Faith & Spirit Quote by Colin Wilson

Wilson isn’t critiquing Christianity as theology so much as demoting it to pathology: an “epidemic” suggests contagion, irrationality, and mass behavior that thrives on vulnerability. The jab is engineered to short-circuit reverence. If you accept the metaphor even briefly, the usual defenses (faith, tradition, community) start to look like symptoms rather than virtues. It’s a deliberately de-sacralizing move, aimed less at believers than at the cultural instinct to treat religion as beyond ordinary scrutiny.

The triad “fear, hysteria and ignorance” is blunt to the point of provocation, but it’s doing craft work. Fear names the emotional entry point, hysteria signals group amplification, ignorance supplies the enabling condition. That sequencing implies a mechanism: people are primed by anxiety, swept up by collective intensity, and kept from checking claims. Then Wilson delivers the real insult: Christianity didn’t win because it was “true,” but because humans are “gullible and superstitious.” The target expands from an institution to a species-level weakness. Subtext: modernity flatters itself as enlightened, yet it still runs on the same credulity, just with different costumes.

Context matters. Wilson came out of Britain’s postwar intellectual scene, suspicious of herd beliefs and fascinated by extremity of mind (his outsider archetype). Read that way, the quote isn’t neutral history; it’s a polemical psychology of belief. Its intent is to shame certainty, to recast religious spread as marketing plus mood, and to force a secular reader into a harsher, less comforting account of how ideas conquer societies.