Faith & Spirit Quote by Daniel J. Boorstin

Boorstin lands the punch with a sly demotion: God doesn’t disappear from the sentence, but His job description does. “Making the world interesting” is a deliberately small, almost petulant phrase for something that used to be cosmic. The point isn’t that people stopped believing; it’s that modern culture quietly reassigned the authority to confer meaning. The theologian’s grand narrative gets outsourced to the newsroom’s daily churn.

The subtext is a critique of mediated reality, a theme Boorstin sharpened in The Image (1961) when he warned that America was drifting from facts to “pseudo-events” engineered for attention. In that light, “newspaperman” isn’t just a reporter with a notebook; he’s an institution, an incentive structure, a machine for novelty. If the world feels dull, the solution is no longer contemplation or moral reckoning but better copy. Interest becomes a public utility delivered by headlines.

The line works because it compresses a whole sociology of modernity into a single swap of agents. Responsibility, once vertical (answerable to a higher order), becomes horizontal (answerable to an audience). That shift flatters the reader’s sophistication while indicting their appetite: we demand surprise, scandal, personality, and plot, so the news supplies it, even when reality won’t cooperate. Boorstin isn’t nostalgic for theocracy; he’s warning that when “interesting” becomes the standard, truth turns into a format, and seriousness becomes just another beat competing for space.