Faith & Spirit Quote by Charles Eastman

Eastman’s line slices through a comforting modern assumption: that religion is either pure mystery or pure ethics, with nothing in between. He frames the supernatural not as a flaw or a relic, but as an “element” always present - a variable ingredient whose proportions shift depending on how much “pure reason” is allowed to steer the faithful. The phrasing is quietly provocative. “Pure reason” isn’t just reason; it’s a cleaned, almost disinfected version of rationality, implying that real human thinking is messier, braided with story, fear, hope, and tradition. By calling devotees “its” devotees, he also hints that reason can become its own kind of creed, with followers and orthodoxies.

The subtext reads like a critique of both sides of a culture war: believers who pretend supernatural claims can be walled off from scrutiny, and rationalists who imagine religion can be replaced by reason without leaving a psychological vacuum. Eastman suggests the supernatural persists because it does cultural work - it supplies authority, awe, moral pressure, and narrative coherence in ways syllogisms rarely do.

Context matters. Eastman, a Santee Dakota physician and writer navigating late-19th/early-20th-century America, watched Western institutions present themselves as uniquely rational while treating Indigenous spirituality as “superstition.” This sentence flips the hierarchy. If every religion contains the supernatural, then the supposed divide between “civilized” belief and “primitive” belief is less a fact than a political story. Reason, in his view, doesn’t abolish the supernatural; it negotiates its influence.