Faith & Spirit Quote by Andrew Denton

Denton opens with a soft landing and then yanks the floor away. "Deep respect" is the social lubricant that keeps the room from turning tribal; it signals he knows faith can be intimate, sustaining, chosen. Then he pivots to the real target: not belief, but systems. By repeating "machinery" twice, he frames power as industrial - impersonal, efficient, grinding. Faith, in this picture, isn’t just misused; it’s fed into a device that standardizes morality, turns conviction into policy, and mass-produces certainty.

The phrase "machinery of state" is a particularly Australian provocation, coming from a public figure in a country that likes its politics practical and its religiosity understated. It echoes Denton’s broader cultural role: the comedian as civic translator, disarming the audience with civility before naming the discomfort many feel when private creed becomes public leverage. He doesn’t argue theology; he argues boundaries.

"Machinery of hate" tightens the moral vise. It implies coordinated, institutional animus - not mere prejudice, but organized campaigns that recruit scripture as branding. The subtext is a warning about moral outsourcing: when faith is attached to authority, dissent becomes heresy and compassion becomes conditional.

"I find it very confronting" is doing double duty. It’s modest, almost therapeutic language - not "I condemn", but "I can’t sit with this". That restraint is strategic: it invites agreement from believers and nonbelievers alike while making clear that the real affront isn’t faith itself, it’s what happens when it starts driving the levers.