Love Quote by Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston’s line lands like a folk proverb with teeth: divinity isn’t just worshipped, it’s engineered. “Gods” here aren’t distant absolutes; they’re products of human need, fear, imagination, and power. The sly pivot is in “always.” It mocks the fantasy that faith is purely disinterested or that the sacred floats above the messy economies of human life. If you make a god, Hurston implies, you’ve baked yourself into its operating system.

The subtext is as political as it is spiritual. “The people who make em” can mean artisans of myth, churches that institutionalize belief, or whole communities that conjure a protector in response to dispossession. Hurston, steeped in Black Southern folklore and trained as an anthropologist, understood religion as lived culture: stories told to survive, to discipline, to organize the world into something bearable. A god’s “love” becomes a mirror of its makers’ desires. It rewards the behaviors that keep it alive.

There’s also a sharp warning about authorship. If humans make gods, then gods can be made to love some people and punish others; sanctity can be recruited as social policy. Hurston’s phrasing is deliberately plain, almost conversational, which makes the provocation harder to dodge. She’s not arguing theology; she’s exposing the feedback loop between belief and authority. The punchline is bleakly funny: create a god, and you’ll never lack for divine affirmation. Until someone else starts writing the script.