The readers of this redoubtable Corner have done it again. Here’s the full quotation from Flannery O’Connor—as you’ll see, it’s even more powerful than the fragment I recalled:
“Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you. What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.”
The citation? The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979), p. 229.