"Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble"
About this Quote
Campbell’s move here is a tidy inversion of the usual culture-war question: he’s not asking whether religions are true, but what kind of truth they traffic in. The line is engineered to disarm literalism without having to sneer at belief. “Every religion is true” is a deliberately provocative opening, then he immediately narrows the claim: true “metaphorically.” He’s defending myth as a technology for meaning-making - a symbolic language that smuggles psychological and ethical insight past the ego’s defenses.
The subtext is classic Campbell: myths aren’t primitive science; they’re maps of inner experience. Gods, devils, floods, resurrections become shorthand for terror, transformation, guilt, grace, the strange fact of being conscious and mortal. Read that way, competing traditions stop being rival news reports and start looking like different dialects describing similar human pressures.
The warning about getting “stuck” is where the cultural critique bites. Metaphor, once mistaken for fact, hardens into gatekeeping: boundaries, punishments, purity tests, and the bureaucratic policing of the ineffable. Campbell is pointing at how institutions convert living symbols into dead certainties because certainty is governable. Metaphor invites interpretation; fact demands obedience.
Context matters: Campbell wrote in a 20th century shaped by world war, scientific authority, and mass media, when religion increasingly had to argue on the terrain of empiricism or retreat into fundamentalism. His quote offers a third route: keep the story, drop the literalism, preserve religion as an art of the psyche rather than a rival to geology or biology. The “trouble” isn’t disbelief; it’s mistaking poetry for a press release.
The subtext is classic Campbell: myths aren’t primitive science; they’re maps of inner experience. Gods, devils, floods, resurrections become shorthand for terror, transformation, guilt, grace, the strange fact of being conscious and mortal. Read that way, competing traditions stop being rival news reports and start looking like different dialects describing similar human pressures.
The warning about getting “stuck” is where the cultural critique bites. Metaphor, once mistaken for fact, hardens into gatekeeping: boundaries, punishments, purity tests, and the bureaucratic policing of the ineffable. Campbell is pointing at how institutions convert living symbols into dead certainties because certainty is governable. Metaphor invites interpretation; fact demands obedience.
Context matters: Campbell wrote in a 20th century shaped by world war, scientific authority, and mass media, when religion increasingly had to argue on the terrain of empiricism or retreat into fundamentalism. His quote offers a third route: keep the story, drop the literalism, preserve religion as an art of the psyche rather than a rival to geology or biology. The “trouble” isn’t disbelief; it’s mistaking poetry for a press release.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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