Faith & Spirit Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s jab works because it doesn’t bother arguing communism on policy grounds; it demotes it to a faith-based temperament. Calling it a “revealed religion” is a deliberate insult wrapped in a taxonomy: communism isn’t treated as a contested set of economic proposals but as a creed that claims privileged access to truth. “Revealed” implies doctrine delivered from on high, not discovered through evidence. That single word smuggles in Mencken’s larger suspicion of mass movements: they thrive on certainty, not nuance.

Then comes the knife twist: “largely made up of prophecies.” Prophecy is prediction with moral theater attached - history as destiny, the future as a vindication for believers. Mencken is needling the Marxist promise of inevitability (the arc from capitalism to revolution to a classless society) by likening it to end-times preaching. The subtext is that when a movement invests in an ordained future, it can excuse present failures as temporary “stages” and treat dissent as heresy. You don’t refute a prophecy; you wait for it, or you punish those who won’t.

Context matters: Mencken wrote in an era when communism and anti-communism both operated as secular religions, complete with saints, devils, and conversion narratives. His cynicism targets the psychological appeal: prophecy flatters the believer with a role in History and offers a clean script in a messy world. The line lands because it’s funny, yes, but also because it exposes how political certainty often borrows the comfort language of the sacred.