Parenting & Family Quote by Bob Bartlett

Bartlett’s line weaponizes a familiar American pressure point: the fear that modern expertise is a rival religion. By framing a routine act of care - taking a child to a doctor - as “putting their faith in man instead of in God,” he recasts medicine as moral betrayal, not pragmatic help. The genius (and danger) is the zero-sum theology baked into the syntax. Faith can’t be plural; trust can’t be shared. You either kneel at the altar of science or the altar of heaven.

As a politician, Bartlett isn’t just describing a belief; he’s organizing a constituency. The phrase “they believe” signals a kind of sociological ventriloquism: he’s narrating what a group thinks in order to legitimize it, to say, in effect, this is a real, defensible worldview - not ignorance, not neglect, not avoidable tragedy. It offers absolution in advance. If a child suffers, the story isn’t “we refused care,” it’s “we chose righteousness.”

Context matters. Mid-century America was a period of accelerating medical authority (vaccines, antibiotics, hospitals becoming civic cathedrals) alongside intense religious identity politics. Bartlett’s framing anticipates later culture-war scripts where expertise is treated as arrogance and institutions as temptations. It’s also a canny populist move: “man” stands in for elites, professionals, and distant systems; “God” stands in for community, tradition, and moral certainty.

The subtext is control. If trusting doctors is spiritual infidelity, then religious leaders and political brokers get to police the boundary of acceptable care - and convert private health decisions into public loyalty tests.