Life & Wisdom Quote by Susie Bright

Bright’s line is a weather report delivered with a smirk: the cultural climate has shifted, and the old moral front isn’t just weakening, it’s being openly mocked. The key move is comparative and cumulative - “more criticism,” “more distance,” “than there has been before” - a triple escalation that frames secularization not as a see-saw argument but as momentum. She’s not pleading for liberation; she’s clocking a trend, with the implicit satisfaction of someone who has spent a career watching puritanism pose as “common sense.”

The subtext is that Christian morality in public life has functioned less like personal faith and more like a regulatory aesthetic: a way to police bodies, sex, and speech while claiming the high ground. Bright, known for sex-positive writing, is fluent in how “puritanism” operates as a cultural reflex - the instinct to treat desire as suspect and pleasure as a problem to be managed. Her phrasing suggests a widening gap between lived reality and inherited moral scripts, as if the audience has finally begun to notice the mismatch.

Context matters: late-20th-century and early-21st-century culture wars, AIDS-era moral panic, the rise of feminist and queer media, and then the internet’s demolition of gatekeepers. “Distance” isn’t just disbelief; it’s refusal. The line captures a moment when shame stops looking inevitable and starts looking like a political tool - and once you see that, it’s hard to go back.