"We have learned to live with unholiness and have come to look upon it as the natural and expected thing"
About this Quote
Normalizing the intolerable is Tozer's real target here. The line doesn’t merely mourn “unholiness”; it indicts the way a community’s moral shock-absorbers wear out. “We have learned” frames spiritual drift as education - not ignorance but training, repetition, habit. The verb quietly suggests an institution (church, culture, even the self) that tutors people into lowered expectations. By the time unholiness feels “natural,” it has stopped being a scandal and started being background noise.
Tozer, a mid-century evangelical voice, is speaking into an America that often blended churchgoing with booming consumer comfort and national self-confidence. His critique lands on the complacency that can accompany prosperity: when faith becomes a social marker, holiness gets demoted from a lived demand to a decorative idea. “Live with” is almost domestic language, the phrase you use for a chronic inconvenience. He’s accusing believers of turning sin into a roommate.
The subtext is less finger-wagging than alarm. Tozer is warning that the most dangerous moral failures aren’t the loud ones but the ones that feel inevitable, even reasonable. Once “expected,” unholiness becomes self-justifying: if everyone assumes it, nobody has to repent; if it’s natural, nobody has to resist. The sentence works because it makes the slide feel gradual and collective - “we,” not “you” - forcing the reader to recognize complicity, not just point at villains.
Tozer, a mid-century evangelical voice, is speaking into an America that often blended churchgoing with booming consumer comfort and national self-confidence. His critique lands on the complacency that can accompany prosperity: when faith becomes a social marker, holiness gets demoted from a lived demand to a decorative idea. “Live with” is almost domestic language, the phrase you use for a chronic inconvenience. He’s accusing believers of turning sin into a roommate.
The subtext is less finger-wagging than alarm. Tozer is warning that the most dangerous moral failures aren’t the loud ones but the ones that feel inevitable, even reasonable. Once “expected,” unholiness becomes self-justifying: if everyone assumes it, nobody has to repent; if it’s natural, nobody has to resist. The sentence works because it makes the slide feel gradual and collective - “we,” not “you” - forcing the reader to recognize complicity, not just point at villains.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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