It almost seems like Quinn's mother is unknowingly taking up a "Pascal's Wager." Blaise Pascal was a devout Catholic Christian in addition to being a world-class mathematician. He proposed in one of his religious works, a wager: If an honest truth-seeker will ACT as though one believes for a whole year, going through the motions etc., by the end of that year, God WILL give him or her the gift of faith to sustain it for real. (It also often (though not as reliably) works on skeptics who try it!)