mid-20th-century Catholic theologian, Vann is pushing back against both shallow devotionalism and a rising practical, results-driven mentality that seeped into religious life. The sentence works because it names the emotional logic behind disbelief without caricature. It’s not atheism he’s arguing against; it’s disappointed entitlement dressed up as faith, and the way it collapses mystery into customer service.