Faith & Spirit Quote by Mary Douglas

A civilized-sounding heresy: Douglas doesn’t denounce religion as a timeless evil, she marks a drift. “Increasingly, over the years” is doing the heavy lifting, turning a hot take into an observational verdict, as if the data kept coming in and the trendline kept sloping the wrong way. It’s the language of someone trained to watch patterns accumulate, not someone looking for a fight.

The subtext is less “faith is irrational” than “religion has changed its social function.” Douglas’s work on purity, taboo, and classification treated belief as a system that organizes community life: it draws lines, makes meaning, turns chaos into an intelligible map. That’s the charitable baseline. So when she says “today” it reads like a lament that those same boundary-making powers have become misaligned with plural, interdependent modern life. The mechanisms still work; the environment has shifted.

“Harm” is left pointedly unspecified, which is rhetorically savvy. It invites the reader to supply the evidence from their own headlines: sectarian nationalism, culture-war moral panics, the policing of bodies, the sacralization of political identity. Douglas is also warning about collateral damage: when religion becomes a primary identity marker, it stops being a shared grammar for living together and becomes an instrument for sorting the pure from the impure.

The line also contains a scientist’s implicit rebuke to nostalgia. If religion once stabilized society, that’s not a permanent entitlement. Institutions don’t get credit for past services; they get judged by present effects. Douglas isn’t anti-spiritual so much as anti-complacent about what our oldest technologies of meaning are doing in a new civilizational setting.