Faith & Spirit Quote by Martin Scorsese

Scorsese’s line lands with the quiet force of an outsider who’s spent his career studying how institutions shape souls. He’s not delivering a policy brief; he’s making a moral close-up. “Eradicating” is the loaded verb here: it implies not reform, not critique, but total deletion, the kind of state ambition that treats belief as a software bug. Against that hardness, he frames the targeted faith as a “religion of kindness,” a phrase that’s deliberately plain, almost childlike. It’s also strategic: kindness is the least controversial virtue, so suppressing it sounds not merely authoritarian but perverse.

The intent is twofold. On the surface, he’s condemning religious persecution in China (often read in relation to Tibetan Buddhism or Christianity, depending on the conversation). Underneath, he’s defending the idea that spiritual traditions can function as cultural immune systems: they teach restraint, compassion, and limits on power, which is precisely why governments that demand total allegiance find them threatening. The subtext is less “China is bad” than “any state that tries to monopolize meaning will eventually criminalize mercy.”

Context matters because Scorsese isn’t a celebrity dabbling in geopolitics; he’s a director whose films obsess over sin, redemption, and the violence people commit in the name of order. His sensitivity to faith isn’t abstract. It’s cinematic: he understands that when you remove a vocabulary for conscience, you don’t create neutrality - you create a vacuum that power rushes to fill.