Love Quote by Charles L. Allen

Allen aims this line like a pastoral scalpel at the churchgoing immune system. It flips the expected outreach narrative: the real obstacle to grace is not scandal, addiction, or obvious wrongdoing, but the quiet conviction that one is already fine. Bad people, in his framing, are reachable precisely because they lack plausible deniability; they can name the mess. The self-righteous, by contrast, have a sturdier armor: moral bookkeeping that turns faith into a receipt.

The subtext is an indictment of performative virtue. Self-righteousness doesn’t merely sin; it sanitizes sin by relocating it. The problem becomes other people’s failures, other communities’ compromises, the world’s decay. That displacement is spiritually convenient because it keeps the self off the examination table. Allen is also making a tactical point about persuasion: you can’t offer rescue to someone who experiences your offer as an insult. Grace requires a felt need, and self-righteousness is a kind of anesthesia.

Contextually, this sits squarely in a mid-20th-century Protestant homiletic tradition that returns obsessively to the Gospel’s villains not as prostitutes or tax collectors but as the respectable religious gatekeepers. It echoes the Pharisee-and-tax-collector dynamic: the outsider goes home justified because he’s honest; the insider stays stuck because he’s impressed with himself. Allen’s intent isn’t to flatter “bad people.” It’s to warn believers that the most dangerous distance from God can look like proximity: the pew, the polished life, the certainty that you’re the sort of person grace is for.