Politics & Power Quote by Robert A. Heinlein

Heinlein’s line lands like a cold weather report: if a belief system gains the lever of the state, it will pull it. The word “truism” is doing sly work here. He isn’t presenting a hot take; he’s framing the impulse to legislate creed as banal, predictable, almost mechanical. That’s the bite. It refuses to romanticize religion as uniquely moral or uniquely dangerous and instead treats it as a human institution with the same appetite for enforcement as any other faction.

The subtext is less “religion bad” than “power clarifies priorities.” Heinlein groups “sect, cult, or religion” into one continuum, collapsing the flattering distinction between respectable faith and fringe zealotry. In his view, the difference is often scale and social permission, not the underlying logic: believers who are sure they have the truth will naturally want public life to reflect it. Law becomes the ultimate mission field.

Context matters. Heinlein wrote through the mid-century American churn of anti-communist moral panic, rising evangelical political organization, and the broader Cold War habit of treating ideology as destiny. His science fiction repeatedly stages societies where private conviction metastasizes into public control, using imagined worlds to pressure-test a very real American question: can a pluralist democracy survive when certainty becomes policy?

The sentence is also a warning to secular readers who think they’re exempt. “Almost any” implicates everyone. Today it reads like a preemptive diagnosis of culture-war governance: once politics becomes a vehicle for salvation stories, compromise stops being a virtue and starts looking like heresy.