Faith & Spirit Quote by Daniel Berrigan

Berrigan’s blunt repetition is the point: strip the story down until only the motive remains. “Spirituality” can sound like a lifestyle preference, a softer word for private comfort. Berrigan snaps it back into something sharper and less marketable: “Connection with God.” Not inspiration, not vibes, not a moral brand. A relationship that makes claims on you.

The line also carries a quiet rebuke to the way political conflict gets narrated. In Berrigan’s America - Vietnam, the draft, the Catholic Church’s own institutional caution - the public wanted arguments that fit familiar categories: patriot vs. traitor, liberal vs. conservative, activist vs. priest. Berrigan insists those frames miss the engine. His protest wasn’t an add-on to faith; faith was the charge that made protest inevitable. Saying “the main issue” twice is a rhetorical shove: stop treating the spiritual as decorative, stop treating the political as ultimate.

Subtextually, it’s a warning to both sides. To religious institutions: if you reduce God to respectable rhetoric, you’ll end up protecting power rather than challenging it. To secular audiences: don’t domesticate religious dissent as mere ideology; for someone like Berrigan, obedience to God can be a more destabilizing force than any party platform.

The sentence works because it refuses nuance as an escape hatch. Berrigan isn’t bargaining for relevance; he’s naming the source of authority that, for him, outranks the nation-state.