Politics & Power Quote by Laurence Housman

Housman’s line is a deceptively tidy piece of moral engineering: fix the concept of God, and the rest of society clicks into place. Coming from a playwright - a profession built on watching humans rationalize their desires in public - the sentence reads less like sermon and more like diagnosis. It’s not claiming people lack rules; it’s suggesting their rules are downstream from the highest story they tell about authority, judgment, mercy, and the value of a life.

The phrasing does a lot of ideological work. “Still think” signals a belief tested by experience, not a bright-eyed platitude. “The human race, or even one nation” scales the problem from utopian to practical in one breath, as if conceding the grand fix is unlikely but a local experiment might be possible. “Could only get right about its God” is the loaded hinge: “right” implies that public chaos isn’t just political failure but theological misalignment. The subtext is both hopeful and quietly coercive. If there is a correct God-concept, someone gets to define it, and disagreement becomes not merely dissent but error.

Context matters: Housman lived through the late Victorian crisis of faith, the rise of secular politics, and two world wars that made “progress” feel morally absurd. In that era, religion wasn’t just private comfort; it was the architecture beneath empire, reform movements, and arguments about human rights. The quote works because it names a modern anxiety: we keep redesigning institutions while leaving our deepest metaphors of power untouched. Whether you read it as yearning for moral clarity or warning about absolutism depends on how you hear that single, dangerous word: “right.”