Daily Inspiration Quote by D. Elton Trueblood

A neat little paradox with a barb: Trueblood is telling you that modern culture has developed a reliable immune response to Christianity in both directions. Criticism of the faith still triggers outrage because religion retains social prestige, nostalgia, and identity-value. Actually practicing it triggers a different kind of shock because the faith, in its most demanding form, is socially disruptive.

The line works because it exposes a quiet consensus: Christianity is tolerated as a symbol more than as a discipline. It can be a civil religion - soft-edged, ceremonial, useful for weddings, political photo-ops, and moral rhetoric. But practice means friction. Turn-the-other-cheek ethics collide with an economy built on leverage. Radical forgiveness looks like weakness. Generosity that costs something threatens the status hierarchy. Sexual restraint reads as judgmental, but so does chastity framed as a personal choice. Even non-believers often prefer a Christianity that stays in the realm of tasteful inspiration, not one that reorganizes time, money, appetites, and loyalties.

As an educator and public intellectual, Trueblood is also taking aim at his own side. He implies Christians can be hypersensitive to critique while remaining oddly comfortable with a version of their religion that asks little of them. The subtext is a dare: if your faith never startles anyone when enacted, it may have been domesticated into mere respectability. The sting is that both camps - the offended defenders and the secular skeptics - are complicit in keeping Christianity safely theoretical.