Daily Inspiration Quote by Don Marquis

Marquis slips the knife in with a grin: theology, he notes, can only imagine evil as a man, yet the institution tasked with defeating evil is propped up, week after week, by women. The line works because it’s two punches delivered as one. First, it needles a church tradition that genders its villains conveniently - sin gets a male face - while leaving intact the deeper structure that often sidelines women in authority. Then it pivots to the lived sociology of religion: women as the unpaid labor force of faith, the reliable congregants, the organizers, the moral infrastructure that keeps pews filled and parish life functional.

The subtext is not exactly “women are better,” but “institutions are hypocritical about who matters.” Marquis frames the devil’s masculinity as almost comically taken for granted (“Yes”), then uses that casual certainty to expose a second certainty: the church’s dependence on women is so obvious it shouldn’t need stating, and yet it rarely gets translated into power.

Context matters. Writing in early 20th-century America, Marquis is steeped in a culture where churches were central civic engines and where women’s public influence was often routed through “respectable” religious work - especially as suffrage and changing gender roles pressed against older hierarchies. It’s a journalist’s one-liner doing what journalism at its best can do: reduce a whole tangle of doctrine, labor, and gender politics to a sentence you can’t unhear.