Cheap Grace

“Cheap grace” enters Kyle’s wiki through The Crucible of Doubt, where the Givenses quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “cheap grace is the mortal enemy of the church,” and add that one version of cheap grace is “baptism without the discipline of community.” In the book’s argument it is the load-bearing frame for treating doubt as faith-building rather than faith-eroding — easy, costless faith doesn’t stick. Kyle’s marginal note pairs Bonhoeffer’s line with Joseph Smith’s “no church that does not demand the sacrifice of its members,” reinforcing that real discipleship is costly. The same chapter quotes Flannery O’Connor in the same key: “Religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it’s a cross.”

This connects to the book’s broader insistence that true religion “is inseparable from suffering” and offers “no cheap solutions,” and to its picture of the ward as an inescapable, unchosen community whose very arbitrariness forges loyalty — the “discipline of community” that grace without cost would skip.

Context: “Cheap grace” (billige Gnade) is the central indictment of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s 1937 book The Cost of Discipleship — grace preached as forgiveness without repentance, communion without confession, “grace without discipleship.” Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor, was executed by the Nazis in 1945.

Where this appears

• The Crucible of Doubt — quotes Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace is the mortal enemy of the church” as the anchor for its doubt-as-faith-building thread; Kyle pairs it with Joseph Smith on sacrifice.