Science & Tech Quote by Mary Douglas

There’s a quiet judo move in Mary Douglas’s phrasing: “It seems true” is less a hedge than an anthropologist’s way of refusing to moralize. She’s not cheering secularism or mocking Christianity; she’s diagnosing a shift in the ecology of authority. “Growth of science and secularism” isn’t just new knowledge or fewer churchgoers. It signals rival institutions for explaining the world, regulating behavior, and certifying what counts as truth. In that light, “organized Christianity” reads pointedly: not private faith, but a bureaucracy of meaning - creeds, clergy, schools, public rituals - suddenly competing with laboratories, universities, and the modern state.

The key word is “feel.” Douglas locates the action not in metaphysical defeat but in perception, which is where institutions actually live or die. Threat is a social emotion before it becomes a political program: you sense your jurisdiction shrinking, your symbols losing their monopoly, your moral categories getting treated as mere “values” rather than facts. That framing helps explain why modern religious responses so often intensify around boundary-making - who belongs, what counts as orthodoxy, which practices are “pure” - because threatened organizations defend themselves by tightening classification systems. It’s a Douglas-esque insight: conflict isn’t only about doctrines; it’s about whose categories organize public life.

Contextually, Douglas’s era spans postwar modernization, expanding higher education, and accelerating scientific prestige. Her sentence captures a historically specific anxiety: not that Christianity was disproven, but that it was being outcompeted as the default interpreter of reality.