Faith & Spirit Quote by Kathie Lee Gifford

The joke lands because it’s doing two things at once: staging a spiritual origin story and puncturing it before it can get sanctified. “Ripe for religion” is the kind of phrase you hear in testimonial culture, where adolescence becomes a dramatic on-ramp to salvation. Gifford sets up that familiar arc, then swerves: “I was actually just plain ripe.” The second “ripe” flips from moral readiness to bodily readiness, from church language to a wink at puberty. It’s self-deprecation with a side of boundary-testing, the kind daytime TV has long depended on: confessional, relatable, a little naughty, never too explicit.

The specific intent is disarming. By admitting susceptibility at “almost 13,” she frames religious longing less as divine intervention and more as a human developmental moment - a kid eager to belong, to be reassured, to have a script. The subtext is sharp: what gets remembered as spiritual clarity can also be hormonally charged vulnerability, and institutions (religious or otherwise) often meet people right at that tender point. She’s not accusing; she’s acknowledging how desire, insecurity, and identity-seeking can be misread as pure faith.

Context matters because Gifford’s public persona toggles between earnest belief and performative cheer. That toggle is the engine here. She gives you a glimpse of piety, then undercuts it with a punchline that keeps her from sounding preachy - and keeps the audience from feeling preached at. The laugh is also a safety valve: it lets her talk about religion and adolescence in the same breath without asking daytime America to sit in discomfort for too long.