Wit & Attitude Quote by Joseph McCabe

A belief in hell turns politics into metaphysics, and McCabe is warning that this is where cruelty gets its cleanest alibi. The line isn’t aimed at individual piety; it’s aimed at institutions. “Any body of men” is the tell: once belief is collectivized, it becomes policy. Hell supplies a moral architecture in which violence can be recoded as rescue, coercion as care. If eternal torment is real, then almost any earthly pressure can be rationalized as merciful triage.

The subtext is less “religion is bad” than “certainty is dangerous when it’s armed.” McCabe’s phrasing is deliberately categorical - “will persecute” - because he’s describing an incentive structure, not a handful of bad actors. The moment a group believes it possesses cosmic truth and that dissent carries infinite consequences, toleration stops being a virtue and starts looking like negligence. You can hear the cynical logic: if souls are at stake, why respect conscience, pluralism, or the slow grind of persuasion? Hell makes urgency permanent.

Context matters. McCabe was an ex-priest turned secular polemicist writing in the long shadow of European confessional conflict and in the middle of modernity’s fight over education, censorship, and the state’s relationship to the church. His claim reads like a compressed history lesson: persecution isn’t an accident of temperament; it’s a predictable feature of a worldview that sanctifies punishment and calls it love. The final clause - “whenever they have the power” - is the coldest part: the thermostat is authority, not holiness.