"There is a great interest in comparative religion and a desire to understand faiths other than our own and even to experiment with exotic cults"
About this Quote
A polite sentence with a quiet alarm bell inside it. Balch is describing a moment when religion stops being inherited furniture and becomes a consumer choice: something you can compare, study, even sample. The phrasing matters. “Great interest” and “desire to understand” sound civic-minded, almost pedagogical, the language of an educator trying to normalize curiosity. Then she pivots to “even to experiment,” a word that smuggles in both modern science and modern restlessness. Faith, traditionally a total commitment, gets reframed as a trial run.
“Exotic cults” is the tell. It carries the period’s anthropological gaze and a hint of condescension, suggesting that the marketplace of belief is expanding, but not on equal terms. “Exotic” marks other religions as thrilling imports; “cults” implies danger, fad, or unseriousness. Balch’s subtext is less “look at these strange beliefs” than “look at what modernity is doing to belief itself.” Comparative religion, still a relatively new academic posture in her era, offers a rational, cross-cultural lens. But it also destabilizes the idea that one’s tradition is the default setting.
Context helps: Balch lived through mass migration, world war, and the rise of internationalist thinking, when borders and identities were being renegotiated. In that environment, religious pluralism isn’t just a moral ideal; it’s social weather. Her sentence reads like an early snapshot of a phenomenon now familiar: spiritual seeking as a mix of empathy, boredom, and self-fashioning, with education trying to keep it from sliding into tourism.
“Exotic cults” is the tell. It carries the period’s anthropological gaze and a hint of condescension, suggesting that the marketplace of belief is expanding, but not on equal terms. “Exotic” marks other religions as thrilling imports; “cults” implies danger, fad, or unseriousness. Balch’s subtext is less “look at these strange beliefs” than “look at what modernity is doing to belief itself.” Comparative religion, still a relatively new academic posture in her era, offers a rational, cross-cultural lens. But it also destabilizes the idea that one’s tradition is the default setting.
Context helps: Balch lived through mass migration, world war, and the rise of internationalist thinking, when borders and identities were being renegotiated. In that environment, religious pluralism isn’t just a moral ideal; it’s social weather. Her sentence reads like an early snapshot of a phenomenon now familiar: spiritual seeking as a mix of empathy, boredom, and self-fashioning, with education trying to keep it from sliding into tourism.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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