Time & Perspective Quote by Herb Caen

Caen’s line works because it refuses the polite fiction that religious conversion is automatically edifying. “Born-again” carries a built-in PR pitch: you were flawed, you saw the light, now you’re improved. Caen punctures that narrative with a comedian’s scalpel, using the plain, crabby idiom of “pain” to drag lofty testimony back down to street level. The joke lands on “second time around,” a phrase normally reserved for second chances and fresh starts. Here, it becomes a sequel nobody asked for.

The subtext isn’t that faith is fake; it’s that public certainty is exhausting. Born-again identity can turn private belief into a social performance: the convert as walking billboard, eager to audit everyone else’s morals. Caen implies a specific kind of interpersonal aggression - the recruiter's grin, the unsolicited life advice, the moral before-and-after photo - that makes the newly saved feel entitled to be newly intrusive.

Context matters: Caen wrote as a San Francisco newspaper voice with a tuned ear for civic hypocrisy and American fads. The late 20th century saw evangelical “born-again” culture surge into mainstream politics and media, packaging salvation as brand, movement, and voting bloc. Caen’s jab catches that zeitgeist: the irritation isn’t just theological, it’s cultural, a reaction to sanctimony marketed as renewal. In one sentence he captures how rebirth, when weaponized as superiority, doesn’t cleanse the personality; it doubles it.