H.L. Mencken on Religion Quotes

“One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. …[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“For the Bible, despite all its contradictions and absurdities, its barbarisms and obscenities, remains grand and gaudy stuff, and so it deserves careful study and enlightened exposition. It is not only lovely in phrase; it is also rich in ideas, many of them far from foolish. One somehow gathers the notion that it was written from end to end by honest men—inspired, perhaps, but nevertheless honest. When they had anything to say they said it plainly, whether it was counsel that enemies be slain or counsel that enemies be kissed. They knew how to tell a story, and how to sing a song, and how to swathe a dubious argument in specious and disarming words.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“The American moron’s mind simply does not run in that direction; he wants to keep his Ford, even at the cost of losing the Bill of Rights”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as of something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive—and a few are enough to carry on.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“I dislike persons who change their basic ideas, and I dislike them when they change them for good reasons quite as much as when they change them for bad ones. A convert to a good idea is simply a man who confesses that he was formerly an ass—and is probably one still. When such a man favors me with a certificate that my eloquence has shaken him I feel about him precisely as I’d feel if he told me that he had started (or stopped) beating his wife on my recommendation.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“The Fathers of the Republic, I believe, were far cleverer fellows than they are commonly represented to be, even in the schoolbooks. If it was not divine inspiration that moved them, then they must have drunk better liquor than is now obtainable on earth. For when they made religion a free-for-all, they prepared the way for making it ridiculous; and when they opened the doors of office to the mob, they disposed forever of the delusion that government is a solemn and noble thing, by wisdom out of altruism.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“In Mencken’s view, “religion belongs to a very early stage of human development, and... its rapid decay in the world since the Reformation is evidence of genuine progress” (“The Ascent of Man”).”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“I am, indeed, against all proselyters, whether they be on my side or on some other side. What moves nine-tenths of them, I believe, is simply the certainty of the result that I have just mentioned. Their lofty pretensions are all tosh. The thing they yearn for is the satisfaction of making someone unhappy: that yearning is almost as universal among them as thirst is in dry Congressmen.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“My argument for them is not altruistic in the least, but purely selfish. I should dislike to see them harassed by the law for two plain and sound reasons. One is that their continued existence soothes my vanity (and hence promotes my happiness) by proving to me that there are even worse fools in the world than I am. The other is that, if they were jailed to-morrow for believing in Christian Science, I should probably be jailed the next day for refusing to believe in something still sillier. Once the law begins to horn into such matters, I am against the law, no matter how virtuous its ostensible intent. No liberty is worth a hoot which doesn’t allow the citizen to be foolish once in a while, and to kick up once in a while, and to hurt himself once in a while.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“What lay at the bottom of their savagery, of course, was their idiotic belief in Calvinism—beyond question the most brutal and barbaric theology ever subscribed to by mortal man, whether in or out of the African bush.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“The effort to put down Christian Science by law is one of the craziest enterprises upon which medical men waste their energies. It is based upon a superstition even sillier than that behind Christian Science itself: to wit, the superstition that, when an evil shows itself, all that is needed to dispose of it is to pass a law against it.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“What Mencken most strongly objected to in religion was not the expression of nonsensical views—these could easily be combated by rebuttal from the other side—but the inveterate tendency of religion to seek the enforcement of its views by the power of the government.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“The Catholics get rid of the difficulty by setting up an infallible Pope, and consenting formally to accept his verdicts, but the Protestants simply chase their own tails. By depriving revelation of all force and authority, they rob their so-called religion of every dignity. It becomes, in their hands, a mere romantic imposture, unsatisfying to the pious and unconvincing to the judicious.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“Children born to-day may see the beginnings of a genuine state church in the Republic, with a hierarchy of live wires and a purely American theology. I regret that I am too old to wait for it, for if it comes it will be a lulu.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“The Low Church rectors, in the main, struggle with poor congregations, born to the faith but deficient in buying power. As bank accounts increase the fear of the devil diminishes, and there arises a sense of beauty. This sense of beauty, in its practical effects, is identical with the work of the Paulist Fathers.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“As animals go, even in so limited a space as our world, man is botched and ridiculous. Few other brutes are so stupid, so docile or so cowardly.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“The only practical effect of having a soul is that it fills man with anthropomorphic and anthropocentric vanities—in brief, with the cocky superstitions that make him disgusting.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

“I believe that it is something quite different, and that that something may be described briefly as a desire to shine in the world without too much effort. The young theologue, in brief, is commonly an ambitious but somewhat lazy and incompetent fellow, and he studies theology instead of medicine or law because it offers a quicker and easier route to an assured job and public respect.”
― H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion