Faith & Spirit Quote by Steve Allen

Allen’s jab lands because it treats “holy war” as a linguistic scandal before it’s even a political one. The phrase is a verbal oxymoron with a body count: it welds the idea of the sacred to the mechanics of slaughter, laundering violence in the language of virtue. By imagining God “disgusted,” Allen flips the usual script. Instead of humans fearing divine judgment, the divine is repelled by our rhetorical nerve - our ability to make brutality sound like obedience.

As an entertainer, Allen isn’t preaching doctrine; he’s puncturing a sales pitch. “Holy war” is branding: two words that recruit young bodies, quiet moral doubts, and turn complex conflicts into a cartoon of good versus evil. His line works like stand-up at its best: a clean setup (“If there is a God”) that disarms believers and skeptics alike, followed by a punchline that exposes the con. That conditional is crucial. Allen doesn’t demand agreement on theology; he demands attention to hypocrisy.

The context is a 20th century saturated with ideological crusades - world wars, Cold War proxy fights, nationalist and sectarian violence - where leaders routinely reached for sacred vocabulary to sanctify the unspeakable. Allen’s subtext is less “religion causes war” than “war loves religion’s halo.” Call it holy, and you preempt scrutiny; call it war, and you admit what it is. His disgust is aimed at the merger: the moment moral language stops restraining violence and starts marketing it.